Abstract Transient uniformity detectors (UDs) are a unique type of retinal ganglion cell (RGC) whose maintained firing is transiently suppressed by all types of visual stimuli. In this study, we have characterized the dendritic morphology and tracer-coupling pattern of UDs that were labeled by loose-seal electroporation of Neurobiotin following functional identification in the isolated rabbit retina. The UDs have a bistratified dendritic tree, branching near the margins of the inner plexiform layer in stratum 1 (part of the OFF sublamina) and stratum 4/5 (part of the ON sublamina). Characteristically, many of the distal dendrites in the OFF arbor do not terminate there but dive recurrently back to the ON arbor. As a consequence, the ON dendritic arbor is usually twice as large as the OFF dendritic arbor in area. The UDs sometimes show homologous tracer coupling to neighboring RGCs with the same morphology, and from this material, we estimate that the UDs have a threefold dendritic field overlap and a maximum density of ~100 cells/mm2 on the peak visual streak, accounting for ~2% of RGCs in rabbit retina. The UDs also show strong heterologous tracer coupling to a novel type of amacrine cell that costratifies with the ON arbor of the UD. Consistent with their unistratified medium-field morphology, these St4/5 amacrine cells appear to be GABAergic: their somata are immunopositive for GABA but immunonegative for glycine and glycine transporter 1. We compare the dendritic morphology of the UDs to that of other types of bistratified RGCs described in rabbit retina and note that the stratification levels and distinctive recurrent dendrites closely resemble those of the "ON bistratified diving" RGCs. This raises the possibility that there are two types of RGCs with distinctive physiological properties that have almost identical bistratified dendritic morphologies.


A new interest in the God of the orthodox Hebrew-Christian tradition has arisen recently among contemporary philosophers. This new interest in theism can be traced to the demise of logical positivism, a lack of intellectual rigor in theological liberalism, and the increased sophistication of theistic arguments. Two arguments illustrate the many contemporary proofs for theism that have attracted wide interest. One argues that belief in God is rational apart from any special evidence. The other, called the kalam cosmological argument, maintains that everything which begins has a cause, the universe had a beginning, and therefore, the universe has a cause. This argument is supported by the reasonableness of a series of choices, beginning with whether or not the universe had a beginning. These arguments are satisfying proof of the existence of God for those who are philosophically inclined.


Scheduling in an input buffered switch can be viewed as repeated matching (corresponding to once every time slot) in a bipartite graph. It has been shown that scheduling algorithms based on maximum weight matching (MWM) with queue-lengths as the weights, leads to excellent performance in terms of throughput and delay. However, computing MWM using a strongly polynomial time algorithm requires O(n3) operations in an ntimesn switch. The main motivation for this paper comes from the following two observations: (1) The weights of edges (packets in buffer) change only a little between successive time slots, thus changing the weight of the MWM only by a small amount; (2) Under MWM algorithm, the average queue-sizes are small. The main difficulty in utilizing these properties comes from the fact that small changes in weights can change the matching arbitrarily, thus making it hard for current popular algorithms to compute an MWM quickly using the information from past (or memory). In this paper, we develop an algorithm based on the algorithm of Cunningham and Marsh that uses the above two properties in order to to find the new MWM quickly. Specifically, for an n port input-queued switch, i.e. a switch with n inputs and n outputs, our algorithm finds MWM in O(n2) operations using past information. We believe that the incremental nature of our algorithm may be useful in the context of other applications.


Fluorescent biosensors are powerful analytical tools for studying biological events in living systems. Luminescent materials with aggregation-induced emission (AIE) attributes have attracted much research interest and have been identified as a novel class of luminogens to develop fluorescent turn-on biosensors with superior sensitivity. In this Tutorial Review, we present an overview of the AIE phenomenon and its mechanism. We summarize the structural design and working principle of AIE biosensors developed recently. Typical examples of AIE biosensors are presented.


Significant relations among language impairments, academic difficulties, and behavioral problems have been well established in previous research, primarily with impaired children or non-minority samples. However, how and why these three developmental domains tend to co-vary has received only limited attention. Preliminary research suggests that academic deficiencies mediate the relation between language impairments and problem behavior. This study assessed 97 urban African American kindergarten children (mean age = 5.98, SD = .33) on measures of language impairment, school functioning, and behavior problems to examine potential processes linking these areas of functioning. Similar to previous research, all three factors correlated significantly with one another. Children with language problems were more likely to have problems with school functioning, and school functioning mediated the relation between language and behavior problems. Additionally, poor frustration tolerance moderated the relation between language impairment and behavior problems. Implications and limitations are discussed.


Understanding the functional linkages between the pelagic and demersal stages of marine organisms is a central goal in ecology. To better understand events that occurred during the larval period as well as their initial influence on juvenile traits, we examined individual level varia- tion in early life-history traits (larval and early juvenile otolith growth rates, size-at-age, and larval duration) of 3 seasonal cohorts of the common coral reef fish Thalassoma bifasciatum (Bloch) (Labri- dae). Juveniles were collected at regular intervals (every second day) for 2 wk following their first appearance on the nearshore reefs of Barbados, West Indies. Otolith analysis indicated that each cohort exhibited a broad range of larval traits. Individuals with shorter larval durations had faster otolith growth and settled at relatively smaller sizes (based on otolith length and standard length) than larvae with longer larval durations, which exhibited slower otolith growth rates. Despite the range in larval durations for T. bifasciatum, otolith growth records revealed no evidence for delay of metamorphosis. Instead, the range in larval durations is likely to be the result of a variable pelagic environment influencing growth rates. Because metamorphosis in this species is an energetically costly non-feeding (3 to 5 d) period, we propose that successful metamorphosis requires a minimum energy reserve. Slower growers may need to remain in the plankton longer (consequently attaining larger sizes) to obtain this minimum condition. Variability in early life-history traits also occurred among the seasonal cohorts. Despite differences in patterns of larval otolith growth, mean larval duration was similar for the 2 fall cohorts (57 and 55 d), but much shorter for the spring cohort (42 d). Such inter-cohort variability in early life-history traits suggests a variable pelagic environment. In contrast to the larval period, juvenile growth rates were much less variable within and among cohorts, reflecting a more constant physical and biological environment on the reef.


Raised Afraid: The Media's Influence in Heightened Fear of Terrorism By Paige Fetters Mentored by Dr. Ken Tunnell, Department of Justice Studies Since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, terrorism has become a household topic and a leading headline for the news media. Following the 9/11 attacks, coverage of the event was played around the clock for the first five days. 99 – 100% of Americans followed terrorism-related events by watching television listening to the radio, or reading print news. Exposure to terrorism-related media have increased substantially since the widespread use of smartphones and social media, where news and topics can be shared and discussed around the world in a matter of seconds. The psychological effects of this exposure could affect how fearful Americans are of terrorism, despite their relative level of victimization. This thesis will explore the various theories and hypotheses that have psychoanalyzed the effects terrorism-related media have had on Americans post-9/11. A convenience sample of 240 college students at a central Kentucky university yielded results of contradictory opinions regarding the government, media, and terrorism protection since 9/11. A comparison of this sample's results to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics revealed similar results regarding various opinions of terrorism. A Pearson correlation was also conducted to examine if any correlation exists between the number of hours spend consuming news and levels of fear regarding terrorism.


We consider the optimization problem of finding the best possible offspring as a result of a recombination operator in an evolutionary algorithm, given two parent solutions. The optimal recombination is studied in the case where a vector of binary variables is used as a solution encoding. By means of efficient reductions of the optimal recombination problems (ORPs) we show the polynomial solvability of the ORPs for the maximum weight set packing problem, the minimum weight set partition problem, and for linear Boolean programming problems with at most two variables per inequality, and some other problems. We also identify several NP-hard cases of optimal recombination: the Boolean linear programming problems with three variables per inequality, the knapsack, the set covering, the p-median, and some other problems.


This paper proposes a semi-conditional normalizing flow model for semi-supervised learning. The model uses both labelled and unlabeled data to learn an explicit model of joint distribution over objects and labels. Semi-conditional architecture of the model allows us to efficiently compute a value and gradients of the marginal likelihood for unlabeled objects. The conditional part of the model is based on a proposed conditional coupling layer. We demonstrate performance of the model for semi-supervised classification problem on different datasets. The model outperforms the baseline approach based on variational auto-encoders on MNIST dataset.


One of the challenges that Ambient Intelligent (AmI) faces is the provision of a usable interaction concept to its users, especially for those with less technical background. In this paper, we describe a new approach to integrate interactive services provided by an AmI environment with the television set, which is one of the most used interaction client in the home environment. An implementation of this approach has been carried out as a multimodal/multipurpose natural human computer interface for elderly people, by creating adapted graphical user interfaces and navigation menus together with multimodal interaction (simplified TV remote control and voice interaction). In addition, this user interface can also be suited to other user groups. We have tested a prototype that adapts the videoconference and the information service with a group of 83 users. The results from the user tests show that the group found the prototype to be both satisfactory and efficient to use.


Newly observed presence of 'emerging contaminants', defined also Compounds of Emerging Concern, chemicals without regulatory status and which impact on environment and human health are poorly understood has been amply reported in wastewater and aquatic environments. 'Conventional' water pollutants have been described for decades and their impact on human health and the environment are known; effective technologies for their removal are well established. This is not the case for most emerging contaminants: no effective removal technologies have been discovered to date, to simultaneously remove all of the concerned contaminants, even though some techniques have been demonstrated to remove some contaminants to a certain extent. Radiation processing using electron beam (EB) accelerators and gamma irradiators has shown promising results in many water-related applications. Radiation/EB processing is an additive-free process using short lived reactive species formed during radiolysis of water for decomposition of pollutants. Isolated studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of radiation, alone or in combination with other treatments, in the decomposition of refractory organic compounds in aqueous solutions and in the removal or inactivation, of microorganisms and parasites. This review paper on this specific technology summarizes results of reported applications.


Inpatients experience frequent psychiatric disorders. Long-term stays in hospitals increase this risk of having a psychiatric disorder and cause negative effects on their ongoing treatments. Several studies emphasized that physicians should be careful for psychiatric disorders affecting the treatment process of inpatients as well as the period of stay in the hospital. This study is a case report. Psychodynamic formulation has been made evaluating the psychiatric disease history and psychodynamic and psychosocial history as well as through psychological tests.


The European Union has pursued a number of initiatives to create a safer and sounder financial sector for the single market. In parallel, bold unconventional monetary policies have been implemented in order to combat low inflation, foster risk taking and, ultimately, reinvigorate growth. But monetary and macro-prudential policies interact with each other and thus may enhance or diminish the effectiveness of the other. Monetary policy affects financial stability by shaping, for instance, leverage and borrowing. Equally, macro-prudential policies constrain borrowing, which in turn have side-effects on output and prices, and therefore on monetary policy. When both monetary and macroprudential functions are housed within the central bank, coordination is improved, but safeguards are needed to counter the risks from dual objectives. Against this background, this paper outlines the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of macro-prudential policy, and discusses the way it interacts with monetary policy. We identify advantages as well as risks from cooperating in the two policy areas, and provide suggestions in terms of institutional design on how to contain those risks. Against this backdrop, we evaluate the recent European practice.


This essay considers the reasonable behavior of consumers in relation to law and the policies that tolerate the assessment of late payment penalties, fees, and surcharges. Attention is trained principally on the inadequately-regulated cycle of creditor billing and debtor repayment practices, rather than on excessively high fees. The focus here is on the credit card issuers and, to a lesser degree, the wireless telecommunication vendors. Problems associated with late fee billing cycles cut a wide swath of billing for recurring debt repayment, however. A variety of different demands on consumers imposed sector-by-sector interact to magnify the consumers' difficulties. Part I addresses the multitude of ways that billers can impose late fee charges. This Part also identifies those deficiencies in legal regimes that aid and abet those who send out bills, by acquiescing to strategies that induce late fee revenue. Part II considers some information-processing and other cognitive difficulties that arise from the late payment regime, and contends that unearned redistribution from consumers to billers results from such incoherence and confusion, and also results in general welfare losses. Part III reviews existing statutory and common-law causes of action through which consumers might hope to recover from billers who intentionally or recklessly diminish the likelihood that deadlines will be met. Part IV proposes a Late Payment Act that illustrates the type of approach that could be adopted on a state - or nation - wide basis to address several of the key shortcomings.


The United States has never been culturally or religiously homogeneous, but its diversity has greatly increased over the last century. Although the U.S. was first a multicultural nation through conquest and enslavement, its present diversity is due equally to immigration. In this paper I try to explain the difference it makes for one area of thought and policy – equal opportunity – if we incorporate cultural and religious pluralism into our national self-image. Formulating and implementing a policy of equal opportunity is more difficult in diverse, pluralistic countries than it is in homogeneous ones. My focus is cultural and religious diversity in the United States, but my conclusions will apply to many other countries – including ones whose pluralism is found more in religion than in culture.


Despite increasing interest in technology-assisted education, technology-based instructional design still lacks support from a reliable body of empirical research. This dearth of reliable information hampers its integration into mainstream school systems. In fact, many teachers remain resistant to using technology in the classroom. In order to overcome teacher resistance to technology in the classroom, we have sought to follow a process described by Friesen to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the educational use of digital learning objects (DLOs) from the teachers' point of view. This article explores the opportunities and challenges inherent in using digital learning objects and reports on the impact of DLO use at both the classroom and school levels. By providing research that links students' use of DLOs with the development of key competencies, we hope to sharpen teachers' visions of how DLOs can help them achieve their educational goals, and to encourage DLO uptake for educational purposes. Finally, we envision a DLO that can assist school principals in the facilitation of educational leadership and help transform teachers' attitudes toward technology-based teaching.


Dissolved-phase transport of groundwater contaminants through crystalline bedrock fractures is often highly heterogeneous and challenging to conceptualize. Groundwater flow can be restricted to a discrete subset of connected bedrock fractures, while contaminant transport may not be well correlated with the degree of fracture-zone hydraulic activity. While characterizing hydraulic interconnectivity between source areas and receptors and between individual wells is a desired component of a conceptual site model (CSM), scale issues may prevent the identification of specific contaminant pathways or the prediction of contaminant concentrations throughout a site. Detailed characterization in known or suspected contamination source areas, in the context of an existing CSM, not only guides remediation and monitoring strategies, but also will enhance understanding of contaminant transport to potential off-site receptors. The case study area in coastal Maine is underlain by fractured metavolcanic and intrusive bedrock, present at or near the ground surface. Water levels are as deep as 120 feet in some wells. Groundwater flow is restricted to fractures, lithologic contacts, or faults within the bedrock. Chlorinated volatile organic compounds (CVOCs) discharged on site from past operations have been detected in wells at concentrations varying from more than 3,000 micrograms per liter to below detection limits, with a heterogeneous spatial distribution. A variety of investigations has led to the development of a CSM for the site. Information obtained from detailed source area investigations may allow identification of specific contaminant pathways within the source area, but not at the greater distances that are present between the source area and some receptors. Investigations, conducted or planned, that focus on the CVOC source areas include: geologic and fracture mapping, surface and borehole geophysical surveys, whole-well and packer sampling, monitoring well installation and angled coring, rock matrix analysis for CVOCs, rock mass characterization, soil sampling, photolineament analysis, borehole radar investigation, hydrophysical logging, packer sampling, and water level monitoring. A combination of conventional and less frequently-applied techniques has allowed an assessment of contaminant transport pathways in the source area, a refinement of the CSM for the overall site, and a more direct evaluation of remedial options.


Geoscience Australia has undertaken a classification of biophysical datasets to create seabed
habitat maps (termed 'seascapes') for the Australian margin and adjacent sea floor. Seascapes
describe a layer of ecologically meaningful biophysical properties that spatially represents
potential seabed habitats. Each seascape area corresponds to a region of the seabed that
contains similar biophysical properties and, by association, potential habitats and
communities. The procedure adopted is inspired by the shelf classification applied in eastern
Canada where physical properties (sediment type, physiography, bed roughness, wave and
current regime) were used to define ecologically meaningful habitats on the Scotian Shelf.
Creating seascapes as proxies for benthic marine biological communities using biophysical
data is required because it is impossible to count and map the distribution of every organism
in the ocean.
This report describes the iterative methods used to create the seascapes, including a
detailed appendix documenting the different datasets used in each planning zone. Creating
the seascapes is necessarily an iterative process whereby the available datasets are integrated
in different combinations, or added as they become available, using the ERMapper™
unsupervised, crisp ISOclass classification program. In each classification only biophysical
properties that have consistent and definable relationships with the benthic biota and are
known in sufficient detail across Australia's entire marine region are used to create the
seascapes. An initial validation of the classification technique has been undertaken on a
subset of the data for the shelf surrounding Tasmania using an alternative unsupervised
fuzzy classification. Results of this validation indicate that the unsupervised classification
methodology provides consistent and reliable classes for defining the seascapes.
Finally, a quantitative method designed to determine where the greatest seabed
heterogeneity occurs to assist with the selection of potential sites for Marine Protected Areas
was trialled on the final seascapes. This Focal Variety method conducted in ArcGIS simply
counts up the number of seascape types within a specified radius (in this case 20 km). Focal
variety analyses were conducted separately on the seascapes (which comprise continuous
spatial data) and geomorphology (which comprise categorical spatial data) and the results
combined. Areas where many different seascapes occur are considered as potential habitat
diversity hotspots.
The mandate for creating the seascapes comes directly from the United Nations
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which Australia ratified in 1994. The CBD
requires Australia to set up a system of marine protected areas for the conservation and
sustainable use of threatened species, habitats and living marine resources and ecological
processes. We believe that the seascapes provide a useful method for assisting in the
development of this system of MPA's by spatially representing seabed heterogeneity in a
consistent, objective and robust way.
The future of seascapes and surrogacy research is to work collaboratively with marine
biologists and ecologists in the formation of seascapes for marine biodiversity prediction,
including undertaking targeted marine surveys to collect further physical and biological data
and building combined databases that permit direct correlation of data. This research will
improve the accuracy and precision with which we can predict Australia's marine
biodiversity and thus strengthen confidence in decisions about the conservation and
sustainable use of Australia's marine resources.


This paper uses student-level data from a statewide community college system to examine the validity of placement tests and high school information in predicting course grades and college performance. We consider the ACCUPLACER and COMPASS placement tests, using two quantitative and two literacy tests from each battery. We find that placement tests do not yield strong predictions of how students will perform in college. Placement test scores are positively—but weakly—associated with college grade point average (GPA). When we control for high school GPA, the correlation disappears. Placement test scores are positively associated with college credit accumulation even after controlling for high school GPA. After three to five semesters, a student with a placement test score in the highest quartile has on average nine credits more than a student with a placement test score in the lowest quartile. In contrast, high school GPAs are useful for predicting many aspects of students' college performance. High school GPA has a strong association with college GPA; students' college GPAs are approximately 0.6 units below their high school GPAs. High school GPA also has a strong association with college credit accumulation. A student whose high school GPA is one grade higher will have accumulate approximately four extra credits per semester. Other information from high school transcripts is modestly useful; this includes number of math and English courses taken in high school, honors courses, number of F grades, and number of credits. This high school information is not independently useful beyond high school GPA, and collectively it explains less variation in college performance. We also calculate accuracy rates and four validity metrics for placement tests. We find high "severe" error rates using the placement test cutoffs. The severe error rate for English is 27 to 33 percent; i.e., three out of every ten students is severely misassigned. For math, the severe error rates are lower but still nontrivial. Using high school GPA instead of placement tests reduces the severe error rates by half across both English and math.


Mini-batch optimal transport (m-OT) has been widely used recently to deal with the memory issue of OT in large-scale applications. Despite their practicality, m-OT suffers from misspecified mappings, namely, mappings that are optimal on the mini-batch level but are partially wrong in the comparison with the optimal transportation plan between the original measures. Motivated by the misspecified mappings issue, we propose a novel mini-batch method by using partial optimal transport (POT) between mini-batch empirical measures, which we refer to as mini-batch partial optimal transport (m-POT). Leveraging the insight from the partial transportation, we explain the source of misspecified mappings from the m-OT and motivate why limiting the amount of transported masses among mini-batches via POT can alleviate the incorrect mappings. Finally, we carry out extensive experiments on various applications such as deep domain adaptation, partial domain adaptation, deep generative model, color transfer, and gradient flow to demonstrate the favorable performance of m-POT compared to current mini-batch methods.


AIM
To translate and validate the European Organisation for Research and Treatment for Cancer (EORTC) brain cancer module (BN-20) into Hindi to make it available for patients and scientific community.

METHODS AND RESULTS
The EORTC BN-20 was translated into Hindi using standard guidelines by EORTC. The process included forward translation by two translators, discussion with the translators in case of discrepancies and formation of first intermediate questionnaire. This questionnaire was then given to two more translators who translated this questionnaire back into English. These 2 questionnaires were then compared with the original EORTC questionnaire and the second intermediate questionnaire was formed. The second intermediate questionnaire was subsequently administered in 10 patients with brain tumors who had never seen the questionnaire before, for pilot-testing. Each of these 10 patients after filling up the questionnaire themselves was then interviewed for any difficulty encountered during the filling up of the questionnaire. These were in the form of specific modules including difficulty in answering, confusion while answering and difficulty to understand, whether the questions were upsetting and if patients would have asked the question in any different way. There were major suggestions in three questions, which were incorporated into the second intermediate questionnaire to form the final Hindi BN-20 questionnaire.

CONCLUSION
The final Hindi BN-20 has been approved by EORTC and can be used in clinical practice and studies for patients with brain tumors.


In this work we create agents that can perform well beyond a single, individual task, that exhibit much wider generalisation of behaviour to a massive, rich space of challenges. We define a universe of tasks within an environment domain and demonstrate the ability to train agents that are generally capable across this vast space and beyond. The environment is natively multi-agent, spanning the continuum of competitive, cooperative, and independent games, which are situated within procedurally generated physical 3D worlds. The resulting space is exceptionally diverse in terms of the challenges posed to agents, and as such, even measuring the learning progress of an agent is an open research problem. We propose an iterative notion of improvement between successive generations of agents, rather than seeking to maximise a singular objective, allowing us to quantify progress despite tasks being incomparable in terms of achievable rewards. We show that through constructing an open-ended learning process, which dynamically changes the training task distributions and training objectives such that the agent never stops learning, we achieve consistent learning of new behaviours. The resulting agent is able to score reward in every one of our humanly solvable evaluation levels, with behaviour generalising to many held-out points in the universe of tasks. Examples of this zero-shot generalisation include good performance on Hide and Seek, Capture the Flag, and Tag. Through analysis and hand-authored probe tasks we characterise the behaviour of our agent, and find interesting emergent heuristic behaviours such as trial-and-error experimentation, simple tool use, option switching, and cooperation. Finally, we demonstrate that the general capabilities of this agent could unlock larger scale transfer of behaviour through cheap finetuning.


Elections held during May 2007 in England and Scotland for the first time allowed accredited observers access to polling stations and counts. This provided an opportunity for detailed scrutiny of the use of e-voting and e-counting equipment in these elections. This article assesses the use of these technologies using observations from 10 constituencies and data obtained using Freedom of Information Act requests, interviews with officials, candidates and parties and reports on previous trials. It finds that inadequate time was available during the procurement process for cross-party consensus to be built around the English e-voting trials or for systems to be fully tested. Design errors meant that a very large number of Scottish ballots were spoiled, while problems with ballot papers required a large number of votes to be counted manually. Votes initially missed due to an over-wide Excel spreadsheet changed the result in the Highlands and Islands and handed control of the Scottish Parliament from the Labour party to the Scottish National Party.


Cultural diversity is a complex and multi-faceted concept. Commonly used quantitative measures of the spatial distribution of culturally-defined groups – such as segregation, isolation or concentration indexes – are often only capable of identifying just one aspect of this distribution. The strengths or weaknesses of any measure can only be comprehensively assessed empirically. This paper provides evidence on the empirical properties of various spatial measures of cultural diversity by using Monte Carlo replications of agent-based modeling (MC-ABM) simulations with synthetic data assigned to a realistic and detailed geographical context of the city of Amsterdam. Schelling's classical segregation model is used as the theoretical engine to generate patterns of spatial clustering. The data inputs include the initial population, the number and shares of various cultural groups, and their preferences with respect to co-location. Our MC-ABM data generating process produces output maps that enable us to assess the performance of various spatial measures of cultural diversity under a range of demographic compositions and preferences. We find that, as our simulated city becomes more diverse, stable residential location equilibria are only possible when people, particularly minorities, become more tolerant. We test whether observed measures can be interpreted as revealing unobserved preferences for co-location of individuals with their own group and find that the segregation and isolation measures of spatial diversity are shown to be non-decreasing in increasing preference for within-group co-location, but the Gini coefficient and concentration measures are not.


First, we introduce a splitting algorithm to minimize a sum of three convex functions. The algorithm is of primal dual kind and is inspired by recent results of Vũ and Condat. Second, we provide a randomized version of the algorithm based on the idea of coordinate descent. Finally, we address two applications of our method: (i) for stochastic minibatch optimization; and (ii) for distributed optimization.


Background: Neonatal emergencies contribute significantly to under-five morbidity and mortality in developing countries, partly due to poverty and limited access to quality healthcare in rural communities. Aims: The aim is to evaluate the spectrum, outcome, case fatality rates (CFRs), and prognostic factors of neonatal emergencies seen in the two free health-care facilities in Ondo State. Methods: This was a cross-sectional descriptive study of neonatal emergencies. Data were collected on eligible consecutive infants using a self-designed questionnaire. Neonatal emergencies were classified based on systemic involvement and underlying causes. Categorized data were expressed as percentages. Outcome and CFRs were presented pictorially. Inferential analysis was performed. The value of P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: Altogether, 425 infants with neonatal emergencies were recruited, constituting 21.3% of the under-five medical emergencies managed during September 2014 to February 2015. The most frequent emergencies were neonatal sepsis (45.2%) and neurological emergencies, especially hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (22.1%) and acute bilirubin encephalopathy (14.6%). Furthermore, 6.1% of the infants presented with disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. The outcome of the emergencies was as follows: 88.6% were discharged, 7.4% died, and 3.7% left against medical advice whereas 0.3% were referred for subspecialty services. The leading causes of death among the 32 mortalities in this survey were sepsis (39.5%), hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (36.9%), and hypothermia (13.2%). Hypothermia, perinatal asphyxia, and hypoglycemia had the highest CFRs, 22.7%, 12.6%, and 11.8%, respectively. Conclusion: Neonatal encephalopathy and sepsis were the most common emergencies seen in the free health-care program. Furthermore, they accounted for a majority of the neonatal deaths. This should be taken into cognizance while designing local interventions for neonatal emergencies.


Water plays an important role in underpinning equitable, stable and productive societies and ecosystems. Hence, United Nations recognized ensuring water security as one (Goal 6) of the seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs). Many international river basins are likely to experience 'low water security' over the coming decades. Water security is rooted not only in the physical availability of freshwater resources relative to water demand, but also on social and economic factors (e.g. sound water planning and management approaches, institutional capacity to provide water services, sustainable economic policies). Until recently, advanced tools and methods are available for the assessment of water scarcity. However, quantitative and integrated—physical and socio-economic—approaches for spatial analysis of water security at global level are not available yet. In this study, we present a spatial multi-criteria analysis framework to provide a global assessment of water security. The selected indicators are based on Goal 6 of SDGs. The term 'security' is conceptualized as a function of 'availability', 'accessibility to services', 'safety and quality', and 'management'. The proposed global water security index (GWSI) is calculated by aggregating indicator values on a pixel-by-pixel basis, using the ordered weighted average method, which allows for the exploration of the sensitivity of final maps to different attitudes of hypothetical policy makers. Our assessment suggests that countries of Africa, South Asia and Middle East experience very low water security. Other areas of high water scarcity, such as some parts of United States, Australia and Southern Europe, show better GWSI values, due to good performance of management, safety and quality, and accessibility. The GWSI maps show the areas of the world in which integrated strategies are needed to achieve water related targets of the SDGs particularly in the African and Asian continents.


Field experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of Cry1Ab toxin of Bacillus thuringiensis expressed in transgenic sweet corn (Attribute™) on larval dispersal and larval density of the fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda (Smith), which could affect rates of adaptation to Bt corn. Crop phenology and agronomy were also tested to determine the affects of rapid corn maturation and tillers on insect survival. Behavior and dispersal of larvae from the neonate to 10 day-old larval stage was measured in single variety plots of Bt and conventional plants. Each plot was artificially infested with one egg mass to test the hypothesis that Bt toxins affect larval behavior, increasing dispersal of early instars. Results indicated that crawling behavior of neonates was similar in both varieties but larvae settled faster on conventional plants. Larval dispersal among plants was also statistically similar in both varieties at all sampling dates. In separated plots, two larval densities and three planting dates were studied. Mortality of fall armyworm larvae in Bt sweet corn was not density-dependent. Early entry of the corn plant into reproductive stage apparently affected larval survival. There is not differential larval utilization and survival in tillers versus main whorls of Bt and non-Bt plants. Insect adaptation to Bt toxins is likely affected by larval dispersal and rapid maturation of corn plants.


The true has no value beyond the sham: As well the counter as coin, I submit. --Robert Browning The Statue and the Bust (21) FORGERY AND FUTURITY The belated revelation--modestly promulgated in 1934 by John Carter and Graham Pollard under the specter of a libel action--that scores of "rare" and collectible editions had in fact been forged and surreptitiously dispersed among the catalogues of universities, libraries, and auction houses in both Britain and America codified a minor canon of Victorian literature, broad enough to include the major figures of any anthology, select enough to print in a series of pamphlets. At the same time, the insinuation--painstakingly grounded in the textual minutiae of rag and wood pulp, kernless fonts, and anomalous punctuation marks--that Thomas J. Wise, the most authoritative critical bibliographer of his time, had for years maintained a prolific industry in counterfeits marked the culmination of a distinctively modernist and technologically informed mode of paleography, the emergence of an elaborate form of detection suited to a "wholly bibliographical" crime (Haywood 80). That those editions could, in the wake of Carter and Pollard's investigation, retain and indeed increase their collective worth through the very fact of their forgery--effectively trading authenticity for curiosity or scholarly use-value--suggests that Wise may have accomplished more even than his accusers have suggested: that the value generated and accrued in the act of forgery is less measurable by collectors' markets than by an index of a different sort, in the exercise of a critical practice "dependent for its development on the stimulus that forgers have provided" (Grafton 123) and in the differential calculations through which one period or mode of production distinguishes itself from another. But if the immediate controversies raised in 1934 have largely been settled, the critical question of the significance of forgery itself--or rather of forgery's implied claim to originality--remains an open one. The identification of a forgery, after all, merely underscores the epistemological difficulty that subtends any pure category of originality: the logical need to define an original on its own terms simultaneously requires and forecloses a reference to some provenance that might sustain an origin as historical fact. As Umberto Eco notes, "[t]o prove that an object is original means considering it as a sign of its own origin. To take something as the sign of its own origin means to take it as a symptom, an imprint, a clue, as the starting point for a series of inferences, conjectures, hypotheses, abductions" (616). In effect, forgeries can signify their origins; originals cannot. A standard of originality is possible only in the negative, as a test for forgery. Obviously enough, then, a forgery initiates a paradox. It functions only so long as it conceals itself, remains something other than itself. With the declaration of its actual status, it ceases to operate as a forgery at all. Once declared, however, a forgery may become (like Wise's pamphlets) an original of another sort: an original with the capacity to figure its own relation to origin perhaps. It may, as forgery, undertake another practice of meaning altogether (or, more precisely, of making), a poiesis that solicits or provokes criticism and accordingly negotiates temporality in a different way In its need for anonymity, a forgery merely shadows a prior dissimulation lodged within the notion of originality, an originality confirmed only in the possibility of its own abduction and in the corollary impossibility of testifying to itself. But in its contrary need for exposure, a poetics of forgery may also resituate the historical conundrum of originality entirely. The problem lies not in the forgeries but in the originals, in their absence. What Carter and Pollard identified were not primarily, after all, simple reprints or pirate editions but rather texts that asserted a prior claim of authority, an imprint or a date sufficient to recast the history of the work in question. …


Multichannel seismic reflection profiles from the East Pacific Rise show distinctive patterns of reflecting events immediately below the reflection Moho in the axial region. These events begin at the reflection Moho horizon between 2 and 12 km from the ridge axis. They dip inward, in two-way traveltime, by 0.2 to 0.4 s over horizontal distances of ∼1 to 3 km; depth conversion indicates that their dip is between 30° and 45°. The events terminate or fade away down dip and are not observed beneath the ridge crest itself. They are observed individually or in pairs about the ridge axis and have only been identified in the axial region. We believe that these are the first well-documented examples of upper-mantle, events in marine seismic observations from an active spreading environment. They provide much-needed observational data on the structure of the uppermost mantle beneath the mid-ocean ridge. We favor the hypothesis that the sub-Moho events are directly related to the accumulation of melt in the upper mantle. If this interpretation is correct, the distribution of events implies that melt arriving at the base of the crust is not always centered with respect to the ridge axis or any imaged crustal features.


Design for behaviour change aims to influence user behaviour, through design, for social or environmental benefit. Understanding and modelling human behaviour has thus come within the scope of designers'work, as in interaction design, service design and user experience design more generally. Diverse approaches to how to model users when seeking to influence behaviour can result in many possible strategies, but a major challenge for the field is matching appropriate design strategies to particular behaviours (Zachrisson & Boks, 2012). In this paper, we introduce and explore behavioural heuristics as a way of framing problem-solution pairs (Dorst & Cross, 2001) in terms of simple rules. These act as a 'common language' between insights from user research and design principles and techniques, and draw on ideas from human factors, behavioural economics, and decision research. We introduce the process via a case study on interaction with office heating systems, based on interviews with 16 people. This is followed by worked examples in the 'other direction', based on a workshop held at the Interaction '12 conference, extracting heuristics from existing systems designed to influence user behaviour, to illustrate both ends of a possible design process using heuristics.


Many, if not most, drug abuse counselors and treatment programs recommend abstinence from all psychoactive substances, in part, because of a fear that clients who decrease or stop their use of one drug will substitute another. Research to confirm this notion of substitution, however, mostly fails to show that abstinence from one drug increases use of another. A within-subjects study investigated whether consumption of alcohol and other substances changed during marijuana abstinence. Using an ABA design, 28 individuals who met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSMIV; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000) criteria for either cannabis dependence or abuse and were not trying to stop their marijuana use completed an 8-day baseline period in which they used marijuana and other drugs as usual, then a 13-day marijuana abstinence period, and finally a 7-day return-to-baseline period. Marijuana abstinence was induced by a previously-validated contingent compensation schedule. Participants called a voicemail system daily to provide self-report of marijuana and alcohol use and visited the laboratory twice per week to provide self-report of caffeine, cigarette, and other illicit drug use, to complete self-report measures on psychological symptoms such as withdrawal and craving, and to submit urine samples to biochemically verify marijuana abstinence. Alcohol use significantly increased from a mean of 2.6 drinks/day (SD=1.0) during the baseline period to 3.0 drinks/day (SD=1.0) during the marijuana abstinence period (p=0.03), a 15% increase. Alcohol use then significantly decreased to 2.5 drinks/day (SD=1.3) during the return-to-baseline period (p=0.03), a 17% decrease. Although alcohol substitution occurred during marijuana abstinence, substitution of cigarettes, caffeine, and non-marijuana illicit drugs did not occur. Individuals with a diagnosis of past alcohol abuse or dependence substituted alcohol to a greater degree (52% increase) than those without this past history (3% increase). Increases in alcohol drinks/day correlated with increases in marijuana withdrawal discomfort scores and with increases in alcohol craving scores from the baseline to the marijuana abstinence period. Problems related to alcohol did not significantly increase from baseline to marijuana abstinence. This study provides empirical validation of the clinical notion of drug substitution and suggests that clinicians' concerns about drug substitution may be valid, but this study's results need to be replicated in individuals who seek treatment for marijuana problems. Whether substitution reduces the ability to abstain from marijuana also needs to be tested. If alcohol substitution does occur and interferes with the ability to quit marijuana, this would be important empirical support for the clinical practice of recommending abstinence from all substances.


Neural networks can approximate complex functions, but they struggle to perform exact arithmetic operations over real numbers. The lack of inductive bias for arithmetic operations leaves neural networks without the underlying logic necessary to extrapolate on tasks such as addition, subtraction, and multiplication. We present two new neural network components: the Neural Addition Unit (NAU), which can learn exact addition and subtraction; and the Neural Multiplication Unit (NMU) that can multiply subsets of a vector. The NMU is, to our knowledge, the first arithmetic neural network component that can learn to multiply elements from a vector, when the hidden size is large. The two new components draw inspiration from a theoretical analysis of recently proposed arithmetic components. We find that careful initialization, restricting parameter space, and regularizing for sparsity is important when optimizing the NAU and NMU. Our proposed units NAU and NMU, compared with previous neural units, converge more consistently, have fewer parameters, learn faster, can converge for larger hidden sizes, obtain sparse and meaningful weights, and can extrapolate to negative and small values.


The article discusses the effectiveness and the intensity of judicial review in the Polish competition law system. First, it studies whether the judicial review offered by the 1st instance Court of Competition and Consumer Protection in Warsaw (SOKiK) is effective in practice. Next, the article analyzes whether Polish courts tend to defer to the findings of the Polish competition authority, UOKiK. Judgments of the Supreme Court concerning relevant market definition serve as case studies. Finally, the article discusses whether proceedings before the Polish competition authority ensure sufficient due process guarantees, the impartiality of decisionmakers, and the overall expert character of UOKiK's decision-making process. On this basis the article examines whether there are grounds for the reviewing courts to defer to UOKiK's findings. The article concludes that currently the review undertaken by SOKiK happens to be superficial and thus ineffective. At the same time, the Supreme Court's review of the determination of the relevant market is not deferential towards UOKiK's findings. The Supreme Court substitutes its own definition of the relevant market for that of UOKiK and that of the lower courts. However, the article shows that there are no grounds at the moment for arguing for greater judicial deference. Proceedings held before UOKiK, despite recently introduced improvements, still do not offer sufficient due process guarantees or a division between investigatory and decision-making functions. In addition, UOKiK's expertise is not sufficient for both institutional and practical reasons.


Computer-based simulation of influenza outbreaks in local communities can help researchers, epidemiologists, and decision makers better understand the impact of the community structure on the reproduction rate of disease, and the relative benefits of different types of prevention and interventions. The goal of scenario modeling is to develop a description of scenario components, such us the disease, the community and interventions. An ontology-based representation of the scenario model together with a modeling tool, which is based on an extension to Protege assist scenario developers in formulating simulation specifications. This approach allows the exploration of new ideas by rapidly formulating and reconstructing scenarios from novel components.


Overwhelming the users with large amount of information on the Web has resulted in users' inability to find the information and their dissatisfaction with available information searching and filtering systems. On the other hand the information is distributed over many websites and a large part of it (for example news) is updated frequently. Keeping track of the changes in huge amount of information is a real problem for users. Due to the great impact the information has on people's lives and business decision-making much research has been done on the efficient ways of accessing and analyzing the information. This thesis will propose a conceptual classification method and ranking of the information in order to provide better user access to a wider range of information it also provides the information that may help in analyzing the global trends in various fields. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method a feed aggregator system has been developed and evaluated through this thesis. To improve the flexibility and adaptability of the system we have adopted the agent-oriented software engineering architecture that has also helped facilitating the development process. In addition since the system deals with storing and processing large amounts of information that requires a large number of resources the cloud platform service has been used as a platform for deploying the application. The result was a cloud based software service that benefited from the unlimited on-demand resources. To take advantage of the available features of public cloud computing platforms those supporting the agent-oriented design the multi-agent system was implemented by mapping the agents to the cloud computing services. In addition the cloud queue service that is provided by some cloud providers such as Microsoft and Amazon was used to implement indirect communication among the agents in the multi-agent system.


A potentially dangerous product is supplied by a competitive market. The likelihood of a product-related accident depends on the unobservable precautions taken by the manufacturer and on the type of the consumer. Contracts include the price to be paid by the consumer ex ante and stipulated damages to be paid by the manufacturer ex post in the event of an accident. Although the stipulated damage payments are a potential solution to the moral hazard problem, firms have a private incentive to reduce the stipulated damages (and simultaneously lower the up front price) in order to attract the safer consumers who are less costly to serve. The competitive equilibrium–if an equilibrium exists at all–features suboptimally low stipulated damages and correspondingly suboptimal levels of product safety. Imposing tort liability on manufacturers for uncovered accident losses–and prohibiting private parties from waiving that liability– can improve social welfare.


We propose a methodology for forecasting the systemic impact of financial institutions in interconnected systems. Utilizing a five-year sample including the 2008/9 financial crisis, we demonstrate how the approach can be used for timely systemic risk monitoring of large European banks and insurance companies. We predict firms' systemic relevance as the marginal impact of individual downside risks on systemic distress. The so-called systemic risk betas account for a company's position within the network of financial interdependencies in addition to its balance sheet characteristics and its exposure towards general market conditions. Relying only on publicly available daily market data, we determine time-varying systemic risk networks, and forecast systemic relevance on a quarterly basis. Our empirical findings reveal time-varying risk channels and firms' specific roles as risk transmitters and/or risk recipients.


The decrease in hydrostatic pressure generated by octopus suckers adhering to wettable and non-wettable surfaces was measured using a flush-mounted miniature pressure transducer. The cavitation thresholds, or lowest sustainable pressures, of sea water on the same surfaces were also measured and were compared with the pressures generated by octopuses. It is shown that suckers can generate hydrostatic pressures below OMPa on moderately wettable surfaces. This disprovesthe commonly repeated assumption that suckers cannot produce pressures below a vacuum and suggests that the importance of suction in attachment mechanisms may have been overlooked. On epoxy, the lowest recorded pressure was −0.168MPa (0.268MPa or 2.66atm below ambient), and the octopus generated negative pressure in 35% of the pulls that were considered maximal efforts. The suckers never generated negative pressures on non-wettable surfaces. These results are in agreement with the range of pressures that sea water can sustain on the same surfaces. It is suggested, therefore, that cavitation, the failure of water in tension, limits the attachment force of suckers. The difference between the cavitation threshold of water in nature and the cavitation threshold of pure water is discussed.


Since every school in Comanche County operates some form of pupil transportation, the purpose of this study is to determine the efficiency of the system of pupil transportation in Comanche County and to find the means of operating school transportation more efficiently.
School consolidation in Comanche County has made pupil transportation one of the most important problems that administrators of the county have to deal with. The tendency is toward larger school attendance areas. As the attendance area gets larger, more pupils will be transported. Increased demands are mounting; replacement of worn-out vehicles and equipment is imperative; a more efficient coverage of the attendance area seems necessary; and finance is lacking.


THE THIN-wire loop is one of the first antennas to receive theoretical consideration, having been discussed by Pocklington1 in 1897. Pocklington treated a closed loop excited by a plane wave; he obtained an exact solution for the current on the loop in the form of a Fourier series. More recently, Hallén2 considered a driven loop and obtained a solution, again in the form of a Fourier series, for the current and the impedance. However, Hallén pointed out that the coefficients of this series contained a singularity which made the series only quasiconvergent and hence useful only for loops small in comparison to a wave length. Moreover, the individual terms were complicated and their evaluation and a summation involved a somewhat difficult numerical task.


Remote sensing of sea surface salinity can be performed by means of microwave radiometry at L-band, but it requires high radiometric accuracy (e.g., on the order of 0.1 K). Since the variability of salinity in the open ocean exhibits large spatial scales and long temporal scales, it is possible to use antennas with large footprints and averaging to meet this goal. However, antennas with large footprints introduce other problems such as variations of the incidence angle and direction of the polarization vectors over the footprint. Examples of these effects are computed here using antennas that are representative of those that will be flown on the Aquarius/SAC-D mission being developed for remote sensing of salinity from space. It is shown that the antenna temperature (i.e., integrated over the antenna pattern) is biased relative to the value at boresight. In part, this is due to change in incidence angles across the field of view. Polarization mixing, because of the variations of the local plane of incidence across the footprint, also induces bias (peculiarly for the third Stokes parameter). Finally, large antenna footprints limit how close to land measurements can be made.


A polyurethane (PU) foam nanocomposite impregnated with iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs) was developed to remove Arsenic (As) from drinking water at ppb concentrations. The effect of synthesis and application parameters such as the size of IONPs, pH levels, adsorbents weight, and arsenic concentrations, on the performance of PU-IONPs adsorbents in removing arsenic are studied. The prepared adsorbents were characterized by scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray microscopy to evaluate the microstructure of PU-IONPs and the surface adsorption of arsenic species; respectively. Atomic absorption spectrometry was conducted to measure the concentration of arsenic in the treated solutions in order to calculate the removal capacity of PU-IONPs. The experimental results revealed that decreasing the size of IONPs from 50–100 nm to 15–20 nm yields a higher removal capacity. Increasing the weight of the used adsorbents and the contact time led to increasing the removal capacity as well. As the arsenic species (III and V) concentration increased in the solution, the removal capacity of PU-IONPs decreased. In a column study, long-term cyclic operation mode was found to be very effective in removing arsenic; 100% removal capacity was achieved when 500 ml of As solution (100 ppb) was treated.


Abstract. Among various factors that influence the long-range transport of pollutants in the free troposphere (FT), the prevailing atmospheric weather states probably play the most important role in governing characteristics and efficacy of such transport. The weather states, such as a particular wind pattern, cyclonic or anticyclonic conditions, and their degree of persistency determine the spatio-temporal distribution and the final fate of the pollutants. This is especially true in the case of Nordic countries, where baroclinic disturbances and associated weather fronts primarily regulate local meteorology, in contrast to the lower latitudes where a convective paradigm plays a similarly important role. Furthermore, the long-range transport of pollutants in the FT has significant contribution to the total column burden over the Nordic countries. However, there is insufficient knowledge on the large-scale co-variability of pollutants in the FT and atmospheric weather states based solely on observational data over this region. The present study attempts to quantify and understand this statistical co-variability while providing relevant meteorological background. To that end, we select eight weather states that predominantly occur over the Nordic countries and three periods of their persistency (3 days, 5 days, and 7 days), thus providing in total 24 cases to investigate sensitivity of free tropospheric carbon monoxide, an ideal tracer for studying pollutant transport, to these selected weather states. The eight states include four dominant wind directions (namely, NW, NE, SE and SW), cyclonic and anticyclonic conditions, and the enhanced positive and negative phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). For our sensitivity analysis, we use recently released Version 6 retrievals of CO at 500 hPa from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) onboard Aqua satellite covering the 11-year period from September 2002 through August 2013 and winds from the ECMWF's ERA-Interim project to classify weather states for the same 11-year period. We show that, among the various weather states studied here, southeasterly winds lead to highest observed CO anomalies (up to +8%) over the Nordic countries while transporting pollution from the central and eastern parts of Europe. The second (up to +4%) and third highest (up to +2.5%) CO anomalies are observed when winds are northwesterly (facilitating inter-continental transport from polluted North American regions) and during the enhanced positive phase of the NAO respectively. Higher than normal CO anomalies are observed during anticyclonic conditions (up to +1%) compared to cyclonic conditions. The cleanest conditions are observed when winds are northeasterly and during the enhanced negative phases of the NAO, when relatively clean Arctic air masses are transported over the Nordic regions in the both cases. In the case of nearly all weather states, the CO anomalies consistently continue to increase or decrease as the degree of persistency of a weather state is increased. The results of this sensitivity study further provide an observational basis for the process-oriented evaluation of chemistry transport models, especially with regard to the representation of large-scale coupling of chemistry and local weather states and its role in the long-range transport of pollutants in such models.


Paper fluidics has recently offered an approach to precisely guide liquid flow in analytical devices with a low-cost regime. Multiple paper layers expand the capability of analytical devices to handle multiple samples as well as multiple detections simultaneously. Here we present a novel inexpensive cut-and-insert method to achieve a well-controlled even distribution of liquid in multi-channel three-dimensional (3D) paper-based analytical devices. A novel vacuum-driven poly dimethyl siloxane (PDMS) stamping method to pattern hydrophobic barriers in the filter paper enables rapid fabrication and assembly of microfluidic paper-based analytical devices (μ-PADs). The cut-and-insert assembly method facilitates more efficient fluid transfer than conventional O2 plasma-assisted overlapped channel binding, due to the strong physical contact between connected layers. The liquid transfer starts from the center region where two inserted layers are overlapped, and thus the presented method enables consistent liquid transfer independent of the angles of connected fluidic paths. Consequently, the angles between the connected μ-PAD strips as well as the 3D distance for the fluid transfer can be freely adjusted as needed. Also, multiple strips can be easily connected in series or in parallel. For example, perpendicularly connected bended paper channels guide upward and then lateral liquid flows by capillary action. Three important assays, i.e. nitrite 0 to 2 ppm, pH 1 to 10, and glucose 0 to 0.22 molL−1, were successfully implemented and measured simultaneously using a device with four strips connected in parallel.


Backgrounds: one of the most difficult tasks carried out by educators in health plan field is educational program assessment and students' clinical evaluation. Logbook is an assessing tool that reduces the distance between the theory and practice; it could be definitely worthwhile for both the professors and the students to achieve the clinical and educational objectives. The purpose of this study was to determine the Comparing the Influence of Log book on the Scores of Practical Oral Medicine Course Gained by Students of General Dentistry Methods: this is a descriptive- analytic study conducted on 36 dental students who have attended the oral medicine course. The students were divided in two groups including the control and case group, randomly. The control group were assessed in the usual method and the case group where assessed by logbook. Then, the average of the grade of oral medicine unit was analyzed in two categories. The data were analyzed by T-test and SPSS 17. The significance level was PResults: the average score of the case group was significantly higher than the control group. In the case group, the average score of practical oral medicine course was 16.54(1.47) and 14.92 (2.41) was for the control group that had a statistical significance (p=0.02). Conclusion: the increase in student's scores can be a motivation for applying this method in clinical assessment of the students.


Significance A causality between millennial-scale climate cycles and the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans in Europe has tentatively been suggested. However, that replacement was diachronous and occurred over several such cycles. A poorly constrained continental paleoclimate framework has hindered identification of any inherent causality. Speleothems from the Carpathians reveal that, between 44,000 and 40,000 years ago, a sequence of stadials with severely cold and arid conditions caused successive regional Neanderthal depopulation intervals across Europe and facilitated staggered repopulation by modern humans. Repetitive depopulation–repopulation cycles may have facilitated multiple genetic turnover in Europe between 44,000 and 34,000 years ago. Two speleothem stable isotope records from East-Central Europe demonstrate that Greenland Stadial 12 (GS12) and GS10—at 44.3–43.3 and 40.8–40.2 ka—were prominent intervals of cold and arid conditions. GS12, GS11, and GS10 are coeval with a regional pattern of culturally (near-)sterile layers within Europe's diachronous archeologic transition from Neanderthals to modern human Aurignacian. Sterile layers coeval with GS12 precede the Aurignacian throughout the middle and upper Danube region. In some records from the northern Iberian Peninsula, such layers are coeval with GS11 and separate the Châtelperronian from the Aurignacian. Sterile layers preceding the Aurignacian in the remaining Châtelperronian domain are coeval with GS10 and the previously reported 40.0- to 40.8-ka cal BP [calendar years before present (1950)] time range of Neanderthals' disappearance from most of Europe. This suggests that ecologic stress during stadial expansion of steppe landscape caused a diachronous pattern of depopulation of Neanderthals, which facilitated repopulation by modern humans who appear to have been better adapted to this environment. Consecutive depopulation–repopulation cycles during severe stadials of the middle pleniglacial may principally explain the repeated replacement of Europe's population and its genetic composition.


The market for financial derivatives is far and away the largest and most powerful market in the world, and it is growing exponentially. In 1970 the yearly valuation of financial derivatives was only a few million dollars. By 1980 the sum had swollen to nearly one hundred million dollars. By 1990 it had climbed to almost one hundred billion dollars, and in 2000 it approached one hundred trillion. Created and sustained by a small number of European and American banks, corporations, and hedge funds, the derivatives market has an enormous impact on the economies of nations—particularly poorer nations—because it controls the price of money. Derivatives bought and sold by means of computer keystrokes in London and New York affect the price of food, clothing, and housing in Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, and Buenos Aires. Arguing that social theorists concerned with globalization must familiarize themselves with the mechanisms of a world economy based on the rapid circulation of capital, Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee offer a concise introduction to financial derivatives.

LiPuma and Lee explain how derivatives are essentially wagers—often on the fluctuations of national currencies—based on models that aggregate and price risk. They describe how these financial instruments are changing the face of capitalism, undermining the power of nations and perpetrating a new and less visible form of domination on postcolonial societies. As they ask: How does one know about, let alone demonstrate against, an unlisted, virtual, offshore corporation that operates in an unregulated electronic space using a secret proprietary trading strategy to buy and sell arcane financial instruments? LiPuma and Lee provide a necessary look at the obscure but consequential role of financial derivatives in the global economy.


The gravity and magnetic data of Tikrit-Kirkuk area in central Iraq were considered to study the tectonic situation. The residual anomalies were separated from regional using space windows method with space of about 24, 12 and 10km to delineate the source level of the residual anomalies. The Total Horizontal Derivative (THD) is used to identify the fault trends in the basement and sedimentary rocks depending upon gravity and magnetic data. The identified faults in the study area show NW-SE, less common NE-SW and rare N-S trends. Some of these faults extending from the basement to the upper most layer of the sedimentary rocks. It was found that the depth of some gravity and magnetic source ranges between 1213Km, which confirm the basement depth that obtained by C.G.G. 1974. While the depth of shallow gravity source equals about 4Km, this depth may be lay with sedimentary cover in Triassic age. A comparison of the residual gravity and magnetic anomalies of the relatively shallow depths showed a general coincidence. The obtained tectonic boundaries divided the study area to many blocks. In general the tectonic boundaries control the river running in the area, at the same time the longitudinal faults control the main oil fields in the study area.


Purpose: Using data from an epidemiological study described elsewhere (Gordon et al 2002 & 2007), multivariate logistic regression models were constructed to explore the association between sleep position, factors related to sleep quality, and the prevalence of waking symptoms (cervical spine pain and stiffness, headache, and aching in scapulae or arm regions).

Method: A causal model was developed in which putative exposures were tested for their association with sleep quality, which was considered as an antecedent cause of waking cervico-thoracic symptoms.

Results: Factors which significantly constrained sleep quality were identified as the presence of a medical condition, past history of injury or accident to the cervical spine, sleep position, and nocturnal bruxism. Poor sleep quality was significantly related to waking cervico-thoracic symptoms.

Conclusions: The significant relationships between these factors highlight the need for assessment of all possible causes of waking cervico-thoracic symptoms in the clinical setting.


Background: India accounts for one fifth of the global incidence of tuberculosis (TB) annually. Genital tract TB is one of the extra pulmonary presentations of TB leading to infertility among Indian women. Genital TB is a chronic disease and often asymptomatic with very few specific complaints. Infertility is the most common clinical presentation of genital TB. Herein, we report a case of 32-year-old female patient suffering from abdominal pain and infertility for the last 8 months. Methods: Hysterosalpingography (HSG) and ultrasonography (USG) did not reveal characteristic radiological appearances of TB although USG detected the presence of a large fibroid in the right uterine wall. Histology, microscopy for acid fast bacilli, liquid culture and nucleic acid amplification assay targeting 64kDa protein encoding gene, the IS6110 element of endometrium biopsy were negative for tubercle bacilli. Results: Since the diagnosis of genital TB is elusive, antitubercular treatment (ATT) using isoniazid, pyrazinamide, rifampicin, and ethambutol was prescribed for two months followed by maintenance therapy with isoniazid and rifampicin for four months without any pregnancy outcome. Conclusion: However, the patient conceived spontaneously after surgical removal of fibroid. Relating infertility to female genital tuberculosis due to high prevalence of TB in the country and ignoring the presence of uterine fibroid might not have been the right decision taken by the gynaecologist. This suggests the urgent need for an accurate method intended for diagnosis of female genital tuberculosis.


Background: Psychosocial risk factors, among which job control has proved to be a key dimension, can have a negative impact on the health of workers. Various research projects have found a relationship between low levels of free time at work and stress and job satisfaction indicators. Objectives: to assess to what extent certain social and employment variables influence "job control". Methods: A descriptive study was carried out on a sample of workers to analyse the influence of certain socio-demographic and work-related variables on job control, by means of an assessment survey on psychosocial risk and the general state of workers' health. The tools used in this study were the COPSOQ-ISTAS 21 version 1.5 psychosocial risk assessment questionnaire and a specific survey on the perceived state of health. Results: Three hundred fourteen workers were asked to participate in the study. One hundred and ninety workers completed the questionnaire and were finally included. For the "job control" variable, 47.4% of workers described their situation as good. The results show that workers with a higher educational level (+78%), who have seniority in the job, have a good understanding of their situation at work (+15%), and are employed as white collars (34%), are more likely to show high job control and, therefore, could be less at risk from psychosocial factors. Conclusions: There are two parameters influencing "job control": social factors concerning educational level, and work situation factors, including seniority and being a white collar worker.


Directed trusts have become a familiar feature of trust practice in spite of considerable legal uncertainty about them. Fortunately, the Uniform Law Commission has just finished work on the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA), a new uniform law that offers clear solutions to the many legal uncertainties surrounding directed trusts. This article offers an overview of the UDTA, with particular emphasis on four areas of practical innovation. The first is a careful allocation of fiduciary duties. The UDTA's basic approach is to take the law of trusteeship and attach it to whichever person holds the powers of trusteeship, even if that person is not formally a trustee. Thus, under the UDTA the fiduciary responsibility for a power of direction attaches primarily to the trust director (or trust protector or trust adviser) who holds the power, with only a diminished duty to avoid "willful misconduct" applying to a directed trustee (or administrative trustee). The second innovation is a comprehensive treatment of non-fiduciary issues, such as appointment, vacancy, and limitations. Here again, the UDTA largely absorbs the law of trusteeship for a trust director. The UDTA also deals with new and distinctive subsidiary problems that do not arise in ordinary trusts, such as the sharing of information between a trustee and a trust director. The third innovation is a reconciliation of directed trusts with the traditional law of cotrusteeship. The UDTA permits a settlor to allocate fiduciary duties between cotrustees in a manner similar to the allocation between a trust director and directed trustee in a directed trust. A final innovation is a careful system of exclusions that preserves existing law and settlor autonomy with respect to tax planning, revocable trusts, powers of appointment, and other issues. All told, if appropriately modified to fit local policy preferences, the UDTA could improve on the directed trust law of every state. The UDTA can also be used by practitioners in any state to identify the key issues in a directed trust and to find sensible, well-drafted solutions that can be absorbed into the terms of a directed trust.


In today's marketplace, reducing the product development time is a deciding factor for the success of a new supercomputer. This paper presents a new test methodology, that we used to reduce the duration of the development phase for the new version of the fastest computer in 2005[3], Blue Gene (BG). Our major contribution is the developed of a new test methodology, which we have applied to part of the new Blue Gene. The main test process consists of executing several integration and performance tests on the new control system version of the parallel processing machines. Although the architecture of the new control system differs considerably from the current one, we were able to hook up the new control system version to the current BG. These tests combining both supercomputer versions enabled us to identify and correct many design errors that would otherwise appear in a later, more critical phase. This approach reduces the total development time, as discussed here.


Building on previous studies of women's formal, descriptive, and substantive representation in Rwanda, this article examines women's symbolic representation, defined as the broader social and cultural impact of the greater representation of women in the Rwandan political system. It explores the cultural meanings of gender quotas by analyzing popular perceptions of women, of women's roles in politics and society more broadly, and of changing cultural practices vis-à-vis gender. Data were gathered over 24 months of ethnographic research conducted between 1997 and 2009 and by ongoing documentary research. The study finds that although Rwandan women have made few legislative gains, they have reaped other benefits, including increased respect from family and community members, enhanced capacity to speak and be heard in public forums, greater autonomy in decision making in the family, and increased access to education. Yet there have also been some unexpected negative consequences, such as increased friction with male siblings, male withdrawal from politics, increased marital discord, and a perception that marriage as an institution has been disrupted by the so-called upheaval of gender roles. Most significantly, increased formal representation of women has not led to increased democratic legitimacy for the government.


This article seeks to understand the significance of Celestina (1499) as it moves through time. It contends that new meanings emerge when the context in which the work is printed and read changes. As the prologue to the Tragicomedia intimates, each new act of engagement brings to the fore meanings that may not have been intended or even conceivable at the point of its composition. Taking a synchronic and comparative approach, the article looks at the 'horizon of expectations' of Celestina 's reception in sixteenthcentury Spain and Italy, when at the height of its popularity. Focusing on the issues of self-knowledge and solitude, it contextualises their portrayal within ideological debates about the misery and dignity of man that circulated in the Renaissance and within an environment that was considering the possibility of disbelief. It juxtaposes Celestina against other contemporary texts involved in this supranational debate, such as Fernan Perez de Oliva's Dialogo de la dignidad del hombre (1546). It argues that, in this new horizon, Celestina 's portrayal of self-knowledge and solitude and its engagement with debates about the misery and dignity of man goes beyond its medieval origins.


Mergers of compact object binaries are one of the most powerful sources of gravitational waves (GWs) in the frequency range of second-generation ground-based gravitational wave detectors (Advanced LIGO and Virgo). Dynamical simulations of young dense star clusters (SCs) indicate that � 27 per cent of all double compact object binaries are members of hierarchical triple systems (HTs). In this paper, we consider 570 HTs composed of three compact objects (black holes or neutron stars) that formed dynamically in N-body simulations of young dense SCs. We simulate them for a Hubble time with a new code based on the Mikkola's algorithmic regularization scheme, including the 2.5 post-Newtonian term. We find that � 88 per cent of the simulated systems develop Kozai-Lidov (KL) oscillations. KL resonance triggers the merger of the inner binary in three systems (corresponding to 0.5 per cent of the simulated HTs), by increasing the eccentricity of the inner binary. Accounting for KL oscillations leads to an increase of the total expected merger rate by � 50 per cent. All binaries that merge because of KL oscillations were formed by dynamical exchanges (i.e. none is a primordial binary) and have chirp mass > 20 M⊙. This result might be crucial to interpret the formation channel of the first recently detected GW events.


Rawapening has an area of 2,667 acres, which now ceases to exist. This natural reservoir serves to preserve water, control flood, generate electric turbine, and raw water resource. The depth of this lake decreases 42 cm annually, with the shallowing could cause flooding of the lakeside and and reducing the water supply. This study finds the additional amount of structure and dimension of sabo dam to prevent hazards at each river: at Panjang 2 (B=20m H=2m, and B=25m H=2,5 m), at Galeh 2 (each of B=8m H=2,4m), at Legi 2 (B=10m H=2m, and B=25m and H=2,5m), at Parat 1 (B=13m H=2,7m), at upstream Sraten 1 (B=15m H=2,7m), at downstream Sraten 1 (B=15m H=2,7m), and at Kedungringgis 1 (B=12m H=1,8m). Existing materials are fine and rough sand. Using WaTEM/SEDEM, saboplan guideline by processing the designed capacity, it is estimated that each river's potential annual yield (in tonnes): Panjang 86.221,8, Galeh/Torong 45.138,24, Legi 42.404,04, Parat 28.579,32, Sraten 25.988,76, and Kedung Ringis 6.955,2. Overall, sabo dam is designed to be a closed type dam located in inlet rivers of Rawapening. Sabo dam construction holds 25% of potential sediment. Collectively, it adds a control volume of 2.885 m3, from 11.539 m3 to become approximately to become 14.424 m3. To cope with sedimentation in Rawapening, the structural approachment (sabodam) should be combined with non structural approachment such as restoring land use in the upstream area for more optimal sedimentation control.Keywords: Sedimentation, rawapening, erosion, WaTEM/SEDEM


The characteristics of pulse-shaping dynamics based on four structural parameters in a fiber laser without any dispersion compensation are studied numerically. The simulations show that the four structural parameters, i.e., the location and bandwidth of the spectral filter and the location and output coupling ratio of the output coupler, are crucial for achieving high pulse energy and high pulse peak power in all-normal-dispersion fiber lasers. To obtain high pulse energy and high pulse peak power, optimal positions of the spectral filter and the output coupler inside the cavity are proposed.


Background and Purpose: Nurses are frequently exposed to anxiety-related problems. In fact, anxiety and stress can negatively affect nurses' mental health and performance. Therefore, in the present study, we aimed to investigate the effect of emotional intelligence training on employed nurses in Sabzevar, Iran in 2014. Methods: In this experimental trial, 135 nurses working in Sabzevar hospitals were enrolled and randomly assigned to intervention and control groups. The subjects were evaluated, using a demographic questionnaire, Bar-On's emotional quotient inventory, and Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). The intervention group was trained in six sessions by an expert. In the final session, the questionnaires were completed by the participants and analyzed. For statistical analysis, t-test and non-parametrical tests were performed. P-value less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results:Based on the findings, 80% of the samples were female. The mean age of the participants was 32.11±6.68 years. Before the intervention, the difference between the two groups was insignificant (P>0.05), while after the intervention, a negative relationship was found between the STAI score and emotional intelligence in the two groups. Also, the difference between the groups regarding STAI scores was significant (P<0.003). Following the intervention, the emotional intelligence scores were higher in comparison with the pre-intervention period in the intervention group. Also, after the intervention, anxiety decreased in the intervention group in comparison with the pre-intervention period (P<0.001). Conclusion: The present results showed that emotional intelligence scores could improve as a result of training, while the STAI scores significantly decreased.


ABSTRACT A sonagraphic analysis of the structure of fox vocalisations, based on 512 adult and 73 cub vocalisations obtained from archive recordings, was combined with field data on the vocal behaviour of an urban fox population. Calls were described quantitatively by six variables: duration, lowest and second lowest frequency bands (from sonagrams), highest and second highest peak frequencies (from power spectra) and the number of components. They were separated into 20 call types, eight of which were cub vocalisations. Call types were used singly or in combination, and some gradation between particular call types was apparent. Hypotheses regarding call function were generated based on the matching of acoustic properties with their seasonal occurrence and the socioecological pressures acting on foxes at different times of the year. Calls that were structurally suited to agonistic and contact functions were found to be significantly more common during the winter, the time of mating and dispersal, when foxe...


Climate change and migration are major concerns in the MENA region, yet the empirical evidence on the impact of climate change and extreme weather events on migration remains limited. Information is broadly lacking on how households in vulnerable areas perceive changes in the climate, how they are affected by extreme weather events, whether they benefit from community and government programs to help them cope with and adapt to a changing climate, and how these conditions influence the decision of household members to migrate, either temporarily or permanently. This introductory chapter summarizes briefly the main results of the study which relied on existing data as well as focus groups and new household surveys collected in 2011 in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen. The results suggest that households do perceive important changes in the climate, and that many households are being affected by extreme weather events resulting in losses in income, crops, and livestock. The coping and adaptation strategies used by households to deal with weather shocks are diverse, but also limited, with most households not able to recover from the negative impact of weather shocks. The ability of community level responses and government programs to support households is also very limited. Finally, while climate change is not today the main driver of migration flows, it does appear to contribute to these flows, and worsening climatic conditions are likely to exacerbate future migration flows.


This article explores how proposals for democratizing the European Union (EU) according to a supranational, contestational model are likely to disrupt its existing political system. The current EU is characterized by a dual system of representation that combines the representation of member states with that of individual citizens. Democratization typically entails enhancing the representation of individuals at the expense of state prerogatives. It is thus possible to make a pertinent analogy with the antebellum United States, which also featured dual representation, and where a great wave of democratization took place following Andrew Jackson's presidency (1829–1837). As the system of representation there became more majoritarian, John C. Calhoun led the calls for introducing new anti-majoritarian constitutional safeguards. A transatlantic comparison suggests the contestational system born of EU democratization will require institutional innovation in order to prove viable. In this context, Calhoun's theory of nullification, an ex post political mechanism wielded by the units to stymie federal legislation, appears more appropriate as an anti-majoritarian bulwark and better able to engender constitutional debate over competences than is the EU's stillborn judicial principle of subsidiarity. In similarly Calhounian fashion, a bottom-up procedure of constitutional amendment originating in the units is further proposed as a way of establishing unit acquiescence to greater supranationalism.


Reactive hyperemia was studied in the hindlimb and forelimb of 81 anesthetized dogs. Reactive hyperemia volume in response to 5-sec arterial occlusions correlated moderately well with the decrease in intravascular pressure. This correlation was poor for 30-sec arterial occlusions. Venous congestion induced by venous occlusion decreased or abolished the vasodilator response to 5-sec arterial occlusions and decreased the response to 30-sec occlusions. Evidence is presented supporting the view that this effect of venous congestion was related to reduction in the fall in intravascular pressure during arterial occlusion. The response to 30-sec occlusions was decreased during acutely induced hypocapnia and increased following acetazolamide administration. The data support the view that both physical and metabolic factors contribute to the production of reactive hyperemia. They further suggest that the accumulation of CO2 in the ischemic tissues contributes to the production of reactive hyperemia.


We explore photospheric emissions from stratified two-component jets, wherein a highly relativistic spine outflow is surrounded by a wider and less relativistic sheath outflow. Thermal photons are injected in regions of high optical depth and propagated until the photons escape at the photosphere. Because of the presence of shear in velocity (Lorentz factor) at the boundary of the spine and sheath region, a fraction of the injected photons are accelerated using a Fermi-like acceleration mechanism such that a high-energy power-law tail is formed in the resultant spectrum. We show, in particular, that if a velocity shear with a considerable variance in the bulk Lorentz factor is present, the high-energy part of observed gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) photon spectrum can be explained by this photon acceleration mechanism. We also show that the accelerated photons might also account for the origin of the extra-hard power-law component above the bump of the thermal-like peak seen in some peculiar bursts (e.g., GRB 090510, 090902B, 090926A). We demonstrate that time-integrated spectra can also reproduce the low-energy spectrum of GRBs consistently using a multi-temperature effect when time evolution of the outflow is considered. Last, we show that the empirical Ep–Lp relation can be explained by differences in the outflow properties of individual sources.


In this,we investigate a very challenging task of automatically generating presentation slides for academic papers. The generated presentation slides can be used by the presenters to prepare their formal slides in a easier way. It first employs a model called SVR model(Support Vector regression model). System use Support Vector regression model for sentence importance assessment by checking importance score of each sentences in an academic paper.Another model named ILP model is used.After getting importance score for each sentence from academic word document with the help of SVR and ILP method is used to generate fine draft slides with content as key sentences. Evaluation results on a test set of pairs of slides collected on the web demonstrate that our proposed system can generate slides with better quality. Keywords-presentation,slidegeneration,sentence,document,analysization,accuracy


Laterally bent dorsal fins are rarely observed in free‐ranging populations of cetaceans, contrary to captivity, where most killer whale Orcinus orca adult males have laterally collapsed fins. This topic has been poorly explored, and data/information on its occurrence and possible causes are limited. The present study: (i) undertakes a review of the available information on bent dorsal fins in free‐ranging cetaceans, and updates it with new records, (ii) reports on the proportion of bent fins in different study populations, and (iii) discusses possible causes. An empirical approach based on bibliographic research and compilation of 52 new records collected worldwide resulted in a total of 17 species of cetaceans displaying bent dorsal fins. The species with the highest number of records (64%) and from most locations was O. orca. On average, individuals with bent dorsal fins represent < 1% of their populations, with the exception of false killer whales Pseudorca crassidens and O. orca. While line injuries associated with fisheries interactions may be the main cause for P. crassidens, and the vulnerability to health issues caused by the evolutionary enlargement of the fin may be the cause for O. orca adult males, factors contributing to this abnormality for other species are still unclear. The occurrence of bent dorsals could be influenced by a set of variables rather than by a single factor but, irrespective of the cause, it is suggested that it does not directly affect the animals' survivorship. While still rare in nature, this incident is more common (at least 101 known cases) and widespread (geographically and in species diversity) than hypothesized, and is not confined only to animals in captive environments. Investigation into the occurrence of bent fins may be an interesting avenue of research.


Mobile data collection is one of research highlights for sparse three-dimensional underwater sensor networks. Therein, optimal or near-optimal cruise trajectory planning of mobile sink is very crucial. A 3D Dubins curves based continuous path programming algorithm (GA-3DTSP in short) for underwater mobile sink with non-holonomic constraints such as well-known autonomous underwater vehicle is proposed. The objective of GA-3DTSP algorithm is to trace sparsely deployed sensor nodes by mobile sink so as to achieve near-optimal energy conservation efficiency. First, an extended 3D Dubins curve is proposed and the length calculation formulae for 3D Dubins curve are investigated. Furthermore, genetic algorithm is used to tackle this difficult NP-complete problem of planning shortest paths in a heuristic manner. Finally, simulation results verify that the proposed GA-3DTSP method can conserve cruise energy of mobile sink effectively.