Abstract. A comparison of aromatic hydrocarbon measurements is reported for the CENICA supersite in the district of Iztapalapa during the Mexico City Metropolitan Area field experiment in April 2003 (MCMA 2003). Data from three different measurement methods were compared: a Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometer (PTR-MS), long path measurements using a UV Differential Optical Absorption Spectrometer (DOAS), and Gas Chromatography-Flame Ionization analysis (GC-FID) of canister samples. The principle focus was on the comparison between PTR-MS and DOAS data. Lab tests established that the PTR-MS and DOAS calibrations were consistent for a suite of aromatic compounds including benzene, toluene, p-xylene, ethylbenzene, 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene, phenol and styrene. The point sampling measurements by the PTR-MS and GC-FID showed good correlations (r=0.6), and were in reasonable agreement for toluene, C2-alkylbenzenes and C3-alkylbenzenes. The PTR-MS benzene data were consistently high, indicating interference from ethylbenzene fragmentation for the 145 Td drift field intensity used in the experiment. Correlations between the open-path data measured at 16-m height over a 860-m path length (retroreflector in 430 m distance), and the point measurements collected at 37-m sampling height were best for benzene (r=0.61), and reasonably good for toluene, C2-alkylbenzenes, naphthalene, styrene, cresols and phenol (r>0.5). There was good agreement between DOAS and PTR-MS measurements of benzene after correction for the PTR-MS ethylbenzene interference. Mixing ratios measured by DOAS were on average a factor of 1.7 times greater than the PTR-MS data for toluene, C2-alkylbenzenes, naphthalene and styrene. The level of agreement for the toluene data displayed a modest dependence on wind direction, establishing that spatial gradients – horizontal, vertical, or both – in toluene mixing ratios were significant, and up to a factor of 2 despite the fact that all measurements were conducted above roof level. Our analysis highlights a potential problem in defining a VOC sampling strategy that is meaningful for the comparison with photochemical transport models: meaningful measurements require a spatial fetch that is comparable to the grid cell size of models, which is typically a few 10 km2. Long-path DOAS measurements inherently average over a larger spatial scale than point measurements. The spatial representativeness can be further increased if observations are conducted outside the surface roughness sublayer, which might require measurements at altitudes as high as 10 s of metres above roof level.


The number of students enrolled in online courses continues to increase as the landscape of higher education evolves to meet the needs of the student population. With the growing number of online education students, and the necessity of programs to demonstrate learning effectiveness, it is essential for higher education institutions to compare the success of online students with their traditional classroom counterparts in terms of course outcomes (final project and course grades). This study used a quasi-experimental design to examine the relationship between the instructional delivery method (online vs. traditional classroom) and the course outcomes and satisfaction of students in selected sport management courses. Differences between instructional delivery method were found in motivational factors, satisfaction, and content knowledge. However, no significant differences were found with respect to final project and course grades. The findings from this study can assist sport management programs beginning to offer online education courses or looking to expand their online course offerings. The results demonstrate that instructional delivery method does not affect a student's course outcomes in sport management courses, leaving them the ability to choose the educational delivery method best suited for their lifestyle and motivations.


Cell migration is a very complex mechanism linked to the inflammatory response as well as to several processes of cell biology and development.
The movement of cells in response to a chemokine gradient is the most popular form of interaction between cell environment and surface and specific surface receptor triggers an intracellular signaling pathway. This phenomenon is known as chemotaxis and is characteristic of neutrophil movements in response to the chemokine Interleuchin-8 (IL8) in a 3D space. Another paradigm of dynamic interaction between cells is the mechanism underlying the confluency of cells cultured in a Petri dish. This process is particularly studied in growing epithelial cell lines, and is influenced by still undefined external stimuli as well as by cell proliferation and cytoskeleton reorganization, that allow the contact and interaction between cells in 2D space. Chronic inflammation is an ideal condition for the study of cell migration and its de-regulation; understanding the mechanisms involved in cell motility and their putative modulation, is the first step in setting new appropriate models of study.
During PhD project, different cellular models have been used: IB3 cell lines belonging to patients with Cystic Fibrosis (caused by mutations of cystic fibrosis transmembrane regulator (CFTR)), and T84 cell lines, a popular model of study of Coeliac Disease, a common intolerance to proteins of wheat. Both disease are characterized by a pro-inflammatory milieu with high level of tissue Transglutaminase (TG2), a multi-functions enzyme with a defined role in several human pathologies.
Cystic Fibrosis is the prototype of diseases in which an uncontrolled production of IL8 leads to a dysregulated neutrophil recruitment. The IB3 cell lines have been used to understand a molecular mechanisms of enhanced IL8 production and their modulation. The results evidence i) the role of TG2 as a new pathogenic factor in Cystic Fibrosis; ii) the role of post-translational modifications of TG2 as a link between genetic defect of CFTR ad inflammation iii) the mechanisms of autophagy inhibition via ROS-TG2 axis, in epithelial airway cell line and mice model of CF. The consequence is a fine modulation of IL8 production. The system allows the design of a 3D model to study cell migration under IL8 diffusive flux in qualitative and quantitative ways.
Another important pathological system with chronic inflammation is celiac disease and the analysis of interactions of alimentary peptides with the frontline gut epithelium is a useful model of study. The epithelial cells are pivot in the innate immune activation in CD and cytoskeleton rearrangement is the earliest event in such a response to gliadin peptides. The data in T84 cell model show a gliadin peptide-driven pro-inflammatory environment as a consequence of its impaired lysosomal degradation. Moreover, alterations of motility and cytoskeletal reorganization emphasize the "toxic" effect of peptide. Therefore, CD offers an ideal opportunity to set up a 2D model of study of cell motility.
Understanding the mechanisms of migration and the identification of appropriate target of modulation of cell recruitment could allow wide industrial applications in biotechnology and will be successful to provide a useful tool to test potential therapeuthic molecules.


The explosive growth in biological sequence data coupled with the design and deployment of increasingly high throughput sequencing technologies has created a need for methods capable of processing large-scale sequence data in a time and cost effective manner. In this dissertation, we address this need through the development of faster algorithms, space-efficient methods, and high-performance parallel computing techniques for some key problems in computational genomics.
The first problem addressed is the clustering of DNA sequences based on a measure of sequence similarity. Our clustering method: (i) guarantees linear space complexity, in contrast to the quadratic memory requirements of previously developed methods; (ii) identifies sequence pairs containing long maximal matches in the decreasing order of their maximal match lengths in run-time proportional to the sum of input and output sizes; (iii) provides heuristics to significantly reduce the number of pairs evaluated for checking sequence similarity without affecting quality; and (iv) has parallel strategies that provide linear speedup and a proportionate reduction in space per processor. Our approach has significantly enhanced the problem size reach while also drastically reducing the time to solution.
The next problem we address is the de novo detection of genomic repeats called Long Terminal Repeat (LTR) retrotransposons. Our algorithm guarantees linear space complexity and produces high quality candidates for prediction in run-time proportional to the sum of input and output sizes. Validation of our approach on the yeast genome demonstrates both superior quality and performance results when compared to previously developed software.
In a genome assembly project, fragments sequenced from a target genome are computationally assembled into numerous supersequences called "contigs", which are then ordered and oriented into "scaffolds". In this dissertation, we introduce a new problem called retroscaffolding for scaffolding contigs based on the knowledge of their LTR retrotransposon content. Through identification of sequencing gaps that span LTR retrotransposons, retroscaffolding provides a mechanism for prioritizing sequencing gaps for finishing purposes.
While most of the problems addressed here have been studied previously, the main contribution in this dissertation is the development of methods that can scale to the largest available sequence collections.


The biological works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle include a significant amount of information on marine animals. In the present study, an overview of his scientific contribution to the knowledge of marine biodiversity and specifically to taxonomic classification, nomenclature and distribution of marine species is attempted. Our results showed that Aristotle's approach looks remarkably familiar to present day marine biologists since: (i) although not directly aiming at it, he gave a taxonomic classification of marine animals, which includes physical groups ranked on three levels at least; (ii) most of Aristotle's marine "major groups" correspond to taxa of the order rank in Linnaeus's classification and to taxa of the class rank in the current classification; (iii) a positive correlation was found between the number of taxa per group identified in Aristotle's writings and those described by Linnaeus; (iv) his classification system exhibits similarities with the current one regarding the way taxa are distributed to higher categories. (v) a considerable number of Aristotle's marine animal names have been used for the creation of the scientific names currently in use; (vi) he gave the first account of the Mediterranean marine fauna, focusing on the Aegean Sea and adjacent areas. Taking into account all the above, we suggest that the foundations of marine taxonomy as laid down by Aristotle are still echoing today.


Background: Children have a more diverse and larger number of risk factors for arterial ischemic stroke (AIS) that differ significantly from adults which are predominated by hypertension, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. The aim of the present study was to inspect and conclude the most common risk factors and causes of AIS in children. Patients and methods: A prospective cohort study included 24 patients admitted to Pediatric Department, Faculty of Medicine, Zagazig University Hospitals. Full history taking, clinical and neurological examination and routine laboratory examination were performed. Neurological outcomes were graded by the site neurologists as no deficit, mild, moderate, or severe deficits and patients were followed up. Results: More than one half 58.3% of arterial ischemic stroke patients had single infraction, mainly at left side 45.8%, affected mainly Anterior circulation (58.3%). The vascular imaging artropathy subtype of Arterial Ischemic Stroke patients nearly two fifths was arteropathy type (12.5%) , Moyamoya, the same percent was arterial dissection. The outcome of treatment arterial ischemic stroke patients 37.5% of them became normal early. After follow up period one half of them became normal. Unfortunately 16.7% had severe deficit at early follow up and still at late follow up period. About1 patient(4.2%) died pre discharge, 2 patients (8.3%) died post discharge, 2 patients (8.3%) related to ischemia, other patient (4.2%) unrelated ischemia. Conclusion: Cardiac lesion is the most risk factors associated with arterial ischemic stroke, followed by arterioropathy, prothrombin disorder and diabetes.


In an attempt to cultivate standardization in soundscape reporting Brown, Kang and Gjestland offered
an influential schema by which the acoustic environment is divided initially into indoor and outdoor environments, and within each into further categories; urban, rural, wilderness, and underwater. Within each of these, sounds are categorised with increasing levels of detail. However, this schema is offered as an organizational framework for further elaboration, rather than as an evidence-based account of semantic categories. In other soundscape categorisation research semantic differential data are used to examine how perceptually similar sounds are. However, this approach typically involves prescribing descriptive terms, taken from previous research or simply prescribed by the researcher, rather than eliciting descriptive terms and semantic categories per se. Another common method for identifying semantic categories is to perform multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis of similarity data generated by a pairwise comparison task. This approach avoids prescribing attributes with which to rate sounds; however the absence of semantic labelling in the task means that interpretation of the data is necessarily subjective, and the amount of time required to perform pairwise comparisons on a large number of sounds is potentially prohibitive. Here we present an evidence-based account of semantic categories of sounds commonly described in the soundscape literature, using a robust method based upon perceptual data generated by an online sorting and category-labelling task. This method is relatively quick to perform and elicits rather than prescribes categories and descriptive terms.


Data summarization has been recognized as a fundamental operation in database systems and data mining with important applications such as data compression and privacy preservation. While the existing methods such as CF-values and DataBubbles may perform reasonably well, they cannot provide any guarantees on the quality of their results. In this paper, we introduce a summarization approach for numerical data based on discs formalizing the notion of quality. Our objective is to find a minimal set of discs, i.e. spheres satisfying a radius and a significance constraint, covering the given dataset. Since the proposed problem is NP-complete, we design two different approximation algorithms. These algorithms have a quality guarantee, but they do not scale well to large databases. However, the machinery from approximation algorithms allows a precise characterization of a further, heuristic algorithm. This heuristic, efficient algorithm exploits multi-dimensional index structures and can be well-integrated with database systems. The experiments show that our heuristic algorithm generates summaries that outperform the state-of-the-art data bubbles in terms of internal measures as well as in terms of external measures when using the data summaries as input for clustering methods


California's population is expected to add another 14 million people by 2030, reaching a total of 48 million. One of the most serious concerns of policymakers is whether the state will be able to supply the water needed to sustain such a population. Although many large water projects in the past were undertaken with state and federal leadership, most current options are local or regional in scope. The frontline agencies responsible for water supply are the hundreds of municipal utilities serving the state's residential and commercial customers. In this report, the author examines how well California is faring in meeting the water supply challenges of growth throughout the state and the extent to which local governments are integrating water supply concerns into their land-use planning. The report also evaluates progress in implementing the new "show me the water" laws, SB 610 and SB 221, which require up-front screening of water availability for large development projects.


This thesis consists of an introductory chapter and four papers, which relate to environmental policy in the presence of transboundary environmental damage. Paper [I] concerns public policy in a multi-jurisdiction framework with transboundary environmental damage. Each jurisdiction is assumed large in the sense that its government is able to inuence the world-market producer price of the externality-generating good. This gives rise to additional incentives of relevance for national public policy in the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium. With the uncoordinated equilibrium as the reference case, the welfare eects from coordinated changes in public policy variables are analyzed. Paper [II] analyses welfare eects of coordinated changes in environmental and capital taxation in the presence of transboundary environmental externalities and wage bargaining externalities. In the wage bargaining between rms and labor unions, rms use the threat of moving abroad to moderate wage claims, which means that domestic policy inuences wage formation abroad. The specic framework implies welfare eects of policy coordination that correspond to each of the respective international interaction mentioned above. In paper [III], national governments face political pressure from environmental and industrial lobby groups, while pollution taxes are determined in an international negotiation. It is shown that a general increase in the environmental concern and the weight the governments attach to social welfare both tend to increase the pollution tax. However, allowing for asymmetries between the countries means that a general increase in the environmental concern has the potential to reduce the pollution tax. Paper [IV] studies national environmental policies in an economic federation characterized by decentralized leadership. The federal government sets emission targets for each member country, which are implemented by the national governments. Although all national governments have commitment power vis-a-vis the federal government, one of them also has commitment power vis-a-vis the other member countries. This creates incentives to act strategically toward the federal government, as well as toward other members.


The brain is a complex biological system composed of a multitude of microscopic processes, which together give rise to computational abilities observed in everyday behavior. Neuronal modeling, consisting of models of single neurons and neuronal networks at varying levels of biological detail, can synthesize the gaps currently hard to constrain in experiments and provide mechanistic explanations of how these computations might arise. In this thesis, I present two parallel lines of research on neuronal modeling, situated at varying levels of biological detail. First, I assess the provenance of voltage-gated ion channel models in an integrative meta-analysis that investigates a backlog of nearly 50 years of published research. To cope with the ever-increasing volume of research produced in the field of neuroscience, we need to develop methods for the systematic assessment and comparison of published work. As we demonstrate, neuronal models offer the intriguing possibility of performing automated quantitative analyses across studies, by standardized simulated experiments. We developed protocols for the quantitative comparison of voltage-gated ion channels, and applied them to a large body of published models, allowing us to assess the variety and temporal development of different models for the same ion channels over the time scale of years of research. Beyond a systematic classification of the existing body of research made available in an online platform, we show that our approach extends to large-scale comparisons of ion channel models to experimental data, thereby facilitating field-wide standardization of experimentally-constrained modeling. Second, I investigate neuronal models of working memory (WM). How can cortical networks bridge the short time scales of their microscopic components, which operate on the order of milliseconds, to the behaviorally relevant time scales of seconds observed in WM experiments? I consider here a candidate model: continuous attractor networks. These can implement WM for a continuum of possible spatial locations over several seconds and have been proposed for the organization of prefrontal cortical networks. I first present a novel method for the efficient prediction of the network-wide steady states from the underlying microscopic network properties. The method can be applied to predict and tune the "€œbump"€ shapes of continuous attractors implemented in networks of spiking neuron models connected by nonlinear synapses, which we demonstrate for saturating synapses involving NMDA receptors. In a second part, I investigate the computational role of short-term synaptic plasticity as a synaptic nonlinearity. Continuous attractor models are sensitive to the inevitable variability of biological neurons: variable neuronal firing and heterogeneous networks decrease the time that memories are accurately retained, eventually leading to a loss of memory functionality on behaviorally relevant time scales. In theory and simulations, I show that short-term plasticity can control the time scale of memory retention, with facilitation and depression playing antagonistic roles in controlling the drift and diffusion of locations in memory. Finally, we place quantitative constraints on the combination of synaptic and network parameters under which continuous attractors networks can implement reliable WM in cortical settings.


This law review article examines: (1) the underpinnings of tribal sovereignty within the American system; (2) the need for restoration based on the Court's drastic incursions on tribal sovereignty over the past four decades and the grave circumstances, particularly tribal governments' inability to protect tribal interests on the reservation and unchecked violence in Indian Country, that result from the divestment of tribal sovereignty; (3) the concept of restoration as illuminated by United States v. Lara, and finally (4) some possible approaches to partial restoration. The article first evaluates the constitutional provisions relating to Indians and the earliest federal Indian law decisions written by Chief Justice Marshall on the premise that these two sources shed light on the upper limits of a potential legislative restoration of tribal sovereignty. Next, the article examines the judicial trend of divestment of tribal sovereignty, focusing particularly on the latest decisions that evidence this trend. The article further examines the negative effects of this divestment in Indian Country, from impeding tribes' ability to provide governmental services and to protect their unique institutions, to problems of widespread on-reservation violence, particularly against Indian women. The article concludes that the judicial trend of divesting tribal sovereignty combined with these dire effects clearly demonstrate a need for restoration. Finally, the article examines the Lara holding and its implications for the types of restoration that will be upheld by Court, concluding with an examination of options for potential legislative restorations.


Nitrate contamination of groundwater is a global issue that has stimulated significant research interest. Understanding the prevailing processes of nitrate removal from groundwater, influences of process conditions and the performance of various approaches are vital for successfully dealing with nitrate remediation. Natural and engineered processes of nitrate removal from groundwater are discussed with focus on the performance of natural and engineered innovative techniques for nitrate removal from groundwater. Nitrate removal from groundwater can be accomplished through microbial autotrophic and heterotrophic mechanisms in the subsurface under natural and engineered conditions. The application of these processes to in-situ and ex-situ nitrate removal is also discussed in this review. Further, the effect of temperature, pH, electron donor and biogeochemistry on groundwater nitrate removal are elaborated. While natural attenuation processes result in small amounts of nitrate removal from groundwater, engineered processes are able to achieve significantly higher nitrate removal from groundwater. However, the challenges of secondary pollution need to be addressed in adopting these technologies for groundwater treatment


Recently, multi-label classification has gained prime importance among the classification problems. The applications of classification problems has increased so rapidly that the need for efficient and accurate classifiers has become a vital requirement in the area of data mining. Multi-label classification problem is distinguished from the single label classification because of the capability to handle multiple labels. In this paper, we put forward a good method to predict the multiple labels of an unlabeled instance by using apriori algorithm. The proposed solution MLC-A is able to find unknown labels for any test instance by checking for the presence of particular set of attributes, along with their discretized values. MLC-A intends to employ Apriori algorithm for multi-label classification purpose, in contrast, to the well known existing methods. Apriori algorithm is utilized to find the relationship between attributes and labels by generating rules. The generated rules will find the occurrence of a label given the existence of various attributes. The experimental results on datasets of yeast, scene and emotions had given excellent accuracy. Using MLC-A the time complexity has reduced to a great extend. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method is evaluated by using hamming loss and is compared to the state of art.


Abstract Considerable variability in survival rate after an acute myocardial infarction exists and accurate risk stratification is of significant importance. The American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association has recommended early risk stratification using several clinical risk scoring instruments to identify high risk patients. The aim of this paper is to identify secondary cardiovascular risk scoring instruments that could be utilized at the time of intervention for acute coronary syndromes and compare their psychometric properties as they were developed. A search using Medline, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature and the Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection databases identified studies published between January 1990 and January 2010 used to measure risk after intervention for acute coronary syndrome. Four validated secondary risk prediction scoring instruments were identified for comparison. Secondary risk prediction scoring instruments for the acute coronary syndrome patient population are evidence based, valid and reliable. Use of the instruments by cardiac focused clinicians will aid in the determination of treatment strategies, and estimation of short and long term events and mortality.


In December 2010, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted the Open Internet Order, which enacted binding network neutrality rules for the first time. Network neutrality rules limit the ability of Internet service providers to interfere with the applications, content and services on their networks; they allow users to decide how they want to use the Internet without interference from Internet service providers. In January of this year, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the core provisions of the Open Internet Order – the rules against blocking and discrimination. The Court upheld the Open Internet Order's disclosure rule, so Internet service providers still have to publicly disclose any blocking or discrimination that occurs. As a result of this ruling, Internet service providers like Verizon, AT&T or Cox Cable that connect users to the Internet are now free to block any content, service or application they want. They can slow down selected applications, speed up others, or ask application or content providers like Netflix or Spotify to pay fees to reach their users. These practices would fundamentally change how each of us experiences the Internet. In the wake of the D.C. Circuit's decision, US policy makers have to decide (again), which, if any, network neutrality rules the US should adopt. They essentially have three options: The FCC can take steps to preserve the Open Internet Rules; it can develop a different, narrower network neutrality regime under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act within the boundaries established by the Court of Appeal's decision; or Congress or the FCC can adopt a new network neutrality regime under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. This paper helps policy makers think through the available options, focusing on the substantive merits of the different non-discrimination rules under consideration. In addition to rules that forbid network providers from blocking applications, content and services, rules that forbid discrimination are a key component of any network neutrality regime. Non-discrimination rules apply to any form of differential treatment that falls short of blocking. They determine, for example, whether network providers are allowed to provide low-delay service only to their own streaming video application, but not to competing video applications; whether network providers can count only traffic from unaffiliated video applications, but not their own Internet video applications, towards users' monthly bandwidth cap; or whether network providers can charge different Internet access charges depending on the application used, independent of the amount of traffic created by the application. The paper makes five contributions: First, it proposes a substantive framework that policy makers can use to evaluate alternative proposals for network neutrality rules and assess specific forms of discriminatory conduct. Second, the paper evaluates eight existing proposals for non-discrimination rules and the Open Internet Order's non-discrimination rule against this framework and proposes a non-discrimination rule that policy makers should adopt around the world – a rule that the Open Internet Order adopted in part. Third, the paper highlights the differences between an antitrust framework and the broader theoretical framework on which most calls for network neutrality regulation are based and explains why an antitrust framework does not capture all instances of blocking or discrimination that concern network neutrality proponents. Fourth, the paper offers the first in-depth analysis of the relationship between network neutrality and new network-level services called Quality of Service. Finally, the paper provides the first detailed analysis of the Open Internet Order's non-discrimination rule for fixed broadband Internet access. The paper is relevant beyond the US: In Europe, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the member states are currently considering which approach to network neutrality they should take. The Brazilian Parliament is in the process of adopting network neutrality rules. In all of these debates, non-discrimination rules are a key point of contention. And no matter which network neutrality regime a country adopts, the question of which, if any, network-discriminations require a legal response will remain relevant for years to come.


Human Activity Recognition (HAR) provides the context for many user-centered personal recommender systems in areas such as healthcare, sports, lifelong learning or home automation. Based on different types of sensors (either camera based, environmental sensors or wearable and mobile sensors) user related data provides the basis to extract movement related features from which the activity that the user is performing can be assessed. Among the different types of sensors, wearable sensors provide a user convenient, non-intrusive, always available alternative that has gained special attention for HAR. Wearable sensors will be a relevant part of the Internet of Things. This paper presents a novel mechanism to detect which particular activity a user is performing based on the data from a single tri-axial accelerometer. A Convolutional Neural Network is used in order to automatically extract the most relevant features to characterize acceleration patterns with inter-activity discrimination capacity. The user anchored coordinate system generating the data from the accelerometer sensor is transformed into a georeferenced coordinate system in order to estimate the horizontal and vertical acceleration components. A sliding window with 50% overlap is used to extract 5 seconds of acceleration data from which a square horizontal-vertical acceleration image is computed. Both monochrome and colored images are generated either by adding the influence of the time evolution of the acceleration series or not in the generated image. The results for both p-fold cross-validation and leave on out approaches are presented using a public dataset. The results outperform by around 8% of those obtained by the authors of the dataset in the case of using a p-fold cross-validation.


This paper describes the flood sensitivity of the Bavarian part of the Alpine Foreland of Germany and addresses different questions concerning climate variability and flood frequencies, from the 14th century until today. The focal point of the paper is the flood frequency of the superordinate spatial unit of the Bavarian Foreland. Based on written historical sources, the flood history of the Alpine Foreland of Germany can be reconstructed back to the 14th century. One major result is the occurrence of "flood-rich" and "flood-poor" episodes in almost cyclical sequences. Flood-rich periods, before the 16th century based on limited available data, were recorded in the periods 1300–1335, 1370–1450, 1470–1525, 1555–1590, 1615–1665, 1730–1780, 1820–1870, and 1910–1955 as well as in a ninth period beginning in 1980. The flood-rich periods are characterized by longer flood duration. Most of the flood-rich and flood-poor periods (in particular the beginning and the end of them) can be connected to changes in natural climate variability. These include changing sunspot numbers (as a measure of solar activity), so-called Little Ice Age type events (LIATEs) as well as changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Climate signals from external forcing factors, which could be used to explain the changing flood frequencies in the Bavarian Alpine Foreland, end in 1930. Relationships within the climate system such as the correlation of flood frequencies with the NAO have changed during the transition from the post Little Ice Age period to the Modern Climate Optimum around 1930. Natural climate variability might have been overlaid by anthropogenic climate change.


Run-time optimization is one of the most important ways of getting performance out of modern processors. Techniques such as prefetching, trace caching, memory disambiguation etc., are all based upon the principle of observation followed by adaptation, and all make use of some sort of profile information gathered at run-time. Programs are very complex, and the real trick in generating useful run-time profiles is sifting through all the unimportant and infrequently occurring events to find those that are important enough to warrant optimization. In this paper, we present the multi-hash architecture to catch important events even in the presence of extensive noise. Multi-hash uses a small amount of area, between 7 to 16 Kilo-bytes, to accurately capture these important events in hardware, without requiring any software support. This is achieved using multiple hash tables for the filtering, and interval-based profiling to help identify how important an event is in relationship to all the other events. We evaluate our design for value and edge profiling, and show that over a set of benchmarks, we get an average error less than 1%.


Goliarda Sapienza's The Art of Joy was written over a nine year span, from 1967 to 1976. At the time of her death in 1996, Sapienza had published nothing in a decade, having been unable to find a publisher for what was to become her most celebrated work, due to its perceived immorality. One publisher's rejection letter exclaimed: 'It's a pile of iniquity.' The manuscript lay for decades in a chest finally being proclaimed a "forgotten masterpiece" when it was eventually published in 2005. This epic Sicilian novel, which begins in the year 1900 and follows its main character, Modesta, through nearly the entire span of the 20th century, is at once a coming-of-age novel, a tale of sexual adventure and discovery, a fictional autobiography, and a sketch of Italy's moral, political and social past. Born in a small Sicilian village and orphaned at age nine, Modesta spends her childhood in a convent raised by nuns. Through sheer cunning, she manages to escape, and eventually becomes a princess. Sensual, proud, and determined, Modesta wants to discover the infinite richness of life and sets about destroying all social barriers that impede her quest for the fulfilment of her desires. She seduces both men and women, and even murder becomes acceptable as a means of removing an obstacle to happiness and self-discovery. Goliarda Sapienza (1924-1996) was born in Catania, Sicily in 1924, in an anarchist socialist family. At sixteen, she entered the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome and worked under the direction of Luchino Visconti, Alessandro Blasetti and Francesco Maselli. She is the author of several novels published during her lifetime: Lettera Aperta (1967), Il Filo Di Mezzogiorno (1969), Universita di Rebibbia (1983), Le Certezze Del Dubbio (1987). L'Arte Della Gioia is considered her masterpiece. Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D., a former library director and language teacher, has been translating professionally for nearly twenty years, and is a member of ALTA, ATA, NCTA and PEN. Her translation of Giovanni Arpino's Scent of a Woman (Penguin, 2011) was named the winner of The John Florio Prize for Italian Translation (2013).


Abstract. The overhead trolley of a gantry crane can be moved in two directions in the plane. The trolley is attempting to control the motion of a suspended, rigid-body, distributed mass load, supported by a hook, modelled as a lumped mass, in turn connected to the trolley by a light flexible cable. This flexible system has six degrees of freedom, four variables describing the flexible, hanging load dynamics and two (directly controlled) input variables for the trolley position. The equations of motion are developed and the crane model is verified. Then a form of wave-based control (WBC) is applied to determine what trolley motion should be used to achieve a reference motion of the load, with minimum swing during complex manoeuvres. Despite the trolley's limited control authority over the complex, flexible 3-D dynamics, WBC enables the trolley to achieve very good motion control of the load, in a simple, robust and rapid way, using little sensor information, with all measurements taken at or close to the trolley.


This paper presents a robust yaw moment controller design approach for improving vehicle handling and stability. With considering the parameter-varying property of tyre cornering stiffness in extreme handling situations, a linear parameter-varying (LPV) model in polytopic form is constructed to represent the nonlinear characteristics of tyres. A yaw moment controller is then designed for the LPV model which aims at optimising the tracking performance on both yaw rate and sideslip angle with respect to their targets. The conditions for designing such a controller are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Numerical simulations on a nonlinear vehicle model are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results show that the designed controller can improve vehicle handling and stability regardless of varying road surface.


During an appraisal I was challenged on how I recognise a consultation has gone very well. I suggested, in my experience, those ending in a seemingly spontaneous patient-initiated handshake may provide one important sign. However, there was no published evidence supporting this hypothesis. Over a 12-month period all patients offering a handshake towards the end of their consultation were asked to complete a short questionnaire exploring the reasons for expressing themselves in this way. Patients were asked only once over the study period. Sixty-six patient-initiated handshakes (55 males, 11 females, aged 23–86 years) were received. These occurred within 5368 consultations representing 1.2% of all consultations and over just one per week. Patients gave 145 reasons for offering a handshake. These were collated into identifiable groups, Most handshakes (83%) were offered by men. This concurs with data from psychological settings where carer-initiated handshakes were more common between male than female dyads and least likely between cross-sex dyads. Most handshakes (79%) were given in approximately equal frequency over several age bands from 40–79 years. The majority of reasons given for handshaking (87%) were related to patients' perceptions of the doctor, the consultation, and their clinical care. These reasons were grouped into the effect of the consultation on the patient (27%), perceptions of the doctor (19%), verbal communication (18%), outcomes of the consultation (12%), and overall satisfaction with care (11%). Only 13% of reasons related to patients' own social and cultural beliefs. This small study suggests that most handshakes offered by patients towards the end of consultations reflect patient satisfaction — 'the happy handshake'. Indeed, many reasons were recorded using superlatives such as 'very' and 'much' representing a high level of patient satisfaction — 'the very happy handshake'. Many patient-centred aspects of the patient–doctor interaction were associated with handshakes. Indeed, the handshake seems related to the interpersonal effectiveness of the doctor in terms of verbal communication, empathy, trust and compassion. These are human qualities, the expression of which, are known to be important in care, difficult to measure, and probably best assessed by patients. This behavioural patient feedback may compliment other methods of feedback currently in use for evaluating doctors' interpersonal effectiveness. Further research is needed to explore the patient-initiated handshake as a marker of these important aspects of quality of care in general practice


Pedagogies of partnership: What works? seeks to identify whether the student learning experience is enhanced or in any way made different through the implementation of teaching and learning that is explicitly intended to foster partnership. The value of student-staff partnerships and student engagement is recognised nationally and in literature.

The report suggests that the process of partnership working in undergraduate learning and teaching is as important as the end product. It also highlights that while partnership working is often defined as the relationship between staff and student, the importance of peer-to-peer partnership and student partnership with the external environment is key.
 - See more at: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resource/pedagogies-partnership-what-works#sthash.l02l5C3W.dpuf


This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary volume brings together diverse analyses of state space in historical and contemporary capitalism. The first volume to present an accessible yet challenging overview of the changing geographies of state power under capitalism. A unique, interdisciplinary collection of contributions by major theorists and analysts of state spatial restructuring in the current era. Investigates some of the new political spaces that are emerging under contemporary conditions of 'globalization'. Explores state restructuring on multiple spatial scales, and from a range of theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives. Covers a range of topical issues in contemporary geographical political economy. Contains case study material on Western Europe, North America and East Asia, as well as parts of Africa and South America.


Understanding the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is of utmost importance to economists and social scientists. In this paper we use a Bayesian structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relationship between inequality and growth via growth and inequality shocks for two large economies, China and the USA, for the years 1979–2018. We find that a growth shock is inequality-increasing, and an inequality shock is growth-reducing. We also find, however, that the sizes of the effects of these shocks are very small, accounting for under 2 per cent of the variance for both countries. Finally, we also find that the effects of the shocks dissipate within ten years, suggesting that the effects of these shocks are a short-term phenomenon.


Enhanced understanding of subsurface water storage will improve prediction of future impacts of climate change, including drought, forest mortality, wildland fire, and strained water security. Previous research has examined the importance of plant‐accessible water in soil, but in upland landscapes within Mediterranean climates, soil often accounts for only a fraction of subsurface water storage. We draw insights from previous research and a case study of the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory to define attributes of subsurface storage; review observed patterns in their distribution; highlight nested methods for estimating them across scales; and showcase the fundamental processes controlling their formation. We review observations that highlight how forest ecosystems subsist on lasting plant‐accessible stores of subsurface water during the summer dry period and during multiyear droughts. The data suggest that trees in these forest ecosystems are rooted deeply in the weathered, highly porous saprolite or saprock, which reaches up to 10–20 m beneath the surface. This review confirms that the system harbors large volumes of subsurface water and shows that they are vital to supporting the ecosystem through the summer dry season and extended droughts. This research enhances understanding of deep subsurface water storage across landscapes and identifies key remaining challenges in predicting and managing response to climate and land use change in mountain ecosystems of the Sierra Nevada and in other Mediterranean climates worldwide.


The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the assumptions underlying the total offset method advanced in the 1967 Alaska Rule and relied upon by some practitioners in the calculation of economic damages in personal injury and wrongful death litigation. The structure of this paper serves as a complement to the previous time series research on the behavior of net discount ratios and net discount rates and provides statistical tests designed to investigate the validity of the assumptions underlying the total offset methodology. Although the total offset method is easy to implement and can be quickly interpreted by a jury, the assumptions do not appear to be supported by the data. The combination of the empirical time series research on net discount ratios and net discount rates and the tests of the underlying assumptions presented in this paper provide compelling evidence against the use of the total offset method of calculating economic damages.


Material degradation of composite materials is a major concern in maritime applications. In this experimental investigation, effects of moisture-induced degradation, using two different salt solutions with concentrations of 1.8% and 3.7%, on reinforced epoxy composites were studied by means of designed experiments. The objective of this study is to find the change of dynamic behavior of the composite material exposed to marine environments for different time spans of weathering. Two different layups were compared, namely the simple cross ply construction [0°|90°]2s and a balanced symmetric bi-axial construction [±45°]2s. The composite laminate specimens manufactured by vacuum infusion process under laboratory conditions were immersed in the two salt solutions, representing salinity levels of oceans and seas, e.g. Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, Baltic Sea and Black Sea, at accelerated weathering conditions of 65°C. The comparative study comprised three weathering stages, specimens in the non-weathered stage in a desiccated condition and specimens subject to weathering for 15 days and 30 days. Drop-weight impact tests were performed on all specimens to obtain the maximum load of this sensitive out-ofplane impact stress state. A diffusion study was performed for all layups and solutions at two temperatures, 65°C and 25°C. Thus, the diffusion was described quantitatively to derive damage state predictions. Diffusion curves and diffusion coefficients of both layups [0°|90°]2s and [±45°]2s did not differ significantly. This is, seemingly, because both laminate constructions possessed the same fiber volume fraction f=55%. Different salt concentrations did not penetrate the composite material with different rates. Peak loads through drop-weight testing were significantly decreased by means of the weathering treatment. Once the composite material was saturated, no significant change of properties occurred for the 30 days period at the accelerated diffusion rate. Comparing both layups, the angle ply laminate significantly bore a higher amount of out-of-plane load in both, the non-weathered and weathered specimens in the lower salt concentration. Exceeding certain salinity, in this study reached through the higher salt concentration of 3.7%, the peak loads through impact testing became alike for both layups.


One important component of utilitarian ethical framework is a specific version of the principle of impartiality. The principle claims that one should bring about the greatest possible overall utility or happiness and that our moral and morally relevant actions ought to result from objective and neutral deliberations, with all our personal interests, likes and dislikes left out. Drowing on relevant insights from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology this paper seeks to show that utilitarian principle of impartiality is seriously endangered by two interconnected Darwinian facts: (1) the fact that human biologically formed psychology and motivation mechanisms do not fit well with the principle requiring the indiscriminate promotion of general happiness, and (2) the fact that human beings are individuals with naturally evolved personal desires, projects and ideals, and not merely spare parts of some general utilitarian clockwork of happiness.


Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, frequently elicited by acute coronary syndromes (ACS). Over the past decades, numerous large-scale randomised clinical trials have demonstrated the benefits of several interventions for the care of patients with ACS, including antiplatelet therapy, anticoagulation, and urgent or emergent cardiac catheterisation followed by revascularisation as appropriate. As a result, an increasing array of evidence-based cardiac medications and interventions have been rapidly adopted worldwide, fostered by multiple practice guidelines providing clear recommendations for clinicians.1 ,2

Recent evidences suggest that these remarkable advancements were associated with a significant decline in mortality from cardiovascular diseases in the recent years, more pronounced in high-income regions (especially Australasia, Western Europe and North America).3 Nonetheless, there are still marked disparities, with respect to the epidemiology, diagnostics and treatment of such patients with ACS, also leading to various morbidity and mortality rates throughout the globe. In this regard, a large number of prospective registries worldwide have been conducted over the last years in the context of ACS, aiming to provide standardised regional data to physicians, institutions and policy makers. The EURHOBOP registry ( EUR opean HO spital B enchmarking by O utcomes in acute coronary syndrome P rocesses) …


For your next project on GitHub, take advantage of the services powerful API to meet your unique development requirements. This practical guide shows you how to build your own software tools for customizing the GitHub workflow. Each hands-on chapter is a compelling story that walks you through the tradeoffs and considerations for building applications on top of various GitHub technologies. If youre an experienced programmer familiar with GitHub, youll learn how to build tools with the GitHub API and related open source technologies such as Jekyll (site builder), Hubot (NodeJS chat robot), and Gollum (wiki). Build a simple Ruby server with Gist API command-line tools and Rubys "Octokit" API client Use the Gollum command-line tool to build an image management application Build a GUI tool to search GitHub with PythonDocument interactions between third-party tools and your code Use Jekyll to create a fully-featured blog from material in your GitHub repositoryCreate an Android mobile application that reads and writes information into a Jekyll repository Host an entire single-page JavaScript application on GitHub Use Hubot to automate pull request reviews


This paper presents a data-driven two-stage distributionally robust planning tool for sustainable microgrids under the uncertainty of load and power generation of renewable energy sources (RES) during the planning horizon. In the proposed two-stage planning tool, the first-stage investment variables are considered as here-and-now decisions and the second-stage operation variables are considered as wait-and-see decisions. In practice, it is hard to obtain the true probability distribution of the uncertain parameters. Therefore, a Wasserstein metric-based ambiguity set is presented in this paper to characterize the uncertainty of load and power generation of RES without any presumption on their true probability distributions. In the proposed data-driven ambiguity set, the empirical distributions of historical load and power generation of RES are considered as the center of the Wasserstein ball. Since the proposed distributionally robust planning tool is intractable and it cannot be solved directly, duality theory is used to come up with a tractable mixed-integer linear (MILP) counterpart. The proposed model is tested on a 33-bus distribution network and its effectiveness is showcased under different conditions.


Economic confidence is an important tool in predicting macroeconomic changes. In this study, causality relationships between the confidence level and the fundamental macroeconomic indicators are analyzed using panel data analysis for 13 European Union countries for the period 2000: 1-2014: 12. According to the obtained results, a bidirectional causality relationship between the level of confidence and consumption expenditures, industrial production and inflation; a unidirectional relationship from the level of confidence to the unemployment rate; and a unidirectional relationship from interest rates to the level of confidence were detected. These results are compatible with the view that economic confidence is a leading indicator in explaining the changes in macroeconomic indicators.


The authors analysed herein the results of examination and surgical treatment of patients presenting with Takayasu aortoarteritis with an isolated lesion of the aortic arch branches. Discrepancy between the degree of ischaemia, dissemination, and localization of lesions, as well as ambiguity of neurological manifestations suggests large compensatory possibilities of the cerebral circulation in this disease. The revealed peculiarities of lesions of the brachiocephalic arteries characteristic the pathology concerned were as follows: high incidence of lesions of subclavian arteries (mainly in the second and third segments), utterly rare involvement of the brachiocephalic trunk, a stenosisng pattern of lesion of carotid arteries with predominant localization in the common carotid artery, not involving it into the process of bifurcation. The outcomes of surgical treatment of patients suggest high efficacy of reconstructive operations in the overwhelming majority of the operated patients, also demonstrating considerable advantage of extrathoracic operations as compared with transthoracic ones.


This paper studies an approach to gait based human identification via similarity learning by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). With a pretty small group of labeled multi-view human walking videos, we can train deep networks to recognize the most discriminative changes of gait patterns which suggest the change of human identity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work based on deep CNNs for gait recognition in the literature. Here, we provide an extensive empirical evaluation in terms of various scenarios, namely, cross-view and cross-walking-condition, with different preprocessing approaches and network architectures. The method is first evaluated on the challenging CASIA-B dataset in terms of cross-view gait recognition. Experimental results show that it outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin. In particular, our method shows advantages when the cross-view angle is large, i.e., no less than 36 degree. And the average recognition rate can reach 94 percent, much better than the previous best result (less than 65 percent). The method is further evaluated on the OU-ISIR gait dataset to test its generalization ability to larger data. OU-ISIR is currently the largest dataset available in the literature for gait recognition, with 4,007 subjects. On this dataset, the average accuracy of our method under identical view conditions is above 98 percent, and the one for cross-view scenarios is above 91 percent. Finally, the method also performs the best on the USF gait dataset, whose gait sequences are imaged in a real outdoor scene. These results show great potential of this method for practical applications.


Primary malignant bone tumors constitute a very small part of adult cancers. However, osteosarcomas constitute approximately half of all malignant bone tumors in ages between 15 to 29 years. This is followed by Ewing sarcoma primitive neuroectodermal tumors of bone and chondrosarcoma. Factors affecting malignant bone tumors include genetics, race, sex, growth and development age, radiotherapy treatment, radioactive substances, chemotherapy treatment, trauma, chemical substances, predisposing lesions, X-rays, and immune deficiency. Determining possible familial and genetic risk factors and predisposing agents and therefore informing families on avoiding physical and chemical exposure may be the most important factors in preventing malignancy. In this article, we aimed to discuss factors affecting the development of malignant bone tumors.


Background: Low vitamin D levels had been reported to be common in normal subjects worldwide. Studies in the Middle East had reported extremely low levels of serum vitamin D, despite high exposure to sunlight. Aim: To estimate vitamin D serum concentration in a sample of apparently healthy subjects from Basrah, by 2 methods (chemiluminescent and fluorescent assays). Methods: The study was carried out on apparently healthy subjects during the period from September 2018 to February 2019. Quantitative determination of the total 25-hydroxy vitamin D in serum was made using chemiluminescent microparticle immunoassay and enzyme-linked fluorescent assay. Other parameters (calcium, phosphorus, alkaline phosphatase, parathyroid hormone, hemoglobin, and erythrocyte sedimentation rate and body mass index) were also measured. Results: The mean level of vitamin D measured by the two methods, was 11.57±6.63 ng/ml and 13.31±6.52 ng/ml by chemiluminescent and fluorescent assays respectively. The prevalence of vitamin D deficiency was high, where more than 80% of the 57 subjects had vitamin D level below 20 ng/ml. If the cut-off point of vitamin D deficiency was taken as 10 ng/ml, around 46% of the subjects were found deficient in both methods. Although the two methods of vitamin D assay were well correlated with each other, fluorescent assay gave, on average, a significantly higher levels compared with the chemiluminescent method. Serum parathyroid hormone, showed a negative correlation with vitamin D serum levels. After excluding children and females, no significant difference was found between adult smokers and non-smokers when vitamin D was measured by both methods. Conclusion: Vitamin D deficiency is common (> 80%) among normal subjects. The enzyme-linked fluorescent assay resulted in higher mean level than chemiluminescent assay. The use of a deficiency cutoff point of 10 ng/ml may be more appropriate.


To most librarians, the topic of federal publishing activities immediately brings forth an image of the Government Printing Office and the seemingly endless expanse of dusting leather bindings that form the enigma of the Serial Set. Many might even agree with John Harvey Powell's opinion that "government documents are stiff, graceless things, scarcely the happiest subject for spirited discourse among polite people" (Powell, 1957, p. 107). They do seem to be so—more used by politicians as a backdrop for the cameras of television news interviews than by researchers or the public. The attitude of librarians toward government publications is dramatically realized in that they are segregated into dark corners of basements as places fit for collections of ancient volumes presided over by possessors of arcane knowledge mumbling incantations like "Jai Si Pea," Sue Dock," and chants of "Mo' Cats" over requests for miracles of information that had been abandoned as hopeless by less adroit magicians working in the light and air of the reference department. This image, of course, is inaccurate. It is also misleading to curse the Public Printer and the Superintendent of Documents for the sins of commission and omission in areas over which these public officers have no control.


Microbubble ultrasound contrast agents have been in clinical use for more than two decades, during which time their range of applications has increased to encompass echocardiography, Doppler enhancement, perfusion studies and molecular imaging, as well as a number of therapeutic applications including drug delivery, gene therapy, high-intensity focused ultrasound treatments and sonothrombolysis. The aim of this article is to review the different types of microbubble agent, their physical behaviour and the mechanisms underlying their effectiveness in imaging and therapeutic applications.


Objective: Swimming pools have potential to create health hazards that range from physical, chemical to biological. Biological concerns center on communicable diseases which can be spread through poor hygiene practices. To prevent the spread of disease, swimmers must be informed and practice appropriate hygiene. This study aims to determine whether the frequency of swimming had an influence on swimming pool hygiene knowledge. Method: Survey questions focusing on risk factors for communicable disease spread, and personal hygiene practices were developed using the pool operation handbooks, input from environmental health instructors at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, as well as past surveys from other studies. Pool patrons were surveyed at Hillcrest Community Centre in Vancouver. Scores from these tests were then analyzed in NCSS9 using one-way ANOVA tests and Two-Sample t-tests. Results: 167 validated surveys were analyzed. The most often incorrectly answered questions were in regards to the duration of avoiding swimming after diarrheal illness, pre-swim hygiene, and after bathroom use hygiene. No statistically significant difference in mean test score was found in individuals that swam more than once a week, more than once a month, or less than once a month. Statistically significant differences in mean test scores were found for individuals that read signs, and age group. Conclusion: From the data, it is observed that those who swam more frequently were not more informed on pool hygiene issues than those who swam less. The sample size (n=167) for this conclusion may be too small, since beta value was 87.5%.


Constraining neutrino mass remains an elusive challenge in modern physics. Precision measurements are expected from several upcoming cosmological probes of large-scale structure. Achieving this goal relies on an equal level of precision from theoretical predictions of neutrino clustering. Numerical simulations of the non-linear evolution of cold dark matter and neutrinos play a pivotal role in this process. We incorporate neutrinos into the cosmological N-body code CUBEP3M and discuss the challenges associated with pushing to the extreme scales demanded by the neutrino problem. We highlight code optimizations made to exploit modern high performance computing architectures and present a novel method of data compression that reduces the phase-space particle footprint from 24 bytes in single precision to roughly 9 bytes. We scale the neutrino problem to the Tianhe-2 supercomputer and provide details of our production run, named TianNu, which uses 86% of the machine (13 824 compute nodes). With a total of 2.97 trillion particles, TianNu is currently the world's largest cosmological N-body simulation and improves upon previous neutrino simulations by two orders of magnitude in scale. We finish with a discussion of the unanticipated computational challenges that were encountered during the TianNu runtime.


Double parton scattering is investigated in proton-proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV where the final state includes a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, and two jets. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5 fb-1, collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. Observables sensitive to double parton scattering are investigated after being corrected for detector effects and selection efficiencies. The fraction of W+ 2-jet events due to double parton scattering is measured to be 0:055±0:002 (stat.) ±0:014 (syst.). The effective cross section, δeff, characterizing the effective transverse area of hard partonic interactions in collisions between protons is measured to be 20:7±0:8 (stat.) ±6:6 (syst.) mb.


The building sector is responsible for about 40% of energy consumption, 40% of greenhouse gas emissions, and 70% of electricity use in the US. Over 50% of the energy consumed in buildings is directly related to space heating, cooling and ventilation. Optimal control of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems is crucial for reducing energy consumption in buildings. We present a physics-based mathematical model of thermal behavior of buildings, along with a novel Parameter Adaptive Building (PAB) model framework to update the model parameters, as new measurements arrive, to reduce the model uncertainties. We then present a Model Predictive Control (MPC), and a Robust Model Predictive Control (RMPC) algorithm and a methodology for selecting a controller type, i.e. RMPC or MPC, versus Rule Based Control (RBC) as a function of model uncertainty. We then address the \Cyber-Physical aspect of a building HVAC system in the design flow. We present a co-design framework that analyzes the interaction between the control algorithm and the embedded platform through a set of interface variables, and demonstrate how the design space is explored to optimize the energy cost and monetary cost, while satisfying the constraints for occupant comfort level. The last part of this dissertation is centered on the role of smart buildings in the context of the smart grid. Commercial buildings have inherent flexibility in how their HVAC systems consume electricity. We rst propose a means to dene and quantify the flexibility of a commercial building. We then present a contractual framework that could be used by the building operator and the utility company to declare flexibility on one side and reward structure on the other side. We also present a control mechanism for the building to decide its flexibility for the next contractual period to maximize the reward. We also present a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme to direct the ancillary service power flow from buildings to improve upon the classical Automatic Generation Control (AGC) practice. We show how constraints such as slow and fast ramping rates for various ancillary service providers, and shortterm load forecast information can be integrated into the proposed MPC framework. Finally, results from at-scale experiments are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.


Hospital is one of critical and important part of health care chain due to improvement of it. Hospital can cause nosocomial case for example cellulitis at Dr. Sutomo Hospital in Surabaya because the environment of it not fulfil the health requirements. Several studies reported that hospital environmental health not yet fulfil all the health requirements needed. Only 56.5% used incenerator with unperfect result in temperature which is only reached 200°C. The need of waste management recently have taken attention to improve its quality. Important factors such as volume and waste characteristics are major concern. According to measurement result held in Latin America showed that the hospital garbage and waste production every day per bed about 3.6 Kgs while in England approximately 3.3 Kgs. This research aimed to have characteristic information and the medical waste management of several hospital in Jakarta and Medan. The collection of data conducted through research and book reference, interview and laboratory test for 9 (nine) parameters. Characteristic and solid medical waste volume in this research are 2.5-53 Kgs of infectious waste. 0.8-60 Kgs of solid material, 0.8-3 Kgs of unused human anatomy, 0.5-3.3 Kgs of chemical side products, 2-6.6 Kgs of plastic waste. Number of patients with one day care per year about 1228 people while for several days care about 4928 people. From the test results showed that Cu, Se, Zn and Cr value over the quality standard requirements based on Government Acts no 18, 1999. Keywords: Medical waste, Waste Quality, Hospital


OBJECTIVE
To translate into and validate for Portuguese the "International Consultation on Incontinence Questionnaire -- Short Form" (ICIQ-SF), a condition-specific quality-of-life questionnaire for patients with urinary incontinence.

METHODS
Two Brazilians independently translated the original ICIQ-SF into Portuguese. These two translations were harmonized, and then checked by independent back-translation by two native English speakers. The harmonized translation was pre-tested in a pilot study on 20 patients. The final version of the ICIQ-SF in Portuguese was applied to 123 consecutive patients aged 16 or over (29 males and 94 females) with a complaint of urinary incontinence, who had sought the Department of Urogynecology and Uroneurology of the School of Medical Sciences of Unicamp. The Portuguese version of the King's Health Questionnaire (KHQ) was also applied to the same group. The psychometric properties of the questionnaire, such as reliability and construct validity were assessed.

RESULTS
The median age was 53 years (range: 16 to 86). The mean retest interval for the ICIQ-SF was 14.37 days (range: 6 to 41). No changes from the original format of the ICIQ-SF were observed at the end of the process of translation and cultural adaptation. The internal consistency was high (0.88), as measured by the Cronbach alpha coefficient. The test-retest value was considered moderate to strong, as measured by the weighted Kappa index (range: 0.72 to 0.75) and Pearson correlation coefficient (0.89). The correlation between the ICIQ-SF and KHQ was considered to be moderate to good for most items (range: 0.44 to 0.77). The evaluation of the construct and concurrent validity was also satisfactory and statistically significant.

CONCLUSIONS
The "International Consultation on Incontinence Questionnaire" (ICIQ-SF) was successfully translated into Portuguese and validated for application to Brazilian female and male patients complaining of urinary incontinence, with satisfactory reliability and construct validity.


Human pose analysis is presently dominated by deep convolutional networks trained with extensive manual annotations of joint locations and beyond. To avoid the need for expensive labeling, we exploit spatiotemporal relations in training videos for self-supervised learning of pose embeddings. The key idea is to combine temporal ordering and spatial placement estimation as auxiliary tasks for learning pose similarities in a Siamese convolutional network. Since the self-supervised sampling of both tasks from natural videos can result in ambiguous and incorrect training labels, our method employs a curriculum learning idea that starts training with the most reliable data samples and gradually increases the difficulty. To further refine the training process we mine repetitive poses in individual videos which provide reliable labels while removing inconsistencies. Our pose embeddings capture visual characteristics of human pose that can boost existing supervised representations in human pose estimation and retrieval. We report quantitative and qualitative results on these tasks in Olympic Sports, Leeds Pose Sports and MPII Human Pose datasets.


Large scale duplicate detection, clustering and mining of documents or images has been conventionally treated with seed detection via hashing, followed by seed growing heuristics using fast search. Principled clustering methods, especially kernelized and spectral ones, have higher complexity and are difficult to scale above millions. Under the assumption of documents or images embedded in Euclidean space, we revisit recent advances in approximate k-means variants, and borrow their best ingredients to introduce a new one, inverted-quantized k-means (IQ-means). Key underlying concepts are quantization of data points and multi-index based inverted search from centroids to cells. Its quantization is a form of hashing and analogous to seed detection, while its updates are analogous to seed growing, yet principled in the sense of distortion minimization. We further design a dynamic variant that is able to determine the number of clusters k in a single run at nearly zero additional cost. Combined with powerful deep learned representations, we achieve clustering of a 100 million image collection on a single machine in less than one hour.


In Hudson v. Michigan, a knock-and-announce case, Justice Scalia's majority opinion came close to jettisoning the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule. The immense costs of the rule, Scalia said, outweigh whatever benefits might come from it. Moreover, police officers and police departments now generally follow the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, so the exclusionary rule has outlived the reasons that the Court adopted it in the first place. This viewpoint did not become the law because Justice Kennedy, one member of the five-vote majority, withheld his support from this section of the opinion. But the closeness of the vote on the rule's survival, and the Court's 2009 opinion in Herring v. U.S., should motivate renewed discussion of what should replace it. But recently published empirical findings cast doubt on the Court's premise in Hudson that the bad old days of search and seizure violations lay behind us. On the contrary, viewing the data conservatively, roughly a third of all search and seizure activity violates the Fourth Amendment. Thus what the situation calls for is a set of proposals that can serve as a substitute for the exclusionary rule if it disappears, but which can also work equally well to brace up the rule if it stays in place. Fortunately, the law, criminology, and technology can combine to provide a viable set of answers for both possibilities. First, a system for tracking police search and seizure activity, based on successful work on early intervention systems now used to head off police misconduct, holds great promise for advancing the ability of supervising officers to assure that those under their commands obey the law. Second, strengthening the ability of members of the public allegedly subjected to police misconduct to bring suit for redress in federal court would create real incentives for better police behavior. This would do much to address the issue of Fourth Amendment violations that uncover no evidence, making the exclusionary rule an inapplicable remedy. Third, new technologies can enable police departments to make video and audio recordings of nearly all police activity. Coupled with appropriate evidentiary presumptions, these devices can change police behavior, including search and seizure activity. The article will examine these three possibilities, explain their superiority to other substitutes for the exclusionary rule, and will also examine their drawbacks.


A growing body of literature is concerned with 'healing' our cities, fostering an ethic of care for urban nature and creating more socially and environmentally just cities. At the same time, urban biodiversity is the focus of an increasing number of projects at multiple scales. However, in contrast to the ethos of multispecies 'entanglement' and 'becoming with' that typically animates this research, large numbers of animals 'entangled' in the machinations of our cities constitute a 'nature' that remains mostly unseen. And yet, it is the local and global practices these animals are part of – associated with food, entertainment, education, companionship and research – and the persistent relations of use and exploitation that underpin them, that are most directly implicated in the ongoing environmental degradation, destruction of habitats and extinction of species that create the 'problem' of urban biodiversity. We therefore argue that a persistent anthropocentrism is hampering efforts to respond effectively to the findings and recommendations of the IPCC, IPBES, FAO and others. Based on a thorough literature search and review of 65 articles concerned with urban 'nature' and multispecies relations, we demonstrate a prevailing hierarchy in how, and more importantly which, nonhuman species are being represented. Parallels are noted from recent social movements and the work of scholars from complementary fields. We highlight the dangers posed by this selective remit of care and concern and suggest critical animal studies as a way to adjust the frame and extend the boundaries of dominant thinking about what constitutes 'nature'. In conclusion, we call for researchers concerned with urban nature and biodiversity to adopt more critical and repoliticized understandings of 'nature' and multispecies relations – ones that are better poised to challenge practices involving commodified animals and slow the pace of environmental destructions and losses they are associated with.


Diasporic populations offer unique opportunities for the study of language variation and change. This volume is the first collection of sociolinguistic studies of English use across the historically complex and widely dispersed Indian diaspora. The contributions describe particular sociohistorical contexts (the UK, Fiji, South Africa, Singapore, and the Caribbean) and then use this rich empirical base to examine diverse questions in theory and method, such as the extent to which different settings see different or similar linguistic outcomes; the role of community structures, transnational ties, attitudes, and identity; reasons for differing rates of change, adaptation, and focussing; and the relevance of endonormative stabilization of Asian Englishes. These themes do not simply further our understandings of diaspora. They can ultimately feed into wider theoretical questions in language contact studies, including universals, selection and adaptation of traits, and interactions between social contact, identity, and language change.


This volume contains the proceedings of a Leiden Workshop on Dynamical Systems and their accompanying Operator Structures which took place at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, on July 21-25, 2008. These papers offer a panorama of selfadjoint and non-selfadjoint operator algebras associated with both noncommutative and commutative (topological) dynamical systems and related subjects. Papers on general theory, as well as more specialized ones on symbolic dynamics and complex dynamical systems, are included.


Heart failure (HF) is a clinically complex and heterogenous disease characterized by an inability of the heart to pump sufficient blood to the periphery. As such, it has historically been thought of and studied as a disease of the left ventricle (LV). While LV failure is the most common form of HF, it is the ability of the right heart to function that predicts survival in many clinical settings. Extrapolation of mechanisms of left HF to the right ventricle (RV) has yet to prove fruitful in identification of therapeutic approaches, in large part due to a lack of basic mechanistic understanding of the RV which is embryologically, anatomically, and physiologically distinct from the LV. The failing LV is characterized by mitochondrial dysfunction and a metabolic switch, both of which contribute to an energetically starved heart with poor contractile ability. These mechanisms, however, are far less described in the failing RV. The purpose of this chapter is to present the current literature examining the role of mitochondria and metabolism in the healthy right heart, treatments to target deficits in the failing RV, and to identify knowledge gaps for future research in this clinically important area.


Investigated is the effect of L-threonine (L-thr) amino acid on the growth of pathogenic calcium oxalate monohydrate (СОМ) crystals. It is found that L-thr molecules inhibit the growth of COM crystals and prevent their aggregation. Additions of 2-4 mM L-threonine in the investigated system decreases the crystal size (5-6 μm) in comparison with that of СОМ crystals without additives (9 μm). Increase of L-thr concentration in the solution up to 8-20 mM does not lead to further decrease of the crystal size.


Soil moisture is a key driver of biogeochemical processes in terrestrial ecosystems, strongly affecting carbon (C) and nutrient availability as well as trace gas production and consumption in soils. Models predict increasing drought frequency in tropical forest ecosystems, which could feed back on future climate change directly via effects on trace gasdynamics and indirectly through changes in nutrient availability. We used throughfall exclusion shelters to determine effects of short‐term (3 month) drought on trace gas fluxes and nutrient availability in humid tropical forests in Puerto Rico. Exclusion and control plots were replicated within and across three topographic zones (ridge, slope, valley) to account for spatial heterogeneity typical of these ecosystems. Throughfall exclusion reduced soil moisture in all sites and lowered exchangeable phosphorus (P) on ridges and slopes. Drought decreased soil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 30% in ridge sites and 28% in slope sites, and increased net methane (CH4) consumption by 480% in valley sites. Both valley and ridge sites became net nitrous oxide (N2O) sinks in response to soil drying. Emissions of CO2 and N2O, as well as CH4 consumption were positively related to exchangeable P and the nitrate:ammonium ratio. These findings suggest that drought has the potential to decrease net trace gas emissions from humid tropical forest soils. The differential response of trace gas emissions and nutrients from different topographic zones to drought underscores the complexity of biogeochemical cycling in these ecosystems and the importance of considering spatial heterogeneity when estimating whole system responses.


Previous research has shown that auditory icons can be effective warnings. The aim of this study was to determine the number of auditory icons that can be learned, in a control room context. The participants in the study consisted of 14 control room operators and 15 people who were not control room operators. The participants were divided into three groups. Prior to the testing the three groups practiced on 10, 20 and 30 different sounds. Each group was tested using the sounds that they had practiced. The results support the potential for learning and recalling a large number of auditory icons, as many as 30. The results also show that sounds with similar characteristics are easily confused.


Volume 1Introduction by D P O'Brien A Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce by Munn, Roberts, North, and Others (1856)Volume 2A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Money by Vaughan, Cotton, Petty, Lowndes, Newton, Prior, Harris and Others (1856)Volume 3A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts and Other Publications on Paper Currency and Banking, from the originals of Hume, Wallace, Thornton, Ricardo, Blake, Huskisson, and Others (1857)Volume 4A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts and Other Publications on the National Debt and the Sinking Fund, From the originals of Harley, Gould, Pulteney, Walpole, Hume, Price, Hamilton, and Others (1857)Volume 5A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Commerce, from the originals of Evelyn, Defoe, Richardson, Tucker, Temple, and Others (1859)Volume 6A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Economical Tracts from the originals of Defoe, Elking, Franklin, Turgot, Anderson, Schomberg, Burke, Bell, and Others (1859)


This guide is to help you find good topics and evidence for your Informative or Persuasive/Position speeches in CMST& 220: Public Speaking.


In Chapter 1 I will present a brief introduction on the state of art of nanotechnologies, nanofabrication techniques and unconventional lithography as a technique to fabricate the novel electronic device as resistive switch so-called memristor is shown. In Chapter 2 a detailed description of the main fabrication and characterization techniques employed in this work is reported. Chapter 3 parallel local oxidation lithography (pLOx) describes as a main technique to obtain accurate patterning process. All the effective parameters has been studied and the optimized condition observed to highly reproducible with excellent patterned nanostructures. The effect of negative bias, calls local reduction (LR) studied. Moreover, the use of AC bias shows faster patterning process respect to DC bias. In Chapter 4 (metal/ e-SiO2/ Si nanojunction) it is shown how the electrochemical oxide nanostructures by using pLOx can be used in the fabrication of novel devices call memristor. We demonstrate a new concept, based on conventional materials, where the lifetime problem is resolved by introducing a "regeneration" step, which restores the nano-memristor to its pristine condition by applying an appropriate voltage cycle. In Chapter 5 (Graphene/ e-SiO2/ Si), Graphene as a building block material is used as an electrode to selectively oxidize the silicon substrate by pLOx set up for the fabrication of novel resistive switch device.
In Chapter 6 (surface architecture) I will show another application of pLOx in biotechnology is shown. So the surface functionalization combine with nano-patterning by pLOx used to design a new surface to accurately bind biomolecules with the possibility of studying those properties and more application in nano-bio device fabrication. So, in order to obtain biochips, electronic and optical/photonics devices Nano patterning of DNA used as scaffolds to fabricate small functional nano-components.


This book is suited especially for those schools offering two courses on criminal procedure, one dealing largely with police practices, the other placing primary emphasis on the post-"police practices" or "investigation" phases--from bail to post-conviction review. Presents a basic structure of the American criminal justice process. Also includes materials on pretrial release, the decision of whether to prosecute, the preliminary hearing, and the grand jury review.


Background Mobile health (mHealth) apps aim at providing seamless access to tailored health information technology and have the potential to alleviate global health burdens. Yet, they bear risks to information security and privacy because users need to reveal private, sensitive medical information to redeem certain benefits. Due to the plethora and diversity of available mHealth apps, implications for information security and privacy are unclear and complex. Objective The objective of this study was to establish an overview of mHealth apps offered on iOS and Android with a special focus on potential damage to users through information security and privacy infringements. Methods We assessed apps available in English and offered in the categories "Medical" and "Health & Fitness" in the iOS and Android App Stores. Based on the information retrievable from the app stores, we established an overview of available mHealth apps, tagged apps to make offered information machine-readable, and clustered the discovered apps to identify and group similar apps. Subsequently, information security and privacy implications were assessed based on health specificity of information available to apps, potential damage through information leaks, potential damage through information manipulation, potential damage through information loss, and potential value of information to third parties. Results We discovered 24,405 health-related apps (iOS; 21,953; Android; 2452). Absence or scarceness of ratings for 81.36% (17,860/21,953) of iOS and 76.14% (1867/2452) of Android apps indicates that less than a quarter of mHealth apps are in more or less widespread use. Clustering resulted in 245 distinct clusters, which were consolidated into 12 app archetypes grouping clusters with similar assessments of potential damage through information security and privacy infringements. There were 6426 apps that were excluded during clustering. The majority of apps (95.63%, 17,193/17,979; of apps) pose at least some potential damage through information security and privacy infringements. There were 11.67% (2098/17,979) of apps that scored the highest assessments of potential damages. Conclusions Various kinds of mHealth apps collect and offer critical, sensitive, private medical information, calling for a special focus on information security and privacy of mHealth apps. In order to foster user acceptance and trust, appropriate security measures and processes need to be devised and employed so that users can benefit from seamlessly accessible, tailored mHealth apps without exposing themselves to the serious repercussions of information security and privacy infringements.


Real walking is the most natural method of navigation in virtual environments. However, physical space limitations often prevent or complicate its continuous use. Thus, many real walking interfaces, among them redirected walking techniques, depend on a reorientation technique that redirects the user away from physical boundaries when they are reached. However, existing reorientation techniques typically actively interrupt the user, or depend on the application of rotation gain that can lead to simulator sickness. In our approach, the user is reoriented using portals. While one portal is placed automatically to guide the user to a safe position, she controls the target selection and physically walks through the portal herself to perform the reorientation. In a formal user study we show that the method does not cause additional simulator sickness, and participants walk more than with point-and-fly navigation or teleportation, at the expense of longer completion times.


Asymmetric allylation of aldehydes with stoichiometric allylmetal reagents has evolved into an efficient and well established methodology for the synthesis of enantiomerically enriched homoallylic alcohols. The use of enantioenriched secondary allylboronates gives rise to a mixture of E/Z homoallylic alcohols with the opposite configuration at the stereogenic centre (reaction 1). The first part of this thesis presents a novel and conceptually different solution to attain high stereoselectivity in the allylation of aldehydes with secondary allylboronates. The method revolves around an efficient kinetic resolution of chiral racemic allylboronates (reaction 2). Catalysis by a chiral Bronsted acid ensures a face- and Z-selective allylation of aldehydes. This asymmetric allylation has proved successful over a wide range of aldehydes with different electronic and steric properties. The methodology provides a shortcut to enantio- and diastereomerically enriched homoallylic alcohols finding a wide use in pharmaceutical and fine chemicals development.

The second part of the present thesis describes the asymmetric total synthesis of two bioactive metabolites of the Pseudopterogorgiane elisabethae family, ()-elisabethadione and ()-erogorgiane. Three key reactions steps to introduce the stereogenic centres in the natural product scaffold include asymmetric allylation, oxy-Cope rearrangement and cationic cyclisation.


During the recent financial crisis, regulatory authorities banned short positions in various financial markets in attempts to moderate pressure from what were felt to be unfavorable, unwarranted, and largely speculative, price changes. Suppression of undesirable price moves was extended to the realm of sovereign debt in November 2012, when the European Union prohibited "naked" purchases of credit default swaps (CDSs) on sovereign bonds. Buying CDS protection is deemed to be naked if the buyer is not doing so to protect an existing long position in the underlying bonds. Academic theory, and empirical evidence from similar bans on short sales in other markets, suggests that such interference in a competitive financial market generally doesn't work very well: Market participants find ways around the rule; liquidity is reduced in the constrained market; information flow is degraded and prices can become biased because investors with unfavorable beliefs are eliminated from the market; and volatility may increase. Using a "diff-in-diffs" strategy of contrasting the effect on CDS spreads in the 28 affected countries with those in the 56 unconstrained countries as this regulation went into effect, Silva, Vieira, and Vieira show that credit-spread volatility was reduced by the ban, but liquidity was hurt as bid–ask spreads widened and open interest declined. They also find that price informativeness was reduced, in particular by lengthening the time it took for negative information to enter CDS spreads.


Administrative law has been transformed after 9/11, much to its detriment. Since then, the government has mobilized almost every part of the civil bureaucracy to fight terrorism, including agencies that have no obvious expertise in that task. The vast majority of these bureaucratic initiatives suffer from predictable, persistent, and probably intractable problems - problems that contemporary legal scholars tend to ignore, even though they are central to the work of the writers who created and framed the discipline of administrative law. We analyze these problems through a survey of four administrative initiatives that exemplify the project of sending bureaucrats to war. The initiatives - two involving terrorism financing, one involving driver licensing, and one involving the adjudication of asylum claims - grow out of the two statutes perhaps most associated with the war on terrorism, the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the REAL ID Act of 2005. In each of our case studies, the civil administrative schemes used to fight terrorism suffer from the incongruity of fitting civil rules into an anti-civil project, the difficulties of delegating wide discretion without adequate supervision, and the problem of using inexpert civil regulators to serve complex law enforcement ends. We conclude that anti-terrorism should rarely be the principal justification for a new administrative initiative, but offer some recommendations as to when it might make sense to re-purpose civil officials as anti-terrorism fighters.