The present study compares previous reports on the effect of "real-life" typical field individual (i.e. cross country running and wrestling – representing combat versus non-combat sports) and team sports (i.e. volleyball and water-polo – representing water and land team sports) training on pro (IL-6) and anti (IL-1 receptor antagonist – IL-1ra) inflammatory mediators in male and female late pubertal athletes. An increase in IL-6 was found following each of the training sessions. In contrast, a significant increase in IL-1ra was found only following the cross-country, wrestling and water-polo practices and not following the volleyball practices in both genders. There was no difference in the inflammatory response between individual and team sports practices. The inflammatory response to the typical practices was correlated with the practice-associated lactate change. The greatest increase in IL-6 and IL-1ra occurred following contact sport practices, and was greater following land (wrestling) compared to the water (water-polo) practice suggesting that this increase may reflect muscle tissue damage and not necessarily training intensity. Further research is needed to better understand the influence of "real-life" typical training on exercise training adaptations of adolescent athletes.


Recommender systems assign products to slots in ways that improve consumers' experience when choosing what to buy. They usually lead to more sales, which increases both consumer surplus and profit. However, firms may also choose which recommender system to use to maximize profit. Furthermore, consumers tend to exhibit a lower price elasticity of demand towards products placed in salient slots. We show that a firm using this knowledge may increase its profit hurting both consumer surplus and total welfare. We use data from a large scale field experiment ran using the video-on-demand system of a large telecommunications provider to measure the price elasticity of demand for movies placed in salient and non-salient slots on the TV screen. During this experiment, the firm randomized the slots in which movies were recommended to consumers as well as their prices. This readily allows for identifying the effects of price and slot on demand and thus compute consumer surplus. We find empirical evidence that indeed consumers are less price elastic towards movies placed in salient slots. Using the outcomes of this experiment we simulate how consumer surplus and welfare change when the firm implements the recommender system that maximizes profit. We also show that, at least in our setting, this system still yields higher consumer surplus than some recommender systems often used in practice, such as lists of most sold, most rated and highest rated products. Our results question whether recommender systems embed mechanisms that extract excessive surplus from consumers, which may need to be better scrutinized.


The aim of this presentation is to show research results devoted to the potential of intermodal terminals in Poland in the context of commercial exchange with China. Due to its geographical and geopolitical position as well as its place in the international transport network, Poland is a natural area in which different manipulation activities on commodities traded between China and Europe take place. Implementing an adequate policy of logistics infrastructure development nationwide will result in synergy effects the moment the commercial exchange with the countries of Eastern Europe is 'unblocked'. Some challenges in this respect include minimizing barriers (mainly infrastructure ones) where Polish and Eastern transport systems meet, maintaining the competitive edge with respect to terminals in Western Europe and preventing the drain which represents a threat to the Polish multimodal industry if there are new railway and road infrastructure connections of meridian character running through the eastern part of Poland. As for the source materials, the analysis uses data concerning the parameters of Chinese container terminals, the distribution and loading and storing capacities of inland terminals in Poland, the characteristics of the transport network on the area in question as well as a group of other factors (such as administrative and legal barriers) which affect transport accessibility of the Polish handling infrastructure. The group of source materials also includes data on the volume of cargo directed from the European market to Central and Eastern Asia. Both the tools of qualitative and quantitative analysis were used as research methods. For the purposes of research into accessibility the author used methods of isochrone accessibility, cumulative accessibility and accessibility expressed by means of infrastructure facilities. This allowed to define areas which are particularly predestined to intensive development of intermodal terminals as well as those which, despite their centrally conducted policy of transport infrastructure implementation, remain 'excluded' from key trade flows. The research proceedings were based on the tool of spatial information systems. In relation to qualitative research, the author used a query among organizations which deal with handling container traffic in Poland with reference to obtaining data on the volume, structure and directions of cargo flows. The research was extended to include in-depth interviews with the main intermodal operators which concerned investment activities in the long term. The conducted research indicates a high potential of Poland's space in the context of the development of logistics infrastructure connected directly with handling trade with China. This potential results mostly from the location of the region. The area in question, however, ∗Speaker †Corresponding author: firstname.lastname@example.com ‡Corresponding author: email@example.com §Corresponding author: firstname.lastname@example.com sciencesconf.org:eugeo2017:149910 does not have the potential suited to possible cargo flows in the form of terminals handling the change in the means of transport which carries the container. Moreover, as it is largely indicated by the research of logistics operators, the system does not have points which make it possible to use multimodal solutions big enough for relations with China. A stable competitive advantage of the Polish handling offer should be constituted by the combination of unique conditions of transport accessibility of Poland with the offer of logistics centres which goes far beyond container handling. It is particularly attractive for the the Chinese investor to have a possibility of customizing the transported goods just before they are delivered to the end user. As this makes it possible to perform a considerably larger number of services related to the given product to the assembly facilities, and consequently increase the revenues.


Each child has the inherent right to life and healthy development, the right to know his or her parents and to live together with his or her parents, as well as to be brought up and maintained by them. However, parents are not always able to implement their rights and duties in respect to their children. Since the child may not be left without guardianship, the need to implement the rights of the child, to ensure his or her interests and to represent him or her, leading to the restriction of parental powers and establishment of guardianship (care) for the child arises. One of the ways of restricting parental powers is through a child's separation from their parents. After the child's separation from their parents (the father or mother), the parents lose the right to live with the child and to require the return of the child to them from other persons. Parent may exercise their other rights as much as possible when living separately from their child. It has been established that the problem of implementation of parental rights and duties in respect of their children arises when implementing the child's separation from their parents: although parents retain all rights and duties with regard to their child, except for the right to live together with the child and to represent him or her, the child's guardian also implements rights and duties in respect of the child, therefore, it remains unclear who should be given the priority when implementing the rights of the child and ensuring his or her interests—the parents or guardians. When implementing the child's separation from their parent(s), limitation of statutory regulation arises: implementation of separation is possible only in the cases when a mother/father/parents are not able to implement the rights and duties in respect of the child due to any objective circumstances related to physical separation (suffer(s) the disease which requires out-patient treatment or is/are departed). In other cases, when parents live together with their child although they are not able to represent the rights and interests of the child due to their state of health, the situation does not fulfill the condition of implementation of the separation, i.e. parents do not live separately from the child.


Cytokinins play an important role in controlling many of the processes that contribute to plant senescence. The aim of this study was to compare the effect of different cytokinins, especially the new aromatic cytokinin meta-topolin (mT), with kinetin (K), benzyladenine (BA), and zeatin (Z) on chlorophyll formation in etiolated cucumber cotyledons. Protein contents and peroxidase activities were also investigated. Exogenous application of cytokinins was effective in stimulating chlorophyll biosynthesis. mT was shown to be the most effective cytokinin in stimulating chlorophyll biosynthesis at low concentrations compared to the other cytokinins. mT treatments at 0.02-0.0002 mg/ml increased the amount of chlorophyll more than threefold compared with control cotyledons. BA stimulated the total chlorophyll content at 0.1-10 mg/ml concentrations, but inhibited at lower (0.01, 0.001 mg/ml) concentrations. K increased the chlorophyll amount at 1 mg/ml concentration to twice that of control cotyledons. Z stimulated the chlorophyll level at almost all the concentrations applied. The effects of the most effective concentrations of cytokinins used in this research on the chlorophyll level and on the protein content were examined. A doubling of protein content in 0.02 mg/ml-mT-treated cotyledons was observed, whereas Z, BA, and K increased the total protein to a lesser extent. BA was shown to have the greatest effect on peroxidase activity.


Had God intended Women merely as a finer sort of cattle, he would not have made them reasonable.' Writing in 1673, Bathsua Makin was one of the first women to insist that girls should receive a scientific education. Despite the efforts of Makin and her successors, women were excluded from universities until the end of the nineteenth century, yet they found other ways to participate in scientific projects. Taking a fresh look at history, Pandora's Breeches investigates how women contributed to scientific progress. As well as collaborating in home-based research, women corresponded with internationally-renowned scholars, hired tutors, published their own books and translated and simplified important texts, such as Newton's book on gravity. They played essential roles in work frequently attributed solely to their husbands, fathers or friends.


Using a novel source of quasi-experimental variation in interest rates, we study the response of household debt and intertemporal consumption allocation to interest rates. We also develop a new approach to structurally estimate the Elasticity of Intertemporal Substitution (EIS). In the United Kingdom, the mortgage interest rate schedule features discrete jumps — notches — at thresholds for the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio, creating strong incentives for bunching below those thresholds. We document large and sharp bunching below every notch, which translates into sizable interest elasticities of mortgage debt, between 0.1 and 1.4 across different LTV levels. We develop a dynamic model that links these reduced-form responses to the underlying structural EIS. The EIS is much smaller and less heterogeneous than the reduced-form elasticities, between 0.05-0.25 across LTV levels and household types. We show that our structural approach is robust to a wide range of assumptions on beliefs about the future, uncertainty, risk aversion, discount factors and present bias. Our findings have implications for the numerous calibration studies in economics that rely on larger values of the EIS.


Integrating renewable energy technologies based on solar PV (SPV) and wind energy in the energy system is challenging due to time dependence of the energy potential for these energy sources. Grid integrated hybrid energy systems combining SPV panels, wind turbines, battery bank and internal combustion generators (ICG) can be used in this regard specially for distributed generation. Energy-economic dispatch strategy plays a vital role in managing the energy flow of the system. However, it is difficult to design such energy system due to complexity of the energy flow because of the changes in electricity demand, solar and wind energy potential. This study evaluates the sensitivity of dispatch strategy on optimum system configuration considering Levelized Energy Cost (LEC) and Grid Integration Level (GI). Two existing dispatch strategies i.e. cycle charging (CC) and modified cycle charging (MCC) dispatch strategies are used for the analysis based on Pareto multi objective optimization of LEC and GI. Pareto-fronts obtained considering both approaches were subsequently compared for different grid curtailments. The results show that a notable difference in LEC and system configuration is observed for two different approaches with the increase of grid interactions.


Wireless radios are a great consumer of energy in sensor networks. Retrieving data from a remote deployment in an energy-efficient fashion is a difficult problem, and while solutions have been proposed in literature, real-world systems typically implement robust though inefficient methods. In an effort to bring efficient monitoring techniques to real-world environmental sensor networks, we seek to now quantify the performance brought by these algorithms in practical terms, i.e., by their resulting reduction in overall station energy consumption. To this end, we have developed a power monitoring extension board that integrates seamlessly with a commercial environmental sensor network platform. The board is capable of measuring all incoming and outgoing power for a station, and can disconnect subsystems, such as the solar panel or sensor bus, as necessary. The board is currently deployed on an outdoor network and is undergoing extensive testing.


General purely algebraic approaches for repeated coarsening of deterministic or statistical eld equations are presented, including a universal way to gauge and control the quality of the coarse-level set of variables, and generic procedures for deriving the coarse-level set of equations. They apply to the equations arising from variational as well as non-variational discretizations of general, elliptic as well as non-elliptic, partial diierential systems, on structured or unstructured grids. They apply to many types of disordered systems, such as those arising in composite materials, inhomogeneous ground ows, \twisted geometry" discretizations and Dirac equations in disordered gauge elds, and also to non-PDE systems. The coarsening can be inexpensive with low accuracy, as needed for multigrid solvers, or more expensive and highly accurate, as needed for other applications (e.g., once-for-all derivation of macroscopic equations). Extensions to non-local and highly indeenite (wave) operators are brieey discussed. The paper reexamines various aspects of algebraic multigrid (AMG) solvers, suggesting some new approaches for relaxation, for interpolation, and for convergence acceleration by recombining iterants. An application to the highly-disordered Dirac equations is brieey reviewed.


The grapsid crab Chasmagnathus granulata populates brackish-water lagoons and other estuarine environments. In its reproduction, this species follows a strategy of larval export, i.e. its larvae live under different salinity conditions from the juveniles and adults. In the present experi- mental investigation, ontogenetic changes in the capability for osmoregulation were studied in all 4 zoeal stages, the megalopa, the juvenile crab instars I, II and IV, and adults (all reared in seawater, 32‰). Moreover, we studied effects of embryonic and larval acclimation on osmoregulation. The zoea I larvae were slight hyper-regulators at low salinities (10 to 17‰) and hyper-osmoconformers at higher salinities. Stages II to IV zoeae were generally hyper-osmoconformers. At metamorphosis to the megalopa, the type of osmoregulation changed to hyper-hypo-regulation. The osmoregulatory capacities under both hypo- and hypersaline conditions increased strongly in the crab I and through- out later juvenile development. These patterns in osmoregulation match the ontogenetic changes that typically occur in the ecology of C. granulata: the zoea I hatches in brackish estuarine waters, where the juveniles and adults live, before it is exported to coastal marine zones. This initial larval stage is euryhaline and capable of hyper-osmoregulation at low salinities. The same capabilities were observed in the megalopa, which re-invades the brackish adult environment. This stage is known to settle in semiterrestrial habitats near the adult burrows, where both brackish and hypersaline condi- tions are likely to occur; this coincides with the first ontogenetic appearance of the hyper-hypo- osmoregulation pattern. The zoeal stages II, III and IV, in contrast, develop in the adjacent sea, where the salinity is higher and more stable. Correspondingly, these intermediate larval stages were found to be stenohaline osmoconformers. Preceding exposure of the eggs and larvae to a reduced salinity (20‰) enhanced the hyper-osmoregulatory capacity at low salinities (5 to 10‰) in all zoeal stages. This indicates an effect of non-genetic acclimation and, hence, phenotypic plasticity. This trait should have an adaptive value, as it increases the chance of larval survival, at least in the initial larval stage, which is in the field exposed to highly variable, mostly reduced salinities.


The Apiesdooringdraai peridotite is a syn-Bushveld Complex, dominantly harzburgitic intrusion of Lower Zone parentage. Detailed mapping and three-dimensional modeling shows the intrusion to comprise several discordant segments linked by concordant, sill-like segments. Deformation in the contact aureole is strongly partitioned adjacent to the discordant segments of the intrusion and is detectable at distances from the contact on the order of the intrusion width. In contrast, areas above and below the intrusion, and at greater distances from the discordant intrusive segments, are effectively undeformed. The geometry of structural features suggests that the peridotite is a variably structurally-evolved stepped-sill system that was emplaced as kilometre-scale magma fingers from the northwest to the southeast, a trend heavily utilised by the mafic-ultramafic magmas of the Bushveld Complex. Deformation in the country rock was affected by the lateral expansion of the magma fingers at high postulated strain rates, and linkage of offset fingers formed prominent steps in the intrusion. Emplacement-related country rock deformation is postdated by a shallow dipping foliation that records compaction and crustal loading during contact metamorphism.


A series of dynamic centrifuge tests was conducted on models of soil-nailed excavations. The models were subjected to various levels of horizontal shaking to investigate the seismic stability of their prototypes. The scaling factor was 50 in all tests, the depth of the prototype excavation was H = 7.6 m, and the length of nails in each test varied between 0.33 H and 1 H. The tests revealed the most probable failure mechanism under strong shaking and at the same time showed that soil nailing is an excellent method for earth support in seismic regions. The paper describes details of the testing procedure. The procedure includes selection and preparation of the soil, selection and design of the nails and facing, step-by-step filling of the model box, rough simulation of possible geologic history of the soil, excavation and installation of the nails and facing, cyclic shaking, measurements of accelerations and displacements, excavation and incisions of the nailed soil after the tests, and data processing. The investigation showed that centrifuge testing can successfully simulate dynamic soil-structure interaction for complex geotechnical systems such as soil nailing. However, to incorporate pertinent details of the prototype into the model and to provide the proper boundary conditions, a carefully planned step-by-step testing procedure must be implemented. Limitations of the testing and problems encountered are also discussed.


In the fall of 1964, USS Skipjack (SSN 585) participated in in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) exercises in the Atlantic Ocean. Skipjack's engineer, Lt. Alfred "Fred" McLaren, was in good spirits, both because the ASW exercises afforded a chance to demonstrate the capabilities of one of the U.S. Navy's most modern submarines, and because the boat's supply officer had acquired an unusually sumptuous array of steaks for evening meals. McLaren was displeased, then, when Skipjack's executive officer placed him on the evening watch. Disappointed at consistently missing out on his favorite food, the young naval officer soon devised an ingenious workaround. He would ask one of his fellow officers to provide a quick head break, during which time he would make his way to the wardroom pantry and take a big bite out of the juiciest steak he could find. Putting the rest of the steak into the fridge, McLaren would find it waiting there for him when he got off watch. For a while, this stratagem worked splendidly, until one night he opened the fridge and found nothing but teeth marks rimmed by a thin border of meat. McLaren could do little but laugh and admit that he had been foiled. Disciplines Military History Comments This is a book review published as Timothy S. Wolters, review essay of "Silent and Unseen: On Patrol in Three Cold War Attack Submarines," by Alfred McLaren, Naval Historical Foundation Book Reviews, vol. 59, 14 December 2016, 3 pp. Posted with permission. This book review is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/history_pubs/64 BOOK REVIEW – Silent and Unseen: On Patrol in Three Cold War Attack Submarines Posted on December 14, 2016 by Admin By Alfred S. McLaren, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD (2015) Reviewed by Timothy S. Wolters, Ph.D. In the fall of 1964, USS Skipjack (SSN 585) participated in in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) exercises in the Atlantic Ocean. Skipjack's engineer, Lt. Alfred "Fred" McLaren, was in good spirits, both because the ASW exercises afforded a chance to demonstrate the capabilities of one of the U.S. Navy's most modern submarines, and because the boat's supply officer had acquired an unusually sumptuous array of steaks for evening meals. McLaren was displeased, then, when Skipjack's executive officer placed him on the evening watch. Disappointed at consistently missing out on his favorite food, the young naval officer soon devised an ingenious workaround. He would ask one of his fellow officers to provide a quick head break, during which time he would make his way to the wardroom pantry and take a big bite out of the juiciest steak he could find. Putting the rest of the steak into the fridge, McLaren would find it waiting there for him when he got off watch. For a while, this stratagem worked splendidly, until one night he opened the fridge and found nothing but teeth marks rimmed by a thin border of meat. McLaren could do little but laugh and admit that he had been foiled. Amusing anecdotes like this one fill Capt. Alfred S. McLaren's fascinating memoir of seven years as a junior officer aboard three operational U.S. Navy submarines during the height of the Cold War. Silent and Unseen is more than an entertaining series of sea stories; it also offers a candid reflection on leadership and a remarkable glimpse into Cold War submarine life and operations. For readers interested in the small but slowly growing body of literature on Cold War submarining, McLaren's name will be familiar. He is also the author of Unknown Waters (University of Alabama Press, 2008), a firsthand account of a Siberian continental shelf survey conducted by USS Queenfish (SSN 651) in the summer of 1970. During that mission, commanded by McLaren, Queenfish navigated under bummocks, over irregular sea floors, and through ice canyons to collect valuable bathymetric data in the Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas. McLaren stressed his success in leading that expedition derived from what he had learned on earlier missions and from previous commanding officers, but he devoted only a few paragraphs to those experiences. Silent and Unseen addresses this lacuna, serving as an illuminating prequel to Unknown Waters. McLaren organizes Silent and Unseen into three roughly equal parts, one each for the boats he served on from January 1958 to April 1965. The first of these, USS Greenfish (SS 351), was a Balao-class diesel-electric submarine that had undergone a GUPPY conversion after World War II. McLaren served as a division officer, participated in two intelligence-gathering missions in the Northern Pacific, and qualified in submarines. Even before he had earned his dolphins, though, McLaren was unexpectedly summoned to Washington for an interview with Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. The legendary engineer accepted the young officer into his burgeoning nuclear power program, and in July 1959 McLaren reported to Advanced Nuclear Power School in Groton, Connecticut. McLaren successfully completed his training the following summer at the Navy's S3G prototype reactor in upstate New York. Having survived Rickover's arduous program, he received orders to USS Seadragon (SSN 584). Seadragon was the fourth and final ship of the Skate-class, and just the eighth nuclear submarine commissioned by the U.S. Navy. McLaren was thrilled, writing, "To say I was excited . . . is an understatement" (p. 67). He was enthralled as well by Seadragon's upcoming mission, a transpolar voyage from Kittery, Maine, to a new homeport in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. During this transit Seadragon would accomplish some historic feats, becoming the first submarine to survey the underside of large icebergs, the first to visit Cornwallis Island, and the third to surface at the North Pole. The boat also discovered a deepwater passage between two islands in the Barrow Strait, invaluable information for any future submarine transiting the Northwest Passage. With Cold War tensions running high, Seadragon and her crew soon found themselves on another mission clandestinely monitoring long-range ballistic missile tests by the Soviet Union. One wishes the author had written more about the mission, as well as two others Seadragon conducted during his time on board, but classification restrictions probably precluded this. McLaren does discuss Seadragon's work developing passive sonar tactics and equipment for ASW, as well as the reason behind his decision to request a transfer in the spring of 1962. The Bureau of Naval Personnel obliged, and the submariner soon found himself headed back to Kittery, where he reported aboard USS Skipjack, then in overhaul, just weeks before U.S. intelligence noted an increase in Soviet military aid to Cuba. Skipjack was the lead vessel of a new class of submarines and the first nuclear sub to have a teardrop hull. She was also the first ship powered by the famous S5W reactor plant, later used on Thresher– and Sturgeonclass SSNs and "Forty-one for Freedom" SSBNs. McLaren recounts how unfolding intelligence about events in Cuba prompted a frenzied effort to finish Skipjack's overhaul, and by early October the boat had completed sea trials and arrived in Groton. Rather than deploy to the Caribbean, though, Skipjack departed for the Mediterranean with orders to protect allied forces from Soviet ships and submarines sailing out of the Black Sea. McLaren says that during the boat's Atlantic transit he and his shipmates expected to be diverted to Cuba at any moment. Regrettably, he fails to recount how they learned that the Cuban Missile Crisis had been resolved. With international affairs slightly less pressing, McLaren and the rest of Skipjack's crew turned their attention to liberty call. Some of the most humorous stories in the book involve events in various Mediterranean ports, including the time McLaren, as ship's duty officer, accidentally gave distinguished-visitor honors to an enlisted Italian sailor. Skipjack returned home in time for Christmas, but months later conducted a surveillance patrol in the Barents Sea, one of two such missions during McLaren's tour. When not on deployment, Skipjack played an important role in Submarine Development Group Two's "Big Daddy" series of submarine ASW exercises. One of the strengths of Silent and Unseen is McLaren's unvarnished analysis of the six commanding officers under which he served while on board Greenfish, Seadragon, and Skipjack. The author says that he learned something from each of them, but the one he holds in highest regard is George P. Steele, Seadragon's inaugural commanding officer. According to McLaren, Steele was "so brave and charismatic a leader at sea that his crew would have gone to the ends of the earth for him" (p. 3). Conversely, the author does not shy away from criticizing Steele's successor, Charles "Dan" Summitt, whom he found timid and uninspiring. McLaren argues that Summitt's lack of leadership and tactical acumen greatly hindered mission effectiveness and almost resulted in disaster during one ASW exercise. One may surmise that McLaren's willingness to criticize Summitt stems from the latter's memoir, Tales of a Cold War Submariner (Texas A&M University Press, 2004), in which Summitt claims to have been so aggressive on one mission that a Soviet destroyer dropped a depth charge on Seadragon (Summitt, p. 118). McLaren seems to want to set the record straight as he sees it. As with all memoirs, the sands of time introduce a few minor errors into the narrative, such as when the author demotes Rickover to the rank of rear admiral during his nuclear power interview (p. 57), or when he accidentally places the loss of Thresher in the wrong year (p. 224). Small errors like these in no way diminish McLaren's contribution, which is substantial. Without a doubt he has written one of the best available memoirs by a Cold War submariner, a tale that is engaging, insightful, and thought-provoking. In his epilogue, McLaren says that he


This paper merges inclusive wealth accounting theory with ecosystem based management (EBM) to resolve two problems. First, we provide measures of an ecosystem's contribution to larger scale sustainability accounts by enabling ecosystems to be better included in inclusive wealth measures. We show the ecosystems are better thought of as portfolios of assets, and the portfolio's performance is depended on the performance of the underlying assets, including their interactions. Second, the wealth held in the ecosystem is an attractive headline index for EBM regardless of whether ecosystem wealth is ultimately included in a broader index. We generalize natural capital theory to approximate realized shadow prices (accounting prices) for multiple interacting stocks of biotic and abiotic assets and liabilities that comprise ecosystems. We apply our approach to the Baltic Sea ecosystem, focusing on the interacting community of three commercially important fish species; cod, herring and sprat. The accounting prices of the three species show decreasing patterns with larger stock accumulation. Our results reveal the "supporting value or regulation services" embodied in the shadow price of a species through its trophic influence on other species. Prey fish have greater shadow prices than would be expected based on market value and predatory fish have lower shadow prices than may be expected based on market value.


This paper presents an integrated modeling approach that combines the legacy urban runoff and the legacy storm sewer models with data exchange at runtime to simulate sewer flows with real-time rainfalls. A software system called IRES has been developed to demonstrate the proposed approach. IRES uses the RUNOFF and the EXTRAN block of Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) as the legacy urban runoff and storm sewer models, respectively. This study uses the Open Modeling Interface and Environment (OpenMI) framework, which is the standard interface for model integration, as the platform for dynamic data exchange in IRES. The Jhong-Kang drainage system located in Taipei, Taiwan, is taken as the case study to verify the proposed approach. Simulated results show that IRES is valid, and the proposed approach can be successfully applied to legacy model integration with dynamic data exchange.


With the recent expansion of extractive industries in Latin America, contestations with the affected communities have increased in number and intensity. Therein, the indigenous right to prior consultation and to free, prior and informed consent has played a crucial role. Based on the empirical study of several consultation processes in Bolivia's hydrocarbon sector since 2007 and referring to deliberative theories as well as human rights norms, this article explores the enabling and constraining factors in the democratization of resource governance through these procedures. While the specificities of consultations in plurinational Bolivia are taken into account, the study also draws general conclusions for similar processes in other resource‐reliant countries.


Banks are of central importance for economic growth, the allocation of capital, competitiveness, and financial stability. Propelled by technological advances in financial analysis and financial deregulation, the banking industry's investment played a key role in enhancing national economic growth in the early 21st century. The global financial crisis in 2007 revealed the banking world's feet of clay. Since 2007, the turmoil in the global financial system has prompted a fundamental reappraisal of the scale, scope, governance, performance, safety and soundness of banks and other financial institutions. In this Very Short Introduction John Goddard and John Wilson explore the world of banking, describing the role of central banks in national and global economies, and analysing the increasing supervision and regulation imposed on the banking industry. Looking to the future, the authors consider proposals for reform of the banking industry, and the prospects of a resolution of the closely-related banking and sovereign debt crises. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.


The process of optimizing programs and libraries, both for performance and quality of service, can be viewed as a search problem over the space of implementation choices. This search is traditionally manually conducted by the programmer and often must be repeated when systems, tools, or requirements change. The overriding goal of this work is to automate this search so that programs can change themselves and adapt to achieve performance portability across different environments and requirements. To achieve this, first, this work presents the PetaBricks programming language which focuses on ways for expressing program implementation search spaces at the language level. Second, this work presents OpenTuner which provides sophisticated techniques for searching these search spaces in a way that can easily be adopted by other projects. PetaBricks is a implicitly parallel language and compiler where having multiple implementations of multiple algorithms to solve a problem is the natural way of programming. Choices are provided in a way that also allows our compiler to tune at a finer granularity. The PetaBricks compiler autotunes programs by making both fine-grained as well as algorithmic choices. Choices also include different automatic parallelization techniques, data distributions, algorithmic parameters, transformations, and blocking. PetaBricks also introduces novel techniques to autotune algorithms for different convergence criteria or quality of service requirements. We show that the PetaBricks autotuner is often able to find non-intuitive poly-algorithms that outperform more traditional hand written solutions. OpenTuner is a open source framework for building domain-specific multi-objective program autotuners. OpenTuner supports fully-customizable configuration representations, an extensible technique representation to allow for domain-specific techniques, and an easy to use interface for communicating with the program to be autotuned. A key capability inside OpenTuner is the use of ensembles of disparate search techniques simultaneously; techniques that perform well will dynamically be allocated a larger proportion of tests. OpenTuner has been shown to perform well on complex search spaces up to 103000 possible configurations in size. Thesis Supervisor: Saman Amarasinghe Title: Professor


In this thesis I investigate whether human sexual preferences develop through sexual imprinting. Sexual imprinting is the acquisition of sexual preferences through non-rewarded experiences with parents and siblings during an early sensitive period and it is known to exist in many other animals. Learning is often sex specific so that males, for instance, learn to prefer as sexual partners individuals that look like their mother, and avoid individuals that look like their father. First, sexual imprinting in animals and humans is reviewed and compared to prevailing evolutionary views presupposing genetically determined sexual preferences. Further, by means of web surveys, I have explored the relationship between childhood exposure to parents with certain natural and cultural traits and sexual attraction to these traits in a partner. Cultural traits were included because it is unlikely that preferences for them are genetically determined adaptations. Parental effects varied between traits. For instance, in heterosexual males, a positive effect of mother was found on attraction to smoking, but not glasses, while a negative paternal effect was found on attraction to glasses, but not smoking. However, when maternal and paternal effects were investigated for a large number of artificial and natural traits, including smoking and glasses, an overall positive effect of opposite sex parent emerged in both heterosexual males and females. Additionally, in the last study we explored a sexual preference for pregnant and lactating women. Results suggest that exposure to a pregnant and lactating mother had an effect if it occurred when the respondent was between 1,5 and 5 years old. In conclusion, these results suggest that human sexual preferences are the result of sex specific learning during a sensitive period. Sexual imprinting should therefore be recognised as a plausible explanation to human sexual preferences that deserves further scientific investigation.


One of key methods to increase the efficiency of computing resources utilization in supercomputer centers is to link them into a distributed network. For user jobs and data to be able to migrate in a supercomputer center network, there should be a distributed storage system providing a single file space for all centers. The paper considers the existing methods and means of implementing distributed storage systems and analyzes their applicability to a supercomputer center network. It states the requirements to a distributed storage system for different aspects of its development and use: data and its metadata storage, user job life cycle support, and data security. Additionally, the paper defines possible options and techniques of implementing stated requirements into a distributed storage system of supercomputer center network.


Abstract Generalized cross entropy estimator (GCEE)-based non-parametric blind signal separation (BSS) algorithm is proposed under the framework of natural gradient (NG) optimization method. To improve the performance of signal separation by BSS, the probability distribution of source signals must be described as accurately as possible. Compared to the non-parametric fixed-width kernel density estimator (FKDE) method, the GCEE with a new data-driven bandwidth selection method can improve the performance of FKDE, which is inspired by the principles of the generalized cross entropy method. Moreover, the direct estimation of the score functions can separate the hybrid mixture of sources that contain both symmetric and asymmetric distribution source signals and do not need to assume the parametric non-linear functions of them. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been confirmed by simulation experiments.


The Jotunheim Massif of Precambrian granu-lite-facies rocks lies on the southeastern side of the Norwegian Caledonides. Although the geological evidence suggests that it is a far-travelled nappe derived from an internal zone to the northwest, a gravity anomaly of +58 mgals indicates that it is underlain by dense rocks to a depth of 10–15 km, which might form a local root-zone (Smithson et al. 1974). The structural evidence described from the thrust-zone forming the northwestern margin of the massif indicates that the early movements on this boundary were directed towards the southeast. Since southeasterly movements also occurred on the low-angle overthrusts which form its southeastern margin, the Jotunheim Massif is clearly allochthonous, derived by overthrusting from the northwest.


We present a detailed study of the lifetime of optical spectral holes due to population storage in Zeeman sublevels of Nd3+:Y2SiO5. The lifetime is measured as a function of magnetic field strength and orientation, temperature, and Nd3+ doping concentration. At the lowest temperature of 3 K we find a general trend where the lifetime is short at low field strengths, then increases to a maximum lifetime at a few hundred mT, and then finally decays rapidly for high field strengths. This behavior can be modeled with a relaxation rate dominated by Nd3+−Nd3+ cross relaxation at low fields and spin lattice relaxation at high magnetic fields. The maximum lifetime depends strongly on both the field strength and orientation, due to the competition between these processes and their different angular dependencies. The cross relaxation limits the maximum lifetime for concentrations as low as 30 ppm of Nd3+ ions. By decreasing the concentration to less than 1 ppm we could completely eliminate the cross relaxation, reaching a lifetime of 3.8 s at 3 K. At higher temperatures the spectral hole lifetime is limited by the magnetic-field-independent Raman and Orbach processes. In addition we show that the cross relaxation rate can be strongly reduced by creating spectrally large holes of the order of the optical inhomogeneous broadening. Our results are important for the development and design of new rare-earth-ion doped crystals for quantum information processing and narrow-band spectral filtering for biological tissue imaging.


In both theory and practice, it is emphasised that engaging in CSR actions brings
many benefits to companies. One of the commonly listed advantages is more trust
from investors, which enables the achievement of superior returns from securities
issued by socially responsible firms. The paper endeavours to investigate whether
this benefit can be also noticed among businesses in the Polish index of socially
responsible companies RESPECT. The study involves firms included in the RESPECT
index from its inception (November 2011) to the end of 2015. The authors
compared the RESPECT index with selected Polish market indices between 2009
and 2015. Empirical studies, based on an analysis of returns, risk, dividend yields
and shareholder structure, facilitated the assessment of the attractiveness of investments
in the shares of socially responsible businesses against the background of
other firms quoted on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.


The project focuses on renewing the current ICT-system in the 8th floor server room, at KTH, Kista. The current ICT-system, surrounding administrative tasks and user functionality are described, and a new improved ICT-system proposal is given. The current and proposed systems are compared. The current ICT-system gives users access to 16 Intel E7501, servers with 2.4 GHz Xeon processors, and 1.5-2 GB of RAM, and 16 SUN Fire v120 servers. These servers are in the proposed ICT-system replaced with hardware capable of running 64-bit software. The future ICT‐system proposal is based on VMware vSphere 4, and surrounding VMware management software. The solution focuses on providing a more flexible and easier administration of the environment, as well as more possibilities for the users, for example in the form of virtual networking configurations. The server room has networking equipment most notably in the form of HP switches, which are kept in the proposed system. The servers that support the server room are also incorporated into the proposed system, these supporting server provide the server room with all surrounding services. Due to hardware incompatibilities the proposed ICT-system has not yet been implemented.


The use of blogging and its potential effects on society and politics have been widely
debated but the meanings and understandings that bloggers themselves hold about the
activity have not been sufficiently explored; indeed in Lebanon and Syria they have
barely been investigated at all. Through interviews with bloggers, ISPs, Internet cafe
owners and others, as well as informal online participant observation and an online
questionnaire, this thesis explores the structural and cultural variables that have
allowed Lebanese and Syrian bloggers to understand and use blogs in their own
specific ways. The study not only recounts what bloggers say about themselves but
investigates the structural variables that surround them, including government and
institutional policy, censorship, impediments to Internet access, historical conditions
under which blogging emerged, attitudes to the Internet, changing events and new
entrants to blogging. By its comparative nature, the project reveals how the meanings
that bloggers attach to their blogging activities and to their socialization with other
bloggers are situated in the social and historical conditions under which blogging is
practiced. The changing meanings blogging acquired for bloggers during the course
of this research illustrated its shifting and relational attributes. Thus an unexpectedly
complex array of interrelated factors is shown to contribute to the tool acquiring
certain meanings and being used in specific ways. The research uncovers differing
reasons between Lebanese and Syrian bloggers as to why they blog, what
socialisation with other bloggers means to them, and what marks of differentiation
such as anonymity and choice of language they use to distinguish the activity of one
blogger from another. Both the Lebanese and Syrian bloggers at this point belong to a
collective effort of other bloggers in their own countries, but the thesis also shows the
meanings of socialisation online and how it is regarded change over time.


The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature posits religious medievalism as one among many critical paradigms through which we might better understand literary efforts to bring notions of sanctity back into the modern world. As a cultural and artistic practice, medievalism processes the loss of medieval forms of understanding in the modern imagination and resuscitates these lost forms in new and imaginative ways to serve the purposes of the present. My dissertation proposes religious medievalism as a critical method that decodes modern texts' lamentations over a perceived loss of the sacred. My project locates textual moments in select works of John Keats, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde that reveal concern over the consequences of modern dualism. It examines the ways in which these texts participate in a process of rejoining to enchant a rationalistic epistemology that stymies transcendental unity. I identify the body of Christ, the central organizing principle of medieval devotion, as the cynosure of nineteenth-century religious medievalism. This body offers a non-dualistic alternative that retroactively undermines and heals Cartesian divisions of mind and body and Kantian distinctions between noumenal and knowable realities. Inscribing the dynamic contours of the medieval religious body into a text's linguistic structure, a method I call the "medievalizing process," underscores the spiritual dimensions of its reform efforts and throws into relief a distinctly religious, collective agenda that undergirds many nineteenthcentury texts.


Cytological observations have been carried out by several researchers in South China, Japan, Ceylon, Hongkong, Himalaya and Java. The results from various regions showed that P. multifida had a fairly high genetic variation, namely diploid, triploid and tetraploid types. Therefore cytological and reproductive study on P. multifida from its geographical distribution areas need to be done. The objectives of this research were to observe the somatic chromosome number and reproductive type of P. multifida, and to recognize the relationship between morphological variation and its ploidy level as well as stomatal index. Plants were collected from several localities in Bogor. Ploidy level was determined by observing somatic chromosome number by using squash methods. Reproductive type was determined by counting spore number in each sporangium. Morphological characters examined were the stipe, lamina, pinnae, veins, and indusium. Observations of stomata and epidermis of leaves were done by making an incision paradermal leaf. Pteris multifida has two ploidy level and reproduction type, namely apogamous triploid (2n = 87) and sexual tetraploid (2n = 116). The two ploidy levels could not be distinguished based on morphological characteristics, but they can be differentiated by their epidermal cells number. Apogamous triploid has fewer number of epidermal cells, the sexual tetraploid has a greater number of epidermis.


A unique data set of ship-borne lidar measurements of Saharan dust layers above the Atlantic ocean has been collected aboard the research vessel Polarstern with a mobile Aerosol Raman Lidar (MARL) during the LIMPIDO-campaign in June 2000. Extended Saharan dust layers have been observed in the region between 8.5 • N and 34 • N in an altitude range between 2 and 6 km. The continental, North African origin of the probed air masses is confirmed by 8-day backward trajectories. The Saharan dust is characterized by an optical depth in the range of 0.1 and 0.3, a depolariza-tion around 10% and high lidar ratios of 45 sr at 532 nm and 75 sr at 355 nm. The backscattering by the dust particles at the UV-wavelength is relatively weak, resulting in a negative color index. From the measured optical properties the effective radius and the refractive index of the dust particles are derived using a new approach based on Mie Theory and non-spherical scattering calculations. The low backscatter coefficient observed at 355 nm is due to significant absorption which increases with decreasing wavelength. This finding agrees very well with results from satellite and sun photome-ter measurements. The effective radii decrease from about 3 µm at the base to 0.6 µm at the top of the dust plumes. The non-spherical shapes of the dust particles are responsible for the high values of the lidar ratios.


Abstract. Several alternatives have been proposed to shift the paradigms of water management under uncertainty from predictive to decision-centric. An often mentioned tool is the stress-test response surface; mapping system performance to a large sample of future hydro-climatic conditions. Dividing this exposure space between success and failure requires clear performance targets. In practice, however, stakeholders and decision-makers may be confronted with ambiguous objectives for which there are no clearly-defined (crisp) performance thresholds. Furthermore, response surfaces can be non-deterministic, as they do not fully capture all possible sources of hydro-climatic uncertainty. The challenge is thus to combine two different types of uncertainty: the irreducible uncertainty of the response itself relative to the variables that describe change, and the fuzziness of the performance target. We propose possibilistic surfaces to assess flood vulnerability with fuzzy performance thresholds. Three approaches are tested and compared on a un-gridded sample of the exposure space: (i) an aggregation of logistic regressions based on α-cuts combines the uncertainty of the response itself and the ambiguity of the target within a single possibility measure; (ii) an alternative approximates the response with a fuzzy analytical surface; and (iii) a convex delineation expresses the largest range of failure specific to a given management rule without probabilistic assumptions. To illustrate the proposed approaches, we use the flood-prone reservoir system of the Upper Saint-Francois River Basin in Canada as a case study. This study shows that ambiguity can be effectively be considered when generating a response surface and suggests how further research could build a possibilistic framework for hydro-climatic uncertainty.


This paper takes on the challenge of understanding behaviour change through the lens of anthropology. In the field of market research, the goal is to find the leverage points of emotional connection that will inspire a desired behaviour. But traditional approaches to research have relied on methods that neither capture these triggers of change, nor inspire connection. Alternatively, an approach to research based on rituals induces transformational experiences that by their very definition are grounded in emotional connection. This paper details a framework for ritual-based research, and provides case studies of how and when rituals might be used for gathering market insights. We conclude with recommendations for extending the approach into engagement opportunities and creative executions.


A great many tools have been developed for supervised clas- sification, ranging from early methods such as linear discriminant anal- ysis through to modern developments such as neural networks and sup- port vector machines. A large number of comparative studies have been conducted in attempts to establish the relative superiority of these methods. This paper argues that these comparisons often fail to take into account important aspects of real problems, so that the apparent superiority of more sophisticated methods may be something of an illu- sion. In particular, simple methods typically yield performance almost as good as more sophisticated methods, to the extent that the di!erence in performance may be swamped by other sources of uncertainty that generally are not considered in the classical supervised classification paradigm.


Women from poor communities in Northeast Thailand can be considered as a disadvantaged group who have struggled against several problems in their daily living and who have worked hard to sustain their lives through unskilled labour. In such a strong Buddhist culture these women have vital roles within the household and in earning money. The combination of which it is suggested, has had an impact on their physical and psychological health. In Thailand, there is limited data available about such women's health, life experience and work. A better understanding of their situation is required in order to inform and redesign effective health intervention programmes to promote the health and well-being of women from these communities. An holistic nursing perspective was used to inform the design of this research. Only by understanding the context, the living experiences and the understandings of the women themselves is it possible to construct effective health intervention programmes. Thus the purpose of the study was to understand women's health and work in the sociocultural context of poverty in Northeast Thailand. A combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques were used in the overall data collection process. The study was conducted in two distinct phases. Phase 1 provided an overall of baseline account of the socio-cultural context of six communities and the health of a sample of women who live therein. It involved focus group interviews (N=102) with residents and a survey (N=209) of households. Phase 2 was a more focused case study (N=49) of women's life experiences, their health and work in one selected community. Phase 1 of the study found that the majority of women had a substantial role in household economics. Coping strategies that women frequently used were `Tam Chai' (accept and not think too much about it). The majority of women in the communities were primary breadwinners and were self-employed as vendors. Regarding women's health, the findings showed a high level of musculoskeletal and psychological complaints. The study showed that nearly all of the women were optimists and felt happy. In the second phase of the study. Buddhism and the Thai way of living emerged as the major factors which influenced women's views on health and well being. The data illustrated that women struggled to survive in the community and that they had to work hard to make ends meet. Women used networks in the community as resources for coping. They saw `health in terms of being strong enough to work and earn a living'. Health per se is the lowest priority in their life. To work and earn money to support their families is the highest. Indeed, the Buddhist teaching of `self-reliance' has a great impact on them. The conclusions reached suggest that nursing interventions and health campaigns could be used to promote and maintain the optimum health of women and their families. Finally recommendations are made with regard to further research; development of services; development of nurse-education and health promotion for women in low-income communities.


'Interdisciplinarity' has become an ambiguous and slightly misleading word probably because people have very different ideas of what it means in practical terms. One topic that is shared among various art disciplines and helps to relate and understand practical interdisciplinary features of an artwork is the role of the physical space. This paper examines the role that spatial sound can play as a teaching enhancing tool exemplified in successful examples of interdisciplinary students' collaborations. Challenges of an integrated interdisciplinary curriculum design for art courses are discussed taking into account relevant issues like contents, assessment and resources.


The design of a modular moving trap Zeeman decelerator capable of decelerating gas pulses produced from a supersonic source is presented here. Unlike the conventional form of Zeeman decelerator, paramagnetic particles are confined in a 3D potential throughout the deceleration process. The decelerator field is produced by flattened helical coils and currents of up to 1000 A peak. As the coils are periodic in nature, each coil produces a number of deep, quadrupole traps along the molecular beam axis. The resultant periodic field is described as a travelling wave. The application of the appropriate time dependent current allows the traps to move through the four coil modules. In order to compensate for the weaker transverse confinement, a quadrupole guide, operating at 700 A DC, is required to prevent further losses during the deceleration process. The operation of the decelerator relies on the power electronics developed specifically for the quadrupole and the decelerator coils. Due to the electromagnetic interference generated through the switching of the large currents, much of the electronics used to control the power electronics had to be developed specifically. The quadrupole power electronics have been designed to produce fast switching edges. This is necessary to minimise the interaction of the particles within the fringe field regions while maximising the interaction time within the pure quadrupole field. Even at a modest voltage applied to the circuitry, the rise time in current to 700 A has been reduced by a half. The decelerator power electronics must be capable of producing an alternating waveform with an amplitude of at least 500 A for each of the coil phases. Furthermore, the frequency of the waveforms must be tunable within a range of 10 kHz to 0 Hz. Through a combination of pulse width modulation and knowledge of the electrical properties of the coil it is possible to synthesise an alternating current waveform from a 800 V DC supply using a suitable switching circuit. %The challenge of switching such high powers is the transient voltage spikes that can be produced, however, these can be avoided through careful consideration of the layout of the circuit. Decelerators such as this do not cool the sample but instead reduces the mean velocity of a subset of particles which remained trapped. This maintains the phase space density of trapped particles.

Modelling the magnetic fields generated by the decelerator coils has been necessary in order to understand the phase space acceptance of the decelerator. The helical nature of the coils required the development of a specific algorithm in order to calculate the field generated by each wire element. The resultant potential can then be interpolated using a tricubic interpolator to extract the field gradients necessary for numerical simulations of the particle trajectories. Including the effects of the pulse width modulated on the trap facilitates the characterisation of the acceptance of the decelerator and the limitations of the current iteration of the design. The numerical simulations can also be compared to experimental results gathered for metastable argon. The 3D guiding, or velocity bunching, of the gas packet over a range of velocities has been demonstrated. The ability to 3D guide and decelerate were severely hampered by the failure of key electronic components, limiting three coils to 100 A peak, moreover, these traps were sub-optimally loaded. Deceleration from 350 to 347 m/s and 342 to 310 m/s has been observed. The design of a trap capable of simultaneously loading samples of decelerated CaH and Li while allowing the cooling of Li would potentially allow for the sympathetic cooling of a molecular species with an atomic refrigerant. This particular atom-molecule system would also facilitate the examination of controlled chemistry and collisions over a range of temperatures through state selection of the reactants. The loading of the trap has been optimised in 1D for CaH with a loading efficiency of 52.2 % while only 7.3 % of Li is loaded when each of the gas packets has a mean velocity of 11 m/s. This implies that the source of the Li must be at least 130 times brighter than that of the CaH.


In the past several years the growth of virtual property in today's economy has been explosive. The everyday use of virtual assets ranging from Twitter and Facebook to YouTube and virtual world accounts is nearly absolute. Indeed, by one account Americans check social media over 17 times per day. Further, a growing number of savvy virtual entrepreneurs are reporting incomes in the six and seven figure range, derived solely from their online businesses. Nevertheless, although the commercial world has come to embrace these newfound markets, commercial law has done a poor job of keeping up. Scholars have argued that laws governing everything from taxation, to bankruptcy, to privacy rights have not kept pace with our ever-changing virtual world. And nowhere is this truer than in the law of secured credit. Doubtlessly virtual property has come to represent significant wealth and importance, yet its value as a source of leveraged capital remains, in large part, untapped. This unrealized potential is not without good reason; the law — specifically Article 9 of the UCC and the law of property more broadly — suffers from a number of deficiencies and anomalies that make the use of virtual property in secured credit transactions not only overly complex and expensive, but almost entirely untenable. This Article shines light on these shortcomings, and, in doing so, advances a number of guiding principles and specific legislative recommendations, all geared toward a reformation of the law of secured credit in virtual property.


This study investigates how perceptions vary in athletic trainers regarding issues pertaining to women in the profession. Subjects included 1500 male and 1500 female certified athletic trainers who responded to 44 demographic and perceptions survey items used to determine whether perceptions were different based on the respondent's gender. Results were compared to a previously disseminated survey in 1996 to also determine if perceptions had changed from 10 years earlier. Results regarding the presentation of awards and the attainment of leadership positions in the organization were also compared to actual data collected. The data suggested that males perceptions had not changed, but females' perceptions had changed, in that females perceived that opportunities had improved. Data regarding the number of females who had ascended to leadership positions or had received awards did not support these perceptions, however, and female athletic trainers continue to struggle to obtain equality in both of these areas. Additionally, homosocial reproduction continues to influence the decreased number of women who are hired into various jobs, or advance into leadership positions, maintaining patriarchy in the athletics arena and in the athletic training organizations. Results suggested that because athletic training has been dominated by men since its inception, patriarchy continues to influence the lack of ascension of women into leadership positions and awards recognition. Many women are choosing to leave the profession due to the gender role pressure that they can not sustain a career in athletic training and raise a family. Men's professional sports continue to reject the concept of hiring women to serve as athletic trainers with their athletes, which also continues to preserve a patriarchal environment.


Type I interferons (IFNs) are encoded by multiple genes (up to 20 in mice) and, although each of these binds to the same receptor, they produce different cellular responses. Each has some antiviral, immunomodulatory, and antiproliferative activity. Because of these important properties, IFNs are used clinically to treat chronic viral infection and cancer. However, high antiviral activity with low antiproliferative activity would be desirable to minimize the side effects of IFN treatment in chronic infection, whereas maximizing antiproliferative activity while minimizing immunoregulatory activity would be desirable in cancer treatment. Brideau-Andersen et al. engineered IFNs by gene shuffling that possessed high antiviral activity but minimal antiproliferative activity. They created a series of IFNs that they call the B9X series and assayed these in three different viral infection assays in cultured cells. They also tested the proteins for stimulation of the differentiation of Th1 cells, which is a desirable response to viral infection, and for antiproliferative effects on a human-derived B cell line (Daudi). By these criteria, two specific engineered IFNs, B9X14 and B9X25, were identified that have very high ratios of antiviral:antiproliferative and Th1-inducing:antiproliferative activities. Receptor binding assays with the Daudi cells indicated that these proteins bound the interferon receptor complex with very high affinity (greater than that of several natural IFN-αs). These results have clinical implications for IFN treatment of chronic viral infection, as well as providing insight into the interaction of IFNs with their receptor. A. D. Brideau-Andersen, X. Huang, S.-C. Chang Sun, T. T. Chen, D. Stark, I. J. Sas, L. Zadik, G. N. Dawes, D. R. Guptill, R. McCord, S. Govindarajan, A. Roy, S. Yang, J. Gao, Y. H. Chen, N. J. Ø. Skartved, A. K. Pedersen, D. Lin, C. P. Locher, I. Rebbapragada, A. D. Jensen, S. H. Bass, T. L. Straight Nissen, S. Viswanathan, G. R. Foster, J. A. Symons, P. A. Patten, Directed evolution of gene-shuffled IFN-α molecules with activity profiles tailored for treatment of chronic viral diseases. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104, 8269-8274 (2007). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The SOCIETY CORP. (SOCIETY FOR SAVINGS) BUILDING, on the north side of PUBLIC SQUARE, is the most important remaining building in Cleveland by John Wellborn Root of the influential Chicago firm of Burnham & Root. The officers of the Society for Savings made a special attempt to bring together the industrial and decorative arts in the building, which was erected in 1889-90. Its design combines elements of the Gothic, Romanesque, and Renaissance styles exemplified by the short granite pillars of the ground-story Gothic arcade, the arches of different styles in the upper stories, and the massive corners with their turrets reaching to 152'. While the red sandstone outer walls are load-bearing and self-supporting, the interior structure was built of steel columns and diagonally braced floors, in effect independent of the outer walls. Inside, the 26' high banking room is one of the most gorgeously decorated spaces in the city. Its ceiling is a stained-glass skylight in the tradition of the Arts & Crafts movement. The Gothic decorative scheme was planned by Chicago decorator Wm. Pretyman, and the murals were designed by the English painter and illustrator Wm. Crane. Above the 1st floor a 9-story light court surrounded with balconies was later covered over at several floors necessitating artificial illumination for the glass ceiling. As part of the $343 million Cleveland Marriott-SOCIETY CTR. development in the early 1990s, the Society for Savings Bldg. was integrated with the neighboring 57-story Society Tower, while the interior was completely restored by architects van Dijk, Pace, Westlake & Partners.


Information systems are being used for more and more applications, are becoming more complicated and expensive, while at the same time affecting large parts of our society. It is therefore important that information systems are developed in an effective and efficient way. To achieve this, numerous methods for information systems development have been described. Such a method typically consists of descriptions of the activities to be performed, the products
to be delivered, and the tools to be used. Commercial methods, being released by large software houses and consultancy firms, are usually made up of several
volumes, confiscating entire book shelves. Methods can be considered as a standardisation of the IS engineering process, in order to enable the efficient and effective performance of that process. A problem with these methods is, that they hardly take into account the situation in which an information system is developed. Each situation is, in principle, different. A situation affects the way of working and the product types to be delivered. On the one hand, a method should accomplish standardisation,
on the other hand should it be flexible, to match the situation at hand. In this dissertation, this requirement is called controlled flexibility.
Controlled flexibility is achieved by constructing methods. For each situation, for instance a project or an organisation, a different method is built. This method completely takes into account the circumstances (situation factors) applicable in that situation. We call such a method a situational method.
This dissertation describes the basic concepts of Situational Method Engineering, the research discipline focused on construction of situational methods.


Besides local features, global information plays an essential role in semantic segmentation, while recent works usually fail to explicitly extract the meaningful global information and make full use of it. In this paper, we propose a SceneEncoder module to impose a scene-aware guidance to enhance the effect of global information. The module predicts a scene descriptor, which learns to represent the categories of objects existing in the scene and directly guides the point-level semantic segmentation through filtering out categories not belonging to this scene. Additionally, to alleviate segmentation noise in local region, we design a region similarity loss to propagate distinguishing features to their own neighboring points with the same label, leading to the enhancement of the distinguishing ability of point-wise features. We integrate our methods into several prevailing networks and conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets ScanNet and ShapeNet. Results show that our methods greatly improve the performance of baselines and achieve state-of-the-art performance.


Novel with illustrations consisting of line drawings, photographic reproductions, and cartoons. It provides anecdotal information and interviews as well as a fictionalized account of his life. The work focuses not only on Zapata's military achievements, but also personal information. Includes text of El Plan de Ayala, Zapata's manifesto on land reform.


Over 60 practical recipes to achieve better results using the experts' methods for data mining Overview Go beyond mere insight and build models than you can deploy in the day to day running of your business Save time and effort while getting more value from your data than ever before Loaded with detailed step-by-step examples that show you exactly how its done by the best in the business In Detail IBM SPSS Modeler is a data mining workbench that enables you to explore data, identify important relationships that you can leverage, and build predictive models quickly allowing your organization to base its decisions on hard data not hunches or guesswork. IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook takes you beyond the basics and shares the tips, the timesavers, and the workarounds that experts use to increase productivity and extract maximum value from data. The authors of this book are among the very best of these exponents, gurus who, in their brilliant and imaginative use of the tool, have pushed back the boundaries of applied analytics. By reading this book, you are learning from practitioners who have helped define the state of the art. Follow the industry standard data mining process, gaining new skills at each stage, from loading data to integrating results into everyday business practices. Get a handle on the most efficient ways of extracting data from your own sources, preparing it for exploration and modeling. Master the best methods for building models that will perform well in the workplace. Go beyond the basics and get the full power of your data mining workbench with this practical guide. What you will learn from this book Use and understand the industry standard CRISP_DM process for data mining. Assemble data simply, quickly, and correctly using the full power of extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tools. Control the amount of time you spend organizing and formatting your data. Develop predictive models that stand up to the demands of real-life applications. Take your modeling to the next level beyond default settings and learn the tips that the experts use. Learn why the best model is not always the most accurate one. Master deployment techniques that put your discoveries to work making the most of your business most critical resources. Challenge yourself with scripting for ultimate control and automation - its easier than you think! Approach This is a practical cookbook with intermediate-advanced recipes for SPSS Modeler data analysts. It is loaded with step-by-step examples explaining the process followed by the experts. Who this book is for If you have had some hands-on experience with IBM SPSS Modeler and now want to go deeper and take more control over your data mining process, this is the guide for you. It is ideal for practitioners who want to break into advanced analytics.


The U.S. government claims authority under the law of war to detain enemy belligerents captured in the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda for the duration of the conflict. Enemy belligerents in this war are generally regarded by U.S. authorities as unprivileged under the Geneva Conventions, and acts they commit in furtherance of the war are therefore likely to be crimes under the law of war and/or under U.S. domestic law. Regarding those belligerents who, because they are considered dangerous, have not qualified for release and transfer to another country, the government has had two choices — to detain them in military custody on a prolonged basis (for the duration of the conflict), or to prosecute them for crimes they are alleged to have committed.President Obama has stated a strong preference for the criminal prosecution option. But for many of the detainees, prosecution is not feasible — for a variety of reasons. These detainees are likely to remain in prolonged detention. The President has described the continuing detention of these individuals as the "legacy problem," i.e. prolonged detention cases left over from the post-9/11 period.The purpose of this paper is to address the legacy problem, in part by taking into account the fact that all of the long term detainees, both those whom it is infeasible to prosecute as well as those who can be prosecuted, can be said to have engaged in culpable criminal activity. A primary goal is to reduce the inequality between the two paths — criminal prosecution or prolonged military detention — by bringing law of war detention and criminal prosecution into closer alignment. Under the present system, choice between the paths appears to result in unequal treatment, i.e., in many cases, criminal prosecution and the imposition of a fixed term sentence for those who are convicted versus what looks like an indefinite period of detention in military custody for the other cohort (subject to the possibility of release through a periodic review process) — even though both cohorts are alleged to have engaged in culpable criminal conduct. A revised approach should, while paying heed to national security interests, not only decrease this apparent difference in treatment but also increase the chances that most of the detainees in indefinite detention might be released short of a lifetime in custody and thus give them some reasonable hope that their detention may end at some point. Progress toward these several goals, which are closely related, can be achieved by tinkering with, and adding to the existing approach, taking into account the special features of a war against a terrorist organization — by introducing into the indefinite detention track some fixed-term criminality attributes plus a standard to be applied for continued indefinite detention, while adding to the criminal prosecution/fixed term imprisonment track a similar standard governing the possibility of a return to military custody.


This paper describes the economically optimal adoption and operation of distributed energy resources (DER) by a hypothetical California microgrid (μGrid) consisting of a group of commercial buildings over an historical test year, 1999. The optimization is conducted using a customer adoption model developed at Berkeley Lab and implemented in the General Algebraic Modeling System. A μGrid is a semiautonomous grouping of electricity and heat loads interconnected with the existing utility grid (macrogrid) but able to island from it. The μGrid minimizes the cost of meeting its energy requirements (consisting of both electricity and heat loads) by optimizing the installation and operation of DER technologies while purchasing residual energy from the local combined natural gas and electricity utility. The available DER technologies are small-scale generators (<500 kW), such as reciprocating engines, microturbines, and fuel cells, with or without combined heat and power (CHP) equipment, such as water and space heating and/or absorption cooling. By introducing a tax on carbon emissions, it is shown that if the μGrid is allowed to install CHP-enabled DER technologies, its carbon emissions are mitigated more than without CHP, demonstrating the potential benefits of small-scale CHP technology for climate change mitigation. Reciprocating engines with heat recovery and/or absorption cooling tend to be attractive technologies for the mild southern California climate, but the carbon mitigation tends to be modest compared to purchasing utility electricity because of the predominance of relatively clean central station generation in California.


We propose an information theoretic approach to the representation and comparison of color features in digital images to handle various problems in the area of content-based image retrieval. The interpretation of color histograms as joint probability density functions enables the use of a wide range of concepts from information theory to be considered in the extraction of color features from images and the computation of similarity between pairs of images. The entropy of an image is a measure of the randomness of the color distribution in an image. Rather than replacing color histograms as an image representation, we demonstrate that image entropy can be used to augment color histograms for more efficient image retrieval. We propose an indexing algorithm in which image entropy is used to drastically reduce the search space for color histogram computations. Our experimental tests applied to an image database with 10,000 images suggest that the image entropy-based indexing algorithm is scalable for image retrieval of large image databases. We also proposed a new similarity measure called the maximum relative entropy measure for comparing image feature vectors that represent probability density functions. This measure is an improvement of the Kullback-Leibler number in that it is non-negative and satisfies the identity and symmetry axioms. We also propose a new usability paradigm called Query By Example Sets (QBES) that allows users, particularly novice users, the ability to express queries in terms of multiple images.


Among all the great discoveries and inventions of the nineteenth century, few offer us a more fascinating insight into Victorian society than the discovery of anaesthesia. Now considered to be one of the greatest inventions for humanity since the printing press, anaesthesia offered pain-free operations, childbirth with reduced suffering, and instant access to the world beyond consciousness. And yet, upon its introduction, Victorian medics, moralists, clergymen, and scientists, were plunged into turmoil. This vivid and engaging account of the early days of anaesthesia unravels some key moments in medical history: from Humphry Davy's early experiments with nitrous oxide and the dramas that drove the discovery of ether anaesthesia in America, to the outrage provoked by Queen Victoria's use of chloroform during the birth of Prince Leopold. And there are grisly ones too: frequent deaths, and even notorious murders. Interweaved throughout the story, a fascinating social change is revealed. For anaesthesia caused the Victorians to rethink concepts of pain, sexuality, and the links between mind and body.From this turmoil, a profound change in attitudes began to be realised, as the view that physical suffering could, and should, be prevented permeated through society, most tellingly at first in prisons and schools where pain was used as a method of social control. In this way, the discovery of anaesthesia left not only a medical and scientific legacy that changed the world, but a compassionate one too.


Fine-needle aspiration (FNA) is the standard of care for the initial workup of thyroid nodules, but there is no consensus algorithm to manage patients with benign results. We examined performance characteristics of initial and repeat satisfactory FNAs for all 402 patients who underwent thyroid surgery during a recent 22-month period. Of these patients, 267 had at least 1 satisfactory FNA and 70 had 2 or more. After an initial benign FNA, 1 repeat FNA correctly identified an unsuspected malignancy in 2 of 70 patients and was indeterminate in 17; of these, 7 of 17 were identified as malignant in the final pathologic diagnosis. Overall, the use of 1 repeat FNA increased the sensitivity for malignancy from 81.7% to 90.4% and decreased the false-negative rate from 17.1% to 11.4%. With more than 1 repeat FNA, there was no improvement in performance characteristics. These data make a strong argument for 1 repeat FNA following an initial benign FNA diagnosis.


Objectives: To develop novel approaches to deliver cost effective, high throughput full genome HIV sequencing that best captures the full extent of within-host and between-host HIV genetic diversity at a population level.

Methods: Methods for each step of sample preparation, including reverse transcription, PCR reactions, and sequencing were developed on high throughput automated liquid handling instruments (Biomek FX, Beckman Coulter) with 96/384 well capacity. Protocols for RNA extraction were optimised based on plasma viral load. Rather than using multiple small fragments, large (6kb) fragments were amplified and sequenced using a set of standard sequencing primers. Alternate primers were then used where necessary to fill gaps remaining in the sequence. A software program "Primer Sleeper" was developed to automate selection of alternative primers based on the sequence already generated. We incorporated all the above into an iterative workflow system in which a 'first pass' nearly complete full-length sequence could be generated for majority of samples and made available for analysis, while mixtures, insertions/deletions and persistent gaps in a minority of problematic sequences were resolved with alternative strategies, including cloning.

Results: We generated 900 full and partial genomes in four study populations with an optimal throughput rate of 44 genomes per week. In the most recently sequenced project of 311 samples, the rate of successful amplification of two fragments spanning the full genome using standard primers was 75%, increasing to 91% by second reactions using alternate primers. Samples from different HIV clades and with a range of viral loads, including those with <2,000 copies/ml have been successfully sequenced.

Conclusions: High throughput HIV sequencing relies on innovations in all aspects of the sequencing assay and laboratory workflow. Our system can deliver sequence data with the turnaround, cost and quality required for investigators involved in contemporary HIV vaccinology, immunology and virology research.


Marital debt is normal, but confusing. In some community property jurisdictions, debts incurred by one spouse can be satisfied from all of the assets managed and controlled by the debt incurring spouse (a managerial regime), while in others from the debt-incurring spouse's separate property plus that spouse's "share" of the marital assets (a partition regime), and in still others from only the separate assets of the debt-incurring spouse for separate debts and from all the community assets if it is a community debt (a CP debt/SP debt classification regime). The various community property jurisdictions have fined-tuned these structures to create hybrid systems that combine aspects of each of the regimes. Frequently debt originates prior to a marriage (hence the description "premarital debt"), however, creating an additional problem: During a marriage, which assets should be available for premarital creditors? A pure managerial regime fails to adequately protect the nondebtor spouse's undivided one-half ownership interest in each community asset, while a pure CP debt/SP debt system effectively enables a debtor to commit "bankruptcy by marriage." Partition systems developed to address these problems offer premarital creditors access to those assets for which the creditor would have had access if there had been no marriage. This partition-style premarital debt structure, however, is employed for child support and spousal support orders as well as for more typical debt and tort liability incurred prior to the marriage. Application of such premarital debt structures to child support is unfortunate. It implicitly may facilitate child support shirkers, effectuates a hierarchy for a choice between support of children of relationship #1 and children of relationship #2, and perpetrates an old stereotype - the wicked, unsupportive step-parent. Child support is more sensibly treated as an on-going obligation of a support-owing parent's current marital community, and not as a premarital debt. Thus I propose that all community assets, including the earnings of the spouse who is not obligated to pay child support, be available to satisfy a child support order. Under the current regime, those earnings are unavailable, because they are not assets that would be the debt-incurring spouse's separate property except for the marriage. While a usual argument against my proposed approach is a fear of discouraging marriages, such a fear is unwarranted in this context. The specific nature of child support obligations, which cannot be bargained-around and which are limited in duration by the age of the child, drives my conclusion that it is not a premarital SP debt. Spousal support obligations, in contrast, more closely resemble typical premarital debt, and should continue to be treated as premarital obligations to which a premarital debt partition structure sensibly applies.


Possibly the most revolutionary development to impact upon decisionmaking has been the electronic computer. Its capability to process large volumes of data rapidly, to make complex computations in fractions of seconds, and to provide outputs in a variety of formats has markedly expanded the boundaries of decisionmaking. Notwithstanding such progress, the computer's contribution to decisionmaking has thus far been largely limited to routine and repetitive operations which lend themselves to the development of standard decisionmaking procedures. This has been an important contribution, yet most decisionmaking situations, particularly at higher levels of management, are unique and ill structured requiring flexible and adaptive responses. Man-machine systems are thought to offer potential for assisting management in meeting these requirements. The study reported here examines comparative problem-solving performance of individuals communicating directly with the computer (on-line processing) versus individuals communicating with the computer in an intermittent fashion (batch processing). The study is marked by an effort to take up the challenge of management problems having no set solution procedure. Performance measurements include objective functions, understanding of variable interactions, and comparative problem-solving patterns.


: Swayed by global pressures and poor international academic standing, Vietnam in 2002 initiated further school-wide curriculum change reflecting a student-centred reform agenda. Initial research on implementation is producing mixed results. One explanation is a mismatch with a Confucian Heritage Culture as a social-constructivist philosophy may counter the traditional widespread teacher-centred classrooms in Vietnam. School mathematics is often regarded as culture-independent as similar topics are taught across nations. We take as a premise that the adoption of the reform agenda is a worthwhile goal. Presented are the findings of a small scale study that set out to explore antecedent philosophical predispositions that may promote or obstruct the reform uptake among Vietnamese secondary mathematics pre-service teachers . Using a mixed-method approach, and a counterpart cohort from Australia for comparison, support for constructivist and traditional mathematics teaching and learning approaches were explored in association with teacher self efficacy. The Australians were expected to reflect reasonable support for a constructivist agenda and the Vietnamese perhaps less so. For both cohorts, the quantitative data reflected strong support for a constructivist framework and a modest rejection of traditional approaches with the latter correlated with teacher self efficacy. Indeed, the Vietnamese cohort conveyed a belief more so than the Australians that mathematics is a creative discipline; likely a reflection of having studied more mathematics. Scale inter-correlations provided apparent philosophical paradoxes worthy of further study. From the qualitative data the Australians do seem to be further down the track in espousing a philosophy that incorporated a constructivist agenda. With further culturally connected professional development the Vietnamese may be better prepared conceptually to apply it.


A scan-path test is one of the most important testing techniques, but it can be used as a side-channel attack against a cryptography circuit. Scan-based attacks are techniques to decipher a secret key using scanned data obtained from a cryptography circuit. Public-key cryptography, such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC), is extensively used but conventional scan-based attacks cannot be applied to it, because it has a complicated algorithm as well as a complicated architecture. This paper proposes a scan-based attack which enables us to decipher a secret key in ECC. The proposed method is based on detecting intermediate values calculated in ECC. We focus on a 1-bit sequence which is specific to some intermediate values. By monitoring the 1-bit sequence in the scan path, we can find out the register position specific to the intermediate value in it and we can know whether this intermediate value is calculated or not in the target ECC circuit. By using several intermediate values, we can decipher a secret key. The experimental results demonstrate that a secret key in a practical ECC circuit can be deciphered using 29 points over the elliptic curve E within 40 seconds.


The natural root distributions of seven species of shade trees (Norway, red and sugar maple, green ash, redbud, ginkgo, and pin oak), growing under nursery conditions were characterized. The north quadrant of the root systems of these trees was more developed than any other quadrant. In general, the vertical distribution of the major roots showed the greatest development at the soil depth of 13-38 cm, with limited growth in the top 1 2 cm, and decreasing development at depths below 38 cm. The fibrous root densities were usually greater in the upper 10 cm depth than at the lower depths. Tree spades, commonly used to transplant nursery trees, reduce the root system by up to 98 percent. Since regenerated roots originate primarily at the severed ends of the roots cut during digging, location of these severed roots, with respect to the new soil profile is an important factor in the re-establishment of transplanted trees.


Blast caused by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae (Hebert) Barr. and bacterial leaf blight (BLB) caused by Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae (Xoo) are two major diseases of rice (Oryza sativa). The use of varietal resistance is the most appropriate strategy for controlling the diseases, and molecular assisted selection can potentially accelerate breeding programs. The objective of this study was to pyramid genes conferring resistance to blast and bacterial leaf blight diseases to rice cultivar RD6, using molecular assisted selection. Near-isogenic lines (NIL) derived from two blast resistant crosses (RD6 × P0489 and RD6 × Jao Hom Nin) were pyramided with IR62266 (xa5), to transfer bacterial leaf blight resistance to RD6 introgression lines. Five flanking sets of simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers (RM319/RM212, RM48/RM207, RM224/RM144, RM313/RM277 and RM122/RM159: four for blast and one for BLB resistance) were used for screening of introgression lines carrying five quantitative trait loci (QTLs) from the BC1F2 generation through to BC2F2:3 generation, and 12 pyramiding lines were identified. Gene validation for blast and bacterial leaf blight diseases was accomplished using artificial inoculation under greenhouse conditions. BC2F2:3 2-8-2-24 and BC2F2:3 2-8-2-25 showed greater levels of blast broad spectrum resistance (BSR) whereas BC2F2:3 2-8-2-36 expressed the highest of bacterial leaf blight resistance with a high blast BSR. Keywords: Gene pyramiding, introgression lines, molecular marker, Near-isogenic lines, SSR. African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(28), pp. 4432-4438


One of the fundamental problems in distributed computing is how to efficiently perform routing in a faulty network in which each link fails with some probability. This article investigates how big the failure probability can be, before the capability to efficiently find a path in the network is lost. Our main results show tight upper and lower bounds for the failure probability, which permits routing both for the hypercube and for the d‐dimensional mesh. We use tools from percolation theory to show that in the d‐dimensional mesh, once a giant component appears—efficient routing is possible. A different behavior is observed when the hypercube is considered. In the hypercube there is a range of failure probabilities in which short paths exist with high probability, yet finding them must involve querying essentially the entire network. Thus the routing complexity of the hypercube shows an asymptotic phase transition. The critical probability with respect to routing complexity lies in a different location than that of the critical probability with respect to connectivity. Finally we show that an oracle access to links (as opposed to local routing) may reduce significantly the complexity of the routing problem. We demonstrate this fact by providing tight upper and lower bounds for the complexity of routing in the random graph Gn,p. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2008