This scientific opinion is a risk assessment of the genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant, increased oleic acid soybean MON 87705 for food and feed uses, import and processing. MON 87705 contains the soybean FAD2-1A/FATB1-A gene fragments down-regulating endogenous FAD2 and FATB enzymes and the CP4 epsps gene cassette conferring tolerance to glyphosate-containing herbicides. Bioinformatic analyses and genetic stability studies did not raise safety issues. The levels of the CP4 EPSPS protein in soybean MON 87705 have been sufficiently analysed. MON 87705 differs from the conventional counterpart in the fatty acid profile (proportion of (C18:1) oleic acid increased and proportions of (C18:2) linoleic acid and (C16:0) palmitic acid decreased) in seeds and the presence of the CP4 EPSPS protein. Scientific risk assessment of soybean MON 87705 was carried out in the context of the intended use as specified by the applicant, namely its use for food and feed as any conventional soybean except for the oil derived from soybean MON 87705, which is to be used in margarine, salad dressing, mayonnaise and home-use liquid vegetable oil, excluding the use of soybean MON 87705 oil for commercial frying.

The safety assessment identified no concerns regarding potential toxicity and allergenicity of the CP4 EPSPS protein. The altered fatty acid profile did not raise concerns regarding toxicity. The overall allergenicity of the whole plant was not changed by the genetic modification. The estimated changes in intake levels of these fatty acids do not raise nutritional concerns in the context of the intended use as specified by the applicant. A feeding study on broiler chickens confirmed that defatted meal of soybean MON 87705 is as nutritious as meals produced from its conventional counterpart and non-GM reference varieties. There are no indications of an increased likelihood of establishment and spread of feral soybean plants. Considering its intended uses, environmental risks associated with an unlikely, but theoretically possible, horizontal gene transfer from soybean MON 87705 to bacteria have not been identified. Potential biotic and abiotic interactions of soybean MON 87705 were not considered to be an issue owing to the low level of exposure. The monitoring plan is in line with the intended uses of soybean MON 87705.

The EFSA GMO Panel considers that the information available for soybean MON 87705 addresses the scientific comments raised by the Member States and states that soybean MON 87705, as described in the application, is as safe as its conventional counterpart with respect to potential effects on human and animal health and the environment in the context of its intended uses as proposed by the applicant.


This paper, part of a symposium on literary-legal scholarship on the concept of "Juris-Dictions," explores the uses of the concept of jurisdiction in the process by which the Writers Guild of America (WGA or Guild) – the union that represents film and TV writers – determines screen credit for writers. Screen credit is governed by the terms of a contract between the WGA and production companies stipulating that the WGA has the exclusive jurisdiction to determine screen and advertising credit for writers who worked on the production. The jurisdiction of the WGA to determine credit – which is the power of writers to decide authorship of works that the writers do not own and of which they are not the legal "authors" within the meaning of copyright law – is enormously important to writers. It gives writers the power to determine who should be known as the author of a film or TV script, which affects how much writers get paid, whether their future work will get produced, how they are regarded within the Hollywood community, and how films and TV programs are interpreted by critics and by that segment of the public who pay attention to writers. Hollywood writers use the legal concept of jurisdiction to assert their power to define authorship, and they use multiple forms of procedural and substantive law to determine the credited author of a script. Because writers are not owners of their work, and because many people contribute to the finished film, writers are credited for stories that are not quite the same as the ones they actually wrote. Yet they insist on credit nevertheless, and for good reason. Ever anxious about their status as the authors of a film in a world in which directors and actors are far more likely to be seen by the public and by critics as the authors of a film or TV show, writers use their jurisdiction over writing credit to protect their status as authors. While jurisdiction is always the device by which law sanctions the exercise of power, the jurisdiction of the Writers Guild reflects and creates a particular form of power in Hollywood: the power to define individual authorship of a collective creation, which in turn creates the power to be paid to tell stories.


This paper proposes a novel framework for an intelligent monitoring system that supervises the performance of the future power system. The increased complexity of the power system could endanger the reliability, voltage quality, operational security or resilience of the power system. A distributed structure for such a monitoring system is described and some of the advanced signal processing techniques or tools that could be used in such a monitoring system are given. Several examples for seeking the spatial locations and finding the underlying causes of disturbances are included.


Background Although tuberculosis (TB) care is provided free of charge in Morocco, a high number of patients voluntarily interrupt their treatment before the end. Treatment Default is a major obstacle in the fight against the disease. The purpose of this study was to describe the impact of knowledge and attitudes toward TB on treatment adherence. Methods Case-control study of 290 TB patients (85 defaulters and 205 controls). A defaulter was defined as a TB patient who interrupted treatment for two months or longer. Socio-demographic measurements, knowledge and attitude were collected by face to face anonymous questionnaire. Khi-square test was conducted to examine differences in TB attitudes and knowledge according to treatment adherence. Results The mean age of participants was 31.7 ± 12.0 years. Monthly income was under 2000 MAD (180 €) for 82% of them. Over sixty four percent were illiterate or had a basic educational level. Microbial cause was known by 17.2% respondents; 20.5% among adherent patients versus 9.4% (p=0.02). The fact that the disease is curable was more known by adherent patients: 99.0% versus 88.2% (p < 0.01). Eighty tree per cent of patients had been informed about treatment duration and consequences of not completing treatment: 89.0% among adherent patients versus 69.7% (p<0.001). The main reason evoked for defaulting was the sensation of being cured (72.9% of defaulters). Conclusion This study shows a poor knowledge on TB especially among non adherent patients. This finding justifies the need to incorporate patient's education into current TB case management.


This thesis explores whether and how the substantive representation of women has been enabled or constrained by specific features of the gendered institutional context during domestic abuse policy development in two new regional legislatures, in Wales and in Tuscany. The thesis uses a sociological institutionalist approach to explore the involvement of civil society women's organisations in the everyday processes of domestic abuse policy development across the case study regions. Both regions are structured by uniquely advanced formal rules committing to the inclusion of civil society organisations and to the value of gender equality. A critical discourse analytic approach is used to investigate how pre-existing informal norms and discursive frames interact with these formal rules in shaping actors' behaviour and the policy solutions proposed to tackle domestic abuse. Feminist political science scholars have hypothesised that changes in the political environment across the European Union, including decentralisation and the devolution of power to the sub-national level, have generated new institutions which may provide greater opportunities for actors making claims for women to participate in the policy process and to influence its outputs, thus improving the substantive representation of women. However, this thesis argues that in the case of domestic abuse policy development, new formal rules making a symbolic commitment to the inclusion of new actors in governing processes were often undermined by tenacious informal norms. Women's organisations that were better equipped to play by pre-existing informal rules were more likely to be included. This thesis makes a contribution to theory-building in the field of feminist political science through an exploration of the nuanced effects of new governing structures on the participation of value-driven women's organisations in policy development. It shows how gendered, culturally dominant discursive frames and wider, pre-existing norms shaping perceptions of appropriate behaviour can affect women's organisations' opportunities for action in the policy process, and their capacity to influence outputs.


When high jumper Alice Coachman won the high jump title at the 1941 national championships with "a spectacular leap," African American women had been participating in competitive sport for close to twenty-five years. Yet it would be another twenty years before they would experience something akin to the national fame and recognition that African American men had known since the 1930s, the days of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens. From the 1920s, when black women athletes were confined to competing within the black community, through the heady days of the late twentieth century when they ruled the world of women's track and field, African American women found sport opened the door to a better life. However, they also discovered that success meant challenging perceptions that many Americans--both black and white--held of them. Through the stories of six athletes--Coachman, Ora Washington, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudloph, Wyomia Tyus, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee--Jennifer H. Lansbury deftly follows the emergence of black women athletes from the African American community; their confrontations with contemporary attitudes of race, class, and gender; and their encounters with the civil rights movement. Uncovering the various strategies the athletes use to beat back stereotypes, Lansbury explores the fullness of African American women's relationship with sport in the twentieth century.


To contemporary audiences, the terms Ulster, Northern Ireland, 'the North', are associated with images of communal conflict, sectarianism and peace processes of indefinite duration. Traced over the last four centuries, however, the history of Ulster is much richer in its social, economic and cultural variety, and also more peaceful, than these popular images would imply. This collaborative volume surveys the history of the province from 1600 to the present, in all its complexities, ambiguities and contrariness. Its collective gaze takes in the variety of political, social, economic and cultural forces that shaped society in the northern province of Ireland, while also alert to national and international influences. The outcome is a set of interweaving narratives that are rich in human drama and the complexities of life in a hybrid society. The two dozen authors represented in the volume are leading scholars from Ireland, Britain and the United States of America, who bring their own original insights and expertise to the study of Ulster's past. firstname.lastname@example.com@uwe.ac.uk


Abstract The seventeenth-century technologist and colonist William White (ca. 1600–73) has been cited as an alchemical tutor to Gabriel Plattes and George Starkey, and hailed as an early modern "wizard of industrial efficiency." This study — the first that focuses on White individually — pays particular attention to White's extraordinary reputation for furnace design and manufacture. By examining the sources of knowledge and social connections that enabled White to acquire and disseminate his knowledge of metallurgy, the authors develop a genealogy of fornacic design that extends from the continent to the Atlantic world and back again, connecting White to better known figures such as Cornelis Drebbel and Robert Boyle. By foregrounding, through White, the technology of early modern alchemy, the authors also hope to emphasise the importance of practical craft in the development of the chemical arts.


There is no report on the antimicrobial effects of evening primrose (Oenothera biennis L.) and borage (Echium amoenum Fisch. & C.A.Mey.). In this research, the seeds of these plants were milled and extracted by chloroform:methanol (2:1). Then, the solvents were evaporated under reduced pressure and temperature to extract the oils. Antimicrobial effects of various concentrations of the oils (10- 1000 mg/l) were assessed against Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Candida albicans and Aspergillus niger. Minimum inhibition concentration of the oils for each strain was measured using Mueller Hinton Broth and Sabouraud Dextrose Broth. The results showed that evening primrose oil increased the growth of C. albicans and A. niger, while it suppressed the growth of S. aureus, S. epidermidis and P. aeruginosa even at the minimum concentration level (1mg/l). Borage oil was found to promote the growth of A. niger and S. epidermidis, but at concentration levels equal to or higher than 1mg/l it inhibited the growth of P. aeruginosa and C. albicans. However, at no concentration level, was it observed to leave any effect on S. aureus. It was also shown that some medical properties of evening primrose and borage could be attributed to antimicrobial effects of their oils.


Eight healthy young adult subjects produced significantly larger steady state pupil areas, as measured by infra-red pupillometry, when exposed to indirect lighting from high frequency high pressure sodium lamps compared to photopically matched levels of indirect incandescent lamps at three levels of luminance: 30, 60 and 90 candelas per meter squared (cd/m2). Three additional intensities were studied, which were not matched photopically between lamps. Analysis of all data showed that a scotopic spectral distribution accounted for pupil size better than either a photopic spectrum or an Alpern-Campbell pupillary response spectrum. Because pupil size can affect visual functioning, these results suggest that control of pupil size should be considered in lighting design and that the scotopic spectral output from lamps should be important in determining the effectiveness of a lighting environment. 14 refs., 15 figs., 3 tabs.


In the 1950s, the Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard investigated social relations at a pulp and paper mill, the result of which was his theory of the "worker collectivity." This is an informal defense organization among subordinate employees against a company's work organization and goals. Our research group returned to the same plant, which until 2012 was still a pulp and paper mill, with two questions in mind: Was the worker collectivity still present at the plant? What had happened since Lysgaard's study when it came to the preconditions for the existence of the worker collectivity?


Time-triggered periodic control implementations are over provisioned for many execution scenarios in which the states of the controlled plants are close to equilibrium. To address this inefficient use of computation resources, researchers have proposed self-triggered control approaches in which the control task computes its execution deadline at runtime based on the state and dynamical properties of the controlled plant. The potential advantages of this control approach cannot, however, be achieved without adequate online resource-management policies. This paper addresses scheduling of multiple self-triggered control tasks that execute on a uniprocessor platform, where the optimization objective is to find trade-offs between the control performance and CPU usage of all control tasks. Our experimental results show that efficiency in terms of control performance and reduced CPU usage can be achieved with the heuristic proposed in this paper.


The growing demand for railway capacity has led to high capacity consumption at times and a delay-sensitive network with insufficient robustness. The fundamental challenge is therefore to decide how to increase the robustness. To do so there is a need for accurate measures that return whether the timetable is robust or not and indicate where improvements should be made. Previously presented measures are useful when comparing different timetable candidates with respect to robustness, but less useful to decide where and how robustness should be inserted. In this paper, we focus on points where trains enter a line, or where trains are being overtaken, since we have observed that these points are critical for the robustness. The concept of critical points can be used in the practical timetabling process to identify weaknesses in a timetable and to provide suggestions for improvements. In order to quantitatively assess how crucial a critical point may be, we have defined the measure RCP (Robustness in Critical Points). A high RCP value is preferred, and it reflects a situation at which train dispatchers will have higher prospects of handling a conflict effectively. The number of critical points, the location pattern and the RCP values constitute an absolute value for the robustness of a certain train slot, as well as of a complete timetable. The concept of critical points and RCP can be seen as a contribution to the already defined robustness measures which combined can be used as guidelines for timetable constructors.


Shallow groundwater in unconsolidated sediments represents a substantial water resource in the Chinese Loess Plateau. However, prior to development of the water supply for agriculture, annual and seasonal fluctuation of the recharge mechanism should be clarified. Since the region is arid, the effect of plant water uptake on groundwater fluctuation must also be assessed. A study was therefore undertaken to clarify groundwater recharge together with interaction between the plant ecosystem and shallow groundwater at a field site in the Loess Plateau of China. Observations showed that recharge response of the groundwater level (GWL) was limited except for intensive rainfall during the rainy season. The main recharge to the groundwater occurred from horizontal inflow from focused recharge at the upstream end of the site. Fluctuation of the GWL produced by plant water uptake was monitored during the growing season. For seasonal fluctuation of GWL, temperature was most important, while for diurnal fluctuation of GWL during the growing season, solar radiation was most important. During the growing season, the GWL declined during the daylight hours and recovered during the night. The diurnal fluctuation was well synchronized with the solar radiation, consistent with plant-water uptake by shrubs surrounding one of the observation wells.


Human subjects viewed round stimuli located equidistantly in the horizontal and vertical planes of vision under conditions where presumed cues to size were present and where they were systematically eliminated. Two experiments revealed a consistent tendency for the horizon object to be judged the closer. Cues introduced reduced the effect.


What does it mean to be human? There are many theories of the evolution of human behavior which seek to explain how our brains evolved to support our unique abilities and personalities. Most of these have focused on the role of brain size or specific genetic adaptations of the brain. In contrast, Fred Previc presents a provocative theory that high levels of dopamine, the most widely studied neurotransmitter, account for all major aspects of modern human behavior. He further emphasizes the role of epigenetic rather than genetic factors in the rise of dopamine. Previc contrasts the great achievements of the dopaminergic mind with the harmful effects of rising dopamine levels in modern societies and concludes with a critical examination of whether the dopaminergic mind that has evolved in humans is still adaptive to the health of humans and to the planet in general.


This thesis investigates the feasibility of using a set of non-invasive biomedical signals to monitor respiration. The signals of interest being the electrocardiogram (EGG), photoplethysmography (PPG) and impedance plethysmography (IP) signals. The work has two main aims; the first being to estimate breathing rates from the signals, the second being to detect apnoeas from the signals. The fusion of information from different signals is used throughout in developing algorithms that give more accurate respiratory information than that obtained using one signal alone. Respiratory waveforms are derived from the signals, and the accuracy of detecting individual breaths from the waveforms is assessed and compared objectively. Results from evaluations on two separate databases show there is no waveform that gives sufficient accuracy to consider using it alone. A novel fusion method is developed which uses measurements from all three signals. This fusion method is based on weighting the estimates from each signal, according to the innovation from a Kalman filter model, applied to each respiratory waveform separately. The fused estimates give a higher overall correlation with respect to the reference breathing rate values than any of the breathing estimates derived from a single waveform. The detection of both central and obstructive sleep apnoea from the signals is investigated. It is shown that the accuracy of detecting central apnoeas from the IP signal using a timedomain method, often used in practice, can be improved by combining it with information from the frequency-domain. When discriminating between obstructive sleep apnoeic and non-apnoeic data it is seen that combining features from two signals results in a superior classification accuracy than is possible by using features from just one signal. The proposed classification system using just one of these signals, the EGG, is shown to give a performance accuracy comparable to that found in the literature. In conclusion this thesis shows that by fusing information from a number of non-invasive biomedical signals, estimations of breathing rates can be found with correlation 0.8. This is superior to estimation using only the impedance pneumography signal (correlation 0.64) which is currently used to monitor respiration. The fusion approach could potentially be applied to improve other non-invasive physiological monitoring systems.


In a recent publication [Appl. Opt. 42, 1932 (2003)], redundancies of phase-space representations were studied. In particular, signal recovery from a single section of the ambiguity function was explored. It is shown that this signal-recovery method can be associated with interferometry.


Abstract. Global stratospheric ozone columns derived from UV nadir spectra measured by SCIAMACHY (Scanning Imaging Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography; data ESA Versions 5.01 and 5.04) aboard the recently launched Environmental Satellite (ENVISAT) from January to June 2003 were compared to collocated total ozone data from GOME (Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment on ERS-2) retrieved using the weighting function DOAS algorithm (WFDOAS; Version 1.0) in order to assess the level-2 data (trace gas data) retrieval accuracy from SCIAMACHY. In addition, SCIAMACHY ozone columns retrieved with WFDOAS V1.0 were compared to GOME WFDOAS for some selected days in 2003 in order to separate data quality issues that either come from the optical performance of the instrument or algorithm implementation. Large numbers of collocated total ozone data from the two instruments, which are flying in the same orbit about 30 min apart, were spatially binned into regular 2.5° times 2.5° grids and then compared. Results of these satellite comparisons show that SCIAMACHY O3 vertical columns (ESA Version 5.01/5.04) are on average 1% (±2%) lower than GOME WFDOAS and scatter increases at solar zenith angles above 85° and at very low total ozone values. Results show dependencies on the solar zenith angle, latitudes, and total ozone amounts which are explained by the implementation of an outdated GOME algorithm based on GOME Data Processor (GDP) version 2.4 algorithms for the SCIAMACHY operational product. The reprocessing with an algorithm equivalent to GOME WFDOAS V1.0 shows that the offset and dependencies on solar zenith angle, latitude, and total ozone disappear and that SCIAMACHY WFDOAS data are within 1% of GOME WFDOAS. Since GOME lost its global coverage in July 2003 due to data rate limitation, continuation of the total ozone time series with SCIAMACHY is of highest importance for long-term trend monitoring. Since the beginning of its operation in March 2002 the SCIAMACHY instrument has performed stable. With the application of proper algorithms to retrieve total ozone, SCIAMACHY will be able to contribute to the global long term satellite total ozone record and it has the potential to achieve the high accuracy of GOME total ozone.


High levels of both morphological and chemical variability exist within the O. basilicum L. species. Long-term traditional uses and wide distribution throughout the world, as well as traditional selection and breeding eff orts, have contributed to variability within the species. Morphological traits according to UPOV descriptor list and AFLP markers were utilized to defi ne the extent of existing variation in the species analyzing 24 accessions. Phenotypic dissimilarities between pairs of accessions were calculated and the UPGMA dendrogram was constructed. A number of clearly defi ned clusters have been detected, giving a good representation of traditional taxonomic relationships. Genetic relationships were determined by Neighbour-Joining cluster analysis based on Dice's distance matrix between accessions. Generally, morphologically similar accessions grouped together and a high congruence between trees was observed. Our analyses revealed a certain degree of correspondence between morphological and molecular data among O. basilicum L. accessions. Both AFLP markers and morphological descriptors can contribute in resolving existing problems concerning intraspecifi c classifi cation in O. basilicum.


Machine learning techniques are gaining prevalence in the production of a wide range of classifiers for complex real-world applications with nonuniform testing and misclassification costs. The increasing complexity of these applications poses a real challenge to resource management during learning and classification. In this work we introduce ACT (anytime cost-sensitive tree learner), a novel framework for operating in such complex environments. ACT is an anytime algorithm that allows learning time to be increased in return for lower classification costs. It builds a tree top-down and exploits additional time resources to obtain better estimations for the utility of the different candidate splits. Using sampling techniques, ACT approximates the cost of the subtree under each candidate split and favors the one with a minimal cost. As a stochastic algorithm, ACT is expected to be able to escape local minima, into which greedy methods may be trapped. Experiments with a variety of datasets were conducted to compare ACT to the state-of-the-art cost-sensitive tree learners. The results show that for the majority of domains ACT produces significantly less costly trees. ACT also exhibits good anytime behavior with diminishing returns.


In 1997 Rwanda introduced a resettlement policy for refugees displaced during previous conflicts. I exploit geographic variation in the speed of implementation of this policy to investigate the impact of conflict‐induced displacement and the resettlement policy on household agricultural output and on skill spillover mechanisms between returnees and stayers. I find that returns to on‐farm labor are higher for returnees relative to stayers, although the evidence suggests that the policy contributed little additional effect to this differential. More speculatively, these differentials suggest that, upon return from conflict‐induced exile, returnees are more motivated to increase their economic performance.


We study the impact of a social housing policy program implemented in Argentina, exploiting the random assignment rule to identify the policy's causal effect on labor market and other socio-economic outcomes. In particular, this paper evaluates an intervention that combines access to quality housing at a heavily subsidized cost, the granting of property rights, and relocation in a suburb of Rosario, Argentina's third largest city. In a preliminary analysis, based on administrative social security records, we find that the policy generates a reduction in registered employment by more than 7 percentage points, especially for women and beneficiaries over 50 years of age. We went further and conducted a purposely-designed household survey among a sample of beneficiaries in order to understand the underlying mechanisms and welfare implications of these results. All in all, our analysis points to the existence of an income effect and confirms the registered fall in formal employment and labor force participation. We do not find an increase in informalization, although beneficiaries' perceived access to local job opportunities are signicantly reduced.


This publication is a snapshot of the Minnesota Farm Real Estate Sales web site (http://www.apec.umn.edu/faculty/sjtaff/salesstudy) as of June 2, 2005. It will be formally "reissued" (the web site will be recaptured) each Spring, as new sales data become available. We no longer distribute a separate farm real estate report in the Minnesota Agricultural Economist (now the Minnesota Applied Economist). The site consists largely of graphs and tables summarizing sales over the past fifteen years. It provides averages at the multi-county region and at the statewide levels of aggregation. Individual transaction data are available for downloading and analysis at Minnesota Land Economics (MLE) web site, located at http://www.apec.umn.edu/landeconomics. Electronic versions of this document are presented in fully navigable portable document format (pdf).


We present a global production sharing model that integrates the organizational choices of offshoring into the determination of relative wages in developing countries. The model shows that offshoring through foreign direct investment contributes more prominently than arm's length outsourcing to the demand for skill in the South, thereby increasing the relative wage of skilled workers. We incorporate these theoretical results into an augmented Mincer earnings function and test the model based on a natural experiment in which China lifted its restrictions on foreign ownership for multinational companies upon its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Empirical findings based on detailed Urban Household Surveys and trade data from Chinese customs provide support to our proposed theory, thus shedding light on the changes in firm ownership structure, the skill upgrading in exports, and the evolution of wage inequality from 1992 to 2008 in China's manufacturing sector.


In central West Greenland, early Palaeoproterozoic siliciclastic and carbonate sequences of the Karrat Group (shelf sequences of the Rae craton margin) were deposited in sedimentary basins controlled by NW- and SW-trending linked extensional fault systems. The shelf basins were later filled and overtopped by turbidite systems filling a foredeep advancing ahead of a thrust system – the Karrat Fjord thrust system – that propagated west to east. Deformation culminated in emplacement of basement-cored nappes, progressive deformation and high-grade metamorphism at c. 1.87 Ga. Reactivation of lower plate growth faults formed dome- and basin-like folds and related thrusts that refolded the structure of the Karrat Fjord thrust system and inverted the shelf basins. The southern Karrat Fjord thrust system was reworked in a belt of intense ductile NW-directed thrusting – the Nunaarsussuaq thrust system – formed at c. 1.84 Ga at the northern limit of the Nagssugtoqidian orogen. Kinematics of these events are at odds with the consensus view that the Rinkian fold–thrust belt is a northward extension of the Nagssugtoqidian orogen resulting from north–south convergence between the Rae and North Atlantic cratons. Application of structural restoration techniques to basin analysis of Palaeoproterozoic rocks has potential to provide new insights into Proterozoic orogenic processes worldwide.


Clark and Wolcott attribute the low productivity of Indian cotton textile workers to their preference for low work effort, and suggest that unions resisted an increase in work intensity. This article argues that low wages were due to surplus labour in agriculture. Low wages allowed the persistence of managerial inefficiencies and resulted in low productivity and work effort. It uses firm-level data from all the textile producing regions in India to examine the relationship between unions and labour productivity. The findings show that fewer workers were employed per machine in the unionized mills in Bombay and Ahmedabad, compared to the mills in less unionized regions. These findings suggest that unionization increased wages and compelled managers to raise productivity


From the Publisher:
XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is a W3C endorsed standard for document markup. Because of its ability to deliver portable data, XML is positioned to be a key web application technology.
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XML defines a basic syntax used to mark up data with simple, human-readable tags, and provides a standard format for computer documents. This format is flexible enough to be customized for transforming data between applications as diverse as web sites, electronic data inter-change, voice mail systems, and wireless devices, to name a few.
Developers can either write their own programs that interact with, massage, and manipulate the data in XML documents, or they can use off-the-shelf software like web browsers and text editors to work with XML documents. Either choice gives them access to a wide range of free libraries in a variety of languages that can read and write XML.
The XML specification defines the exact syntax this markup must follow: how elements are delimited by tags, what a tag looks like, what names are acceptable for elements, where attributes are placed, and so forth. XML doesn't have a fixed set of tags and elements that are supposed to work for everybody in all areas of interest for all time. It allows developers and writers to define the elements they need as they need them.
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About the Authors:
Elliotte Rusty Harold is a noted writer and programmer, both on and off the Internet. His Cafe au Lait website has become one of the most popular independent Java sites on the internet, and his spin-off site Cafe con Leche for XML News and Resources has become one of the most popular XML sites on the internet. Elliotte is the author of O'Reilly's Java Network Programming.
W. Scott Means has been a professional software developer since 1988, when he joined Microsoft Corporation at the age of 17. He was one of the original developers of OS/2 1.1 and Windows NT, and did some of the early work on the Microsoft Network for the Advanced Technology and Business Development group. Most recently he is serving as the CEO of Industrial Web Machines, a new Internet venture based in Columbia, South Carolina.


A large share of a neighborhood project's environmental impacts is due to mobility. It either takes place inside the neighborhood, such as transit traffic or internal mobility, or is induced by it and exchanged with the rest of the urban area. A way to improve mobility impacts evaluation in the assessment of neighborhood alternative designs, is to refine traffic simulation models making them more sensitive to spatial design while keeping their sensitivity to local traffic conditions and associated energy consumption and pollutants' emissions. This paper introduces a methodology relying on the classic four-step scheme for mobility demand modelling together with specific spatial refinement. The neighborhood is divided into fine sub-areas, with specific consequences for each step: first, trips are generated on the basis of sub-area land-use and activity data; second, the trips are distributed between all Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZs), enabling to identify internal short-range trips; third, the mode choice model takes into account the particular access conditions between sub-areas and transit stations or roadway nodes; fourth, traffic assignment involves finer TAZs and finer path description. Furthermore, a 5th step is added to deal with environmental evaluation, especially the allocation of mobility impacts to the project's sub-areas. These steps are presented and illustrated on the 'Cite Descartes' district case study, in Eastern Paris. Dividing its 1 km² area into about 100 sub-areas enabled us to depict the projects' program and spatial layout very finely, especially so in relation to the transit stops and stations location. Some limitations and needs for further research are also outlined.


This paper aims to provide an overview of the current state of taxation in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, and its main reform needs and options. It previews the findings of recent studies prepared or commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for its forthcoming flagship publication More than Revenue: Taxation as a Development Tool in the -Development in the Americas- series. Reflecting fiscal consolidation imperatives, the main objective of fiscal policies in the region in recent decades has been revenue mobilization, often at the expense of efficiency and equity objectives. This paper analyzes the region's taxation in regard to revenue adequacy, efficiency, vertical and horizontal equity, ease of administration and compliance, and degree of fiscal decentralization, concluding that there is significant scope for reforms that would result in simultaneous improvement on several of these fronts. Although the paper does not provide a specific blueprint for reforms, which would need to be designed on a country-by-country basis, it identifies directions for reform that are relevant for most of the region.


City of Ambition is a brilliant history of the New Deal and its role in the making of modern New York City. The story of a remarkable collaboration between Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia, this is a case study in creative political leadership in the midst of a devastating depression. Roosevelt and La Guardia were an odd couple: patrician president and immigrant mayor, fireside chat and tabloid cartoon, pragmatic Democrat and reform Republican. But together, as leaders of America's two largest governments in the depths of the Great Depression, they fashioned a route to recovery for the nation and the master plan for a great city. Roosevelt and his "Brain Trust"-shrewd, energetic advisors such as Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins-sought to fight the Depression by channeling federal resources through America's cities and counties. La Guardia had replaced Tammany Hall cronies with policy experts, such as the imperious Robert Moses, who were committed to a strong public sector. The two leaders worked closely together. La Guardia had a direct line of communication with FDR and his staff, often visiting Washington carrying piles of blueprints. Roosevelt relied on the mayor as his link to the nation's cities and their needs. The combination was potent. La Guardia's Gotham became a laboratory for New Deal reform. Roosevelt's New Deal transformed city initiatives into major programs such as the Works Progress Administration, which changed the physical face of the United States. Together they built parks, bridges, and schools; put the unemployed to work; and strengthened the Progressive vision of government as serving the public purpose. Today everyone knows the FDR Drive as a main route to La Guardia Airport. The intersection of steel and concrete speaks to a pair of dynamic leaders whose collaboration lifted a city and a nation. Here is their story.


The aim of this study was to examine the effectiveness of teaching philosophy on the way community of inquiry on critical thinking and its dimensions of female students in fifth grade in Yazd. The study population included all fifth grade students in Yazd in academic year 2015–2016. The research method was quasiexperimental with pretest-posttest on experimental and control groups. For this purpose, 30 students were selected by using convenience sampling and they were randomly assigned to two groups, experimental group (n= 15) and control group (n= 15). The critical thinking questionnaire of WatsonGlazer was used for gathering data. Philosophy on the way community of inquiry was taught to the experimental group during 12 sessions (each session was 60 minutes). Results of examining hypothesis by using analysis of covariance (significance level= 0.05) showed that teaching philosophy on the way community of inquiry has effect on critical thinking and its dimensions (perception, inference, interpretation and evaluation of logical reasoning), and it has improved them.


In a recent article appearing in this journal, Douglas MacKenzie (2010) argues that President Hoover's business conferences artificially propped up wages in the early years of the Depression, aggravating unemployment. MacKenzie's (2010) critique of Hoover fails on at least two counts: it commits an aggregation fallacy and ignores the vast literature on real wage cyclicality, and it exaggerates a series of historical points on the authority that Hoover had to implement his high-wage policy. Readers of MacKenzie (2010) could also benefit from new research on Hoover's business conferences by Rose (2010), although MacKenzie (2010) himself certainly cannot be blamed for failing to incorporate such


Legionella pneumophila is found in diverse ecological niches such as axenic cultures, biofilms with other microbes, and intracellular vacuoles of protozoa and human cells. This may have provided ample opportunities for the organisms to rearrange their genomes and to accumulate genes that help them survive in these different environments. Legionella's ability to survive in harsh conditions such as in plumbing systems treated with potent biocides may require additional genes necessary for detoxification. The needed gene pool can be assembled via gene family expansions and horizontal gene transfer from other organisms. Genome comparisons of the Philadelphia 1 strain and those of Paris and Lens, indicating positions of the large-scale genome rearrangements. Phylogenetic and gene composition analysis indicate that different L. pneumophila strains display distinct acquisition histories for these gene subsets, suggesting gene rearrangements as well as repeated horizontal gene transfer events. Several dozen eukaryotic gene homologs with distinct phenotypes which appear to be acquired by gene transfer were identified. Overall, the genome of L. pneumophila reveals features supporting genome rearrangement events of different scales. Given its intracellular existence, it is not surprising that examination of the genome sequence offers evidence that L. pneumophila can be an active participant in horizontal gene transfer. As more strains of L. pneumophila are sequenced, along with other species of Legionella, much more will be learned about their evolutionary origins, lifestyle, and potential for pathogenicity.


This study investigates the experience of people from ethnic minority communities in a recruitment and selection process to An Garda Siochha which commenced in September 2005.
10 interviews were conducted with applicants for the position of trainee Garda. The interviewees were from a range of applicants of non Irish backgrounds who reached different stages in the recruitment process which was undertaken on behalf of the Garda Commissioner by the Public Appointments Service.
The findings show issues specific to different ethnic groups and adds to the evaluation of the recruitment and selection process and makes suggestions based on the results of these case studies to help develop alternative approaches at all stages in the recruitment process which may help increase participation of ethnic minorities in public service employment campaigns.
In addition suggestions are made for the implementation of a change management programme to ensure the development of an organisation culture which embraces diversity in order that the organisation can achieve the strategic goal of ethnic and cultural diversity as outlined in the Corporate Plan of An Garda Siochana for 2005-2007.


This report reviews current perspectives on market barriers to energy efficiency. Ratepayer-funded utility energy-efficiency programs are likely to change in scope, size, and nature as the deregulation process proceeds; the authors research focuses on understanding to what extent some form of future intervention may be warranted and how they might judge the success of particular interventions, especially those funded by ratepayers. They find that challenges to the existence of market barriers have, for the most part, failed to provide a testable alternative explanation for evidence suggesting that there is a substantial ``efficiency gap`` between a consumer`s actual investments in energy efficiency and those that appear to be in the consumer`s own interest. They then suggest that differences of opinion about the appropriateness of public policies stem not from disputes about whether market barriers exist, but from different perceptions of the magnitude of the barriers, and the efficacy and (possibly unintended) consequences of policies designed to overcome them. They conclude that there are compelling justifications for future energy-efficiency policies. Nevertheless, in order to succeed, they must be based on a sound understanding of the market problems they seek to correct and a realistic assessment of their likely efficacy. This understanding can only emerge from detailed investigations of the current operation of individual markets.


Urban Research Belfast (URB) is a two-year project that developed and evaluated an inter-disciplinary framework and practical tool to improve architects' and designers' skills to undertake urban design investigations, and to engage better with existing communities in contested inner-city contexts. It identifies a lack of effective skills amongst built environment design professionals to engage with other professionals, policy makers and members of the public in dynamic, challenging city contexts. URB established an original knowledge and training framework called TALK (Teaching Action Learning Knowledge) that proposes how to better connect abstract urban design theory to concrete experiments for more effective understanding of urban issues. This book section examines the context, imperatives, and theoretical framework that underpin the research design and qualitative methodology. It then describes and discusses a key research outcome for applying the TALK principles to live situations in marginalised urban neighbourhoods, testing an original cross-disciplinary action-based tool called Machines for Experiential Urban Learning (MEUL) in Belfast. MEUL is a broadly transferable mechanism to translate experiential theory into collaborative design strategies for architects and designers engaged in urban investigations, arguing for a shift from object- and solution-focused priorities to process- and narrative-led aims and place-driven aspirations. The research involved over two hundred participants through a range of related live projects including temporary installations in empty city spaces, public workshops and exhibitions. Photographic and video documentation combine with survey and interview feedback to examine how the proposed design framework and tools could influence wider socio-cultural, political, and professional dimensions of urban design practice and inner-city regeneration. The conclusions argue that tools like MEUL which focus on socio-cultural narrative and open-ended 'storytelling' processes of design promote greater understanding of early-stage urban design investigations from within rather than as an outsider. They add to international debates on designers' roles in built environment futures.


Quality of life (QoL) is discussed as an additional outcome measure in multiple sclerosis (MS). However, few questionnaires assessing disease specific QoL in MS have been published. On the basis of the literature and interviews with clinicians and MS patients, we have developed a disease specific QoL instrument and validated it in a broad range of patients with MS. In this study, a heterogeneous sample of n=237 MS patients completed the newly developed Hamburg Quality of Life Questionnaire in Multiple Sclerosis (HAQUAMS, in German language) and a battery of already validated questionnaires. They further underwent neurological scoring and objective tests. By these means, we investigated its validity, appropriateness, internal consistency, and retest reliability. Internal consistency and retest coefficients were high and satisfied psychometric standards. Convergent and discriminant validity was supported by direction, magnitude and pattern of correlations with other health measures. HAQUAMS subscales and its total score distinguished between patient groups of varied disease severity, cognitive impairment, and affective symptomatology. No floor or ceiling effects were found in either of the HAQUAMS subscales. The HAQUAMS is a reliable, valid and appropriate instrument for QoL assessment in multiple sclerosis. Data of responsiveness are currently being obtained.


Within the research carried out in the field of the theory of
functional sentence perspective (FSP), the question of
potentiality in interpretation seems to play a marginal role.
The paper deals with the treatment of the issue from the
synchronic point of view, focusing on the position of
potentiality in FSP analysis. The author draws on the findings
presented by Humboldt, Mathesius and Firbas and presents the
results of his own investigation into the issue of potentiality
in FSP. The discussion is illustrated by authentic examples of
cases of potentiality in functional interpretation, and by
suggested solutions.


The three East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania are justly famous for their rich avifauna which includes approximately 150 species which visit the area from the Palaearctic Region as well as a large and varied Ethiopian element. The ornithological literature pertaining to the area is surprisingly sparse; the present paper is an attempt to clarify the distributional knowledge of the less common Palaearctic migrants. The most widely used reference work covering the three countries is that of Mackworth-Praed & Grant (1957, 1960) although this book deals with several extra-liminal territories as well as East Africa proper. A serious limitation of Mackworth-Praed & Grant is that very few definitive records are given. The most useful reference dealing with Kenya and Uganda is Jackson (1938); Jackson's distributional notes are based upon recorded specimens which, although not usually dated precisely, can frequently be located in the earlier literature or in museums. Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania) and Zanzibar were excluded from Jackson's work although Moreau produced a most excellent account of all the migrants to Tanzania at about the same time (Moreau 1937). Definitive records for the three countries were brought up to date therefore, to just before the Second World War. Since that time the birds of East Africa have been poorly documented, in marked contrast to those of Zambia which have received detailed attention by several workers, especially by C. W. Benson.


PURPOSE
As a crucial step in accessing the kidney in several minimally invasive interventions, percutaneous renal access (PRA) practicality and safety may be improved through the fusion of computed tomography (CT) and ultrasound (US) data. This work aims to assess the potential of a surface-based registration technique and establish an optimal US acquisition protocol to fuse two-dimensional (2D) US and CT data for image-guided PRA.

METHODS
Ten porcine kidney phantoms with fiducial markers were imaged using CT and three-dimensional (3D) US. Both images were manually segmented and aligned. In a virtual environment, 2D contours were extracted by slicing the 3D US kidney surfaces and using usual PRA US-guided views, while the 3D CT kidney surfaces were transformed to simulate positional variability. Surface-based registration was performed using two methods of the iterative closest point algorithm (point-to-point, ICP1; and point-to-plane, ICP2), while four acquisition variants were studied: (a) use of single-plane (transverse, SPT ; or longitudinal, SPL ) vs bi-plane views (BP); (b) use of different kidney's coverage ranges acquired by a probe's sweep; (c) influence of sweep movements; and (d) influence of the spacing between consecutive slices acquired for a specific coverage range.

RESULTS
BP view showed the best performance (TRE = 2.26 mm) when ICP2 method, a wide kidney coverage range (20°, with slices spaced by 5°), and a large sweep along the central longitudinal view were used, showing a statistically similar performance (P = 0.097) to a full 3D US surface registration (TRE = 2.28 mm).

CONCLUSIONS
An optimal 2D US acquisition protocol was evaluated. Surface-based registration, using multiple slices and specific sweep movements and views, is here suggested as a valid strategy for intraoperative image fusion using CT and US data, having the potential to be applied to other image modalities and/or interventions.


Southeast Asia is one of the most vulnerable regions of the world to the impacts of climate change. At the same time, the region is also following a trajectory that could make it a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Understanding the economic implications of policy options for low carbon growth is essential to formulate instruments that achieve the greatest emissions reductions at lowest cost. This study focuses on five developing countries of Southeast Asia that collectively account for 90% of regional emissions in recent years—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam. The analyses are based on the CGE economy-energy-environment model ICES under an array of scenarios reflecting business as usual, fragmented climate policies, an approximately 2.4°C post 2020 global climate stabilization target, termed 650 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent (eq), and an approximately 2°C global target (termed 500 ppm CO2 eq). Averted deforestation through reducing emissions from forest degradation and deforestation (REDD) is included in some scenarios. The study shows that global and coordinated action is found to be critical to the cost effectiveness of emissions stabilization policies. A 650ppm stabilization scenario (below 3°C in 2100) has a similar cost to the region to current fragmented targets, but achieves much higher levels of emissions reductions. However, only some of the countries have short-term emissions targets that are consistent with a stabilization scenario at 650ppm: these are Indonesia, Philippines and Viet Nam. None of the countries' mid-term targets are coherent with more ambitious stabilization scenario at 500ppm.


Abstract. A series of long-term and temporary measurements were conducted to study the improvement of air quality in Beijing during the Olympic Games period (8–24 August 2008). To evaluate actions taken to improve the air quality, comparisons of particle number and volume size distributions of August 2008 and 2004–2007 were performed. The total particle number and volume concentrations were 14 000 cm −3 and 37 μm −3 cm −3 in August of 2008, respectively. These were reductions of 41% and 35% compared with mean values of August 2004–2007. A cluster analysis on air mass history and source apportionment were performed, exploring reasons for the reduction of particle concentrations. Back trajectories were classified into five major clusters. Air masses from the south direction are always associated with pollution events during the summertime in Beijing. In August 2008, the frequency of air mass arriving from the south was 1.3 times higher compared to the average of the previous years, which however did not result in elevated particle volume concentrations in Beijing. Therefore, the reduced particle number and volume concentrations during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games cannot be only explained by meteorological conditions. Four factors were found influencing particle concentrations using a positive matrix factorization (PMF) model. They were identified as local and remote traffic emissions, combustion sources as well as secondary transformation. The reductions of the four sources were calculated to 47%, 44%, 43% and 30%, respectively. The significant reductions of particle number and volume concentrations may attribute to actions taken, focusing on primary emissions, especially related to the traffic and combustion sources.


The background of this thesis is the cosmic censorship hypothesis, which states that the gravitational collapse of physically reasonable matter should not result in the formation of naked singularities. In the absence of a proof of this hypothesis, much effort has been directed towards examining spacetimes which contain naked singularities, in an attempt to determine the nature of the cosmic censor. One area of particular interest is the study of perturbations in naked singularity spacetimes. Should perturbations of a spacetime diverge on the Cauchy horizon associated with the naked singularity, then this spacetime can be ruled out as a serious counter-example to cosmic
censorship. In this thesis we examine the behaviour of general linear perturbations of the class of self-similar Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi spacetimes which contain a naked singularity. The perturbations naturally split into two
classes, odd and even parity, which we consider in turn. For the odd parity perturbation, we first identify a single gauge invariant scalar which describes the perturbation and obeys an inhomogeneous wave equation. We then show that a perturbation which evolves from initially regular data remains finite on the Cauchy horizon. Finiteness is demonstrated by considering the behaviour of suitable energy norms of the perturbation (and pointwise values
of these quantities) on natural spacelike hypersurfaces. For the even parity perturbations, we first show that a particular average of the state variable describing the perturbations generically diverges at the Cauchy horizon. Using this, we show that the L^p-norm of the perturbations also diverges, for 1 ≤ p ≤ ∞. This divergence has a characteristic form that depends only on the background spacetime. By combining these results with an extension
of odd parity methods, as well as some theorems from real analysis, we can demonstrate that the perturbations generically diverge pointwise on the Cauchy horizon. A general perturbation is a sum of odd and even perturbations;
our results therefore indicate that a general perturbation diverges on the Cauchy horizon. This result supports the cosmic censorship hypothesis.


This article sets out to provide a summarized historical survey of some relevant contributions to axiological semantics from linguists included in the two most influential linguistic traditions from the 50s to the late 70s: structural linguistics and transformational-generative grammar. In fact, even if their representative opinions at that time could now be regarded as incidental, it would be unfair to claim that some of their intuitions and principles have not been crucial in illuminating essential aspects of the parameter of axiological evaluation in modern linguistics. In this respect, it is worth highlighting the ideas disseminated by key figures of the Saussurean or Chomskyan traditions from the perspective given by half a century of evolution in the field. For that purpose contributions are included from authors such as Apresjan, Bally, Coseriu, Duchacek, Fodor, Grzegorek, Guiraud, Katz, Klima, Pottier, Stati, and Ullmann, among others.


Any phonological theory needs to encompass an account of acquisition and any account
of acquisition must take its place within a general theory of phonology. This thesis aims
to ascribe phonological significance to speech perception in infancy, a move impossible
unless phonology is defined, as it is here, from both a psycholinguistic and a formal
viewpoint as a dedicated pattern-recognition system. Extant results from infant studies
are reviewed and aligned with current phonological theory. In particular, such theory
characterises phonology as bi-modular, so the acquisition of individual melodic and
prosodic modules and their subsequent orientation with respect to one another must
constitute three different developmental tasks. This delivers a relatively simple account
of the mapping between psychoacoustics and phonology.
Perception and pre-existing theories of segmental complexity are related using an original
experiment into the perception of vowel-height contrast in Catalan.
If infant perception has phonological import, then disparate phonetic reflexes which are
predicted as phonologically identical should show parallels in acquisition. General theory
argues that the same abstract melodic objects underlie both laryngeal contrasts in stops
and lexical tonal contrasts. Earlier studies show that language-specific attunement to stop
contrasts has taken place by the age of six months. New tests are now reported, using
children of the same age, which demonstrate that infants acquiring Yoruba, a language
which has a three-way contrast for tone, attend more closely to pitch changes within the
minimal domain word than do English controls. Further, they only attend to those pitch
changes that possess phonological import within that domain in the steady-state language.
In this their perception exactly parallels that displayed by adult speakers. Apparent
anomalies in the results of these tests are shown to be closely parallelled by phonological
asymmetries in the tonology of Yoruba.


The purpose of this paper is to develop methods that can reconstruct a bandlimited discrete-time signal from an irregular set of samples at unknown locations. We define a solution to the problem using first a geometric and then an algebraic point of view. We find the locations of the irregular set of samples by treating the problem as a combinatorial optimization problem. We employ an exhaustive method and two descent methods: the random search and cyclic coordinate methods. The numerical simulations were made on three types of irregular sets of locations: random sets; sets with jitter around a uniform set; and periodic nonuniform sets. Furthermore, for the periodic nonuniform set of locations, we develop a fast scheme that reduces the computational complexity of the problem by exploiting the periodic nonuniform structure of the sample locations in the DFT.


Purpose of this paper: the purpose of this paper is to investigate how to measure collaborative design performance and, in turn, improve the final design output during a design process, with a clear objective to develop a Design Performance Measurement (DPM) matrix to measure design project team members¹ design collaboration performances. Design/methodology/approach: the methodology adopted in this research uses critical literature reviews, in-depth focus groups interviews and a questionnaire survey. Findings: the main finding of this study is a DPM matrix that addresses five DPM indicators: efficiency, effectiveness, collaboration, management skill, and innovation, and 25 detailed DPM criteria. It was found that decision-making efficiency is the most important DPM criteria for collaborative design efficiency; plus delivering to the brief for effectiveness; clear team goal/objectives for collaboration; decision-making ability for management skill; and competitive advantage for innovation. Research limitations/implications: as the present study was focused on exploring DPM during a design process, some key DPM criteria, which are not measurable during a design development process, were not included in this study. The proposed multi-feedback approach for DPM matrix implementation needs to be validated in future research. Practical implications: the DPM matrix can be applied to support a design manager in measuring and improving collaborative design performance during a design process, by reviewing and modifying collaborative design development, identifying the design team strengths and weaknesses, improving team communication, and suggesting suitable responsive actions. Original/values: the major contribution of this study is the investigation and development of a DPM matrix to measure collaborative design performance during a design process


The barrier model of productivity growth suggests that individual country productivity is related to the world technology frontier disturbed by national barriers. We offer a country study of the barrier model exploiting the dramatic changes in the linkages to the world economy in South Africa. The productivity growth in the manufacturing sector panel for 1970-2003 covers a period of political and economic turbulence and international sanctions. The econometric analysis uses tariffs as measure of barrier and fixed effects estimation to concentrate inference to time series properties. The model shows how productivity growth can be understood as a combination of world frontier growth and the tariff barrier to international spillovers. The estimates establish a long run relationship where domestic productivity follows the world frontier and with change of the barrier affecting transitional growth.


DURING the past generation, there has been a dramatic expansion of legalized gambling. Beginning with New Hampshire in 1964, 37 states and the District of Columbia have instituted lotteries. As recently as 1988, only two states allowed casino gambling. Today, 24 states do so, as do a number of Native American reservations. And gambling has become very big business. Total wagers reached nearly half a trillion dollars in 1994. Gross revenues from gambling have surged--to $40 billion annually, from only $10 billion a decade ago. Casino gambling has quadrupled; lottery revenues have registered a sixfold increase; and gambling on Indian reservations, nonexistent until the late 1980s, now brings in more than $3 billion each year. State governments drain off about one-third of total lottery wagers to finance public-sector activities.


Neoproterozoic gray to dark gray carbonaceous shales belonging to the Bhander Group exposed in and around Maihar and Nagod areas, Satna district, Madhya Pradesh, contains an exceptionally well preserved, diversified fossils represented by both planktic and benthic meso-megascopic (millimeter to centimeter in dimension) and multicellular metaphytes. The fossils are of varied shape viz., leaf like thalloid films, palmate, straight to curve, with/without holdfast. Some of them are dichotomously branched and compactly entangled thin filaments, including possible reproductive structures. Out of eighteen algal taxa described assemblage includes fifteen genera and sixteen species belong to known metaphytes interpretable as multicellular eukaryotes. The assemblage comprises thalloid algae referable to Aggregatosphaera miaoheensis, Baculiphyca taeniata,Doushantuophyton lineare, Daus-hantuophyton cometa, Enteromorphites siniansis, Eopalmaria pristina, Flabellophyton lantianensis, Glomulus filamentum,Huangshanophyton fluticulosum, Jiangchuania taeniphylla, Konglingiphyton erecta, Palaeochorda vindhyansis, Sitaulia minor and discoidal carbonaceous films of Churaria cir-cularis, Longfengshania ovalis, Protoarenicola baiguashanensis, Protoconites minor and Tawuia dalensis. Amongst these two taxa viz. S. minor gen. et. sp. nov. and P. vindhyansis gen. et. sp. nov. Presence of holdfasts and branches indicates advent of complexity in Neoproterozoic life. It is assumed that they preferred shallow water where dissolved nutrients and congenial stable environment. The multicellular metaphytes are comparable to modern algae belonging to Rhodophyta, Phaeophyta, Xanthophyta and Chlorophyta. This assemblage closely resembles the known assemblages of the equivalent sediments (Cryogenian to Early Ediacaran age) of Miaohe biota (China) and White Sea Biota, central Ural (Russia).

 Key words: Multicellular, eukaryotes, metaphytes, Bhander group, Vindhyan Supergroup.


Cities are more than centers of production. This paper introduces new spatial variables in order to gain new insights into the role cities play as centers of leisure, consumption and beauty. First, a revealed preference indicator of urbanity is constructed based on geo-tagged photos shared in web-communities. Second, spatial variables are generated to capture features that have received little attention in quantitative urban research. Among them, the quality of the built environment, both with respect to contemporary as well as historic architecture, and the cultural endowment constituted by mainstream and avant-garde establishments. From a comparative spatial analysis of the European metropolises Berlin and London, I find that urbanity defined along these lines is of similar importance for the spatial structure cities as labor market accessibility and spillover effects. Urbanity attracts consumption affine households, especially the high-skilled.


When a group needs to reach a consensus decision, uninformed members can help to reduce the influence of a manipulative minority. Ideas are like fire, observed Thomas Jefferson in 1813—information can be passed on without relinquishing it (1). Indeed, the ease and benefit of sharing information select for individuals to aggregate into groups, driving the buildup of complexity in the biological world (2, 3). Once the members of some collective—whether cells of a fruit fly or citizens of a democratic society—have accumulated information, they must integrate that information and make decisions based upon it. When these members share a common interest, as do the stomata on the surface of a plant leaf (4), integrating distributed information may be a computational challenge. But when individuals do not have entirely coincident interests, strategic problems arise. Members of animal herds, for example, face a tension between aggregating information for the benefit of the herd as a whole, and avoiding manipulation by self-interested individuals in the herd. Which collective decision procedures are robust to manipulation by selfish players (5)? On page 1578 of this issue, Couzin et al. (6) show how the presence of uninformed agents can promote democratic outcomes in collective decision problems.


Some 7.3 billion people currently live on the planet. Of these, 3.4 billion live in rural areas. In just a few regions—Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa—less than 50 per cent of poverty is now located in rural areas. But for the rest of the world's regions between 55 per cent and 80 per cent of the poor continue to live in the countryside. Progress is being made, but much of the know how needed is not disseminated outside of a small coterie of professionals who work in the area. With urban development attracting a great deal of attention lately, poorer rural areas deserve the same and new knowledge for empowerment of rural communities is urgently needed.

This book provides an overview of current thinking and practices that have emerged over the last thirty years for uplifting rural communities in developing economies. Drawing on a body of knowledge across a spectrum of relevant disciplines, this book provides a range of innovative ideas for rural planning, housing and infrastructure development.

Governments in many emerging economies, where rural poverty is often most acute, have attempted to improve livelihoods. Approaches and techniques that have been used for urban development are often not applicable to rural communities. Studies show that money allocated for rural development is often not effectively spent due to distance, lack of infrastructure, lack of education, poverty and other factors. Meanwhile, the gap in development between the city and country continues to grow, sometimes leading to social and political instability, in both developing and developed countries. This book seeks to provide a guidebook for meeting such challenges.

Through in-depth enquiry of global practices and thinking about rural development, and selected case studies, the authors argue that careful consideration must be given to incorporating issues of resilience, resourcefulness and the involvement of communities at grassroots levels in realising the transformation of rural settlements into Smart Villages.


Classical physics, anchored in materialist reductionism, offered adequate descriptions of everyday mechanics but ultimately proved insufficient for describing the mechanics of extremely high speeds or small sizes, and was supplemented nearly a century ago by quantum physics, which includes consciousness in its formulation. Materialist psychology, modeled on the reductionism of classical physics, likewise offered adequate descriptions of everyday mental functioning but ultimately proved insufficient for describing mentation under extreme conditions, such as the continuation of mental function when the brain is inactive or impaired, such as occurs near death. "Near-death experiences" include phenomena that challenge materialist reductionism, such as enhanced mentation and memory during cerebral impairment, accurate perceptions from a perspective outside the body, and reported visions of deceased persons, including those not previously known to be deceased. Complex consciousness, including cognition, perception, and memory, under conditions such as cardiac arrest and general anesthesia, when it cannot be associated with normal brain function, require a revised psychology anchored not in 19th-century classical physics but rather in 21st-century quantum physics that includes consciousness in its conceptual formulation.


Climate change is now almost universally accepted as a reality and so too is the "hand of man". We are causing it. However, do we really understand (accept) what is causing most change or are we focusing huge amounts of money on politically correct (not "wrong") symptoms? Are greenhouse gases the real problem? Or is how we manage the land the problem and the solution? We put forward some propositions that beg a rethinking of the climate change issue, with a focus on better local land management for better local climate outcomes. We acknowledge that our evidence is based largely on a different way of thinking about climate change and local ecosystem health, but some case studies support this perspective and therefore require close scrutiny with an open mind. The core to our perspective is thermodynamics and the role of plants in that. Plants made our planet suitable for humans. We contend that the ecological malaise is driving climate change at a greater rate than industrial emissions and that the solution lies in land recovery. That is, if we want to address the causes and not simply the symptoms and convenient part truths. Enduring, self-sustaining, ecosystem rejuvenation is the key. We discuss how this can be pursued at a farm scale. We focus on key issues and how they can be addressed by systems thinking, rather than seeing the symptom as the core problem. Bush encroachment is such a symptom. We cannot change how brightly the sun shines, but we can influence how that energy is used, especially if we link it to water management and plant growth.


The focus this research is on the aspects of success for African American entrepreneurs in Columbia, Missouri that could be emulated to grow more sustainable black businesses thereby increasing the economy of the community. This ethnography will explore central phenomena of the sociology of entrepreneurship and group characteristics that aid in the development of successful business activity. These aspects may include positive community networks, family support, work ethic, and risk-taking behaviors. The research includes an analysis of entrepreneurial success based on education and experience, work ethic and passion, to help identify trends. These trends could assist in the growth and sustainability of Black business, increased economic and political power, and a greater socio-economic status in the community at large. Understanding the trends will maximize the potential for increasing African American businesses resulting in greater self-sufficiency, economic stability, and strengthen the overall economy. The ultimate objective is to add to the limited body of science on successful African American entrepreneurship and to promote the social and behavioral sciences and ensure an environment where equal opportunity, equity, and diversity are a priority. My research accepts the John Sibley Butler theory that states "this area of sociology differs from traditional race theory which espouses the necessity for separate Black economic development to sustain a successful business. Rather, Butler asserts that to the extent to which an ethnic group is assimilated into a society the higher the probability for economic success for that group. Instead, the sociology of entrepreneurship concentrates on the process by which groups develop, maintain, and expand business enterprises within the economic structure increase economic success," (Butler, Page 1). Gone are the days of exclusive Black-on-Black trade—today's African American entrepreneur must tap into mainstream or white markets to successfully compete. The data in this study was collected through a sample of 24 Black business owners who have a physical location, and personal experience with business success in Columbia, Missouri. These respondents represent 20% of all Blacks doing business as individual proprietorships, partnerships, or any type of corporation in Columbia. These respondents were willing voluntary informants selected based on their knowledge and availability. Nearly 29% operated in the retail trade industry, 25% in the beauty industry, 46% professional services which includes legal services, health and fitness, education, social assistance, and other services, construction, and repair and maintenance. This study of growing sustainable Black business in Columbia, Missouri is grounded in classical Race Theory as the conceptual basis with economic uplift as the framework. This study suggests that a separate Black economy is no longer a viable option. The important question to ask moving forward is: how does the majority population gain awareness, and then how do they move beyond the traditional consumer practices to a more consumer-culturalconsciousness approach? White consumers may have to become more proactive in much the same way as they have embraced environmentalism. Black business owners may have to assimilate more into the dominate group in order to maximize the probability of economic success. https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/8341/short.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y Dr. Rex Campbell, Dissertation Supervisor


Background The global prevalence of diabetes mellitus is increasing alarmingly. However, the quality of vital medicines and medical products used to treat and monitor diabetes remains uncertain but of potential great public health significance. Here, we review the available evidence on the quality of antidiabetic medicines and supplies for self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG) and discuss their potential impact for the patients and society. Methods Searches were conducted in PubMed, Embase, Google Scholar, Google and relevant websites in English and French. The Medicine Quality Assessment Reporting Guideline (MEDQUARG) was used to assess the quality of medicine quality surveys. Results 52 publications on the quality of antidiabetic medicines, including 5 medicine quality prevalence surveys and 20 equivalence studies, were analysed. The prevalence surveys and equivalence studies included 674 samples of which 73 (10.8%) were of poor quality. The median (Q1–Q3) concordance with MEDQUARG items was 30.8% (19.2%–42.3%). No prevalence surveys on SMBG supplies' quality were found, but 29 publications, including falsified products and incorrect results due to strip degradation or contamination, were identified. Conclusion There is little accessible evidence on the quality of antidiabetic medicines and SMBG supplies. Surveys were poorly designed and reported, making data aggregation and interpretation problematic. Despite these caveats, these results suggest that there are important issues with the quality of medical products for diabetes that need focused monitoring. There is an urgent need to achieve consensus protocols for designing, conducting and reporting medical product quality surveys. PROSPERO registration number CRD42016039841.


A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) report concludes that global warming, while already a global crisis, is likely to become even more devastating. The scientific consensus is that global warming is caused by increases in greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide. The Sahel of West Africa seems to be more adversely affected by such climate changes, leading to reduced and more sporadic rainfall. In addition, food security in the region is tenuous and fragile, due to adverse climate change, but also due to the historical mining of nutrients and carbon. With the adoption of the Kyoto accords, at least by some countries, sequestered carbon (C) has become a tradable commodity. This provides a double incentive to increase soil organic carbon in the C-depleted and degraded soils of West Africa — return C to improve soil quality and assist in removing CO2 from the atmosphere to assist in mitigating climate change. A challenge, however, remains to determine which agricultural systems can actually sequester C. The technology called Aménagement en courbes de niveau (ACN), which can be roughly translated as 'Ridge-tillage', has given crop yield increases of 30 to 50%. To date, there has only been anecdotal evidence suggesting that Aménagement en courbes de niveau leads to increased soil organic C. The objectives of the study reported here were to determine whether the technology has the potential to sequester C in West African soils, and, if so, how much. In this study, soil organic C was measured by combustion methods in soils sampled at 0–20 and 20–40 cm depths in a series of experiments in Mali, Senegal and The Gambia. Soil organic C was measured in three very different types of experiments, all including Aménagement en courbes de niveau technology, resulting in three methods of measuring C sequestration. Our results indicate that the Aménagement en courbes de niveau technology significantly increased maize yields by 24% by weight in the Gambia experiment while soil organic C was increased by 26% in The Gambia, by 12% in Siguidolo, Mali, and by 14% in peanut systems of Nioro, Senegal. These increases in soil organic C are likely due to three factors: (1) reduced erosion and movement of soil, (2) increased crop growth resulting from the greater capture of rainfall, and (3) increased growth and density of shrubs and trees resulting from the increased subsoil water, resulting in turn from the increased capture of rainfall, and reduced runoff. Measuring soil C on fields that were successively placed under Aménagement en courbes de niveau management and the use of replicated experimental plots appear to be the best methods to quantify the C sequestration potential of the practice. These results indicate that this soil and water conservation technology not only harvests water and increases food production, but also increases soil organic carbon. This technology thus is a successful technique to sequester C in soils and if carried out in a large region may both offset CO2 emissions and help mitigate climate change.


Background and Objectives: Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. It has been recognized that stress, diabetes, and hypertension are important in etiology and progression of CAD. This study is to evaluate the role of meditation in improving biochemical parameters such as blood glucose, glycosylated hemoglobin, and serum insulin levels in known CAD patients. Material and Methods: Sixty CAD patients are divided into two groups of which one group did meditation and other did not. Blood glucose, glycosylated hemoglobin, and fasting serum insulin levels were measured before and at the end of 6 months of study in both the groups. Results: At the end of the study, significant decrease was seen in patients who practiced meditation as compared to other group. Conclusion: Meditation may modulate the physiological response to stress through neurohumoral activation, which may be a novel therapeutic target for the treatment of CAD.


Crowdfunding is an emerging Internet application for creators designing campaigns (projects) to collect funds from public investors. Usually, the limited budget of the creator is manually divided into several perks (reward options), that should fit various market demand and further bring different monetary contributions for the campaign. Therefore, it is very challenging for each creator to design an effective campaign. To this end, in this paper, we aim to enhance the funding performance of the newly proposed campaigns, with a focus on optimizing the product supply of perks. Specifically, given the expected budget and the perks of a campaign, we propose a novel solution to automatically recommend the optimal product supply to every perk for balancing the expected return of this campaign against the risk. Along this line, we define it as a constrained portfolio selection problem, where the risk of each campaign is measured by a multitask learning method. Finally, experimental results on the real-world crowdfunding data clearly prove that the optimized product supply can help improve the campaign performance significantly, and meanwhile, our multi-task learning method could more precisely estimate the risk of each campaign.


Living cells dynamically modulate the local morphologies of their actin cytoskeletons to perform biological functions, including force transduction, intracellular transport, and cell division. A major challenge is to understand how diverse structures of the actin cytoskeleton are assembled from a limited set of molecular building blocks. Here we study the spontaneous self-assembly of a minimal model of cytoskeletal materials, consisting of semiflexible actin filaments, crosslinkers, and molecular motors. Using coarse-grained simulations, we demonstrate that by changing concentrations and kinetics of crosslinkers and motors we can generate three distinct structural phases of actomyosin assemblies: bundled, polarity-sorted, and contracted. We introduce new metrics to distinguish these structural phases and demonstrate their functional roles. We find that the binding kinetics of motors and crosslinkers can be tuned to optimize contractile force generation, motor transport, and mechanical response. By quantitatively characterizing the relationships between modes of cytoskeletal self-assembly, the resulting structures, and their functional consequences, our work suggests new principles for the design of active materials.


Seed is the most important input in agriculture and, compared to fertilisers, pesticides and labour, still the cheapest. Two keys to better yields are good cultural practices and the improvement of local, open-pollinated varieties.

A major problem in agriculture remains the availability of the right seeds against the right price. The most discouraging thing is that the cost of improved seeds is growing by the day, which is not only disadvantageous to smallholders. It is also a stumbling block to any country seeking to achieve food security for all its citizens. In the case of Malawi, for example, before hybrid seeds were introduced in the early 1950s, farmers did not bother to buy seeds. They used their own or exchanged them with neighbours. The introduction of hybrids was accompanied by subsidies on seeds and other inputs. It was, then, not so much a burden for a poor smallholder to start buying these seeds.

The situation is different nowadays. In 1987, the government started implementing the IMF/World Bank recommendation of structural adjustment and slowly removed its subsidies. This made farm input prices, including hybrid seeds, unaffordable for smallholders. Maize production declined as some farmers who had adopted hybrids fell back to local maize production.

Need for intermediate product

In Malawi, 90% of the land area used for maize is on smallholdings; of this 80% is sown with low-yielding, unimproved varieties. It was therefore logical to initiate a maize breeding programme that would offer an intermediate product, a variety that farmers could afford, that was higher yielding, yet similar to local varieties in terms of storage and processing, and from which farmers could save their own next year s seed. This is where the OPVs came in. Although open-pollinated maize varieties cannot compete with hybrid maize in performance in high fertility environments, they do perform better than hybrids in low fertility environments. That is why I would recommend OPVs to poor smallholders in ACP countries whose land is mostly less fertile due to intensity of growing crops without following crop rotation concepts.

Beyond affordability

The sad thing is that though researchers have come up with a number of OPVs, many commercial companies do not want to promote and sell these varieties. But why? They fear losing their trade since most OPVs can be recycled for three years without losing their productivity. This recycling might be a disadvantage to the commercial companies, but there are cost advantages to a smallholder. Food production for the household will not fall as would be the case if primitive local varieties were used as an alternative. In this sense, therefore, I will commend to governments of ACP countries and other decision-makers to encourage the use of OPVs among poor smallholders. This is how they can achieve food security. Remember, in poor countries like Malawi, smallholders form the bulk of the population. What is the purpose of promoting hybrid varieties, favourable for rich farmers, and leaving aside OPVs which are ideal for the smallholder majority? On that note, it is important to think about the type of farming systems and the target community when thinking about agricultural development. Promote what is ideal for smallholders to smallholders. The ambition to achieve food security for all should be the mantle of agricultural programmes, not promoting the commercial activities of seed companies.

Save seeds

Another point to note on farming systems is that of input management. In our research in Malawi it turned out that under low input management system, hybrids had no significant advantage over OPVs in yield performance. Smallholders who are mainly poor do not grow their seeds under high input management. There is no sense, therefore, in encouraging them to grow the elite or hybrid seeds for if they do so, they will lose yields significantly.

One other point I want to emphasise is training. This goes with the common song of empowerment. Smallholders need to be trained in seed production as well as in processing and marketing skills. This should be provided to the farmers in their cooperatives. It will ensure that the farmers themselves come up with their favourable varieties of seeds in terms of traditional and scientific demands.

Traditionally, in Malawi maize is pounded in a mortar to remove the bran before it is taken to be milled into flour. Subsistence farmers always favour varieties of maize as hard as local varieties for these

purposes. If farmers are empowered to produce OPVs which favour these traditional methods, then their food security could be assured. Such programmes will also ensure a constant flow of pure stock into the seed production system, as farmers will never worry about going to buy seeds even after the three year time span for OPVs. In Malawi the government and donors like the European Union have been facilitating such training programmes. The result is that the seed of crops that five years ago could not be found on the market can now be purchased: improved OPV maize, groundnuts, beans, soybeans, pigeon peas and many more.

All in all, I would define the major challenges in food security as strengthening the seed system and intensifying farmer training on good crop production practices for maximum benefits.

[caption to illustration]

Elizabeth Mary Minofu Sibale is an agricultural scientist specialised in maize. She has worked for the research department in Malawi s ministry of agriculture. She is now a programme manager for the food security programme of the EU Delegation to Malawi. In 2000, she won the annual award of the World Bank Group and IMF Africa Club for her work on breeding Open Pollinated Varieties (OPVs).

The opinions expressed in Viewpoint are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CTA.


Background and Objective: Portable and readily accessible wellness devices can aid vital sign measuring for those interested in tracking their health. In this diagnostic accuracy study, we evaluated the performance of the VitalWellness device (VW), a wireless, compact, noninvasive device that measures four vital signs (VS) – blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), respiratory rate (RR), and body temperature (BT) – using the index finger and forehead. Methods: Adult volunteers with VS that fell both within and outside of the normal physiological range were enrolled to provide BP, HR, RR, and BT measurements using both the VW and Food and Drug Administration-approved reference devices. A subgroup of participants underwent an additional test to analyze the VW's performance on HR and RR outside of normal physiological ranges. Statistical measurements were plotted on scatter and Bland–Altman plots. Sensitivity analyses to evaluate the VW's performance by gender, skin color, finger size, and auxiliary activities were performed. Results: A total of 263 participants completed the study. On an average, systolic BP measured using the VW was 10 mmHg lower than that of the reference device (correlation coefficient r = 0.7), whereas diastolic BP was 3 mmHg lower (r = 0.6), and RR was 2 bpm lower (r = 0.7). VW HR and BT measurements were, on average, 1 bpm and 0.3°F higher than the corresponding reference measurements (r = 0.9 and r = 0.3), respectively. Conclusion: The VW device is well-suited for home-based, nonmedical monitoring of HR, RR, and BP. Further improvement in measurement accuracy is required to enable applications for medical use.


The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account. These results are also reconciled with meta-analytic approaches and with other investigations on how school resources affect labor market outcomes. Simple resource policies hold little hope for improving student outcomes.


In this paper, we take a control-theoretic approach to answering some standard questions in statistical mechanics, and use the results to derive limitations of classical measurements. A central problem is the relation between systems which appear macroscopically dissipative but are microscopically lossless. We show that a linear system is dissipative if, and only if, it can be approximated by a linear lossless system over arbitrarily long time intervals. Hence lossless systems are in this sense dense in dissipative systems. A linear active system can be approximated by a nonlinear lossless system that is charged with initial energy. As a by-product, we obtain mechanisms explaining the Onsager relations from time-reversible lossless approximations, and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem from uncertainty in the initial state of the lossless system. The results are applied to measurement devices and are used to quantify limits on the so-called observer effect, also called back action, which is the impact the measurement device has on the observed system. In particular, it is shown that deterministic back action can be compensated by using active elements, whereas stochastic back action is unavoidable and depends on the temperature of the measurement device.