In three experiments we investigated the dynamics of impression formation when perceivers encounter unsurprising (e.g. male mechanic) versus surprising (e.g. female mechanic) social category conjunctions. In Experiment 1, participants took longer to form an impression of targets described using a surprising versus an unsurprising conjunction of categorizations. In Experiment 2, we investigated the stages during which impressions of category conjunctions are formed. While unsurprising category combinations were characterized with reference to 'constituent' stereotypic traits, surprising combinations were characterized initially by stereotypic traits but later by 'emergent' impressions. In Experiment 3, we investigated motivational states that drive the dynamics of category conjunction. We found that higher Personal Need for Structure (PNS) predicted the use of more emergent and fewer constituent attributes in the impressions formed of surprising combinations. Across all three experiments, more 'causal attributes' were used in descriptions of the surprising combination. We discuss the implications of these findings for developing a model of the dynamics and composition of social category conjunctions.


Stochastic valuation modeling is an important area for financial professionals who deal in products such as equity insurance, especially segregated fund contracts. A stochastic analysis of the guarantee liabilities under any given segregated fund contract requires a credible long-term model of the underlying equity (stock) return process. This paper introduced econometric models far less complex than the Wilkie model for valuing and managing financial risks associated with combined guaranteed minimum maturity benefit and minimum death benefit (GMMB/GMDB) regarding segregated fund contracts in an emerging market (India). Finally, we assess the valuation model via simulation under the GMMB/GMDB for a life age 50 with varying assumptions about the margin offset. The simulation results clearly indicate that, the net present value of outgo is mostly in the negative.


[1] The influence of hydrologic transience and heterogeneity on basal motion is an often-neglected aspect of numerical ice-flow models. We present a flow-band model of glacier dynamics with a Coulomb friction sliding law that is coupled to a model of the basal drainage system by means of subglacial water pressure. The ice-flow model contains "higher-order" stress gradients from the Stokes flow approximation originally conceived by Blatter (1995). The resulting system of nonlinear equations is solved using a modified Picard iteration that is shown to improve the rate of convergence. A parameterization of lateral shearing is included to account for the effects of three-dimensional geometry. We find that lateral drag has a discernible effect on glacier speed even when glacier width exceeds glacier length. Variations in flow-band width are shown to have a greater influence on flow line speed than either different valley cross-sectional shapes or the presence or absence of glacier sliding along valley walls. Modeled profiles of subglacial water pressure depart significantly from pressures prescribed as a uniform fraction of overburden, thus producing profiles of glacier sliding that are distinctly different from those that would be described by a sliding law controlled by overburden pressures. Simulations of hydraulically driven glacier acceleration highlight the value of including a representation of basal hydrology in models aiming for improved predictive capability of glacier dynamics.


Alessandro Duranti explores the way traditional oratory in a Samoan village is shaped by the needs of the political process and shows how language insulates ceremonial speakers from the perils of everyday confrontation. He proposes a "moral flow hypothesis" in discourse, to describe a grammar that distributes praise and blame and in that way defines the standing of individuals in the community. This ethnographic journey from linguistic to political anthropology demonstrates that the analysis of grammar in context needs ethnography just as much as the conduct of politics needs grammatical analysis.


This research examines how libraries are collaborating, why libraries collaborate, and seeks the environmental conditions that foster successful cross-institutional collaborations. The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) Consortium's CollaboraTeS Project is examined, to inventory expertise and needs within the OhioLINK community and the members' willingness to share, barter or contract their expertise with other OhioLINK institutions. This is followed by an examination of a sample of North American collaborative projects to identify environmental conditions that foster collaborations in North American libraries. A brief survey within the OhioLINK environment was then conducted that validated anecdotal evidence that the CollaboraTeS Toolbox has not been used as much as was intended. The OhioLINK environment was then assessed using the environmental factors discussed in the second phase of the research, and it was evident that only two of the factors were present within the OhioLINK environment that were identified as fostering collaboration. More research is suggested into inventories of expertise and into identifying and building the environmental conditions that foster crossinstitutional library collaborations.


In this paper we discuss an application integrating an ontological data model with an argumentation-based decision-support system, showing how the combination of leading technologies OWL, SPARQL and Jena can be used to achieve this. In the context of improving a decision support tool that is currently being trialled live in a clinical environment, we describe quantitatively how the incorporation of an ontology leads to an improvement over the existing software, highlighting the benefits of incorporating an ontology in medical applications. Data and clinical feedback is being collected from a live trial at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, where we are able to test the original decision support tool, but also the ontology driven version, and thus will be able to demonstrate that any quantitative improvements in the efficacy of the software are a product of the ontological data model alone.


Drilling and blasting are the major unit operations in opencast mining. Inspite of the best efforts to introduce mechanization in the opencast mines, blasting continue to dominate the production. Therefore to cut down the cost of production optimal fragmentation from properly designed blasting pattern has to be achieved. Proper adoption of drilling and blasting can contribute significantly towards profitability and therefore optimization of these parameters is essential.
Introduction
Rock breaking by drilling and blasting is the first phase of the production cycle in most of the mining operations. Optimization of this operation is very important as the fragmentation obtained thereby affects the cost of the entire gamut of interrelated mining activities, such as drilling, blasting, loading, hauling, crushing and to some extent grinding. Optimization of rock breaking by drilling and blasting is sometimes understood to mean minimum cost in the implementation of these two individual operations. However, a minimum cost for breaking rock may not be in the best interest of the overall mining system. A little more money spent in the rock-breaking operation can be recovered later from the system and the aim of the coordinator of the mining work should be to achieve a minimum combined cost of drilling, blasting, loading, hauling, crushing and grinding. Only a "balance sheet" of total cost of the full gamut of mining operations vis-a-vis production achieved can establish whether the very first phase- rock breaking- was "optimum" financially; leaving aside factors of human safety. An optimum blast is also associated with the most efficient utilization of blasting energy in the rock- breaking process, reducing blasting cost through less explosive consumption and less wastage of explosive energy in blasting, less throw of materials, and reduction of blast vibration resulting in greater degrees of safety and stability to the nearby structures.
Development of a Blast Optimization Model
Selection of proper explosive in any blasting round is an important aspect of optimum blast design. Basic parameters include VOD of explosive (m/s), Density (g/cc), Characteristic impedance, Energy output (cal/gm), and Explosive type (ANFO, Slurry, Emulsion etc.). However, all these parameters can not be taken for optimizing the blasting method successfully. Some of the parameters are taken for minimizing the blasting cost. These cost reduction and optimum blast design parameter will give an economical result. The parameters are
i. Drill hole diameter,
ii. Powder factor (desired),
iii. Cost of explosive,
iv. Numbers of holes required to blast.
Methodology
The study of the various parameters of blasting suggests that the powder factor should be constant as per the requirement. The number of holes desired as per the explosive, the drill ihole diameter as available and the cost of explosive are kept as input. The spacing, bench height, burden, charge per hole as depending on the previous parameters can be calculated. From the different input and calculated parameters the total cost of the method is calculated and the least expensive method is selected as the optimized model. Blasting related information were collected from three different mines of Mahanadi Coalfields Ltd.(MCL) for implementation of the optimization model. A program was designed using visual basic on .net platform taking the above parameters into consideration to select the optimized model. It was observed that the program gives satisfactory results. A sample output of the program is as presented below:
Conclusion
The blast optimization model has been developed with simple methodologies which can be adopted by the mining industry to compare the explosive costs and achieve better blasting results and. The model developed is a user friendly one, since by keeping the powder factor and number of choices of explosives available as constant and by varying the parameters like drill hole diameter, number of holes and cost of explosives one can compare the explosive performance and accordingly take a decision to select the proper type of explosives for blasting. It may be noted, that the model has been developed based on case studies of three different mines of MCL, and it can be modified with collection of information from a large number of mines.
References
Nanda, N.K. (2003), "Optimization of mine production system through operation research techniques", 19 th World Mining Congress, New Delhi, November, pp.583-595.
Pal Roy, P. (2005), "Terms and parameters influencing mine and ground excavations", Rock blasting effects and operations, pp. 17-22,


This research deals with the role of the leisure industry and the implemented measures on safety and security towards the economic growth of the municipalities in the third district of Laguna Province in the Philippines. This study comprised 100 randomly selected samples from the seven municipalities. The statistical tools used were mean, standard deviation and t-test. The results of the study showed that the leisure industry as well as the implemented measures on safety and security contribute to the overall development of the municipalities which were measured in terms of employment, service and income. I was clear that the leisure industry generates more income than other industries which essentially helped improved funds of the municipalities. As the current study generated data from survey, the results are mere perceptions of the key stakeholders. Further studies are encouraged on the measurement of the actual income contribution of the industry to the municipalities.


In response to the decision of the High Court of Australia in Plaintiff M68/2015 v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection (2016) 257 CLR 42, over 120 churches from nine denominations around Australia began offering refugees and asylum seekers, at risk of being transferred to Nauru, physical protection from removal by Australian authorities and sanctuary in church buildings. This paper provides an analysis of the offer of church sanctuary in 2016 by Australian churches as a strategy for law reform. The offer of church sanctuary in 2016 should be seen as a partial success because it contributed to a number of asylum seekers and refugees being spared return to extraterritorial processing facilities. The success enjoyed by churches was due to the legitimacy derived from the theological and historical roots of the concept of sanctuary and the standing of churches in Australian society. Although churches were not successful in ending Australia's extraterritorial processing regime, they continue to be engaged in resistance to Australian refugee law and policy. It is thus too early to determine if they can contribute to more substantive law reform in the long term.


Little-known exposures of the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation from the Purgatoire Valley of southeastern Colorado have yielded the world's largest continuously mapped assemblage of dinosaur trackways. Body fossils include plant, invertebrate, and vertebrate remains indicative of predominantly fresh-water conditions. The tracks occur in a lacustrine sequence characterized by (1) shallow-water shales; (2) micritic shoreface limestones with ooids, intraclasts, ripple marks, mud cracks; and (3) minor quartzose sandstone with salt-crystal casts. Analysis of these sedimentary facies suggests that in southeastern Colorado, lakes were larger and longer lived than in other Morrison paleoenvironments.

Trackway orientations and footprint-depth contours pinpoint the location of the paleoshoreline at successive levels in the section. Detailed mapping of 1,300 footprints in bed 2 has revealed more than 100 trackways which testify to the activity of both quadrupedal and bipedal dinosaurs. The respective ratio based on trackway counts is ∼40/60. The quadrupedal tracks are attributed to sauropods, and represent the first ever discovered in North America. They also exhibit the first known manus claw impressions and are in need of formal description. More than 90% of the bipedal tridactyl prints lack claw impressions and are tentatively therefore referred to the Ornithopoda, cf. Gypsichnites possibly a Camptosaurus . The small proportion with distinct claw impressions may represent Allosaurus . Resulting estimates of species diversity (∼5) and predator-prey ratio (1:30) are in general agreement with the estimates of other authors based on skeletal remains, and they suggest that the Purgatoire River tracks may accurately reflect the composition of the dinosaur fauna. Distinctive groupings of parallel, non-overlapping trackways suggest gregarious behavior among sauropods and tridactylous forms.


Action research (AR) has developed extensively since the 1970s. We reviewed the AR literature within the information systems (IS) discipline and found 16 different methods, which constitutes a problematic situation for researchers. We describe and critique those methods before integrating their strengths to improve the AR method that is most frequently practiced in IS: canonical action research (CAR). The existing set of principles and criteria for CAR is modified and elaborated to enhance the foundation for undertaking AR consistently. We discuss the general implications of this improved form of the method, which we name integrated action research (IAR). We specifically suggest how IAR can be used to investigate the application of disruptive technologies, including those that embody artificial intelligence and enable more flexible and socially distanced work.


Background Triatoma infestans —the principal vector of the infection that causes Chagas disease— defies elimination efforts in the Gran Chaco region. This study identifies the types of human-made or -used structures that are key sources of these bugs in the initial stages of house reinfestation after an insecticide spraying campaign. Methodology and Principal Findings We measured demographic and blood-feeding parameters at two geographic scales in 11 rural communities in Figueroa, northwest Argentina. Of 1,297 sites searched in spring, 279 (21.5%) were infested. Bug abundance per site and female fecundity differed significantly among habitat types (ecotopes) and were highly aggregated. Domiciles (human sleeping quarters) had maximum infestation prevalence (38.7%), human-feeding bugs and total egg production, with submaximal values for other demographic and blood-feeding attributes. Taken collectively peridomestic sites were three times more often infested than domiciles. Chicken coops had greater bug abundance, blood-feeding rates, engorgement status, and female fecundity than pig and goat corrals. The host-feeding patterns were spatially structured yet there was strong evidence of active dispersal of late-stage bugs between ecotopes. Two flight indices predicted that female fliers were more likely to originate from kitchens and domiciles, rejecting our initial hypothesis that goat and pig corrals would dominate. Conclusions and Significance Chicken coops and domiciles were key source habitats fueling rapid house reinfestation. Focusing control efforts on ecotopes with human-fed bugs (domiciles, storerooms, goat corrals) would neither eliminate the substantial contributions to bug population growth from kitchens, chicken coops, and pig corrals nor stop dispersal of adult female bugs from kitchens. Rather, comprehensive control of the linked network of ecotopes is required to prevent feeding on humans, bug population growth, and bug dispersal simultaneously. Our study illustrates a demographic approach that may be applied to other regions and triatomine species for the design of innovative, improved vector control strategies.


Argumentation theory conceptualises the human practice of debating. Implemented as computational argumentation it enables a computer to perform a virtual debate. Using existing knowledge from research into argumentation theory, this thesis investigates the potential of computational argumentation within biology. As a form of non-monotonic reasoning, argumentation can be used to tackle inconsistent and incomplete information two common problems for the users of biological data. Exploration of argumentation shall be conducted by examining these issues within one biological subdomain: in situ gene expression information for the developmental mouse. Due to the complex and often contradictory nature of biology, occasionally it is not apparent whether or not a particular gene is involved in the development of a particular tissue. Expert biological knowledge is recorded, and used to generate arguments relating to this matter. These arguments are presented to the user in order to help him/her decide whether or not the gene is expressed. In order to do this, the notion of argumentation schemes has been borrowed from philosophy, and combined with ideas and technologies from artificial intelligence. The resulting conceptualisation is implemented and evaluated in order to understand the issues related to applying computational argumentation within biology. Ultimately, this work concludes with a discussion of Argudas a real world tool developed for the biological community, and based on the knowledge gained during this work.


The verbal and visual mediums play a cardinal role in internalization of gender stereotypes in children. Being an influential form of communication, the media has an indispensable impact on the child's psyche. Besides being a mode of a method of entertainment only for youngsters, it has scholastic and socializing perspectives. Cartoon series as one such visual have provided youngsters with characters displaying behaviors and individual traits that they imbibe and internalize, thereby promoting stereotypical expectations. Gender bias in the cartoons is formulated by the stereotypes which are associated with the roles expected to be performed by a girl or boy. Gender disparity in cartoons reflects women characters as weak or inferior, bound to the household chores and male as strong or superior. Keeping in cue with the aforesaid, the research examines gender disparity prevalent in animated world and to reveal its adverse impact. The research analyzes two contemporary Indian cartoon series from the perspective of the character's physical appearance, male/female roles in problem-solving, social


This study attempts to examine a different spectrum of CEO compensation and economic performance in small- and medium-sized firms in America. Particularly, this study explores the directions and magnitudes of the relationships between compensation variables (cash-based short-term vs. long-term compensation) and economic performance (accounting- and market-based performance) after controlling for other interacting factors like CEO tenure, CEO stock ownership, and industry type. The researchers find that CEOs compensation in small- and medium-sized firms, in different types of industries, is positively linked to those firms' economic performance, particularly with respect to market-based performance. With respect to the control variables, only the CEO's stock ownership shows a significantly positive sign in determining the CEO's compensation.


Civil penalties have become an increasingly important part of the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) enforcement program. The SEC now routinely obtains large civil penalties in enforcement actions, regularly trumpets those penalties in press releases, and highlights the penalty amounts in its end-of-the-year statistics. Civil penalties are defended on the ground they are necessary to make unlawful conduct costly and painful, and thereby deter misconduct and promote adherence to lawful and ethical standards of behavior. But with respect to one category of cases, civil penalties have always been controversial: when civil penalties are assessed against public companies, the cost of the fines are ultimately borne by the shareholders who are not responsible for the misconduct, and who indeed may have already been harmed thereby. Nevertheless, over the last decade the SEC has moved decidedly in favor of assessing civil penalties when public companies engage in violative conduct. Civil penalties are now the norm and a standard part of the resolution of most public company enforcement actions. This Article is the first attempt to synthesize and analyze a comprehensive dataset of SEC enforcement actions against public companies with an eye to civil penalties. It shows that penalties are not only routine but a central element in most negotiated resolutions of enforcement actions against public companies, as part of a package of relief that reflects what appears to be a studied compromise between statutory charges and monetary sanctions. One trend, which has become more pronounced over the last several years, is for the SEC and public companies, particularly those in the financial services industry, to settle enforcement proceedings through the entry of in-house administrative orders that include non-scienter-based charges, the payment of a civil penalty, and no individual charges.


This paper investigates eleven fundamental questions of motion event encoding from a massively cross-linguistic (i.e. typological) perspective in a bottom-up approach in parallel and original texts making use of quantitative and qualitative methods and various visualization methods. It is found that motion events can be encoded by lexical and grammatical means, by words and morphemes and tend to be expressed by constructions rather than simple markers (distributional spatial semantics). It is argued that local decomposition is more appropriate to address the semantics of motion events than global decomposition and that motion event typology consists of continuous rather than discrete variables. In motion event typology there are many features with only weak correlations (high heterogeneity). Both universal and culture-dependent aspects of motion event encoding are identified and areal trends in motion event typology are addressed (notably the deviant behavior of the North American continent).


Recent work suggests that Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs)—or "patent trolls"—are a new form of financial intermediary. According to this view, individual patent holders are unable to contract with large manufacturers because they lack the financial resources necessary to litigate against infringement. Since individual patent holders are heterogeneous in their constraints and preferences, the market function of PAEs should depend on their specific demands. We conducted an experiment in which subjects from a population of interest were each assigned patents that were infringed by large manufacturers in a hypothetical scenario. We relaxed the financial constraints of some patent holders and evaluated whether this randomized intervention subsequently reduced the demand for PAEs relative to costly litigation. Our results indicate that PAEs served an intermediary function for two groups in our sample: subjects who identified as inventors rather than entrepreneurs, and subjects who were relatively more sensitive to financial losses.


A high-bandwidth, low-latency load-store unit is a critical component of a dynamically scheduled processor. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most complex and non-scalable components. Recently, several researchers have proposed techniques that simplify the core load-store unit and improve its scalability in exchange for the in-order pre-retirement re-execution of some subset of the loads in the program. We call such techniques load/store optimizations. One recent optimization attacks load queue (LQ) scalability by replacing the expensive associative search that is used to enforce intraand interthread ordering with load re-execution. A second attacks store queue (SQ) scalability by speculatively filtering some load accesses and some store entries from it. The speculatively accessed, speculatively populated SQ can be made smaller and faster, but load re-execution is required to verify the speculation. A third uses a hardware table to identify redundant loads and skip their execution altogether. Redundant load elimination is highly accurate but not 100%, so re-execution is needed to flag false eliminations. Unfortunately, the inherent benefits of load/store optimizations are mitigated by re-execution itself. Reexecution contends for cache bandwidths with store retirement, and serializes load re-execution with subsequent store retirement. If a particular technique requires a sufficient number of load re-executions, the cost of these re-executions will outweigh the benefits of the technique entirely and may even produce drastic slowdowns. This is the case for the SQ technique. Store Vulnerability Window (SVW) is a new mechanism that reduces the re-execution requirements of a given load/store optimization significantly, by an average of 85% across the three load/store optimizations we study. This reduction relieves cache port contention and removes many of the dynamic serialization events that contribute the bulk of re-execution's cost, and allows these techniques to perform up to their full potential. For the scalable SQ optimization, this means the chnace to perform at all. Without SVW, this technique posts significant slowdowns. SVW is a simple scheme based on monotonic store sequence numbering and a novel application of Bloom Filtering. The cost of an effective SVW implementation is a 1KB buffer and an 2B field per LQ entry. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-04-29. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/cis_reports/35


The Effect of Teacher Certification on Student Achievement. (May 2004) Karin Sparks, B.A., University of New Mexico; M.S., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. James F. McNamara The purpose of this study was to review the empirical research evidence on the effect of teacher certification on student achievement. An exploratory meta-analysis was conducted on studies that examined the effect of fully certified and less-than-fully certified teachers on student achievement. The meta-analysis focused on the areas of mathematics, science and reading and explored trends across areas of achievement, school level and research design. The study was directed towards (a) a synthesis of findings, and (b) recommendations for future research and policy decisions. The meta-analysis population consisted of five individual studies that generated twenty-seven effect size estimates. Three studies utilized either an individual level or class level of analysis and yielded twelve mean difference effect size estimates. Two studies utilized either a school or state level of analysis and yielded fifteen correlational effect size estimates. The majority of findings in mathematics favor the positive effect of fully certified teachers. In science, the findings pointed towards equivalent levels of student


Traditional text similarity measures consider each term similar only to itself and do not model semantic relatedness of terms. We propose a novel discriminative training method that projects the raw term vectors into a common, low-dimensional vector space. Our approach operates by finding the optimal matrix to minimize the loss of the pre-selected similarity function (e.g., cosine) of the projected vectors, and is able to efficiently handle a large number of training examples in the high-dimensional space. Evaluated on two very different tasks, cross-lingual document retrieval and ad relevance measure, our method not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, but also achieves high accuracy at low dimensions and is thus more efficient.


Nowadays, Universities and other Training Institutions need to clearly identify the Information Technology IT skills that companies demand from IT practitioners. This is essential not only for offering appropriate and reliable university degrees, but also to help future IT professionals on where to focus in order to achieve better job positions. In an attempt to address this issue, this study rely on 102 Chief Information Officers, from Iberian large companies, to characterize current IT professionals and what is expected from future hirings. Results revealed that IT Technicians and Senior Analysts are the predominant positions and also that future hiring will request candidates with at least two to five years of work experience. The two most important skills found were core functions at the IT department: business knowledge and user support. In contrast, traditional competences such as web development and management of emerging technologies were less demanded.


Given that requirements elicitation is one of the important stages in software development, many researchers agree that incorrect, incomplete and confusing requirements have a great negative impact on the quality, cost and delivery time of software projects. Therefore, factors that affect requirements elicitation and the activities of its process have been identified. However, there are no studies on what factors affect the activities Integration, Documentation and Refinement. Moreover, the theories of organizational behaviour, organizational learning, Technology acceptance model, among others, provide factors not studied in the area of requirements elicitation. The purpose of this research is to identify new factors that influence each activity of the requirements elicitation process and, consequently, the quality. Hence, in the present paper seven new factors that affect the activities of the requirements elicitation process are presented: learning capacity, negotiation capacity, permanent staff, perceived utility, confidence, stress, and semi-autonomous. In addition, 17 relationships (factor-activity) have been introduced. An empirical study was carried out on 182 respondents, obtaining, from the analysis of simple and multiple correspondences, that all the proposed factors have an influence between "High" and "Very high". Furthermore, the hypothesis test T-Students, with 95% confidence, verifies that 15 of the 17 relationships are valid.


Climate change impacts on the environment, people and their living conditions but also for on their possibilities for shaping their future. The Federal Government has therefore set clear and far-reaching targets for combating climate change. With its scientific technical solutions and sociological knowledge, research contributes to the implementation of these goals. Promoting and developing the carbon-free generation and use of energy as well as tapping existing potentials of energy-efficient technologies can make a decisive contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But if one looks at the challenges linked to the goal of limiting the rise in temperature to a maximum of two degrees, it is quite obvious that the problems of climate change cannot be solved through technological innovation alone. The brochure "Climate protection needs action", published by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research, shows results from research projects conducted under the support measure "socio-ecological research" which have created a solution-oriented knowledge base about the dynamic interactions between societies and their natural environment.


ABSTRACT The fast growth of the Internet usage has caused problem on Internet protocol address space. To solve this problem, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) was created to expand the availability of address spaces. An important part of the IPv6 suites is the Neighbour Discovery Protocol (NDP), which is geared towards substitution of Address Resolution Protocol in router discovery, and function redirection in Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). NDP includes the routing function which is determines which route a data packet will follow to arrive at its intended destination, and the address function which assigns unique addresses to each and every device connected to a network for identification purposes. NDP messages are broadly categorized into five types and each message type carries out distinct tasks, these messages are: Router Solicitation (RS), Neighbour Solicitation (NS), Router Advertisement (RA), Neighbour Advertisement (NA), and Redirect. NDP security vulnerabilities is openness of a network of computer, wherein there exists a lack of trust among users. Typically, huge numbers of NDP messages can be used to flood a network, resulting in disconnecting of the connected devices. Due to the limitations of existing defence mechanisms, NDP are still prone to network-based attacks and these vulnerabilities must be considered while creating an IPv6 network. In this thesis, we present a novel detection method for DDoS and Replayed attacks that are launched using NDP in IPv6. This detection method is a stream-based network representation, instead of packet-based representation. The proposed detection method makes use of Locally Weighted Learning machine learning techniques, with three different algorithms as its based learner Bayesian network, Decision tree and Naive Bayes. LWL-Bayesian Network model achieved the highest detection rate of 96.48%. LWL-Naive Bayes model is the next best model, with an accuracy rate of 96.024%, while the LWL-Decision Tree model had the lowest overall detection rate of 93%. Comparatively, all developed IDSs are capable of detecting DDoS and Replayed attacks based on NDP-based network traffic as well as the detection of anomalies. They all demonstrated strong predictive ability, however, the LWL-Bayesian Network model proved to have the best overall performance to develop a locally weighted IDS model among the three models. In short, the development of the detection models, has strong predictive capabilities, with high accuracy rate, does not overfit, has low computational costs, and uses less time for model development and attack detection.


Close to two decades after the end of the civil war in Mozambique, the country is yet to complete the reintegration of the demobilised combatants into society. In early 2009, the government of Mozambique embarked on a programme that envisages assisting with the reintegration of an estimated 100 000 former fighters.
It would be assumed that most of these former fighters agitating for compensation could have reintegrated naturally into the society by now. This however is not the case, and the Mozambican government has been designing a new programme that aims to address various demands synthesised into 18 points. This paper sought to understand why the former fighters are raising these issues, and how the government intends to respond. At the time of writing this paper, the process was still in its formative stages and therefore not conclusive. The analysis builds on interviews with associations of ex-combatants, government officials and civil society organisations, as well as information from secondary sources.


Description: Phytotherapy in the Management of Diabetes and Hypertension is a good addition to existing volumes detailing knowledge of hyperglycemia therapy. This e-book emphasizes the basic biochemistry behind diabetes mellitus and hypertension, along with the control or remediation of these conditions through a cost effective, safe, easy-going, easy-adaptable method validated by scientific research. This e-book contains 7 chapters dealing with various aspects of these diseases and their Phytotherapy treatment and life style management. Phytotherapy can give patients long term benefits with less or no side effects. Hence, this e-book is an authentic alternative or complementary therapeutic compendium to physicians and patients. This book will also be useful to students, teachers, researchers, clinicians and general readers interested in learning about applied phytotherapy.


This is the introductory chapter for a book that presents a comparative analysis of the role of domestic courts in treaty enforcement. The book examines the application of treaties by domestic courts in twelve countries: Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. The central question addressed in each of the twelve country chapters is this: do domestic courts provide remedies to private parties who are harmed by a violation of their treaty-based primary rights? In brief, the most significant conclusions that emerge from this study are as follows: 1. Domestic courts in eight of the twelve countries examined in this volume -- Australia, Canada, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Poland, South Africa and the United Kingdom -- generally do enforce treaty-based rights on behalf of private parties. On the other hand, the evidence is somewhat mixed for the other four countries: China, Israel, Russia and the United States. 2. In China, Israel and Russia, the trends are moving in the direction of greater judicial enforcement of treaties on behalf of private parties. The United States is the only country studied in this volume where the trends are moving in the opposite direction. 3. The conventional wisdom is wrong, insofar as the conventional wisdom holds that direct judicial application of treaties is a more effective means of treaty enforcement than indirect application. In countries such as Canada and India, where domestic law precludes direct application of treaties, domestic courts play an active role in treaty enforcement by applying treaties indirectly. In contrast, in the United States and China, for example, although domestic courts have the authority to apply treaties directly in some cases, they rarely utilize their judicial power to remedy treaty violations committed by government actors.


This work presents simultaneous imaging and detection of three types of cell receptors using three types of plasmonic nanoparticles. The size, shape, and composition-dependent scattering profiles of these particles allow for a system of multiple distinct molecular markers using a single optical source. With this goal in mind, a system of tags consisting of anti-EGFR gold nanorods, anti-IGF1R silver nanospheres, and anti-HER-2 gold nanospheres was developed for monitoring the expression of three commonly overexpressed receptors in cancer cells. These labels were chosen because they each scatter strongly in a distinct spectral window. A hyperspectral dark-field microscope was developed to record the scattering spectra of cells labeled with these molecular tags. The ability to monitor multiple tags simultaneously may lead to applications such as profiling the immunophenotype of cell lines and gaining better knowledge of receptor signaling pathways. Single, dual, and triple tag experiments were performed to analyze the specificity of the nanoparticle tags as well as their effect on one another. While distinct resonance peaks in these studies show the ability to characterize cell lines using conjugated nanoparticles, shifts in these peaks also indicate changes in the cellular dielectric environment which may not be distinct from plasmon coupling between nanoparticles bound to proximal receptors.


Understanding why environmental problems occur and what best to do about them is much facilitated by an understanding of economics. This book provides an introduction to the subject of environmental economics which does not assume an in-depth prior understanding of economics. Part one explains the fundamental economic concepts, using environmental examples, including markets, environmental evaluation, risk, and trade. Part two then sets these concepts to work in understanding and developing policy responses to some of the major environmental issues of our time. Examples are drawn from all over the world and include such vital global issues as climate change, water pollution, and the loss of biodiversity. An Introduction to Environmental Economics examines both a wide range of environmental case studies and also assesses a variety of economic theories and their approach to environmental issues. Clearly written, global in approach, and theoretically broad-minded, this new text is an ideal introduction both to the study of environmental economics and to the question of how economics can provide tools for improving our global environment.


Structurally defined cross-β assemblies have allowed for the development of basis sets for isotope-edited infrared spectra to follow progressive assembly over time. These basis sets, composed of a minimal number of individual spectra, are sufficient to identify the populations of polymorphs evolving throughout the assembly process. This approach provides, for the first time, the spectral assignment and relative distribution of paracrystalline intermediates formed from the intermolecular molten globule phase where nucleation occurs. Using the basis sets, we can now follow how subtle changes in assembly energetics impact the accessible polymorphs along the assembly pathway. Here, simple methylation of the Gln22 side chain of the nucleating core of the Dutch mutant of the Aβ of Alzheimer's disease, Aβ(16-22)E22Q, dramatically increases the distribution of sampled polymorphs and slows progression to the final thermodynamic assembly. These data establish that amyloid cross-β structures can assemble through a dynamic conformational phylogeny. This fluid context-dependent network, so accessible to simple peptides, may provide the basis for the conformational selection and evolution of the complex supramolecular assemblies implicated in the many protein misfolding and prion diseases.


Abstract. Chlorine and bromine atoms lead to catalytic depletion of ozone in the stratosphere. Therefore the use and production of ozone-depleting substances (ODSs) containing chlorine and bromine is regulated by the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer. Equivalent effective stratospheric chlorine (EESC) has been adopted as an appropriate metric to describe the combined effects of chlorine and bromine released from halocarbons on stratospheric ozone. Here we revisit the concept of calculating EESC. We derive a refined formulation of EESC based on an advanced concept of ODS propagation into the stratosphere and reactive halogen release. A new transit time distribution is introduced in which the age spectrum for an inert tracer is weighted with the release function for inorganic halogen from the source gases. This distribution is termed the release time distribution . We show that a much better agreement with inorganic halogen loading from the chemistry transport model TOMCAT is achieved compared with using the current formulation. The refined formulation shows EESC levels in the year 1980 for the mid-latitude lower stratosphere, which are significantly lower than previously calculated. The year 1980 is commonly used as a benchmark to which EESC must return in order to reach significant progress towards halogen and ozone recovery. Assuming that – under otherwise unchanged conditions – the EESC value must return to the same level in order for ozone to fully recover, we show that it will take more than 10 years longer than estimated in this region of the stratosphere with the current method for calculation of EESC. We also present a range of sensitivity studies to investigate the effect of changes and uncertainties in the fractional release factors and in the assumptions on the shape of the release time distributions. We further discuss the value of EESC as a proxy for future evolution of inorganic halogen loading under changing atmospheric dynamics using simulations from the EMAC model. We show that while the expected changes in stratospheric transport lead to significant differences between EESC and modelled inorganic halogen loading at constant mean age, EESC is a reasonable proxy for modelled inorganic halogen on a constant pressure level.


Abstract Electron cyclotron (EC) heating and current drive is a well-established auxiliary heating mechanism for tokamak plasmas, which is also effective in assisting plasma breakdown and controlling disruptive plasma instabilities. ITER requires 20 MW of power at 170-GHz frequency to be coupled into the plasma for EC radio-frequency (rf) applications. Gyrotrons are rf/microwave oscillators capable of delivering high continuous-wave power in the microwave and millimeter-wave frequency range (a few to hundreds of gigahertz). An EC system with 26 gyrotron sources at 170 GHz, with a typical unit power of 1 MW each, and a total installed power capacity of 24 MW is planned for ITER. As a part of the in-kind contributions, the Indian domestic agency is responsible for two sets of EC sources that provide 2 MW (∼8%) of the EC power at 170-GHz frequency. Here, we provide an overview of the gyrotron source system, its basic concepts and main features, design aspects, auxiliary requirements, performance issues, and future research and development goals.


Missionary work came late to the eastern Lowveld, and specifically to the areas today known as Hoedspruit, Acornhoek and Bushbuckridge. The twentieth century saw the Swiss (Evangelical Presbyterian Church) and the Germans (Lutheran Church) doing missionary work in the eastern Lowveld, with the Roman Catholics making an entry through Mozambique. The Dutch Reformed Church began missionary work in the Hoedspruit/Acornhoek/Bushbuckridge area in the 1950s. At present, however, these and other mainline churches have all but disappeared from the religious scene among farm workers in the area, and among black Christians, indigenous churches with a focus on healing ministries are dominant. This article traces the history of Christian ministries among farm workers in the eastern Lowveld, with particular emphasis on the Hoedspruit area. It focuses on developments since the Tomlinson Report of the 1950s led to the renewal of missionary work in the broader South Africa, including this area. Against this historical backdrop, the religious identity of farm workers in the Hoedspruit area is described with the help of a recent research project on the religious discourses that inform the way in which farm workers in this area – among whom there is a 28.8% prevalence of HIV infection – perceive illness and healing. Reasons for the departure of farm workers from the historically mission churches in favour of indigenous churches with pronounced healing ministries are identified. Introduction: aims and sources


Abstract A new species of Hipposideros is described from Vietnam. Morphologically, it is similar to taxa in the Hipposideros armiger complex but is substantially smaller. The new species, which has been found living sympatrically with H. armiger in Cat Ba National Park, is distinguished from it by size, acoustic characters, and differences in the mitochondrial DNA. Currently, the new taxon is known from Cat Ba Island in Ha Long Bay in northern Vietnam and from Chu Mom Ray National Park, which is situated on the mainland some 1,000 km to the south. It was collected in disturbed and primary forests.


Social dilemmas, or situations in which individual and collective interests collide, elicit strong emotions. But are these emotions socially functional in that they help establish cooperation? Generally, they are, as four empirical chapters showed. In dyadic relations, refusal to return a favour is best reciprocated while expressing disappointment instead of anger or no emotion. This does not even lead to a negative impression. When not recipients but observers can reciprocate cooperative acts, non-cooperation out of anger or disappointment is perceived by observers as a just action to retaliate against defectors and is therefore met cooperatively. In situations where group members have to coordinate their contributions to obtain a public good, anger signals bleaker prospects than guilt does, especially when communicated by an influential fellow group member. This makes that group members are more likely to exit the group or install a democratic leader. Guilt actually promotes successful coordination by signalling that both the person that experiences guilt and the person towards guilt is experienced will contribute, which encourages people to cooperate even when coordination is difficult. Thus, emotions are indispensable, socially informative cues that typically help to establish cooperation, facilitate coordination and implement structural solutions in social dilemmas.


Beginning in 2011 a festival in honor of the seventeenth-century radical Gerrard Winstanley has been held annually…commemorate[ing] the life and ideas of…Winstanley, leader of the Digger, or True Leveller, movement of the English Revolution (1640–1660). Largely forgotten for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the communist thought of Winstanley was rediscovered by German and Russian Marxists in the late nineteenth century… From the socialists of the late nineteenth century to participants in the Wigan Festival in the early 2000s, Winstanley and the Diggers have provided inspiration for radical leftists for more than a hundred years.… What accounts for the lasting popularity of a relatively marginal social movement and its main theorist in the middle of seventeenth-century England? More importantly for present purposes, why have Winstanley and the Diggers held a prominent place for modern activists concerned with environmental issues and consumerism?This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


Reverse engineering of integrated circuits, i.e., understanding the internals of Integrated Circuits (ICs), is required for many benign and malicious applications. Examples of the former are detection of patent infringements, hardware Trojans or Intellectual Property (IP)-theft, as well as interface recovery and defect analysis, while malicious applications include IP-theft and finding insertion points for hardware Trojans. However, regardless of the application, the reverse engineer initially starts with a large unstructured netlist, forming an incomprehensible sea of gates.This work presents DANA, a generic, technology-agnostic, and fully automated dataflow analysis methodology for flattened gate-level netlists. By analyzing the flow of data between individual Flip Flops (FFs), DANA recovers high-level registers. The key idea behind DANA is to combine independent metrics based on structural and control information with a powerful automated architecture. Notably, DANA works without any thresholds, scenario-dependent parameters, or other "magic" values that the user must choose. We evaluate DANA on nine modern hardware designs, ranging from cryptographic co-processors, over CPUs, to the OpenTitan, a stateof- the-art System-on-Chip (SoC), which is maintained by the lowRISC initiative with supporting industry partners like Google and Western Digital. Our results demonstrate almost perfect recovery of registers for all case studies, regardless whether they were synthesized as FPGA or ASIC netlists. Furthermore, we explore two applications for dataflow analysis: we show that the raw output of DANA often already allows to identify crucial components and high-level architecture features and also demonstrate its applicability for detecting simple hardware Trojans.Hence, DANA can be applied universally as the first step when investigating unknown netlists and provides major guidance for human analysts by structuring and condensing the otherwise incomprehensible sea of gates. Our implementation of DANA and all synthesized netlists are available as open source on GitHub.


Abstract. A compact (500 cm3), lightweight (500 g), near-field, single particle backscattering optical spectrometer is described that mounts flush with the skin of an aircraft and measures the concentration and optical equivalent diameter of particles from 5 to 75 μm. The backscatter cloud probe (BCP) was designed as a real-time qualitative cloud detector primarily for data quality control of trace gas instruments developed for the climate monitoring instrument packages that are being installed on commercial passenger aircraft as part of the European Union In-Service Aircraft for a Global Observing System (IAGOS) program ( http://www.iagos.org/ ). Subsequent evaluations of the BCP measurements on a number of research aircraft, however, have revealed it capable of delivering quantitative particle data products including size distributions, liquid-water content and other information on cloud properties. We demonstrate the instrument's capability for delivering useful long-term climatological, as well as aviation performance information, across a wide range of environmental conditions. The BCP has been evaluated by comparing its measurements with those from other cloud particle spectrometers on research aircraft and several BCPs are currently flying on commercial A340/A330 Airbus passenger airliners. The design and calibration of the BCP is described in this article, along with an evaluation of measurements made on the research and commercial aircraft. Preliminary results from more than 7000 h of airborne measurements by the BCP on two Airbus A340s operating on routine global traffic routes (one Lufthansa, the other China Airlines) show that more than 340 h of cloud data have been recorded at normal cruise altitudes (> 10 km) and more than 40% of the > 1200 flights were through clouds at some point between takeoff and landing. These data are a valuable contribution to databases of cloud properties, including sub-visible cirrus, in the upper troposphere and useful for validating satellite retrievals of cloud water and effective radius; in addition, providing a broader, geographically and climatologically relevant view of cloud microphysical variability that is useful for improving parameterizations of clouds in climate models. Moreover, they are also useful for monitoring the vertical climatology of clouds over airports, especially those over megacities where pollution emissions may be impacting local and regional climate.


Many contemporary researchers of female violence claim that gender stereotypes dominate works about militant women. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the historical works about the Russian female terrorists in order to find out whether those stereotypes influence its contents and the scholars' conclusions. Typology of the gender stereotypes that exist in the works about women terrorists is constructed in the article and used for the analysis of the historical literature. The article is concluded with the discussion about what is to be done in order to avoid the gender stereotypes and write a new balanced research on the topic.


Heart failure is a global problem. It is estimated that approximately 38 million people worldwide experience heart failure, and this number is growing because of the ageing of nations' populations, but also because patients are rescued from death during an acute myocardial infarction, and later develop heart failure. The prevalence of heart failure is roughly 2% of the population, and up to 10% in people aged 75 years and older. It is also estimated that the lifetime risk of heart failure at the age of 40 years is approximately 20% (one in five) for both men and women. Heart failure is also increasing in low- and medium-income countries, probably because of changes in lifestyle which favour the development of obesity, hypertension and diabetes mellitus. The mortality of heart failure is worse than that associated with most cancers. Average mortality is roughly 50% within five years. However, evidence-based treatment did reduce mortality significantly. About two thirds of the economic burden of heart failure is owing to hospital admissions and re-admissions. Therefore, heart failure is also an expensive disease.


Dolutegravir, a second-generation HIV Integrase Strand Transfer Inhibitor (INSTI), is the most current antiretroviral ratified for treatment of HIV-1 infection. This approval is based on the superiority of Dolutegravir in clinical trials over the well-known antiretroviral marketed drugs like Efavirenz, Raltegravir, and Darunavir. Largely, Dolutegravir has established excellent tolerability, limited drug interactions, insignificant drug resistance and once-daily dosing for treatment-naive patients. (R)-3-amino butanol is a key unit for the synthesis of Dolutegravir and rarer methods of synthesis are mentioned in the literature.


We investigated whether the potentiation of postprandial lipaemia by fructose occurs in both non-diabetic subjects and those with non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Six non-diabetic and six diabetic subjects were studied on two occasions. They were given a meal containing 1 g fat/kg body weight with, on one occasion, 0.75 g fructose/kg body weight, on the other occasion 0.75 g starch/kg body weight. In both groups, plasma glucose and insulin concentrations rose more after starch than after fructose. At 1–2 h after the meal, plasma non-esterified fatty acid concentrations were suppressed more after fructose than after starch, but later they rose more after fructose than after starch. Plasma triacylglycerol concentrations rose more slowly after fructose, but were considerably higher than those after starch from 4–6 h after the meal. There were no differences in post-heparin plasma lipoprotein lipase (EC 220.127.116.11) activity at the end of the test. The potentiation of postprandial lipaemia by fructose was positively related to the fasting plasma insulin concentration, suggesting that insulin-resistant subjects are more prone to this effect. We conclude that the potentiation of postprandial lipaemia by fructose is seen in both diabetic and non-diabetic subjects. Our results suggest that alterations in the dynamics of plasma non-esterified fatty acids might underlie the effects of fructose on triacylglycerol metabolism.


Nucleic Acid Detection in Anti-Viral Responses and Autoimmunity Rebecca Lynn Brunette Chair of Supervisory Committee: Assistant Professor Daniel B. Stetson Department of Immunology Viruses infect all living organisms. Therefore, hosts evolved extensive means to detect and destroy viral pathogens. Pattern recognition receptors that detect viral RNA or DNA genome are important components of the innate immune response against viruses. In vertebrates, viral nucleic acid is detected by two mechanisms that both result in the production of antiviral type I IFN. The first mechanism involves toll-like receptor detection of non-cell autonomous viral nucleic acid and allows uninfected, specialized innate immune cells to initiate an adaptive immune response to eliminate infection. Second, cell intrinsic receptors allow all infected cells to detect viral infection and induce a type I IFN response. The interferon stimulatory DNA (ISD) pathway specifically detects of viral DNA genomes. Chronic activation of the ISD pathway is the cause of lethal autoimmune disease in Trex1 deficient mice and humans thereby coupling innate immune detection to initiation of autoimmunity. The ISD pathway induces type I IFN by STING-dependent activation of TBK1 and IRF3. However, little is known about the DNA sensors proteins of the ISD pathway. Here we use the novel model of Trex1 autoimmunity to identify Trex1 interacting proteins that may be involved in ISD sensing. We discovered that Trex1 is localized to the inner nuclear membrane in addition to the endoplasmic reticulum and interacts with nuclear partners Brd7, Btf3l4, Chaf1a, Pias1, Rfc2 and Sae2. This data implies that negative regulation of the ISD pathway may occur in the nucleus and not the cytoplasm as previously thought. In addition, we identified new members and characterized the 13 members of the AIM2-like receptor (ALR) family of ISD sensors. Here we show the ALR family of nuclear proteins is highly divergent across mammals reflecting each species' unique struggle with specific viral pathogens. We also discovered the ALR proteins fit into two functional categories based on their ability to interact with STING and induce type I IFN or interact with ASC to activate the IL-1β inflammasome. Together our data imply nuclear detection of DNA occurs utilizing highly species-specific sensors and provides a functional framework for further study of the ISD sensors.


The computer, writes Peter Lunenfeld, is the twenty-first century's culture machine. It is a dream device, serving as the mode of production, the means of distribution, and the site of reception. We haven't quite achieved the flying cars and robot butlers of futurist fantasies, but we do have a machine that can function as a typewriter and a printing press, a paintbrush and a gallery, a piano and a radio, the mail as well as the mail carier. But, warns Lunenfeld, we should temper our celebration with caution; we are engaged in a secret war between downloading and uploading -- between passive consumption and active creation--and the outcome will shape our collective futures. In The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld makes his case for using digital technologies to shift us from a consumption to a production model. He describes television as the "the high fructose corn syrup of the imagination" and worries that it can cause "cultural diabetes"; prescribes mindful downloading, meaningful uploading, and "info-triage" as cures; and offers tips for crafting "bespoke futures" in what he terms the era of "Web n.0" (interconnectivity to the nth power). He also offers a stand-alone genealogy of digital visionaries, distilling a history of the culture machine that runs from the Patriarchs (Vannevar Bush's WWII generation) to the Hustlers (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) to the Searchers (Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google fame). After half a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now find ourselves with a vast new infrastructure for uploading. We simply need to find the will to make the best of it.


Abstract This paper reports on findings from a three-year ethnographic study of 24 young people in northern England who were classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET), or at risk of becoming so. Drawing on conceptions of opportunity structure and educational marginality, the paper discusses the processes leading to young people becoming NEET after leaving school. It presents findings concerning the family backgrounds, school experiences, and educational attainment of participants, and traces their initial post-16 destinations and their pathways to NEET status. Although most participants did not become NEET immediately after leaving school, restricted labour market opportunities and a lack of high-quality education and training for middle- and low-attaining young people exacerbated social and educational disadvantage. Over time, participants became increasingly restricted to marginal forms of learning. The paper argues that a focus on opportunity structures provides a powerful way of understanding these processes, and that alongside sustained NEET status, educational marginality should be of equal concern to policy makers.


This study was conducted in Gibe woreda of Hadiya Zone southern Ethiopia, with objective of assessing available feed resources and improved forage management practices. A cluster sampling procedure was employed. First a total of 5 kebeles from 21 kebeles were randomly selected. Then 31 households from each kebele and hence a total of 155 households, were randomly selected for interview who practiced improved forage production and produce livestock. About 82% of the respondents were males and 72% of them are illiterate. About 46.5% of the respondents had 1-2 ha of cropping land and 65.8% of the respondents had less than 0.5 ha grazing land holdings. The mean number of livestock per household was 2.4 cattle, 1.5 sheep, 1.8 Goat, 0.5 equines and 4.4 poultry.  The major livestock feed resource in the area were natural pasture (55.2%), crop residues(30%), improved forages(3.8%),  and hay(7%),  and industrial by products(4%),  were the feed resources used in the study area are used as animal feeds. In rank shortage and poor quality feed (1 st ), prevalence of disease (2 nd ), lack of veterinary service (4 th ) and lack of improved breeds (3 rd ) were the major constraints for livestock production. Only 3.8% of the respondents cultivate improved forages for different purposes and to feed their animals (1.9%), but 0.95% and 0.95% of the respondents were cultivate forages as wind break/ shelter and for protection of soil erosion respectively. Major species of improved forage cultivated in the area were desho grass, elephant grass, and lablab and cow pea respectively. However, the cultivation improved forages was constrained by land shortage (84% of the respondents) and lack of planting materials (16% of the respondents). It can be conclude that although there is practice of improved forage cultivation the produces are facing with different problems. Thus extension services that encourage the farmers to cultivate the improved forages should be applied. Keywords: cultivated forage, crop residue, and natural pasture, livestock


Don't be intimidated by the likes of lawyers with their in flagrante delicto and caveat emptor; with this highly entertaining ready reference, you can be confident in using and understanding all the Latin tags commonly employed today. You'll learn, for instance, what e pluribus unum really means and why ars gratia artis is the ultimate Hollywood irony. For each of the 1,200 phrases, maxims and proverbs listed, this book gives the correct spelling and literal meaning, as well as clarifiying how to use the phrase. The index moves you swiftly and easily from English into the corresponding Latin. But the greatest pleasure to be had from the book comes when it is opened at random to reveal the fascinating stories behind many phrases in common usage. Whether you want to check a specific reference or simply browse, this book will prove a welcome source of information and entertainment.


Multi-Failure Mode Risk Assessment of the Houston/Galveston Bridge System to Hurricane Threats by Candase Dawn Arnold This research implements the first Houston/Galveston area hurricane risk assessment of bridges for multiple failure modes: bridge deck uplift and bridge scour. Due to recent hurricane damage of bridges, emergency managers need to understand the potential state of the bridge network immediately following a storm for effective mitigation and post-event planning. To that end, this study builds a new database of bridge information necessary for vulnerability modeling, adapts current deterministic models of bridge deck uplift and scour for a probabilistic framework and expands the scour models to include a qualitative estimate for embankment scour. The study area bridges are tested under various hurricane scenario events to reveal the likelihood of damage. Potential applications include retrofit prioritization, real-time spatial damage modeling and better informed preparation. By understanding the risk hurricanes pose to the bridge system, emergency officials can better plan rescue and recovery efforts before a storm impacts the Texas coast


[1] Multiple scattering strongly affects the CloudSat Profiling Radar reflectivity when the satellite is overpassing moderate and heavy precipitation systems. Therefore it is important to identify profiles that may be contaminated by multiple scattering prior to interpreting the results of any application that involves the use of CloudSat data in raining scenes. On the basis of analysis of multiple-scattering Monte Carlo reflectivity simulations applied to cloud-resolving model-generated microphysical profiles encompassing a large variety of precipitating systems, a relatively straightforward criterion is proposed for flagging profiles potentially affected by multiple scattering. The path-integrated attenuation, that can be estimated from CloudSat's 2B-GEOPROF product, can be used to identify four multiple-scattering regimes: (1) the single scattering approximation is applicable to the entire Z-profile; (2) the single scattering approximation is unreliable but the second order of scattering approximation is valid; (3) the second order of scattering approximation is not valid owing to higher order of multiple-scattering effects which, however, do not affect the surface reference technique-based path-integrated attenuation estimates; and (4) the multiple scattering is affecting the surface return as well, thus spoiling the path-integrated attenuation estimates. Operational path-integrated attenuation thresholds for each of these regimes are then applied to the CloudSat data set over the global oceans, where path-integrated attenuation estimations are more accurate than over land. Case studies and global statistics of the occurrence of multiple scattering are presented: for ocean pixels, around 80% (90%) of the profiles identified as rainy can be treated in the single scattering (second order of scattering) approximation. A threshold value around 20 dB for the one-way path-integrated attenuation is suggested for the applicability of the surface reference technique to the CloudSat Profiling Radar system. This roughly corresponds to 96.5% of the rainy pixels. Owing to the different precipitation regimes, results are strongly regionally and seasonally dependent. For instance in the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone a not negligible fraction of the raining pixels requires either second-order (10–15%) or higher-order scattering (∼10%) to accurately model the observed reflectivity profile.


Many people work in uncomfortable thermal environments where the need to perform manual handling tasks is a fundamental requirement. A review of the research into the effects of performing manual handling in these environments revealed design limitations and gaps in knowledge. Current industry guidance merely states that 'extremes of heat and humidity should be avoided'. The purpose of this thesis was to study participants' physiological and subjective responses while lifting in hot, warm and cold environments. Three studies were conducted using the psychophysical approach where participants self-selected the load in a floor to knuckle-height lift. For the first study 12 males (mean +/- sd), age 25.2 +/- 6 yrs, mass 74.9 +/-11.9 kg, stature 1.73 +/- 0.1m were recruited and acclimated over five days (1 hr sessions) in an environmental chamber at 38°C, 70% relative humidity (RH). They completed 15x35-min trials on consecutive weekdays in five environments: thermoneutral, 21 °C, 45% RH (17°C WBGT); warm-dry, 30°C, 25% RH (22°C WBGT); warm-humid, 30°C, 65% RH (27°C WBGT); hot-dry, 39°C, 22% RH (27°C WBGT); hot-humid, 38°C, 70% RH (34°C WBGT) and three lift frequencies: 1, 4.3 and 6.7 lifts.min -1. Heart rate and aural temperature were significantly higher and maximum acceptable weight of lift (MAWL) significantly lower in the hot-humid environment compared to all others. Ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) were significantly higher in hot-humid compared to both warm-dry and thermoneutral. Although participants reduced workloads in the heat, they did not compensate adequately. There were no significant differences in response between two environments with the same WBGT (27°C).Secondly, 12 males, age 26 +/- 5.6 yrs, mass 75.1 +/- 9.2kg, stature 1.77 +/- 0.1m were recruited. They completed 15x35-min trials in five environments: thermoneutral, 16°C, 65% RH; 10°C, 55% RH; 5°C, 45% RH; 0°C, 55% RH (standard ensemble); 0°C, 55% RH (enhanced ensemble) and the same three lift frequencies. MAWL significantly decreased at higher lift frequencies. Mean aural temperature was significantly lower at 0°C (standard) compared to thermoneutral. Mean MAWLs were higher than in the heat suggesting that participants increased activity to keep warm possibly placing them at greater risk of musculoskeletal injury. In all environments below thermoneutral the mean end aural temperature was <36.2°C when lifting at 1 lift.min[-1].Finally, 10 males, age 28.4 +/- 5.1 yrs, mass 79.5 +/- 13.1 kg, stature 1.8 +/- 0.1 m were recruited to assess the effects of face-cooling on physiological strain and perceived exertion while lifting at 6.7 lifts.min[-1] in 30°C, 65% RH (27°C WBGT). Face-cooling significantly reduced local skin temperature and heart rate. There were no other significant differences. Face-cooling seems to be limited to mediating RPE (encompassing thermal strain) independent of core temperature which might continue to rise. The following recommendations are suggested for inclusion in future industry guidance. Workers should not regulate their own workloads in uncomfortable environments. RH does not impose additional strain in air temperatures up to 30°C. At ~39°C care must be taken when RH exceeds 25%. Attention must be paid to workers' clothing ensembles in temperatures below 16°C so that they provide adequate insulation. Finally, face-cooling should not be thought of as a protective mechanism against heat stress.


Optical-frequency-domain reflectometry is used to measure the group-index difference and the refractive-index difference (i.e., beat length) between the fast and slow modes in polarization-maintaining optical fiber. The Rayleigh scatter normally present in the fiber is measured in reflection. This measurement, in turn, enables a distributed measurement of the fiber's birefringence that is rapid and completely nondestructive


Research problem: Examines how Korean entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurship program revised their English-language slide decks for their competitive presentations ("pitches") by reusing content from professional communication genres, including their own documents and feedback from potential stakeholders in their target markets. Research question: As entrepreneurs learn to pitch ideas to unfamiliar markets, how do they revise their slide decks by reusing content from other professional communication genres? Specifically, what strategies do they follow when reusing content? Literature review: The professional communication literature demonstrates that reuse tends to take place in documentation cycles where documents are set in interaction with each other and that reuse itself involves rhetorical choices. Yet such reuse strategies have not been examined in existing studies of entrepreneurial pitches in marketing and technology commercialization. Methodology: In an exploratory qualitative study, researchers textually analyzed 14 sets of five related document genres in the archives of an entrepreneurship program. These genres represented a full cycle of activity: application to the program, initial pitches, initial feedback from program personnel, detailed feedback from representative stakeholders in the target market, and revised pitches. Interviews and surveys of program personnel further contextualize the data. Results and conclusions: Entrepreneurs reused content from professional communication genres, including those that they had generated as well as those generated by market stakeholders. However, reuse went simply beyond accepting and copying feedback; as they learned to make their pitch arguments, these entrepreneurs had to weigh this feedback and engage with it critically. This reuse can be characterized as Accepting (repeating verbatim or in close paraphrase); Continuing (extending lines of argument); and Resisting (rebutting lines of argument). These findings suggest that entrepreneurs need all three strategies as they refine their pitches for their target markets.


The extraordinary low non-radiative recombination and band gap versatility of halide perovskites have led to considerable development in optoelectronic devices. However, this versatility is limited by the stability of the perovskite phase, related to the relative size of the different cations and anions. The most emblematic case is that of formamidinium lead iodine (FAPI) black phase, which has the lowest band gap among all 3D lead halide perovskites, but quickly transforms into the non-perovskite yellow phase at room temperature. Efforts to optimize perovskite solar cells have largely focused on the stabilization of FAPI based perovskite structures, often introducing alternative anions and cations. However, these approaches commonly result in a blue-shift of the band gap, which limits the maximum photo-conversion efficiency. Here, we report the use of PbS colloidal quantum dots (QDs) as stabilizing agent for the FAPI perovskite black phase. The surface chemistry of PbS plays a pivotal role, by developing strong bonds with the black phase but weak ones with the yellow phase. As a result, stable FAPI black phase can be formed at temperatures as low as 85°C in just 10 minutes, setting a record of concomitantly fast and low temperature formation for FAPI, with important consequences for industrialization. FAPI thin films obtained through this procedure preserve the original low band gap of 1.5 eV, reach a record open circuit potential (Voc) of 1.105 V -91% of the maximum theoretical Voc- and preserve high efficiency for more than 700 hours. These findings reveal the potential of strategies exploiting the chemi-structural properties of external additives to relax the tolerance factor and optimize the optoelectronic performance of perovskite materials.


Health is a crucial resource for a person's being to measure in our society from any disease. The fast development of the population appears to be trying to record and dissect the massive measure of knowledge about patients. Healthcare may be a need, and clinical specialists are constantly attempting to get approaches to actualize innovations and give effective outcomes. The main problem faced by the healthcare industry is the rising costs which include diagnosis and prediction of diseases, drug discovery, medical imaging diagnosis, personalized medicine, behavior therapy, and smart health records. Machine learning gives us an advantage of processing these information naturally which helps in making the human services framework progressively powerful. Getting the correct determination may be a key part of Healthcare. It clarifies a patient's medical issue and suggests health care treatment. The disease diagnostic technique is a complex, community-oriented action that has clinical, intelligent and data social events to make a decision about a patient's medical issue. Google has built up a ML model to assist recognize dangerous tumours on mammograms. Stanford's profound learning calculation to differentiate skin malignancy. This paper is focused on the importance of Machine Learning in Healthcare just like the different application areas, latest research works in healthcare, wise machine learning contribution in Healthcare, and so on. Machine Learning is an application of Artificial Intelligence that helps in automatically learning and improving itself from experience. It is used in many other sectors like Law, Marketing & Advertising, Finance, Retail& Customer Services and Healthcare which also includes Covid-19. This paper presents various research in the Medicine and Healthcare sector


Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a novel and effective surgical intervention for refractory Parkinson's disease (PD). The authors review the current literature to identify the clinical correlates associated with subthalamic nucleus (STN) DBS-induced hypomania/mania in PD patients. Ventromedial electrode placement has been most consistently implicated in the induction of STN DBS-induced mania. There is some evidence of symptom amelioration when electrode placement is switched to a more dorsolateral contact. Additional clinical correlates may include unipolar stimulation, higher voltage (>3 V), male sex, and/or early-onset PD. STN DBS-induced psychiatric adverse events emphasize the need for comprehensive psychiatric presurgical evaluation and follow-up in PD patients. Animal studies and prospective clinical research, combined with advanced neuroimaging techniques, are needed to identify clinical correlates and underlying neurobiological mechanisms of STN DBS-induced mania. Such working models would serve to further our understanding of the neurobiological underpinnings of mania and contribute valuable new insight toward development of future DBS mood-stabilization therapies.


Estimates of the susceptibility of plant species of coastal dune vegetation tokilling by Armillaria luteobubalina Watling & Kilewere obtained from the occurrence of mycelial sheaths of the pathogen beneaththe bark of the root collars of dead plants in 62 disease centres.Dicotyledons (Magnoliopsida) outnumbered monocotyledons (Liliopsida), being81% of the 330 plant species found in disease centres in coastalvegetation. Fifty-one percent of the species were from five Magnoliopsidafamilies with the largest number of species from the Myrtaceae and Proteaceae.Eleven percent of the species were from three Liliopsida families with thelargest number of species from the Cyperaceae. Thirty-four percent of speciesoccurred in three or more disease centres. Thirty-eight percent, or a total of125 of all species, were killed by A. luteobubalina incoastal vegetation. Hosts on which the pathogen did not reach the root collarwould not have been detected. The largest number of species killed were fromthe Proteaceae (26% of species killed) followed by Myrtaceae,Epacridaceae, Papilionaceae and Mimosaceae. Only 6% of species killedwere from the Liliopsida. The distribution of species frequency and thosekilled by infection is positively skewed, with 40% of species notkilled in any centre and 8% killed in greater than 75% of thecentres in which they occurred. The percentage of disease centres in which aspecies occurred and was killed by A. luteobubalina issignificantly linearly correlated with mortality rating and relativeimportance. Cross-tabulation of species by disease centres in which plantswere killed provided the opportunity to classify the relative susceptibilityof plant species to killing by A. luteobubalina.


Due to an increasing variability in farm income because of extreme weather conditions and higher market volatilities, the German Farmers Association demanded the introduction of income equalization deposits for agricultural income to avoid a progression-based extra tax load and to support farmers building reserve funds. This article examines the economic effects as well as the legitimacy according to German tax law and its administrative practicability. Fundamentally, smoothing income over several years is admissible according to the German ability-to-pay principle. Nevertheless, a restriction to a particular group of tax payers is only acceptable if special circumstances faced by this group seem to make it necessary. This constraint demands restrictions on deposit and withdrawal which are linked to specific agricultural difficulties. Due to a couple of problems and difficulties in definition, measurement and valuation on an on-farm level, the administrative feasibility of these restrictions is limited. Different types of profit assessment for farmers complicate a fair and straight-forward usage. It is uncertain if income equalization deposits will be a useful risk management tool for farmers while simultaneously meeting all legal requirements in German tax law.


Abstract A Galerkin weak form for the monoenergetic neutron transport equation with a continuous finite element method and discrete ordinate method is developed based on self-adjoint angular flux formulation. This weak form is modified for treating void regions. A consistent diffusion scheme is developed with P0 projection. Correction terms of the diffusion scheme are derived to reproduce the transport scalar flux. A source iteration that decouples the solution of all directions with both linear and nonlinear diffusion accelerations is developed and demonstrated. One-dimensional Fourier analysis is conducted to demonstrate the stability of the linear and nonlinear diffusion accelerations. Numerical results of these schemes are presented.


Kriging is an estimation technique that has been proved useful in image processing since it behaves, under regular sampling, as a convolution. The uncertainty obtained with kriging has also been shown to behave as a convolution for the case of regular sampling. The convolution kernel for the uncertainty exclusively depends on the spatial correlation properties of the image. In this work we obtain, first, analytical expressions for the uncertainty of 1D images with noise using this convolution procedure. Then, we use this uncertainty to propose a new criterion for determining whether a 1D image with noise is correctly sampled.


Spanish has two copulas, ser and estar, which are often translated as English 'be'. Here, we study their differences by investigating their contrastive distributional patterns in combination with adjectival predicates. Specifically, we test the processing predictions of a presupposition-based analysis (Deo et al. 2016) that accounts for a wide range of distributional patterns of the copulas. This analysis has the advantage that it explains the variable copulas' uses observed across Spanish varieties. Our focus is on Iberian and Mexican Spanish. The presupposition-based analysis establishes a clear-cut distinction between the two copulas: estar presupposes the contingency of the prejacent, ser does not. Accordingly, the use of estar requires that the common ground contextually entails that its prejacent is contingent. If the common ground does not imply the contingency of the prejacent, this new information would need to be accommodated by the hearer. We hypothesize that estar predications, when presented in isolation with adjectival predicates that show a preference to appear with ser, will engender a processing cost as a result of adding to the common ground the proposition that the prejacent holds contingently. This hypothesis is tested in two studies, an acceptability questionnaire and a self-paced reading. The results show that when the context does not explicitly support estar's presupposition, sentences are scored lower (study 1, acceptability questionnaire) and read slower (study 2, self-paced reading) by both Iberian and Mexican speakers. In addition, the data provide experimental evidence for the 'constrained' variability across Spanish dialects. The results suggest that Mexican speakers are able to accommodate the contingencypresupposition of estar without relying on explicit contextual cues to a larger extent than Iberian speakers. Altogether, the data support an analysis of copula distinction in Spanish that takes into account the contingency-presupposition of estar and the variability in copula use across Spanish dialects. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/ vol23/iss1/25 Copula Distinction and Constrained Variability of Copula Use in Iberian and Mexican Spanish Sara Sánchez-Alonso, Ashwini Deo and Marı́a Mercedes Piñango


Indigenous people in Australia experience multiple forms of disadvantage. Some of these result in poor educational outcomes, which, in turn, create further disadvantage. While a number of factors have been thought to contribute to the difficulties that Indigenous children encounter at school, the implications of conductive hearing loss have been largely a neglected issue. Conductive hearing loss results from middle ear disease (otitis media). Indigenous children experience otitis media in more severe forms, earlier and for longer periods during childhood than do other groups of children in Australia. However, there has been a long‐standing tendency to regard middle ear disease and the related conductive hearing loss as largely a health issue, despite past research which has demonstrated that conductive hearing loss is associated with school behaviour problems, and with poor learning outcomes for many Indigenous students. This research project used an embedded case study, mixed methods design to consider issues that are fundamental to the improvement in the educational support available for urban Indigenous students with conductive hearing loss. The project evaluated an informal speech reception game that could be used by teachers and parents to identify the children who may have a current conductive hearing loss. It also examined children's classroom responses, responses that were often viewed by teachers as behaviour problems, and found that these could be related to students' current conductive hearing loss. ii The research outcomes provide a better understanding of how conductive hearing loss, in conjunction with background noise levels in classrooms, can shape responses by students that teachers identify as behaviour problems. The resulting framework of knowledge can be drawn on to help teachers working with children with current conductive hearing loss. It provides a base for the development of more effective classroom intervention and behaviour management strategies that cater for the communicative and educational needs of the many Indigenous children with conductive hearing loss.


In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Localized Makeup Transfer Network to automatically recommend the most suitable makeup for a female and synthesis the makeup on her face. Given a before-makeup face, her most suitable makeup is determined automatically. Then, both the beforemakeup and the reference faces are fed into the proposed Deep Transfer Network to generate the after-makeup face. Our end-to-end makeup transfer network have several nice properties including: (1) with complete functions: including foundation, lip gloss, and eye shadow transfer; (2) cosmetic specific: different cosmetics are transferred in different manners; (3) localized: different cosmetics are applied on different facial regions; (4) producing naturally looking results without obvious artifacts; (5) controllable makeup lightness: various results from light makeup to heavy makeup can be generated. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our network performs much better than the methods of [Guo and Sim, 2009] and two variants of NerualStyle [Gatys et al., 2015a].


Title of dissertation: THE BROWNING OF THE ALL BLACKS: PACIFIC PEOPLES, RUGBY, AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN NEW ZEALAND Andrew David Grainger, Doctor of Philosophy, 2008 Dissertation directed by: Professor David L. Andrews Department of Kinesiology In this dissertation I examine how the complex, and often contradictory, discourses of being a 'Pacific person' are played out in, and through, New Zealand rugby. In particular, I interrogate how these discourses—manifest in various forms of public expression—structure, regulate, and, potentially, challenge traditional notions of nationality. In the opening chapters I first explore how liberal values and the goals of inclusion and pluralism have been an important part of defining New Zealand identity. In this regard Pacific peoples are playing an ever-more important role. I suggest, however, that an emergent 'Pacific multiculturalism' actually reinforces white cultural power. It also masks the way national belonging has been racialized in New Zealand, and the role rugby has, and continues to, play in inscribing the Otherness of Pacific peoples. What I suggest is needed is alternative or resistant models of 'culture.' In the concluding chapters I turn to the notion of diaspora as one potential alternative. Rearticulating the insightful ideas of Paul Gilroy in my penultimate chapter, I argue that diaspora can be productively adapted as a model to comprehend the lives, travels, migrations, and significances of Pacific athletes. I suggest they provide important diasporic resources for rearticulating modes of belonging that exceed national boundaries. Methodologically, this project is a discursive analysis of the public discourses of Pacificness circulating in a diverse range of documentary, literary, and media sources. I suggest that this critical analysis of the performance, practice, and institutions of Pacific/New Zealand rugby provides a unique context within which to examine the ensemble of discourses and forces by which identity is understood and produced, and through which the Pacific subject in constituted. My hope is that, in accord with Gilroy (1993), this analysis both identifies and actively produces alternatives to divisive discourses of national and ethnic absolutism. That is, my goal is to produce a text which not only critiques, but offers strategies of resistance to, the practices, structures, and ideologies of exclusion.


In this age, a huge amount of data is generated every day by human interactions with services. Discovering the patterns of these data are very important to take business decisions. Due to the size of this data, it requires very high intensive computation power. Thus, many frameworks have been developed using Central Processing Units (CPU) implementations to perform this computation. For instance, a distributed and parallel programming model such as Google's MapReduce. On the other hand, since the last half decade, researchers have started using Graphics Processing Units (GPU) performance to process these huge data. Unlike CPU, GPU can execute many tasks in parallel. To measure the performance of GPU, EURA NOVA implemented two data mining algorithms (K-Means and Naive Bayes) in the framework to enable task execution in a distributed manner by considering availability of GPU power in each node. Even though the framework was successfully implemented, when compared to another CPU parallel framework, its performance was very poor. It shows that the framework does not use the performance of GPU effectively. Moreover, it contradicts with the fact that GPU can execute many tasks in parallel and thus, faster than CPU implementation. As a result, this research topic started with the objective to answer how to improve this performance. Specifically, to improve the performance of the K-Means implementation. We also included a new data mining implementation called Expectation Maximization to the framework, taking advantage of each GPU node and the distribution nodes. Furthermore, we address some good practices when implementing data mining in GPU from a sequential design. Working with general purpose GPU is still in development stage. A well known library is Thrust. We used it to achieve the above objectives. Finally, we evaluated our solutions by comparing with other existed CPU frameworks. The results show that we improved the K-Means performance more than 130x, and plugged the expectation maximization implementation into EURA NOVA's framework.


Nanoparticles of acenes exhibit highly efficient intermolecular singlet fission (SF). Recent reports indicate that altering the morphology of 6,13-(triisopropylsilylethynyl)pentacene (TIPS-Pn) nanoparticles has a profound influence on their SF dynamics. Here, we show that poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) induces a phase transition in pre-formed TIPS-Pn nanoparticles. These nanoparticles are amorphous when initially formed, but crystalline after addition of PVA. Surface characterization indicates that a diffuse PVA layer surrounds the nanoparticles. We propose that a periodic interaction between the hydroxyl groups of PVA and TIPS groups of TIPS-Pn on the nanoparticle surface induces a large-scale structural rearrangement to yield crystalline TIPS-Pn. Such reorganization in pre-formed organic nanoparticles is unprecedented, and we believe that this is the first report of such an effect induced by polymer adsorption. Transient absorption spectroscopic results reveal that SF within these nanoparticles is accelerated by an order of magnitude upon structural rearrangement.


Personalization algorithms, widely used by digital media sources, filter and prioritize news in ways that may not be apparent to users. Savvy media consumers should be aware of how this technology is used to tailor news to their tastes. This two-part study examines the extent to which US college students are aware of news personalization, and the actions and criteria that affect news selection and prioritization. Interviews with one set of students (N = 37) focus on the news sources they use most often to begin a news search. A subsequent survey given to a second set of students (N = 147) focuses on Google and Facebook, two influential gatekeepers. Results show that students are largely unaware of whether and how news sources track user data and apply editorial judgments to deliver personalized results. These studies identify aspects of news personalization that warrant greater attention in college curricula.