ABSTRACT For over a century, friction ridges, most notably fingerprints, have been considered the most positive method of personal identification. Friction ridge identification was based on the premise that nature did not repeat and the comparison technique appeared to have objective standards for reaching a conclusion. The recording of fingerprints was simple, non-intrusive, and required only minimal supplies. Recent court challenges have brought into question the validity and reliability of fingerprinting as a science. The Supreme Court determined that the Federal Rules of Evidence require scientific evidence to be scientifically valid before it enters the courtroom. The long-held premises of fingerprinting as an application had not previously undergone a serious challenge. Scientists, police, and lawyers struggle to design the juridical intersection where law and science cross paths. Challenges to fingerprints were seen to cross these boundaries: They were unwanted and generally resented. Over the years fingerprinting has progressed and is now capable of meeting the standards set by modern courts. The current challenge is for the friction ridge practitioner community to transition from the historical police mind-set to a scientific mind-set. This requires a cultural change, albeit a professional one, that many practitioners and agencies may be ill-equipped to handle. "I sometimes think that the most injustice which is done in the execution of our criminal law, is done innocently by those who are honestly mistaken in identification, or are overanxious to assist in the prosecution of the law to the extent that they do not realize either their own recklessness, or the responsibility for the statements they are marking." (The Hon. William E. Leahy, Washington D.C., February 1922--as reported in Personal Identification, Wentworth and Wilder, 1932, p7). For over one hundred years, friction ridges (most notably fingerprints) have been considered the most positive method of personal identification. During the late 1880's fingerprint identification was first employed in India when an employee of the East India Company decided to use fingerprinting to prevent impersonation by locals using fingerprints to sign documents. The idea traveled to England a few years later and made its North American debut at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair when a detective from Scotland Yard gave a presentation on the subject. The idea was brought back to Canada by Edward Foster of the Dominion Police who had been in St. Louis guarding a display of gold (Ashbaugh, 1999). Friction ridge identification was based on the premise that nature did not repeat exactly. The comparison technique appeared to have objective standards for reaching a conclusion based on a quantity of details but was mostly intuitive pattern recognition. These details, called Galton details after Sir Francis Galton an early supporter of fingerprint identification (Galton, 1892), appear at the ends of friction ridges or where friction ridges join together. Galton details are also called friction ridge characteristics or points. The recording of fingerprints was simple, non-intrusive, and required only minimal supplies: printer's ink and paper. This procedure appealed to practically-minded police managers but as fingerprints became more deeply embedded in the realm of law enforcement, and as their confidence with the technique grew, main stream scientists seemed to lose interest in the discipline. A few researchers interested in fingerprints worked in related sciences, such as embryology, (Wentworth & Wilder 1932), dermatoglyphics, and anatomy but fingerprinting was generally left in the hands of the police, military and other government agencies. Fingerprint identification was considered absolute--what other questions were there? Police agencies assurance in fingerprints as the acme of uniqueness effectively stunted further scientific inquiry and research. …


A Shrew attack, which uses a low-rate burst carefully designed to exploit TCP's retransmission timeout mechanism, can throttle the bandwidth of a TCP flow in a stealthy manner. While such an attack can significantly degrade the performance of all TCP-based protocols and services including Internet routing (e.g., BGP), no existing scheme clearly solves the problem in real network scenarios. In this paper, we propose a simple protection mechanism, called SAP (Shrew Attack Protection), for defending against a Shrew attack. Rather than attempting to track and isolate Shrew attackers, SAP identifies TCP victims by monitoring their drop rates and preferentially admits those packets from victims with high drop rates to the output queue. This is to ensure that well-behaved TCP sessions can retain their bandwidth shares. Our simulations indicate that under a Shrew attack, SAP can prevent TCP sessions from closing, and effectively enable TCP flows to maintain high throughput. SAP is a destination-port-based mechanism and requires only a small number of counters to find potential victims, which makes SAP readily implementable on top of existing router mechanisms.


In this paper we argue that cartography is profitably conceived as a processual, rather than representational, science. Building on recent analysis concerning the philosophical underpinnings of cartography we question the ontological security of maps, contending that it is productive to rethink cartography as ontogenetic in nature; that is maps emerge through practices and have no secure ontological status. Drawing on the concepts of transduction and technicity we contend that maps are of-the-moment, brought into being through practices (embodied, social, technical); that mapping is a process of constant reterritorialization. Maps are never fully formed and their work is never complete. Maps are transitory and fleeting, being contingent, relational and context-dependent; they are always mappings; spatial practices enacted to solve relational problems (eg, how best to create a spatial representation, how to understand a spatial distribution, how to get between A and B, and so on). Such a rethinking, we contend, provides a fresh perspective on cartographic epistemology, and could work to provide a common framework for those who undertake mapping as applied knowledge (asking technical questions) and those that seek to critique such mapping as a form of power/knowledge (asking ideological questions). We illustrate our argument through an analysis of mapping practices.


The objective of this research topic is to show QbD and PAT tools such as multivariate analysis can perform "Continued Process Verification by using a RealTime Multivariate Process Monitoring (RT-MSPM) system. There are not one but many challenges The pharmaceutical and bio-pharmaceutical manufacturers are facing multiple challenges such as changing regulatory requirements, healthcare reforms, economic pressure and availability of advance manufacturing technology to make better quality products at reduced costs. Due to the recent technological developments, significant opportunities exist for improving pharmaceutical development, manufacturing and quality assurance through innovation in product and process development, process analysis, and process controls. The latest FDA guidelines such as QbD, PAT and the 2011 process validation have opened the doors for "Real-Time Process Monitoring" concepts for "Continued Process Verification". The regulatory agencies have taken the initiative by providing guidelines in last ten years such as, Pharmaceutical cGMPs for the 21st Century A Risk Based Approach, Final Report in September 2004 [1], Guidance for Industry: PAT A Framework for Innovative Pharmaceutical Development, Manufacturing, and Quality Assurance [2], Guidance for Industry Quality Systems Approach to Pharmaceutical Current Good Manufacturing Practice Regulations [3], Internal Commerce for Harmonization (ICH) guidelines [4, 5, 6, and 7], QbD, a perspective from the "Office of Biotechnology Products" (OBP) [8] and lastly, Guidance for Industry Process Validation General Principles and practices utilizing three stages during Process Validation [9]. The objective of agency is to ensure that the most up-to-date concepts of risk management and quality systems approaches are incorporated into the manufacturing. The application of multivariate statistical models for process monitoring can provide information on the challenges that are routinely encountered by drug manufacturers and process can be monitored in real-time to achieve continued process verification (CPV). The outcome of the study is intended to become a benchmark for biological manufacturers who are interested in applying the "PAT tools" for existing legacy products or any new manufacturing process to address challenges [10, 11] such as raw material variation and control of process variability, identifying and monitoring of relevant process parameters in the operating space, RT-MSPM with early fault detection and diagnosis of process upsets and trends. PCA (Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and PLS (Projection to Latent Structure (PLS) are the two popular techniques are used to create the multivariate (MV) models. MV statistical models for process monitoring are used in this study to address the challenges in biologics manufacturing process such as raw material variation and control of process variability, identification and monitoring of relevant process parameters in the operating space and RT-MSPM for Early Detection and Diagnosis of Process Upsets and Trends. The implementation of RT-MSPM assists in meeting the latest process validation guidance requirement to achieve continued process verification (CPV) by monitoring each and every batch in real time. With the use of RT-MSPM tool, every run can be considered as a process validation run. If the process is monitored in real time then the sampling frequency can be reduced significantly, which can result in tremendous cost saving.


Introduction: Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS) is characterised by chronic widespread pain and tender points on palpation. FMS is associated with depression, anxiety, fatigue, sleep disorders, and functional bowel disorders that can intensify painful feelings, altering functional capacity and quality of life. The health provider usually identifies these conditions through assessment and monitoring tools and recordsthe results on paper. Failure to use electronic information systems, which have specific methodology for the integration of Health Information Systems, hampers the applicability of these methods in clinical practice and does not allow visualisation and comparison of the results in a simple manner. Objective : To propose an information system for assessing and monitoring patients with FMS (SISFIBRO). Method : The first phase consisted of data collection to select evaluation and monitoring methods used by doctors, physical therapists, rheumatologists, and specialists in fibromyalgia. Next, we performed the modelling of the system in the Unified Modelling Language (UML). Based on the diagram of classes, we performed conceptual data modelling with entity-relationship diagrams. The prototype was implemented with the SISFIBRO Oracle database. Below, we included data from 36 patients with FMS to analyse whether the system provided all of the information and necessary functions. Results: In Brazil, most of the professionals (82.4%) record and store patient data on paper charts, and 17.6% do so using electronic systems. The most widely used instruments and methods arethe visual analogue scale (VAS) SF-36, theFibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ), evaluation of tender points according to the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), and the Beck Depression Scale; all are available in SISFIBRO. We developed 1 diagram of use, 1 diagram of classes, 6 diagrams of objects, and 5 diagrams of sequences. We decided that SISFIBRO must be integrated with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) for the recording, storing, sharing, and retrieving of the information. This integration will assist in the clinical practice of health professionals. Conclusion : It was possible to create a system with the reliability needed to support and improve the assessment and treatment of FMS.


Recent scholarly efforts to recognize water rights and water fights have been driven into being through various territorial disputes. In such work, water is usefully treated as a form of imagined soil that can be mapped, as a liquid habitat with nutrients to haul or as a mining site with resources to be extracted. This paper instead draws from the physics of water to reconceptualize policy's corrosions in everyday worlds, as an intervention into the human-centrism of conventional policy analyses, as part of an approach I am calling a policy ecology. Using case studies drawn from the largest Indigenous public housing and infrastructure program conducted in Australia to date, here I trace the path of water into the cracks of human-made forms. The scale of the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program was unprecedented and its history has already been written as one of unintended consequences amid mostly welcome material benefits. In treating water as a body that acts, rather than a body that can be (re)territorialized through contest, this paper tries to erode analyses which approach Indigenous social policy as an equation of bureaucracy plus good and/or misdirected will, which soon routes the traffic of critical analysis toward case study evaluations of where and how implementation goes wrong and how it might be corrected. I call this policy teleology, in contrast with policy ecology, by which I mean both the ecology of the policy environments themselves and the variegated connections that stem from and flow through the alive, inhabited worlds that policy is entering into – the coalescences between humans and multiple other forces which help shape the policy category known as 'Indigenous living conditions'. The tale of water as itself transformative and animate is an attempt to recover more porous images of self and nature that might feed into understandings of policy unfurling, without denying the naturalized images of improvable human processes through settler-colonial intervention that underlies such an ambition.


This chapter addresses two main counterarguments put forth in Landau (2007) against the movement analysis of Control, and especially against the phenomenon of Backward Control (BC), as proposed for Tsez by Polinsky a Potsdam (2002). The first objection concerns the Case properties of the subject chain in Tsez BC. Landau argues that if this could bear two distinct cases, ergative and absolutive, one would expect the merging of a second DP in the matrix clause to be possible. The second objection is that BC is very rare. In Tsez only two verbs display BC. These are aspectuals (/ begin/, /continue/, /stop /), which also have a standard raising analysis, thus casting doubts on the idea that the two BC constructions really involve Control rather than Raising. We show that, unlike the situation described in Tsez, Landau's objections do not hold for Greek and Romanian. First, BC is not rare in these languages, as all obligatory control (OC) verbs exhibit BC. Second, data involving quirky subjects clearly suggest that Control chains are Multiply Case Marked Chains. Our results thus provide stronger empirical support for an approach to Control in terms of Movement, as defended in Hornstein (1999) and subsequent work. We then explore the differences between Tsez and Greek/Romanian and argue that Tsez is basically a FC language, which explains why OC is limited to aspectuals. Finally we show that the availability of BC is related to the extensive availability of agreementassociate relationships of the clitic doubling type in a language.


Exploring the presence of environmental ethics in the Buddhist Jātaka stories, from the scriptures of the Theravāda tradition, is not a new idea. The Jātaka stories are a collection of birth-stories, or 'folklore,' that communicate appropriate models of comportment in situations associated with environmental concern. The actors of these stories follow the escapades of humans and non-humans (including animals, trees and spirits). Although principally in agreement with this approach, in this paper I would like to explore a different idea that may support the formation of an environmental ethics based on the stories. In so doing the paper focuses on 'moral tools' and principles that can be used in practical decision making, related to the environment; the virtues that can be taken from the stories, that serve to attune us to environmental awareness and greater concern; and the innovative application of virtues that could inspire hitherto 'undefined' responses to the environment. The paper seeks to highlight the rich potential of the Jātaka stories—and their store of creative forms of morality— to further our understanding of early Buddhism and provide guidelines towards a modern environmental virtue ethic.


Quantification of human attention is key to several tasks in mobile human-computer interaction (HCI), such as predicting user interruptibility, estimating noticeability of user interface content, or measuring user engagement. Previous works to study mobile attentive behaviour required special-purpose eye tracking equipment or constrained users' mobility. We propose a novel method to sense and analyse visual attention on mobile devices during everyday interactions. We demonstrate the capabilities of our method on the sample task of eye contact detection that has recently attracted increasing research interest in mobile HCI. Our method builds on a state-of-the-art method for unsupervised eye contact detection and extends it to address challenges specific to mobile interactive scenarios. Through evaluation on two current datasets, we demonstrate significant performance improvements for eye contact detection across mobile devices, users, or environmental conditions. Moreover, we discuss how our method enables the calculation of additional attention metrics that, for the first time, enable researchers from different domains to study and quantify attention allocation during mobile interactions in the wild.


Traditional images of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American South are of an inward-looking region characterized by economic stagnation, xenophobia, cultural isolation, and reactionary politics. This dissertation contends that vibrant transnational links connected the South to the wider world through an analysis of the political and economic landscape of postbellum Louisiana, the 1884 New Orleans World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial, the Louisiana State Lottery Company, and Central America. An examination of Edward Austin Burke demonstrates that the era's New South creed comprised a seminal transnational component. This dissertation will explore how Burke became a central cog in Louisiana's Democratic political machine and a leading American capitalist in Central America. As owner-editor of the New Orleans Times-Democrat and director general of the 1884 New Orleans world's fair, Burke enjoyed a marvelous platform from which to broadcast his vision of a transnational New South that promoted Latin America as a market for southern-made exports and an investment opportunity for southern businessmen. The New Orleans exposition displayed technologies and products that shaped and at times threatened gender roles, racial hierarchies, class norms, local political dynamics, and imperial visions. Burke was also a key partner in the alliance between Louisiana's Democratic government and the Louisiana lottery. The lottery, with its tentacles in Latin America and nearly every state of the Union, insured that no other Gilded Age political machine utilized national and transnational ties as successfully as Louisiana's. In the late 1880s, Burke began a near forty-year residency in Honduras, where he held diversified interests in the country's railroads and real estate along with substantial mineral concessions. The major also actively supported numerous Honduran administrations, held five different high-ranking positions in government-supported railroads, recruited other foreign capitalists, served as intermediary when disputes arose between capitalists and Honduran leaders, and informally advised several presidents on matters ranging from infrastructure projects to American politics. Using American and Latino perspectives, this study demonstrates how the interplay between the U.S. South and Latin America was a defining variable in their respective developments.


A theory of gravitational quantum states of ultracold neutrons in waveguides with absorbing/scattering walls is presented. The theory covers recent experiments in which the ultracold neutrons were beamed between a mirror and a rough scatterer/absorber. The analysis is based on a recently developed theory of quantum transport along random rough walls which is modified in order to include leaky absorbing interfaces and, more importantly, the low-amplitude high-aperture roughness. The calculations are focused on a regime where the direct transitions into the continuous spectrum above the absorption threshold dominate the depletion of neutrons from the gravitational states and are more efficient than the processes involving the intermediate states. The theoretical results for the neutron count are sensitive to the correlation radius lateral size of surface inhomogeneities and to the ratio of the particle energy to the absorption threshold in the weak-roughness limit. The main impediment for observation of the higher gravitational states is the "overhang" of the particle wave functions which can be overcome only by using scatterers with strong roughness. In general, strong roughness with high amplitude is preferable if one wants just to detect the individual gravitational states, while strongroughness experiments with small amplitude and high aperture are preferable for the quantitative analysis of the data. We also discuss ways to further improve the accuracy of calculations and to optimize the experimental regime.


The Intelligent Network (IN) is an telecommunications services architecture which enables the rapid creation and deployment of supplementary telecommunications services. However, this flexibility makes the management of the network performance critical in ensuring that customers receive their expected Quality of Service. This thesis describes a model which has been developed to predict the delays in the network due to IN-specific service processing.

The model proposed is a queuing network which builds on the existing state of the art as follows. The characteristics of the flows between the IN physical entities are considered and general service time distributions are assumed at each entity. Additionally, the model allows the reservation of capacities as the SCP for each service type. An analytic formulation was developed using the decomposition approximate method. The model was also simulated in order to ascertain its' accuracy.

The results of the analytic solution and the simulation were compared for different scenarios and the results are presented in this thesis. The analytic approximation was found to be a very good solution for situations where network utilisation was low or medium. As the utilisation of the network increases to higher utilisation factors, the accuracy of the analytic solution decreases.


Organizational behavior is a variable that predicts many organizational variables. One of these variables that have an important role in many organizations today is organizational citizenship behavior. So the present study was conducted to evaluate the effect of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) on performance customer Personality. In this study, data were collected to assess relationship between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) with customer satisfaction, behavioral intentions, Loyalty intentions and customer perceptions of service quality. The Pearson correlation coefficients, structural equation modeling and Friedman ANOVA were used for data analysis.The results showed that the mean comparison between organizational citizenship behavior and performance customer Personality were statisticaly significant (p ≤ 0.05). The results of the present study suggest that the organizational citizenship behavior had a positive effects on performance customer Personality.


European Union's conflict transformation approaches are best known in the framework of the Europeanization process of Central and Eastern Europe. Little is known about the European Union's 3rd party structural transformation intervention into the social conflicts taking place inside the European Union. Many Member-States of the European Union experienced over the last decade an increase in the social conflict involving Muslim communities. The E.U.'s bodies and institutions are the most suited to address such an European-wide conflict. As a 3rd party, the European Union uses a structural transformation approach to address this conflict, through legislation and policies aimed at changing the structures of the Member-States. However, the 3rd party intervention of the European Union depends on the capacity of the Member State's political structures to adopt the requested legislation and policies which address the conflict. The research question is: Do political opportunity structures impact the process of 3rd party intervention in the context of the European Union? Political opportunity structures is operationalized as institutional arrangements (centralized vs. decentralized) which allow for an easier or more difficult filtration of 3rd party intervention mechanisms coming from above the state level. Political culture is also taken into account in relationship to the institutional arrangements. The process of 3rd party intervention has two phases: transposition and implementation. The research methods used were comparative case studies (France and Spain) and secondary data analysis. The conclusion is that political structures impact the process of 3rd party intervention in an insignificant way and are not influential on the levels of conflict.


"This study examines the sources of crop income growth in Indian agriculture over the 1980s and 1990s. Using a method developed by Minot (2003), the analysis decomposes crop income growth into the contribution of yield increases, area expansion, price increases, and diversification from low-value crops to higher-value crops. The results confirm that at the national level, technology (higher yield) was the main source of crop income growth during 1980s, while rising prices and diversification emerged as the dominant sources of growth in agriculture during 1990s. Diversification towards higher-value crops such as fruits and vegetables accounted for about 27% of crop income growth in the 1980s and 31% in the 1990s. However, these national averages hide substantial regional variation. In the grain-dominated northern and eastern regions, price increases were the most important source of growth during 1990s, while in the southern and western regions crop income growth was led by diversification into higher-value crops. The results reflect the slowing growth of wheat and rice yields in India, as well as the growing importance of diversification into higher-value crops. Restoring the growth in grain yields will require investment in agricultural research and development, while facilitating further diversification involves institutional development to better link small farmers with growing markets for high-value commodities. " Author's Abstract


Ribosomal RNA genes are widely applied in phylogenetic studies due to the ubiquitous presence and relative conservation of many regions of their nucleotide sequences. Many specific PCR primers have been developed for amplification of the rDNA cluster fragments from particular taxa. However, the use of universal primers hybridising to the conserved rDNA regions enables discovering sequences of eukaryote endosymbiont or pathogen origin in the analysed DNA sample. This approach makes it possible to detect gregarines (Protozoa: Apicomplexa) that are obligate parasites of digestive tracts and body cavities in invertebrate animals. Here we report new uncultured gregarine clones detected by rDNA sequencing in one harvestmen, Rilaena triangularis (Opiliones: Phalangioidea), and two astigmatid feather mite species, Proctophyllodes stylifer and P. ateri (Acari: Analgoidea). To our knowledge, this is the first record of parasitic Astigmata (cohort Psoroptidia) infected with gregarines. Comparison of the amplified rDNA fragments with sequences deposited in GenBank revealed that analysed sequences corresponded to 18S rDNA from the genera Gregarina (85 and 90 % identity with G. chortiocetes for sequences found in P. ateri and harvestman, and Syncystis (87 % identity with S. mirabilis for sequences found in P. stylifer). The differences observed between nucleotide sequences of the gregarine 18S rDNA fragments indicated that the gregarine isolates from which the sequences were derived belonged to presumably three different species.


During meiosis, the replicated chromatids remain condensed, which is important to prevent inappropriate DNA replication and to allow proper progression through the second meiotic cell cycle. Di Agostino et al. examined meiosis stimulated by the phosphatase inhibitor okadaic acid in mouse spermatocytes. Entry into meiosis as detected by chromatin condensation was stimulated by OA, and this could be inhibited by pretreatment of the spermatocytes with the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) inhibitor U0126. One of the downstream effectors of MAPK is the kinase p90Rsk. Spermatocytes, which are meiosis competent, expressed the p90Rsk2 isoform, whereas mitotic spermatids expressed p90Rsk3. Various assays demonstrated that p90Rsk2 was phosphorylated and activated by OA treatment of spermatocytes and that activation was blocked by exposure to the MAPK inhibitor. Furthermore, like the MAPKs, ERK1 and ERK2, p90Rsk2 was physically associated with the condensed chromatin in the meiotic cells. Histone 3 is phosphorylated in condensed chromatin, and although p90Rsk2 can phosphorylate histone 3 in vitro, the exposure of the spermatocytes to U0126 did not prevent OA-stimulated histone 3 phosphorylation. Thus, histone 3 phosphorylation correlates with chromatin condensation, but is not sufficient to cause condensation. Di Agonstino et al. found that p90Rsk2 activated the NIMA (never in mitosis in Aspergillus nidulans)-like kinase Nek2 and the stimulation of Nek2 was inhibited in OA treated spermatocyes pretreated with U0126. If histone phosphorylation by p90Rsk2 is not the relevant target for triggering chromatin condensation, then possibly Nek2 represents the important downstream effector of p90Rsk2. The authors propose that a kinase complex forms on the chromosomes that include ERK1 and ERK2, p90Rsk2, and Nek2 and that this complex is responsible for triggering chromatin condensation in response to extracellular signals. S. Di Agostino, P. Rossi, R. Geremia, C. Sette, The MAPK pathway triggers activation of Nek2 during chromosome condensation in mouse spermatocytes. Development 129, 1715-1727 (2002). [Online Journal]


Study of a database of 350 giant oilfields show these to be dynamic short-lived phenomena, with a median age of 35 Ma. A third show evidence for post-entrapment destructive processes, particularly erosion, fault leakage, gas flushing and biodegradation. Many cases of biodegradation may occur prior to complete filling of the oilfield. Re-entrapment of oil released from spilling or breached traps is common. The main controls on oilfield preservation are post-entrapment tectonism and seal type, with temperature and hydrodynamic regimes being secondary factors. Destructive processes are concentrated in shallow and deep zones and in seepage-prone traps such as compressional anticlines. Such factors strongly influence the distribution of preserved light oilfields, with preservation potential maximized in tectonically quiescent basins with evaporite seals, e.g. the Middle East and the Permian Basin. More attention is required, particularly in older petroleum systems, to models involving post-entrapment leakage and re-migration.


Malaysian Exploration Asset Team (MEAT) was a typical multi-discipline team
in Petronas Carigali Sdn Bhd. It was formed in February 1997 with the aim to manage
the company's exploration drilling operation in offshore Malaysia. MEAT is relatively
a small sized team comprised a group of professionals, engineers and non-technical
staffs. Its goal was to manage the operation in a safe manner, cost-effective, smooth
and environmental-friendly operation. Figure 1 shows the organization chart of the
team whereby it was consisted of twenty-seven members from nine different
backgrounds. The team leader, who reported to the Exploration Manager, acted as the
head of the operation and accountable for the overall performance of the team Based
on the previous 1996/97 domestic exploration drilling programme, the overall
performance of the team was satisfactorily as recomized by the management of the
company.
Since the team would be continually provided the same services, moreover with
the increasing cost of operation, its always important for the team to analyze the
environment that could affect its performance. A cost-effective operation would be
the most important factor for the team, especially during the economy crisis of the
country. As such, strategic management approach would be useful for the team in
determining its operational strategy. From strategic point of view, a prudent strategic
planning that follow a close parallel to the company's vision and objectives, would be


A practical guide to the emerging mobile advertising market, Mobile Advertising covers all the major topics in this emerging multibillion-dollar industry. This is a complete how-to guide for anyone who wants to understand and take advantage of this hot new advertising medium. Drawing on the experience of three industry veterans, insights from key influencers and decision makers, and detailed case studies, the book gives you practical guidance for getting the most out of mobile advertising.


A verifying compiler automatically verifies the correctness of a source program before compiling it. Founded on the definition of the source language and a set of rules (a methodology) for using the language, the program's correctness criteria and correctness argument are provided in the program text by interface specifications and invariants. This paper describes the program-verifier component of a verifying compiler for a core multi-threaded object-oriented language. The verifier takes as input a program written in the source language and generates, via a translation into an intermediate verification language, a set of verification conditions. The verification conditions are first-order logical formulas whose validity implies the correctness of the program. The formulas can be analyzed automatically by a satisfiabilitymodulo-theory (SMT) solver. The paper defines the source language and intermediate language, the translation from the former into the latter, and the generation of verification conditions from the latter. The paper also builds a methodology for writing and verifying singleand multi-threaded code with object invariants, and encodes the methodology into the intermediate-language program. The paper is intended as a student's guide to understanding automatic program verification. It includes enough detailed information that students can build their own basic program verifier.


Following almost a decade with little change in global atmospheric methane mole fraction, we present measurements from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) and the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) networks that show renewed growth starting near the beginning of 2007. Remarkably, a similar growth rate is found at all monitoring locations from this time until the latest measurements. We use these data, along with an inverse method applied to a simple model of atmospheric chemistry and transport, to investigate the possible drivers of the rise. Specifically, the relative roles of an increase in emission rate or a decrease in concentration of the hydroxyl radical, the largest methane sink, are examined. We conclude that: 1) if the annual mean hydroxyl radical concentration did not change, a substantial increase in emissions was required simultaneously in both hemispheres between 2006 and 2007; 2) if a small drop in the hydroxyl radical concentration occurred, consistent with AGAGE methyl chloroform measurements, the emission increase is more strongly biased to the Northern Hemisphere.


Sound engineering is an interdisciplinary and rapidly expanding domain. It covers many aspects, including sound mastering technology, music information retrieval providing a part of multimedia applications, sound perception, electroacoustics, sound synthesis, sound restoration and also medical applications. These topics have been covered by presenters during the 12th International Symposium on Sound and Vision Engineering and Mastering (ISSVEM'07), which was organized by the Multimedia Systems Department of the Gdansk University of Technology on June 15-16, 2007. The Symposium was held under the auspices of the Polish Section of the Audio Engineering Society and the Polish Academy of Sciences and provided a valuable forum for the knowledge exchange based on diverse experiences and a wide range of technical and music expertise. Outcomes of this Symposium included extended versions of papers, which are all application-oriented and state-of-the-art, trying to identify current trends and practice in sound engineering domain. All the articles submitted to this issue were chosen for publication after two additional reviewers' opinions according to the peer review standard. We hope that these papers will be interested to specialists from many areas.


The lack of simple interfaces for microfluidic devices with a large number of inlets significantly limits production and utilization of these devices. In this article, we describe the fabrication of a reusable manifold that provides rapid world-to-chip connectivity. A vacuum network milled into a rigid manifold holds microdevices and prevents leakage of fluids injected into the device from ports in the manifold. A number of different manifold designs were explored, and all performed similarly, yielding an average of 100 kPa (15 psi) fluid holding pressure. The wide applicability of this manifold concept is demonstrated by interfacing with a 51-inlet microfluidic chip containing 144 chambers and hundreds of embedded pneumatic valves. Due to the speed of connectivity, the manifolds are ideal for rapid prototyping and are well suited to serve as "universal" interfaces.


Iron is an essential dietary element that supports oxygen transport, nutrient metabolism and protein synthesis; however, dysregulation of iron biology can be detrimental to health. The importance of iron homeostasis is particularly apparent in the brain where deficiencies result in impaired cognition and accumulations are associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Despite the observation that altered iron status is associated with impaired brain health, little is known about what drives iron dysregulation in the brain. Obesity is associated with increased risks for altered systemic iron status and neurodegeneration, but the effects of obesity on iron biology in the brain are uncertain. The following study characterizes changes in brain iron biology resulting from high fat diet-induced obesity in a mouse model. The key findings from this study include the observation of attenuated iron concentration changes between late development and adulthood, as well as increased alpha-synuclein expression, and evidence of lipid peroxidation in certain iron-rich brain regions of the obese mice compared to controls. These findings demonstrate that obesity is sufficient to alter brain iron biology and that the alterations occur in a regionally differentiated manner. Further, the observation of elevated alpha-synuclein and lipid peroxidation in regions where iron biology is also altered indicates that the changes brought on by obesity may be involved in iron related neurodegenerative processes.


We make use of the color sensitivity of the naked human eye to solve the inverse grating problem. We conduct color-matching experiments between simulated colors and the color of the zero diffraction order, and show that human color vision may reveal structure dimensions at an accuracy in the order of ten nanometers, which is comparable to the precision of destructive methods such as scanning electron microscopy. Our results suggest that for a wide range of structures, the color observation may help to get quick, but still accurate, results, without any sophisticated instrumentation.


It is essential to understand and recognize the role that environmental resources such as forest goods and services play in the provision of income to peoples' livelihoods (especially the poor and marginalized communities). The purpose of this paper is to give a concise account and scientific basis of the importance of the phenomenon of valuation of environmental goods and services which is manifested in two ways. Firstly, it helps policymakers in designing and implementing effective sustainable livelihoods and poverty reduction strategies. Secondly, the size and nature of environmental values have implications for issues of conservation and sustainable resource use. This paper outlines the contemporary models and approaches of valuing the direct use benefits, indirect use benefits and intermediate use services of the forest as an ecosystem and not a mechanical body to produce goods and services for income generation, overlooking the fundamental principles of sustainable forest management and sustainable development. Shortcomings and remedial measures of valuation methods are also summarized. Through appreciating the total value of the forest resources, national governments and local communities would be able to promote sustainable forest resource use across all strata of society and incorporate the value of natural forests and woodlands in their System of National Accounts to avoid unnecessary conversion of forests into other development projects.

 Key words: Forest goods and services, natural woodland, sustainable, economic valuation, user surveys, non-use values.


There is growing impetus for a domestic U.S. climate policy that can provide meaningful reductions in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. I describe and analyze an up-stream, economy-wide CO2 cap-and-trade system which implements a gradual trajectory of emissions reductions (with inclusion over time of non-CO2 greenhouse gases), and includes mechanisms to reduce cost uncertainty. Initially, half of the allowances are allocated through auction and half through free distribution, with the share being auctioned gradually increasing to 100 percent over 25 years. The system provides for linkage with emission reduction credit projects in other countries, harmonization over time with effective cap-and-trade systems in other countries and regions, and appropriate linkage with actions taken in other countries, in order to establish a level playing field among domestically produced and imported products.


Time series can be found in domains as diverse as medicine, astronomy, geophysics, engineering, and quantitative finance. In general, a time series is a sequence of data points, measured at successive points in time and spaced at uniform time intervals. This thesis is concerned with time series mining, including segmentation, classification, and clustering of temporal data. Many algorithms for these tasks depend upon pairwise (dis)similarity comparisons of (sub)sequences, which accounts for the continued research on time series distance measures as an important subroutine. In the course of this work we introduce several novel distance measures, which describe time series characteristics that may distinguish the individual classes contained in the data. Our proposed time series distance measures address frequently encountered issues, such as the processing of multivariate data, the computational complexity of pairwise (dis)similarity comparisons, the invariance required for temporal data with distortions, the separation of mixed signals, and the analysis of nonlinear systems. Our work contributes to the time series community by introducing novel approaches to pattern recognition in temporal data, presenting miscellaneous sensor fusion techniques for multivariate measurements, offering efficient and robust distance measures for fast time series classification, introducing previously disregarded invariance and proposing corresponding distance measures, comparing various machine learning algorithms for signal separation, and providing nonlinear models for time series mining. In addition to our theoretical contributions, we furthermore demonstrate that our proposed time series distance measures are beneficial in real-world applications, including the optimization of vehicle engines with regard to exhaust emission and the optimization of heating control in terms of energy efficiency. Furthermore, we present several specifically developed time series mining tools, which implement our introduced distance measures and provide graphical user interfaces for straightforward parameter setting as well as exploratory data analysis.


In various writings Karl Marx made references to an 'aristocracy of finance' in Western Europe and the United States that dominated ownership of the public debt. Drawing on original research, this paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of the pattern of public debt ownership within the US corporate sector. The research shows that over the past three decades, and especially in the context of the current crisis, a new 'aristocracy of finance' has emerged, as corporate holdings of the public debt have become rapidly concentrated in favor of large corporations classified within Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE). Drawing on Wolfgang Streeck's concept of the 'debt state', the paper goes on to demonstrate how concentration in ownership of the public debt reinforces patterns of social inequality and proceeds in tandem with a shift in government policy, one that prioritizes the interests of government bondholders over the general citizenry.


MicroRNA (miRNA) is a small non-coding RNA with an established function to regulate genes at the post-transcriptional level leading to suppression or degradation of its messenger RNA expression (mRNA). Its dysregulation plays a vital role in a variety of biological and pathological processes including cancer. A lot of algorithms have been established to predict the target sites of miRNA, but experimentally identifying and validating its target region is still lacking. Guidance in experimental procedures is really needed to find genuine miRNA targets. Therefore, in this review, we provide an outline on the workflow in predicting and validating the targeted sites of miRNA using several methods as a guideline for the scientists. The final outcome of this type of experiment is essential to explore the major impact of miRNAmRNA interaction involved in the biological processes and to assist miRNA-based drug development in the future.


Aplastic anemia remains a diagnosis of exclusion. Our ability to reliably diagnose, and therefore exclude, a variety of inherited or acquired diseases with similar phenotypes has improved markedly. An efficient diagnostic plan is important because time from diagnosis to treatment is related to outcome regardless of the therapeutic option chosen. HSCT remains the mainstay of therapy for those with matched sibling donors, and results have improved even further in recent years. For those without a sibling donor, the high response and overall survival rates of combined immunosuppressive therapy (IST) have proven robust. Nonetheless, incomplete response, relapse, and progression to myelodysplasia/leukemia have more clearly emerged as significant long-term issues. Improvements in outcome of alternative donor transplantation and the use of established and novel immunosuppressive agents provide multiple alternatives for treating refractory or relapsed patients. Best practices in this regard are not yet clearly established and may vary by a variety of demographic and treatment-specific factors. Regardless of the type of therapeutic approach, patients require ongoing monitoring for occurrence of disease and/or therapy-related side effects.


The whole genome of Jatropha curcas was sequenced, using a combination of the conventional Sanger method and new-generation multiplex sequencing methods. Total length of the non-redundant sequences thus obtained was 285 858 490 bp consisting of 120 586 contigs and 29 831 singlets. They accounted for ∼95% of the gene-containing regions with the average G + C content was 34.3%. A total of 40 929 complete and partial structures of protein encoding genes have been deduced. Comparison with genes of other plant species indicated that 1529 (4%) of the putative protein-encoding genes are specific to the Euphorbiaceae family. A high degree of microsynteny was observed with the genome of castor bean and, to a lesser extent, with those of soybean and Arabidopsis thaliana. In parallel with genome sequencing, cDNAs derived from leaf and callus tissues were subjected to pyrosequencing, and a total of 21 225 unigene data have been generated. Polymorphism analysis using microsatellite markers developed from the genomic sequence data obtained was performed with 12 J. curcas lines collected from various parts of the world to estimate their genetic diversity. The genomic sequence and accompanying information presented here are expected to serve as valuable resources for the acceleration of fundamental and applied research with J. curcas, especially in the fields of environment-related research such as biofuel production. Further information on the genomic sequences and DNA markers is available at http://www.kazusa.or.jp/jatropha/.


Neuronal polarity is essential for normal brain development and function. However, cell-intrinsic mechanisms that govern the establishment of neuronal polarity remain to be identified. Here, we report that knockdown of endogenous FOXO proteins in hippocampal and cerebellar granule neurons, including in the rat cerebellar cortex in vivo, reveals a requirement for the FOXO transcription factors in the establishment of neuronal polarity. The FOXO transcription factors, including the brain-enriched protein FOXO6, play a critical role in axo-dendritic polarization of undifferentiated neurites, and hence in a switch from unpolarized to polarized neuronal morphology. We also identify the gene encoding the protein kinase Pak1, which acts locally in neuronal processes to induce polarity, as a critical direct target gene of the FOXO transcription factors. Knockdown of endogenous Pak1 phenocopies the effect of FOXO knockdown on neuronal polarity. Importantly, exogenous expression of Pak1 in the background of FOXO knockdown in both primary neurons and postnatal rat pups in vivo restores the polarized morphology of neurons. These findings define the FOXO proteins and Pak1 as components of a cell-intrinsic transcriptional pathway that orchestrates neuronal polarity, thus identifying a novel function for the FOXO transcription factors in a unique aspect of neural development.


Consider the online convex optimization problem, in which a player has to choose actions iteratively and suffers corresponding losses according to some convex loss functions, and the goal is to minimize the regret. In the full-information setting, the player after choosing her action can observe the whole loss function in that round, while in the bandit setting, the only information the player can observe is the loss value of that action. Designing such bandit algorithms appears challenging, as the best regret currently achieved for general convex loss functions is much higher than that in the full-information setting, while for strongly convex loss functions, there is even a regret lower bound which is exponentially higher than that achieved in the full-information setting. To aim for smaller regrets, we adopt a relaxed two-point bandit setting in which the player can play two actions in each round and observe the loss values of those two actions. Moreover, we consider loss functions parameterized by their deviation D, which measures how fast they evolve, and we study how regrets depend on D. We show that two-point bandit algorithms can in fact achieve regrets matching those in the full-information setting in terms of D. More precisely, for convex loss functions, we achieve a regret of O( √ D), while for strongly convex loss functions, we achieve a regret of O(lnD), which is much smaller than the Ω( √ D) lower bound in the traditional bandit setting.


Low-rank matrix approximation has been widely adopted in machine learning applications with sparse data, such as recommender systems. However, the sparsity of the data, incomplete and noisy, introduces challenges to the algorithm stability - small changes in the training data may significantly change the models. As a result, existing low-rank matrix approximation solutions yield low generalization performance, exhibiting high error variance on the training dataset, and minimizing the training error may not guarantee error reduction on the testing dataset. In this paper, we investigate the algorithm stability problem of low-rank matrix approximations. We present a new algorithm design framework, which (1) introduces new optimization objectives to guide stable matrix approximation algorithm design, and (2) solves the optimization problem to obtain stable low-rank approximation solutions with good generalization performance. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed work can achieve better prediction accuracy compared with both state-of-the-art low-rank matrix approximation methods and ensemble methods in recommendation task.


This paper is based on a system which is used to detect various hazardous gases with the help of arduino. This work changes the presently available systems that are set industrial areas and this system can also be used in houses and at work place. The primary aim of the work is to design arduino based hazardous gas detecting system using gas sensors. The toxic gases like butane (also known as LPG), methane and carbon monoxide are sensed and displayed on the LCD display. The concentration of the gasses will be shown in the form of percentage by LCD display.


Ion implantation modifies the surface composition and properties of materials by bombardment with high energy ions. The low temperature of the process ensures the avoidance of distortion and degradation of the surface or bulk mechanical properties of components. In the present work nitrogen ion implantation at 90 keV and doses above 1017 ions/cm2 has been carried out on AISI M2, D2 and 420 steels and engineering coatings such as hard chromium, electroless Ni-P and a brush plated Co-W alloy. Evaluation of wear and frictional properties of these materials was performed with a lubricated Falex wear test at high loads up to 900 N and a dry pin-on-disc apparatus at loads up to 40 N. It was found that nitrogen implantation reduced the wear of AISI 420 stainless steel by a factor of 2.5 under high load lubricated conditions and by a factor of 5.5 in low load dry testing. Lower but significant reductions in wear were achieved for AISI M2 and D2 steels. Wear resistance of coating materials was improved by up to 4 times in lubricated wear of hard Cr coatings implanted at the optimum dose but lower improvements were obtained for the Co-W alloy coating. However, hardened electroless Ni-P coatings showed no enhancement in wear properties. The benefits obtained in wear behaviour for the above materials were generally accompanied by a significant decrease in the running-in friction. Nitrogen implantation hardened the surface of steels and Cr and Co-W coatings. An ultra-microhardness technique showed that the true hardness of implanted layers was greater than the values obtained by conventional micro-hardness methods, which often result in penetration below the implanted depth. Scanning electron microscopy revealed that implantation reduced the ploughing effect during wear and a change in wear mechanism from an abrasive-adhesive type to a mild oxidative mode was evident. Retention of nitrogen after implantation was studied by Nuclear Reaction Analysis and Auger Electron Spectroscopy. It was shown that maximum nitrogen retention occurs in hard Cr coatings and AISI 420 stainless steel, which explains the improvements obtained in wear resistance and hardness. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy on these materials revealed that nitrogen is almost entirely bound to Cr, forming chromium nitrides. It was concluded that nitrogen implantation at 90 keV and doses above 3x1017 ions/cm2 produced the most significant improvements in mechanical properties in materials containing nitride formers by precipitation strengthening, improving the load bearing capacity of the surface and changing the wear mechanism from adhesive-abrasive to oxidative.


The availability of mobile device ecologies enables new types of ad-hoc co-located decision-making and sensemak-ing practices in which people find, collect, discuss, and share information. However, little is known about what kind of device configurations are suitable for these types of tasks. This paper contributes new insights into how people use configurations of devices for one representative example task: collaborative co-located trip-planning. We present an empirical study that explores and compares three strategies to use multiple devices: no-overview, overview on own device, and a separate overview device. The results show that the overview facilitated decision- and sensemaking during a collaborative trip-planning task by aiding groups to iterate their itinerary, organize locations and timings efficiently, and discover new insights. Groups shared and discussed more opinions, resulting in more democratic decision-making. Groups provided with a separate overview device engaged more frequently and spent more time in closely-coupled collaboration.


One of the most unique examples of real‐time monitoring supported by UNICEF is found in Bangladesh in the pre‐primary education (PPE) programme operated by BRAC. Randomisation techniques are used for school selection by monitors as well as for intra‐classroom sampling to test learning outcomes. Monitoring is a multi‐level decentralised learning process that allows staff members to compare actual performance, outputs and results against standards. Monitoring duties are executed by the programme staff themselves as well as by the organisation. The intent is to promote internal programme learning, not just logical framework type reporting, and builds on the recognition that monitoring is only effective if it enables responses to programme implementation. The BRAC initiative demonstrates that monitoring with a real‐time component can be central to a strategy emphasising learning outcomes. It also shows that ICTs are not a necessary ingredient of 'real‐time' monitoring despite the current fashion in thinking.


Safe and sustainable energy storage systems with the ability to perform efficiently during large numbers of charge/discharge cycles with minimum degradation define the main objective of near future energy storage technologies. Closing the gap between high power and energy per unit weight requires new materials that can act as a battery and capacitor at the same time. Conductive polymers have attracted attention as hybrid battery-capacitor materials. However, their potential impact has not been fully investigated because their behaviour, especially in non-aqueous electrolytes such as ionic liquids, is not completely understood. Here, we aim to clarify the fundamental functionality of these hybrid characteristics while studying the interaction between a conductive polymer and an ionic liquid by in situ atomic force microscopy and electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance. The main achievement is the visualisation of the morphological modifications of the conductive polymer depending on the state of charge. These modifications significantly influence the viscoelastic material properties of the polymer. Our combined findings provide a model which explains why conductive polymers behave like (pseudo)-capacitors at a high state of charge and as batteries at a low state of charge. This understanding enables application-orientated synthesis of conductive polymers and their use as high-performance energy storage materials.


In this paper we show how Perl, an expressive and extensible high-level programming language, with network and ob ject-oriented programming support, can be used in processing data for statistics and statistical computing. The paper is organized in two parts. In Part I, we introduce the Perl programming language, with particular emphasis on the features that distinguish it from conventional languages. Then, using practical examples, we demonstrate how Perl's distinguishing features make it particularly well suited to perform labor intensive and sophisticated tasks ranging from the preparation of data to the writing of statistical reports. In Part II we show how Perl can be extended to perform statistical computations using modules and by "embedding" specialized statistical applications. We provide example on how Perl can be used to do simple statistical analyses, perform complex statistical computations involving matrix algebra and numerical optimization, and make statistical computations more easily reproducible. We also investigate the numerical and statistical reliability of various Perl statistical modules. Important computing issues such as ease of use, speed of calculation, and efficient memory usage, are also considered.


Dynamic measurement of surface pressure is of particular interest in the field of Langmuir monolayers, where the change in surface pressure throughout an experiment can provide information on the properties of the monolayer forming material, or on the reaction kinetics of the monolayer's interaction with other materials. One of the most common methods for the measurement of dynamic surface pressure is the Wilhelmy plate method. This method measures changes in the forces acting upon a thin plate of material at the air-water interface; this measurement is then converted to surface pressure. One version of this method, which uses filter paper plates at the air-water interface, is particularly popular due to their relatively low cost. However, it has been seen that the use of filter paper plates attached to a Wilhelmy balance requires an initial stabilisation period lasting several hours, during which the readings drift from the original baseline. Here the cause of this drift is explored, considering how changes in the weight of the plate over time influence the assumptions on which the surface pressure is derived from the measurements made by the Wilhelmy balance. A simple method for preventing this drift through pre-soaking of the filter paper plates is presented.


The role of primary motor cortex (M1) in the control of hand movements is still unclear. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of unimanual performance reported a relationship between level of precision of a motor task and additional ipsilateral M1 (iM1) activation. In the present study, we determined whether the demand on accuracy of a movement influences the magnitude of the inhibitory effect between primary motor cortices (IHI). We used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure active IHI (aIHI) of the iM1 on the contralateral M1 (cM1) in the premovement period of a left-hand motor task. Ten healthy participants manipulated a joystick to point to targets of two different sizes. For aIHI, the conditioning stimulus (CS) was applied to iM1, and the test stimulus (TS) to cM1, with an interstimulus interval of 10 ms. The amount of the inhibitory effect of the CS on the motor-evoked potential (MEP) of the subsequent TS was expressed as percentage of the mean MEP amplitude evoked by the single TS. Across different time points of aIHI measurements in the premovement period, there was a significant effect for target size on aIHI. Preparing to point to small targets was associated with weaker aIHI compared with pointing to large targets. The present findings suggest that, during the premovement period, aIHI from iM1 on cM1 is modulated by the demand on accuracy of the motor task. This is consistent with task fMRI findings showing bilateral M1 activation during high-precision movements but only unilateral M1 activity during low-precision movements.


Conventional logic synthesis flows are composed of three separate phases: technology independent optimization, technology mapping, and technology dependent optimization. A fundamental problem with such a three-phased approach is that the global logic structure is decided during the first phase without any knowledge of the actual technology parameters considered during later phases. Although technology dependent optimization algorithms perform some limited logic restructuring, they cannot recover from fundamental mistakes made during the first phase, which often results in non-satisfiable solutions. In this paper, we present a method for integrating the three synthesis phases using an annealing algorithm as optimization framework. The annealing-based search is driven by a complex objective function, combining both technology independent as well as technology dependent optimization criteria. Our experimental results shown that, on average, the presented approach can improve the area and delay of circuits optimized with script rugged of SIS by 11.2% and 32.5% respectively.


The series of heteropoly complexes were prepared by conventional reflux method in the water bath separately by taking Isopoly anions of Mo, V, W. All the products isolated were crystalline in nature appeared as dark yellow products. The chemical as well as physical methods were applied to characterize all the three isolated products the chemical analysis suggests the ionic nature of complexes since the complexes were dissolved in warm water. The inorganic wet analysis suggests ionic nature of sodium as its cation in association with complexes. The IR analysis applied for identification of group frequencies also suggests the ionic nature of sodium for the isolated complexes in solid state. The thermal analysis involving DTA and TGA support the stability of complexes in the atmosphere due to the presence of large no of water of hydration. The magnetic susceptibility analysis supports the paramagnetic nature of all the isolated series of products containing Al3+ and Ce4+ hetero cation. The structure of the heteropoly complexes synthesised may be suggested as Anderson's structure. The study of elemental analysis and molecular weight determination as well as chemical and physical analysis of the products, the following formula based on the IUPAC system may be proposed as: 1. Na2 (Al2CeMo7O27) 150H2O (sodium-7-molybdo-1-cirate-2 aluminate hydrate) 2. Na2 (Al2CeV4O16) 72H2O (sodium-4 -vanado-1-cirate-2 aluminate hydrate) 3. Na4 (Al2CeW4O19) 177H2O (sodium-4-tungstato-1-citrate-2-aluminate hydrate)


This article examines the education strategy of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), the state-in-exile with partial sovereignty on "borrowed territory" in Algeria. The article, which opens with a historical glance at the conflict, argues that SADR's education program not only succeeded in fostering self-reliance by developing skilled human resources, but was forward looking, using education as a vehicle to instill "new traditions of citizenship" and a new imagined national community, in preparation for future repatriation. In managing refugee camps as provinces of a state, the boundaries between the "refugee" as status and the "citizen" as a political identity were blurred. However,the stalled decolonization process and prolonged exile produced new challenges and consequences. Rather than using the skilled human resources in an independent stat eof Western Sahara, the state-in-limbo forced SADR andthe refugees to adapt to a deadlocked conflict, but not necessarily with negative outcomes to the national project.


Written as a comment on Philip Hamburger's book, Law and Judicial Duty, this essay explains why the history of judicial review remains a difficult area for scholarship. American judicial tradition espoused that judges had an obligation to declare as void laws repugnant to the constitution. The essay suggests that the source of this duty, as well as the meaning of both the constitution and laws of the land, changed over time. The essay proposes that scholars perceived American judicial review as problematic only when this tradition conflicted with an increasingly rigid belief in separation of powers. The essay concludes by suggesting that Marbury's significance derives from its status as the last time an American judge could declare that striking down a law as repugnant to a constitution was the simple consequence of expounding the law. The comment ultimately argues for recovering the time-honored meaning of "expounding" as applied to the work of judges.


Collaborative activities that reflect 'ethnicity as provenance' benefit from collaborative, interdependent relationships among archives, classroom, and community. Examples from Center for Colorado & the West at Auraria Library (University of Colorado Denver) and the Southern Colorado Ethnic Heritage and Diversity Archives and the Voices of Protest Oral History Project (Colorado State University-Pueblo) illustrate collection development practices that advance joint ownership of archival materials by the archives and the originating cultural population. Concluding reflections offer transferable principles for working collaboratively with cultural communities on creation, identification, interpretation, and preservation of photographs, videos, documents, oral histories and ephemeral material reflective of culture, achievements, conflict, and legacy.


To investigate the effects of eucalypt trees on pasture in open eucalypt woodlands of north-eastern Queensland, 2 common native pasture species, Chrysopogon fallaxand Heteropogon contortus, were grown in soil collected from under tree canopies and inter-canopy areas. These soils were collected from 2 localities that differed in soil fertility. The objective was to determine whether trees enhanced soil nutrient levels beneath their canopies and whether such changes affected pasture productivity and quality. It was hypothesised that tree effects would be greater when overall soil fertility was low. Shade and water stress treatments, which aimed to simulate field conditions, were also imposed to investigate their independent and interactive effects on plant growth.

Chemical analyses showed that nutrient levels were higher in under-canopy soils, and plants grown in under-canopy soil produced 42% more biomass than plants in outside-canopy soil. This increase in biomass was significantly greater when the soil was from the low fertility site than from the high fertility site. Leaf quality, in terms of N and P concentration and dry matter digestibility (DMD), was generally higher in plants in under-canopy soil. Shading reduced plant root biomass but had no effects on above ground biomass or leaf quality. Water stress reduced above and below ground biomass and increased leaf quality. Shading and water stress effects were greater in plants in the more fertile soil types. Simulated 'under-canopy' plants (shaded, water-stressed plants in under-canopy soil) produced more biomass and had higher leaf N concentration and DMD than simulated 'outside-canopy' plants (unshaded, well-watered plants in outside-canopy soil).

In a pastoral context, trees in tropical woodlands are generally considered in terms of their competitive effect on pasture productivity. This study has demonstrated that soil nutrient availability is enhanced under eucalypt canopies. The biomass results indicate that this effect is greater when overall soil fertility conditions are low. These enhanced soil nutrient conditions influence forage productivity and quality. Such positive benefits should be considered when management decisions are taken to remove or kill trees in eucalypt woodlands.


Swarms of autonomous MAVs show great potential in many diverse applications. In a search and rescue mission, a group of MAVs could quickly reach disaster areas by flying over obstacles, cluttered and inaccessible terrains, and work in parallel to detect and locate people that are in need of help. However, multiple challenges still remain in the design of truly autonomous MAV teams. Due to the strict constraints imposed on the MAVs in terms of size, weight, 3D coverage, processing power, power consumption and price, there are not many technological possibilities that could provide individuals with information abut the position of themselves and their team mates without the aid of external systems. Inspired by the sense of hearing among many animal groups which use sound for localization purposes, we propose an on-board audio-based system for allowing individuals in an MAV swarm to use sound waves for obtaining the relative positioning, and furthermore, the self-localization information. We show that not only such a system fully satisfies the constraints of MAVs and is capable of obtaining these information, but also provides additional important opportunities, such as the detection and localization of crucial acoustic targets in the environment. Operating during night time, through foliage and in adverse weather conditions such as fog, dust and smoke, and detection and collision avoidance with non-cooperative noise-emitting aerial platforms are some of the potential advantages of audio-based swarming MAVs. In this thesis, we firstly describe an on-board sound-source localization system and novel methods for the innovative idea of localizing emergency sound sources on the ground from airborne MAVs. The ability of MAVs to locate source of distress sound signals, such as the sound of an emergency whistle blown by a person in need of help or the sound of a personal alarm, is significantly important and would allow fast localization of victims and rescuers during night time and in fog, dust, smoke and dense forests. We propose three different methods for overcoming the ambiguities related with localizing emergency sound sources or, in general, narrowband sound sources. Furthermore, we present the on-board audio-based relative positioning system for obtaining information about the position of other MAVs in their vicinity. We initially describe a passive method that exploits only the engine sound of other robots, in the absence of the self-engine noise, to measure their relative directions. We then extend this method to overcome some of its limitations, where individuals generate a chirping sound similar to the sound of birds to assist others in obtaining their positions. We then describe an estimator based on particle filters that fuses the relative bearing measurements with information about the motion of the robots, provided by their onboard sensors, to also obtain an estimate about the relative range of the robots. Finally, we present a cooperative method to address the self-localization problem for a team of MAVs, while accommodating the motion constraints of flying robots, where individuals obtain their three dimensional positions through perceiving a sound-emitting beacon MAV. All methods are based on coherence testing among signals of a small on-board microphone array, to measure the probable direction of incoming sound waves, and estimators for robust estimation of the desired information throughout time.


Stuart Andrews, Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xvii + 250 $85.00 Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xii + 224 $84.00 "The Catholic Question" was a persistent and usually passionate debate about relieving Roman Catholics of civil disabilities that had been imposed on them by the Penal Laws of the 17th century, a debate that intensified between the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 and the Catholic Emancipation act of 1829--the years of the Romantic period in literature. The public policy issue was complicated by deep-rooted prejudice against "Romish superstition" with a history going back to Mary Tudor's persecution of Protestants and the series of "popish plots," real or imagined, that followed. A more serious complication was the problem of Ireland. Following the rebellions of 1798, an Act of Union dissolved the Dublin parliament, raising the question of how five million Irish Catholics could be admitted to full participation in the political life of a united kingdom. The dispute thus involved a legal and cultural struggle over religious difference, historical grievances, and the very definition of "Britishness." Michael Tomko's British Romanticism and the Catholic Question and Stuart Andrews' Robert Southey: History, Politics, Religion, the two books under consideration, make the case that the Catholic Question played a more central role in the culture of the Romantic period than previous literary historians have noticed. Tomko addresses the impact of the controversy on imaginative literature while Andrews provides a vivid clarification of the issues at the heart of the conflict and the passions that drove one writer's lifelong obsession with the threat he thought Roman Catholicism posed to Britain's survival as a Protestant nation. After he became Poet Laureate in 1813, Southey wrote little verse, devoting his creative energies to historical and argumentative prose. He was a conscientious and energetic historian, as his biographies of Wesley and Nelson still demonstrate, but the prose that Andrews examines here mainly concerned the dispute on the Catholic Question, in which he was a committed partisan. In a series of books, articles, and reviews, the debate became the primary concern of his life as an author. He engaged in acrimonious public quarrels with two able and prominent defenders of Catholic rights, John Milner and Charles Butler. In his Book of the Church (1824) Southey's admiration of the Church of England necessitated invidious comparisons with "the errors, corruptions and crimes" of the pernicious "Romish Church" (as he almost always called it). Milner's Strictures on the Poet Laureate's Book of the Church (1824), responded in kind to what he thought was a tissue of vituperation and fanaticism, whose author "raves through the history of many centuries, in abusing and calumniating the common source of Christianity, in order to court the heads of the present Establishment, under pretence of vindicating it" (121). Butler's Book of the Roman Catholic Church (1825) similarly argued that Southey's book was "calculated to revive past animosities, to inflame prejudice, to perpetuate discord" (119). Southey responded to his critics in Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826), with still more rancorous attacks on the "idolatrous and superstitious" Church of Rome, and in a later publication wrote, "Throughout papal Christendom there has been substituted for Christianity a mass of corruption which nauseates the understanding" (184). In various writings he ridiculed transubstantiation, indulgences, belief in purgatory, veneration of Mary and the saints, and the authority of the Pope. He thought that auricular confession by absolving sin encouraged more of it; he found priestly celibacy repugnant; and he entertained gothic visions of innocent girls being shut up convents, forced to practice idolatry, denied meat on Fridays, and encouraged to indulge in self-flagellation. …


Drawing widely on archive material and recently published documents from both German states on the 1980s, the article examines the impact on a divided Germany of the nuclear arms spiral, from the end of the 1970s up to the collapse of socialist states East Germany and the Soviet Union. Drawing on personal reflections and talks with witnesses, the author describes contradictory attitudes in the World Peace Council and its East German counterpart towards the new European nuclear disarmament movement around the European Nuclear Disarmament Campaign (END). The Cold War dictated rules and defined the scope for the fight to end the nuclear arms race and avert the constant threat of an atomic inferno. In the state-socialist system centred on the USSR, ideology determined the struggle for nuclear disarmament and, in turn, the foreign and security policy principles of the Soviet system. This objective and subjective framework imposed limits of its own, was influenced by the hegemonic objectives of the Soviet system, and contradictory in itself. Inevitably, therefore, East German attempts at containing damage after the double-track decision were restricted.


The structural and electronic properties of liquid MgSiO3 under pressure are investigated by ab initio molecular-dynamics simulations. At ambient pressure, most of Si atoms have the same coordination even in the liquid state as in the crystalline phase, i.e., each Si atom is bonded to two bridging oxygen (BO), i.e., O atoms twofold-coordinated to Si, and two nonbridging oxygen (NBO), i.e., O atoms onefold-coodinated to Si. It is, however, found that the structural defects, such as fivefold- or threefold-coordinated Si atoms, are always formed with the rearrangement of Si-O covalent bonds in the atomic diffusion processes. The population analysis clarifies that maximum of the diffusivity in the pressure dependence results from the increasing of the number of defects under compression.


In this paper, linear regression models will be used to decode individual joint angles from low frequency EEG components. To that end, isotonic flexion/extension knee movements will be analyzed. Particularly, the decoding performance of healthy and incomplete spinal cord injured subjects will be assessed to determine the behavior of this methodology with motor disabled people. When studying cortical activity during walking, the appearance of muscular artifacts severely influences the EEG signals recorded. The analysis of single joint movements should decrease the noise provoked by the gait process itself. Additionally, different time windows prior to the decoded angle will be assessed to obtain a more reliable decoder. The results show that decoding performance is significantly above chance for most of the subjects (both healthy and disabled) and suggests that meaningful information of the movement planning starts around 2.5 seconds prior to the decoded angle.


We explore how the communication concerns of non-native English speakers (NNS) and Americans relate to their perceptions of each other and decisions to interact. NNS identified their concerns in communicating with Americans, the perceived causes of their concerns, and the strategies they would employ to address these concerns. Americans noted their perceptions of NNS' (heavy and mild) accents and identified factors that influence their perceptions of NNS and decisions to communicate with NNS. Results revealed that the more NNS attribute their communication concerns to Americans' bias, the more likely they would avoid interacting with Americans. Results also suggested that Americans show a more favorable attitude toward mild accent NNS. We discuss the implications these findings have for international education and future research.


Recent years have witnessed the rising popularity of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and related fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Many online courses and resources are available even for those without a strong background in the field. Often the student is curious about a specific topic but does not quite know where to begin studying. To answer the question of "what should one learn first,"we apply an embedding-based method to learn prerequisite relations for course concepts in the domain of NLP. We introduce LectureBank, a dataset containing 1,352 English lecture files collected from university courses which are each classified according to an existing taxonomy as well as 208 manually-labeled prerequisite relation topics, which is publicly available 1. The dataset will be useful for educational purposes such as lecture preparation and organization as well as applications such as reading list generation. Additionally, we experiment with neural graph-based networks and non-neural classifiers to learn these prerequisite relations from our dataset.


Private investment is an important strategy of achieving economic growth. through its ability to stimulate economic activity by expanding the capacity for production of goods and services. and creation of employment opportunities. To increase private investment. bi-lateral organizations have emphasized the need to liberate the economy in most developing countries. However. even with liberalization policies. the trend in private investment in these developing Countries. Kenya included has not been very encouraging as had been envisaged. Given the poor performance of private investment in Kenya. it is questionable whether liberalization policies advocated by the IMF have had any significant effects. It could be the case that proper institutional base was not laid down for the liberalization policies to have any meaningful results. Using Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) and data from 1965 -2007. this study analyzed the extent to which institutional factors impacted on private investment in Kenya and attempts to filter out the relative impact of liberalization measures against institutional factors in increasing private investment flows' in Kenya. This study found out that tax administration had a negative impact on private investment and that Investment promotion impacted negatively on private investment in Kenya. The impact of shocks due to tax administration were found to be dominant compared to those of liberalization policies. while the impact of investment promotion shocks was lesser. compared to that of liberalization of the Kenyan Economy. This study concluded that among the institutional factors that were considered for analysis. tax administration was of a greater importance to private investors and should have been put in place and properly enhanced before liberalization of the economy. if the latter was to achieve its objective of enhancing economic growth through increased private investment.


This article evaluates the consequences of neuromarketers' reliance on direct and indirect forms of remote sensing. These remote sensing strategies, tactics, and resources include various sophisticated techniques for evaluating neuronal and behavioral responses to commercial messages with the aid of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. The information generated with the aid of fMRI, in combination with inferences drawn from the massive data analyses enabled by machine learning techniques, is expected to contribute to the power and influence of market-oriented segmentation and targeting. After characterizing the current state of and future trends in applied neuromarketing research, we discuss how reliance on descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive communications strategies enabled by remote sensing will affect the life chances and well-being of segments of the global population. We conclude with a discussion of the moral and ethical implications of these developments, primarily in the context of public policy deliberations related to privacy and surveillance that we associate with remote sensing.


In recent years, the role of acetylation has gained ground as an essential modulator of intermediary metabolism in skeletal muscle. Imbalance in energy homeostasis or chronic cellular stress, due to diet, aging, or disease, translate into alterations in the acetylation levels of key proteins which govern bioenergetics, cellular substrate use, and/or changes in mitochondrial content and function. For example, cellular stress induced by exercise or caloric restriction can alter the coordinated activity of acetyltransferases and deacetylases to increase mitochondrial biogenesis and function in order to adapt to low energetic levels. The natural duality of these enzymes, as metabolic sensors and effector proteins, has helped biologists to understand how the body can integrate seemingly distinct signaling pathways to control mitochondrial biogenesis, insulin sensitivity, glucose transport, reactive oxygen species handling, angiogenesis, and muscle satellite cell proliferation/differentiation. Our review will summarize the recent developments related to acetylation-dependent responses following metabolic stress in skeletal muscle. Key Words


There is a sense among scientists that the time is finally ripe for the problem of consciousness to be solved once and for all. The development of new experimental and theoretical tools for probing the brain has produced an atmosphere of unparalleled optimism that the job can now be done properly: The race for consciousness is on! In this book, John Taylor describes the complete scene of entries, riders, gamblers, and racecourses. He presents his own entry into the race, which he has been working on for the past twenty-five years -- the relational theory of consciousness, according to which consciousness is created through the relations between brain states, especially those involving memories of personal experiences. Because it is an ongoing and adaptive process, consciousness emerges from past brain activity. It is this highly subtle and delicate process of emergence that leads to the complexity of consciousness. Taylor does not just present another theory of consciousness, but makes comprehensible the nuts-and-bolts methodology behind the myriad attempts to win the race.


Age-related musculoskeletal and metabolic disorders often resulting from glucose intolerance due to age-related insulin resistance represent one of the most significant health problems in our ageing world. The incretin hormone glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) has shown to have positive effects on vascular function and glucose disposal as demonstrated by recent human and animal studies. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate whether GLP-1 can exert the same positive effect on muscle's postprandial glucose metabolism and vascular blood flow in old age. To examine such effects, the study was conducted in a cross-over design (± GLP-1) consisting of two acute study visits with a four week 'wash-out' period. GLP-1 was infused in the femoral artery in overnight fasted healthy old volunteers (n=7) along with glucose and insulin clamps in combination with Octreotide and amino acids to achieve constant postprandial conditions. Leg blood flow (LBF) was measured by Doppler ultrasound, computation of rates of total body glucose metabolism (M) during the clamps was calculated by glucose infusion rates minus urinary loss of glucose minus space correction and leg glucose disposal by arterial-venous (A-V) balance technique. Our results show that the infusion of GLP-1 increased overall LBF, which was significant when a t-test was applied (P < 0.05) but not significant using a 2-way ANOVA. Significant increases (P < 0.05) were also seen in measured whole body glucose metabolism (M). However, glucose leg uptake during the GLP-1 infusion did not significantly increase. We, therefore, conclude that GLP-1 infusion in healthy old people has a significant effect on whole body postprandial glucose metabolism and vascular blood flow. However, this effect may be influenced by raised insulin concentrations and exerted possibly through an insulin-mediated mechanism and not by GLP-1 action alone. Nevertheless, GLP-1 effect could still contribute to the increased delivery of glucose to the muscle in the elderly and specifically combat the negative consequences of ageing i.e. impaired glucose uptake, vascular blood flow and age-related insulin resistance by further enhancing the action of insulin. However, further investigations are required.


NEHAL J. PATEL Comparison of Antibiotic Sensitivity Profiles, Molecular Typing Patterns, and Attribution of Salmonella enterica Serotype Newport in the U.S., 2003-2006 (Under the direction of Dr. Karen Gieseker) Salmonella causes gastrointestinal illness in humans. The purpose of the study was to determine the relative contribution of different food commodities to sporadic cases of salmonellosis (attribution analysis) caused by Salmonella Newport (SN) using PulsedField Gel Electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns and antimicrobial sensitivity (AST) data submitted by public health laboratories and regulatory agencies from 2003 to 2006. The genetic relationship between isolates from non-human (348) and human (10,848) sources was studied by two unique clustering methods: UPGMA and Ward. Results show poultry was the highest contributor of human SN infections, followed by tomatoes and beef. Beef was the largest contributing food commodity of multi-drug resistant (MDR)-AmpC infection patterns. Results from this pilot study show that PFGE and AST can be useful tools in performing attribution analysis at the national level and that SN MDR-AmpC patterns are decreasing and seem to be restricted to isolates from animal sources. INDEX WORDS: Attribution analysis, Salmonella Newport, PFGE, antimicrobial


Two opposing accounts of early language evolution, the compositional and the holistic, have become the subject of lively debate. It has been argued that an evolving compositional protolanguage would not be useful for communication until it reached a certain level of grammatical complexity. This paper offers a new, discourse-oriented perspective on the debate. It argues that discourse should be viewed, not as a level of language structure 'beyond the sentence', but as sequenced communicative behaviour, typically but not uniquely involving language. This provides for continuity from exchanges making use of simple communicative resources such as single words and gestures to those making use of complex grammatical conventions. Supporting evidence comes from child language and from original experiments with adults using constrained language systems. The paper shows that the utility of emerging compositional language is not dependent on some critical level of complexity, and so defends the compositional account.


Leaf kopasanda (Chromolaena odorata L. King & H.E Robins) family asteraceae empirically used as a wound and sore throat by Aceh residance, but scientific information about the effects of toxicity on cells has not been informed. The method used is phytochemical screening by using appropriate chemical detection reagents and continued with the search profile for extract using thin layer chromatography (TLC) as well as toxicity test of crude extract and its partition to shrimp larvae (Artemia salina Leach). Chemical content of extracts showed the presence of flavonoids, saponins, triterpenoids, alkaloids and tannins. The stain profile on TLC plate with silica gel GF254 as stationary phase showed the best stain by using the mobile phase on crude extract ethanol and its partition ethyl acetate, n-hexane and water were respectively n-heksan : etil asetat (3:7), n-heksan : etil asetat (7:3); n-heksan : etil asetat (2:8). their toxicity effects showed a low toxic category. C. odorata extracts have potentially safe and can be developed in aspects of biological activity.


The effects of errors in estimates of genetic parameters on genetic response to selection in pigs were investigated when the selection was based on selection index for relative desired genetic changes (DC-index). The effects of errors on gains based on economic selection index (Smith-Hazel index: SH-index) were also investigated to compare with DC-index. Information on individual phenotype of candidate for selection (SIC) and on family (SIF) of the candidate was used in selection index. Average daily gain (DG), backfat thickness (BF) and litter size at birth (LS) were considered as traits for breeding objective and selection criteria. The respective heritabilities of 0.3, 0.5 and 0.1 for DG, BF and LS, with genetic and phenotypic correlations between DG and BF of 0.2, and no correlations between LS and DG and BF were assumed. A distinction is drawn between the response [E(_??_H0)] possible with use of the optimum index based on exact parameters and that achieved [E(_??_ H1)] with an index which uses the estimates of the genetic parameters in SH-index. We also draw a distinction between the response [E(_??_g0i)] possible with use of the optimum index and that achieved [E(_??_g1i)] of each ith trait with an index which uses the estimates of the parameters in DC-index. The efficiencies of selection in SH-index and DC-index were defined as RH[=E(_??_H1)/E(_??_H0)] and RD[the minimum value of E(_??_g1i)/E(_??_g0i) in all selected traits], respectively. Errors in estimates of genetic correlation had smaller effect for RH and RD than errors in estimates of heritability per unit. Expected loss in efficiency in DC-index was more sensitive than SH-index to incorrect estimates of heritability or genetic correlation. Errors in phenotypic correlation scarcely affect both RH and RD. For response to selection, the effect of error in estimate of heritability for LS was the largest in three traits. If there is no confirmation of accurate estimates of genetic parameters (e. g. genetic parameters in literature are used in selection programs) and if absolute of relative desired change for LS per genetic standard deviation unit is larger than that for both DG and BF, a higher heritability for LS should be used to construct selection index.