This essay proposes that the history of California includes the intended destruction and decimation of native cultures, including their forced removal, illegal land acquisition, slavery, separation of families, and outright murder enacted by the private citizenry and governmental agencies during European contact can be defined as genocide as outlined by the United Nations Geneva Convention, 1948. The lasting legacy of contact on aboriginal lifeways and tradition, as well as the recent resurgence of native traditions and culture is addressed to suggest that the health and healing of native communities lies in reconciling the past to make passage into the future.


Phase monopulse, amplitude monopulse, and phase-amplitude monopulse are compared. The latter uses only two antenna feeds and by controlling the aperture illumination from these feeds has a separation of the illumination phase centers in one axis and opposed tilts of the phase fronts, or squint, in the other axis. It is described as more fundamental or less redundant than four-horn or other multihorn monopulse designs. In lacking redundancy it is less complex, but has fewer degrees of freedom to optimize performance. The earliest example of phase-amplitude monopulse, the AN/APG-25 (XN-2), is described and its performance given.


Within the territorial boundaries of the Islamic State's (IS) 'caliphate', women were largely confined to the domestic sphere. Their roles centred on support to militant husbands and the ideological upbringing of children. The physical collapse of IS' proto-state marks a significant turning point in women's commitment and activism for the group. Many IS-affiliated women are now indefinitely detained within Kurdish-run camps in North-eastern Syria. The harsh living conditions therein have fostered ideological divides. While some show signs of disillusionment with IS' 'caliphate' dream, others have sought to re-impose its strictures. This paper contributes to the understanding of women's roles across the lifespan of the Islamic State, and the efficacy of independent female activism to facilitate the group's physical recovery. It argues that IS' post-territorial phase has brought greater autonomy and ideological authority to individual hard-line detainees. However, beyond the camps, women's influence and ability to realise IS' physical resurgence remains practically limited and dependent on male leadership.


This study empirically examines the role of consumer trust and its antecedents in determining consumers' intention to adopt mobile payment. This research proposes that consumers' willingness to adopt mobile payment depends on their assessment of the trustworthiness of mobile service provider and vendor, their assessment of the functional reliability of mobile payment systems as well as their general disposition to trust and their cultural background, in particular, uncertainty avoidance. Data were gathered from 302 participants in Auckland, New Zealand. Results show that all five sets of trust antecedents influence the development of trust and trust is an important predictor of intention to adopt mobile payment. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.


Edge detection, especially from colour images, plays very important roles in many applications for image analysis, segmentation and recognition. Most existing methods extract colour edges via fusing edges detected from each colour components or detecting from the intensity image where inter-component information is ignored. In this study, an improved method on colour edge detection is proposed in which the significant advantage is the use of inter-component difference information for effective colour edge detection. For any given colour image C, a grey D-image is defined as the accumulative differences between each of its two colour components, and another grey R-image is then obtained by weighting of D-image and the grey intensity image G. The final edges are determined through fusion of edges extracted from R-image and G-image. Quantitative evaluations under various levels of Gaussian noise are achieved for further comparisons. Comprehensive results from different test images have proved that this approach outperforms edges detected from traditional colour spaces like RGB, YCbCr and HSV in terms of effectiveness and robustness.


The effect of two concentrations of an aqueous extract of the San Pedro Daisy, (Lasianthaea podocephala Gray) roots was evaluated on the water quality, physiological condition and production parameters of the white Pacific shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei (Boone), farmed under intensive laboratory conditions. Two treatments and a control were considered: T1 (1 mL of extract per aquarium), T2 (3 mL of the extract per aquarium) and C (control, 0 mL of the extract). No negative effects of the treatments on water quality parameters were observed, which ranged into acceptable limits and without significant differences (P < 0,05). Some of the production parameters such as final biomass and FCA were slightly better in the treatments using the extract. The concentration of haemolymph metabolites indicate that shrimp from treatments with the extract were under better conditions, suggested by the levels of protein and cholesterol in the muscle; moreover, the gene expression results suggest that the extract could have an immunostimulatory effect on shrimp. However, additional studies are required to evaluate the active ingredients of the root extract at the molecular level in order to have more information for the potential use of the plant.


The objective of the research was to determine the relationship between body weight and body measurement of Peranakan Etawah (PE) goat male at different age in Klaten Regency. The research was conducted in District Karangnongko and Kemalang. The research used 98 male goats aged 0-60 months and the data were analyzed using correlation and regression. The study found a very positive relationship between the chest girth, the body length, shoulders height, chest depth and body weight on goats aged 0-6 months until 12-24 months of age. Another findings were goats with 24-36 months of age had a very positive relationship between chest girth and the body length with body weight, while shoulders height and chest depth had a positive correlation with body weight. A very positive relationship was also found on the chest girth with body weight of goats with age of 36-60 months, while other body measurements had a very low positive relationship. The study concluded that chest girth had a close correlation with body weight of the PE goat. Keywords: Body measurements, body weight, Peranakan Etawah


Studies in 1982 and 2006 conducted by the Canadian government and Canadian professional theatre organizations, respectively, revealed that Canadian women directors have been and continue to be underrepresented in relation to their male counterparts. Despite this disparity, however, Canadian women stage directors are creating innovative theatre and re-visioning traditional works. Whether directing work by and about women, re-staging canonical works, developing new multi-media work, or experimenting with new rehearsal methods, these women directors are ostensibly destabilizing conventional aesthetic forms and providing social critique through artistic innovation. Outside Canada, however, these women are largely unrecognized, and English language scholarship that investigates "American" or "North American" theatre often focuses exclusively on the US. Utilizing feminist historiography and qualitative case study methods, this study addresses that omission and investigates the work and directorial methods of four prominent Canadian women directors: Nina Lee Aquino, Kim Collier, Jillian Keiley, and Kelly Thornton. Through one-on-one interviews with each director, rehearsal and performance observations, and available critical reviews and archival documents, this project considers these directors' artistic contributions, directorial methods, and the ways that gender, nationality, and other intersecting identities such as race, class, sexuality, and regionality impact their work. Ultimately, this project intends to contribute to the current and ongoing conversation about the status of Canadian women in theatre as well as to larger global discourses surrounding issues of gender, nationality and the arts.


This study was developed to evaluate the effects of salinity on the growth and gas exchange of cassava plants, cultivar Verdinha. The four concentrations of NaCl (mM) were as follows: 0, 20, 40, and 60. Under salinity, the lowest concentration of Na + ions was observed in the tuberous roots; however, the dry matter of tuberous roots was reduced with an application of just 20 mM NaCl. The harvest index was reduced 50% with the highest salt concentration. Salinity reduced carbon assimilation ( A ), stomatal conductance ( g s ), transpiration, and the instantaneous water use efficiency. The correlation between g s and A was high and positive, showing that stomatal movement was one of the responsible for the lower A. Under salt stress, there was an increase in intercellular CO 2 concentration, indicating the impairment of carbon metabolism. Based on the reduction of dry matter of the tuberous roots (reduction of 81% under 60 mM NaCl), it was concluded that cassava is sensitive to salinity. The growth of shoots and the absorbing roots were minimally affected by salinity, even in the situation where A was reduced; therefore, the sensitivity of cassava was related to the high sensitivity of the tuberous roots to the ionic and/or osmotic effects of salinity. Thus, tuberous roots can be the target organ in studies that aim to improve the tolerance of cassava to salinity.


There has been an unprecedented political focus on economic development and poverty reductions since the Gleneagles Summit of 2005, yet it seems economists have been unable to agree on how to capitalise on the opportunity. Is more aid the solution? Or the problem? This article argues that, beyond the headline-grabbing generalities, development economists are building up a detailed body of empirical evidence specific to individual countries which will shape more effective policy interventions in the years ahead. As in many other areas of applied economics, there is a quiet revolution in what economists know and consequently in their policy advice.


Objectives. While mild to severe acne is a common problem in the teenage years, many adults also suffer from the condition. Although there is an appreciable body of dermatological literature on this issue, the psychosocial concomitants of severe, visible adult acne are little elaborated. The aim of this research is to detail the salient experiences of adults with severe visible acne, and to set out the implications of these experiences. Design: A phenomenological qualitative approach was adopted to elicit detailed accounts of the impact of visible acne upon the lives of a small sample of sufferers. Method. Eleven adults suffering from severe visible acne took part in semi-structured interviews via e-mail, over an extended period of time. Transcripts of these interviews served as the data for an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Results. Six themes emerged, detailing different aspects of respondents' personal and social lives in the context of their acne. These were: Control and the variable nature of acne; Comparisons and self-image; The experience of social interaction; Relationships with family and friends; Gender, sexuality and romantic relationships; and Interactions with health professionals Conclusions. These themes allowed a deeper understanding of issues reported in previous quantitative research in the area, as well as revealing findings that had not been previously reported in relation to the experience of adult acne and its impact upon personal and social relationships. With an acknowledgment of these experiences, personal and professional acquaintances have the potential to improve their interpersonal relationship with the person concerned, and encourage both psychological and social progress.


Protected areas are a cornerstone of conservation strategies globally, yet questions remain about their impacts, including on highly migratory species. The Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, one of the Northern Line Islands in the Central Pacific, contains a regionally significant green turtle Chelonia mydas foraging ground. Residency patterns of this species were investigated through satellite telemetry (n = 15 males, 1 female, 2 subadults) and flipper tagging (n = 555) between 2008 and 2013. Almost every captured turtle was flipper-tagged, but telemetry efforts focused primarily on adult males, which have been studied infrequently. Overall, the turtles tracked during 4076 transmission days (mean = 227, range = 37 to 633) had high site fidelity and small home ranges, and remained close to their capture sites in waters ≤50 m deep. Five turtles were tracked for >1 yr, but none left Palmyra on annual breeding migrations. Only one satellite-tracked turtle departed the atoll, covering a total distance of ~5600 km in a near-circular loop. Similarly, flipper tag recaptures on the atoll (n = 67) occurred near the original capture site. However, additional tags were recovered from 1 female in Kiritimati, Northern Line Islands, and from 1 subadult in Kosrae, Micronesia, ~690 and 3800 km away from Palmyra, respectively. Such ex tended, spatially restricted residency with low turnover is expected in small, high-quality habitats. The study highlights the importance of this protected area, which harbors regionally endangered turtles whose movements over several years are almost entirely encompassed within its established boundaries.


Increased competition of universities in Taiwan has promoted the adaptation of neoliberal management practices within institutions. These changes have altered the career outlook of faculty from a more single focus into a multi-role perspective. This continuing role conflicts have created the misalignment of academic identity and blurring of work ideologies. Within the aspects of doctoral education, currently a decreasing trend in number of enrollments and graduation rates are seen. This is in part caused by the outgoing mobility of graduate students and the perceived difficulties in securing a job for post-graduate degree holders. As doctoral students are crucial to the future of Taiwan academia, understanding how their career perspectives are shaped is of the utmost importance. To analyzed the doctoral students' career inclination, a survey containing their perceived importance with regards to interactions with their mentor, classmates, course design, and together with their perceived self-efficacies are collected. A total of 94 doctoral students from the two comprehensive universities in Taiwan are surveyed. Regression results show that academic identity inclined towards research only career is highly dependent on doctoral students' coping facilitations, while teaching only career is best determined by their mentors' provision of career opportunities, and the teaching and management oriented courses. More important, results show that a dual perspective academic identity is highly significant with the doctoral students' mentor provision of career opportunities. These findings suggest that doctoral students' future career are highly shaped by their experiences with their course undertaking and quality of interactions with their mentors.


T he 2012 Hormone Therapy Position Statement of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS) states that hormone therapy (HT) is the most effective treatment for symptoms of menopause. To maximize safety, the initiation of HT should be considered for healthy symptomatic women who are within 10 years of menopause or aged younger than 60 years and who do not have contraindications to use of HT. Contraindications are well established and should be considered in making this decision. However, vasomotor symptoms persist for an average of 7.4 years and for more than a decade in many women. Moderate to severe vasomotor symptoms have been documented in 42% of women aged 60 to 65 years. Thus, many women will continue to have vasomotor symptoms after age 65, and these symptoms can disrupt sleep and adversely affect health and quality of life. Provided that the woman has been advised of the increase in risks associated with continuing HT beyond age 60 and has clinical supervision, extending HT use with the lowest effective dose is acceptable under some circumstances, such as for the woman who has persistent bothersome menopausal symptoms and for whom her clinician has determined that the benefits of menopause symptom relief outweigh the risks. Use of HT should be individualized and not discontinued solely based on a woman_s age. The decision to continue or discontinue HT should be made jointly by the woman and her healthcare provider. REFERENCES


"Taonga Tuku Iho: Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Maori Life" was first published in 1963 as "An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Maori Life". This new edition with its Maori title (which translates to 'treasures from the past that have been handed down to us') has been fully revised and updated by Buddy Mikaere so that it is now a comprehensive yet easy-to-follow guide to pre-European Maori life. Drawing on the classic works of early anthropologists, ethnologists and commentators such as Elsdon Best, Sir Peter Buck and many others, this book is ideal for visitor information, as a home reference and as a basic text for students and researchers. Arranged alphabetically for easy reference, the text summarises all important elements, influences and features of pre-European Maori life, including detailed explanations and references to myths, legends and stories of the gods. The authoritative text, written by A.W. Reed and revised by Buddy Mikaere, is complemented throughout the original book's detailed line drawings. There is also a range of full-colour and black and white photographs.


We envision the creation of a climate liability market to address climate change. Each period, countries are issued liability commensurate to their emissions of the period. Liability bearers are required to pay over time, as climate harm materializes. Revenues are used to compensate participating countries in proportion of climate harm. Because liabilities are traded like financial debt among participants, the mechanism achieves a unique carbon price through decentralization of the choice of a discount rate as well as beliefs about the severity of the climate problem. We discuss properties of such a mechanism along the dimensions of efficiency, fairness, exposure to risk, commitment, participation, as well as implementation challenges.


From decade to decade, significant changes occur in the choice of first names for children. One-time favorites are perceived as old fashioned and replaced by new choices. In The Name Game, Jurgen Gerhards shows that shifts in the choice of names are based on more than arbitrary trends of fashion. Instead, he demonstrates, they are determined by larger currents in cultural modernization. Using classic tools of sociology, Gerhards focuses on changing patterns of first names in Germany from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, using these as an indicator of cultural change. Among the influences he considers are religion, and he notes a trend toward greater secularization in first names. He considers the extent to which Christian names have been displaced, and whether the process is similar for Catholics and Protestants. He traces the impact of different political regimes (Second Empire, Weimar Republic, Third Reich, West Germany, East Germany) and the accompanying rise and fall of German nationalist sentiment. He also investigates the dissolution of the family as a unit of production, and its impact on the naming of children. He shows that the weakening of traditional ties of religion, nation, and family has led to greater individuation and greater receptivity toward foreign first names. Gerhards concludes with a discussion of whether the blurring of gender and sex roles is reflected in the decrease of gender-specific names. Written in a lucid, approachable style, The Name Game will be of interest not only to sociologists and cultural studies specialists, but also non-professionals, especially parents who are interested in reflecting on the process of name giving.


The emphasis on increasing student retention and graduation rates at institutions of higher education is driving the need for creation and implementation of early alert systems. Such early alert systems could be used in identifying students in academic trouble before failure. Early identification of students who are at a risk of dropping or failing a course will help instructors to adapt their course delivering techniques with student's learning styles and improve overall performance of a class. This paper discusses an early alert system to identify students who are at risk of failure based on their activity at the beginning of semester. The proposed alert system considers various indicators, including the homework assignments and the mid-term exam corresponding to the first quarter, along with in-class participation as input parameters. Data collected in large sections of Mechanics of Materials course over four semesters were employed for development and validation of the early alert system. The data analysis showed that the proposed model is capable of predicting the final scores of the students with an acceptable accuracy (R=0.69). Feasibility of using the model was also validated using over 100 additional data points, which were randomly selected from the initial dataset. Good correlation was observed between the data and model predictions, with over 94% of the data points falling within the limits of a 90% confidence interval. The proposed model has possible implications in the similar engineering courses provided that the required data are collected during early semester activities. This tool enables the instructor to detect and reach out to the at-risk student and provide proactive assistance, so that they are able to succeed in the course. Proactive assistance may include referrals to appropriate resources, providing tailored activities to improve the weakness of students and one-to-one academic skill building workshops.


We consider the complexity of determining the winner of a finite, two-level poset game. This is a natural question, as it has been shown recently that determining the winner of a finite, three-level poset game is PSPACE-complete. We give a simple formula allowing one to compute the status of a type of two-level poset game that we call parity-uniform. This class includes significantly more easily solvable two-level games than was known previously. We also establish general equivalences between various two-level games. These equivalences imply that for any n, only finitely many two-level posets with n minimal elements need be considered, and a similar result holds for two-level posets with n maximal elements.


This report replicates Economics of Disability Reports 1, 2, and 3, with some minor changes. These reports contain the prevalence of a disability, employment rates, and median household size-adjusted income between states over the 1980s and 1990s. In response to the requests of state officials to generate statistics that reflect the population they serve, this report includes people aged 18 through 64 rather than people aged 25 through 61. The new age group is more likely to include those who enter the labor force after high school, during college, and post-college as well as those people who have decided not to take early retirement. In addition, at the request of state officials, the statistics in this report are not separated by gender because most government agencies do not make a strong distinction between men and women, even though men and women face different labor market conditions. This report uses data from the March Current Population Survey to estimate the prevalence of a disability, employment rate, and median household size-adjusted income among the non-institutionalized working-age (aged 18 through 64) civilian population in the United States, and for each state and the District of Columbia for the survey years 1981 through 2000 and income/employment years 1980 through 1999. Two definitions of disability that are commonly used in the literature—work limitation and work disability—are utilized. The prevalence of a work limitation and work disability varies greatly across states and over time. The employment rate of persons with work limitations relative to that of persons without a disability varies greatly across states. However, over the last 20 years the relative employment rate of those with work limitations dramatically declined overall and in most states. Consequently, the decrease in the relative employment rate for persons with work limitations induced the growth in the median household size-adjusted income of those with work limitations to fall below that of the rest of the working population in the vast majority of the states.


In the wake of United States v. Windsor, the IRS determined that a validly married same-sex couple is married for federal tax purposes regardless of their state of residence. A same-sex spouse residing in a state that does not recognize same-sex marriage is required to file federal taxes as married under federal law but is prohibited from filing as married in-state, thereby creating incompatibility—a filing status mismatch—between her federal and state income taxes. In order to resolve this, states should not require a same-sex spouse to prepare a pro forma "unmarried" federal return for state filing purposes, as this is inefficient to administer and enforce, and creates an inequitable compliance burden on the taxpayer. Nor should states delink their base from federal income or remove from their state tax codes all references to federal tax law, as this reduces tax efficiency. Instead, states should place traditional concerns of tax efficiency and equality above narrower same-sex marriage policy objectives when crafting their tax systems. Tax efficiency and equity require that states at least permit resident same-sex married taxpayers to allocate income and deduction figures already computed for their federal returns when preparing their state returns.


There is a clear and unmet need for a robust and affordable biomass conversion technology that can process a wide range of biomass feedstocks and produce high yields of fermentable sugars and biofuels with minimal intervention between unit operations. The lower microbial toxicity of recently-developed renewable ionic liquids (ILs), or bionic liquids (BILs), helps overcome the challenges associated with the integration of pretreatment with enzymatic saccharification and microbial fermentation. However, the most effective BILs known to date for biomass pretreatment form extremely basic pH solutions in the presence of water, and therefore require neutralization before the pH range is acceptable for the enzymes and microbes used to complete the biomass conversion process. Neutralization using acids creates unwanted secondary effects that are problematic for efficient and cost-effective biorefinery operations using either continuous or batch modes. We demonstrate a novel approach that addresses these challenges through the use of gaseous carbon dioxide to reversibly control the pH mismatch. This approach enables the realization of an integrated biomass conversion process that eliminates the need for intermediate washing and/or separation steps. A preliminary technoeconomic analysis indicates that this integrated approach could reduce production costs by 50–65% compared to previous IL biomass conversion methods studied.


A circuit-oriented model for 4H-SiC power diodes is presented. The modeling technique used in this work was previously applied to a silicon (Si) power diode model for both turn-on and turn-off transients, and presents a good trade-off between accuracy and speed. The model is physics-based, but includes judicious approximations for fast calculation, and includes up-to-date physical models for silicon carbide, with temperature dependence. The proposed model is practically implemented in the circuit simulator SABER, using the MAST modeling language. Model performances are compared to measurements on 2.5 kV 400 A Si IGBT/SiC diode modules from ABB at various input currents.


Application of human mesenchymal stem cells represents a promising approach in the field of regenerative medicine. Specific stimulation can give rise to chondrocytes, osteocytes or adipocytes. Investigation of the underlying biological processes which induce the observed cellular differentiation is essential to efficiently generate specific tissues for therapeutic purposes. Upon treatment with diverse stimuli, gene expression levels of cultivated human mesenchymal stem cells were monitored using time series microarray experiments for the three lineages. Application of gene network inference is a common approach to identify the regulatory dependencies among a set of investigated genes. This thesis applies the NetGenerator V2.0 tool, which is capable to deal with multiple time series data, which investigates the effect of multiple external stimuli. The applied model is based on a system of linear ordinary differential equations, whose parameters are optimised to reproduce the given time series datasets. Several procedures in the inference process were adapted in this new version in order to allow for the integration of multiple datasets. Network inference was applied on in silico network examples as well as on multi-experiment microarray data of mesenchymal stem cells. The resulting chondrogenesis model was evaluated on the basis of several features including the model adaptation to the data, total number of connections, proportion of connections associated with prior knowledge and the model stability in a resampling procedure. Altogether, NetGenerator V2.0 has provided an automatic and efficient way to integrate experimental datasets and to enhance the interpretability and reliability of the resulting network. In a second chondrogenesis model, the miRNA and mRNA time series data were integrated for the purpose of network inference. One hypothesis of the model was verified by experiments, which demonstrated the negative effect of miR-524-5p on downstream genes.


This technical memorandum describes a developing project under the direction of NOAA's Biogeography Branch in consultation with the National Park Service and US Geological Survey to understand and quantify spatial patterns and habitat affinities of reef fishes in the US Virgin Islands. The purpose of this report is to describe and disseminate the initial results from the project and to share information on the location of acoustic receivers and species electronic tag ID codes. The Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument (VICRNM), adjacent to Virgin Islands National Park (VIIS), was established by Executive Order in 2000, but resources within the monument are poorly documented and the degree of connectivity to VIIS is unknown. Whereas, VICRNM was established with full protection from resource exploitation, VIIS has incurred resource harvest by fishers since 1956 as allowed in its enabling legislation. Large changes in local reef communities have occurred over the past several decades, in part due to overexploitation. In order to better understand the habitat utilization patterns and movement of fishes among management regimes and areas open to fishing around St, John, an array of hydroacoustic receivers was deployed while a variety of reef fish species were acoustically tagged. In July 2006, nine receivers with a detection range of ca. 350 m were deployed in Lameshur Bay on the south shore of St. John, within VIIS. Receivers were located adjacent to reefs and in seagrass beds, inshore and offshore of these reefs. It was found that lane snappers and bluestriped grunts showed diel movement from reef habitats during daytime hours to offshore seagrass bed at night. Timing of migrations was highly predictable and coincided with changes in sunrise and sunset over the course of the year. Fish associated with reefs that did not have adjacent seagrass beds made more extensive movements than those fishes associated with reefs that had adjacent seagrass habitats. In April 2007, 21 additional receivers were deployed along much of the south shore of St. John (ca. 20 km of shoreline). This current array will address broader-scale movement among management units and examine the potential benefits of the VICRNM to provide adult "spillover" into VIIS and adjacent harvested areas. The results from this work will aid in defining fine to moderate spatial scales of reef fish habitat affinities and in designing and evaluating marine protected areas.


With around 12% of Kenya's rural population having access to electricity in 2014, rural electrification's progress has been conspicuously slow over the years. The purpose of this study is to identify and evaluate cost optimal technology options for improvement of electricity access in rural Kenya, on a geographical information system platform. Based on a one-year scenario, the study uses site suitability and cost distance analysis to conduct a mapping exercise based on four pre-chosen technologies. The results indicate that these technologies have the potential to reach around 2.1 million households increasing the national electrification rate by 28 percentage points to stand at around 94% from the current reported figures of 66%. Grid extension has the potential to reach 1.6 million households, followed by the solar photovoltaics and solar photovoltaics/wind hybrid mini-grids reaching 167,925 households while solar home systems extends to 315,844 households. Geographical information systems can be useful to energy planners, regulators, investors and users, as they aid in decision-making through the intersection and integration of information on multiple levels. Further research is also identified.


Article A-3000 of Appendix A in Section XI of the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code provides linear elastic fracture mechanics based calculation procedures for the determination of stress intensity factors. The 2015 Edition of ASME Section XI implements a number of significant improvements in Article A-3000. Major improvements include the implementation of an alternate method for calculation of the stress intensity factor for a surface flaw that makes explicit use of the Universal Weight Function Method and does not require a polynomial fit to the actual stress distribution, and the inclusion of closed-form equations for stress intensity factor influence coefficients for circumferential ID surface cracks. With the inclusion of the explicit weight function approach and the closed-form relations for influence coefficients, the procedures of Appendix A for the calculation of stress intensity factors can be used more efficiently.Closed-form equations for stress intensity factor influence coefficients for axial ID surface cracks have been under development. Tabular data of influence coefficients for the cylinder geometry provided in API 579-1/ASME FFS-1 2007 are used as data source. A set of closed-formed equations for an axial semi-elliptical ID surface crack with depth a and length 2c in a cylinder were previously reported in a 2014 PVP paper. The smallest value for a/c is 0.03125 in the tabular data that were used to fit the equations. For practical applications, it is desirable to use axial flaw equations that allow a/c to approach zero without extrapolation. This issue is addressed in the current PVP paper.Copyright © 2015 by ASME


Entrepreneurial Orientation is a significant influencer of firm performance more so for manufacturing firms operating under globalization, internationalization and regional integration regimes. Regionalization is the coming together by nations as a means of attaining socio-economic and political goals by nations, which cannot be achieved in isolation. Regionalization results in expanded markets, characterized by increased number of competition, and increased market size. This therefore, exerts greater pressure on manufacturing firms to regionalize; this is a challenge to firms accustomed to operating under a domestic market set-up. To overcome the challenges associated with regionalization, eminent scholars in other parts of the world have recommended, that, manufacturing firms adopt Entrepreneurial Orientation as a solution to the challenges brought about by regionalization. It is on this basis that the study sought to determine the influence of entrepreneurial orientation on the performance of manufacturing firms in Kenya operating under the East African Community regional integration. The study findings revealed that performance of Kenya's manufacturing firms operating under the East African Community regional integration, are significantly influenced by entrepreneurial orientation, in terms of Sales, Profits and Employment as measures of firm performance. The significance influence is more pronounced in terms of Sales for manufacturing firms which are integrated or operate within the regional integration. The study concluded that Kenya's manufacturing firms intent on enhancing their performance urgently need to adopt entrepreneurial orientation and recommends that further study be undertaken in other areas besides entrepreneurial orientation as an influencer of manufacturing firm performance. Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Orientation, Competitiveness, Firm Performance, Regional Integration.


With the aim of gaining a better understanding of the role which the static shear plays on the largedeformation behavior of saturated sand, a series of undrained cyclic torsional shear tests on saturated Toyoura sand specimens up to single amplitude shear strain of about 50 % were performed. Several hollow cylinder specimens at relative density of 44 48 % were tested while varying the initial static shear and the subsequent cyclic shear stress levels. Depending on the degree of stress reversal, the loading pattern could be classified into three groups: stress reversal, intermediate and non-reversal. The observed failure behavior of specimens could be distinguished into liquefaction and residual deformation failures depending on the magnitude of combined static and cyclic shear stress. It was found that the presence of static shear does not always lead to an increase in the resistances to liquefaction and strain accumulation: they could either increase or decrease with increasing the static shear depending on the magnitude of combined shear stress, the type of loading and the failure behavior. As well, the mode of development of large residual deformation changed in accordance with the failure behavior which the specimen exhibited.


Malware is a pervasive problem in distributed computer and network systems. Identification of malware variants provides great benefit in early detection. Control flow has been proposed as a characteristic that can be identified across variants, resulting in flowgraph based malware classification. Static analysis is widely used for the classification but can be ineffective if malware undergoes a code packing transformation to hide its real content. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for constructing a control flow graph signature using the decompilation technique of structuring. Similarity between structured graphs can be quickly determined using string edit distances. To reverse the code packing transformation, a fast application level emulator is proposed. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the automated unpacking and flowgraph based classification, we implement a complete system and evaluate it using synthetic and real malware. The evaluation shows our system is highly effective in terms of accuracy in revealing all the hidden code, execution time for unpacking, and accuracy in classification.


Extracted from text ... The automotive
industry:
significant cultural differences
J
Johan de Nysschen, CEO of Audi in
America, was the guest speaker at an
Alumni breakfast of the Graduate School
of Management at the University of
Pretoria at the end of last year.
Johan de Nysschen, a South African who
graduated at the Graduate School of Management
at the University of Pretoria and
CEO of Audi in America, recently visited
South Africa and was invited by the GSM
to share his business experiences at an executive
breakfast.
As America is the largest market for
Audi outside of Germany, this position
places De Nysschen ..


Abstract The exploration of plasma-wall–interaction physics is one of the major tasks of the tokamak TEXTOR. A characterization of the high-temperature plasma edge is essential to interpret the interaction processes of the different charged and uncharged particles in the boundary layer. In the design of the TEXTOR, much effort was made to optimize diagnostic access to the plasma edge for the best possible characterization. The major part of the plasma edge diagnostics presented here is based on passive and active spectroscopy, in addition to different types of electrical probes. Thereby, pioneering work has been achieved in both fields. In passive emission spectroscopy, the work concentrated on the determination of particle fluxes of different types of atomic (W, Si, C, …) and molecular (D2, CD, C2, …) species from the corresponding photon fluxes at different locations and on the visualization of the local impurity sources by means of two-dimensional imaging. The active spectroscopy with atomic beams was focused on the determination of plasma edge parameters (ne, Te, Ti, …) with good spatial and temporal resolution. Therefore, different techniques like thermal Li and He beams, suprathermal Li beams—realized by laser blow-off techniques—and hydrogen neutral beam injectors have been employed. Furthermore, laser-induced fluorescence measurements in the ultraviolet and in the vacuum ultraviolet ranges, which were for the first time performed in a fusion plasma, are presented. The continuous improvement of the different plasma edge diagnostics over more than a decade of TEXTOR plasma operation with different types of first-wall materials is discussed.


—Several studies have shown the relevance of biosig-nals in driver stress recognition. In this work, we examine something important that has been less frequently explored: We develop methods to test if the visual driving scene can be used to estimate a drivers' subjective stress levels. For this purpose, we use the AffectiveROAD video recordings and their corresponding stress labels, a continuous human-driver-provided stress metric. We use the common class discretization for stress, dividing its continuous values into three classes: low, medium, and high. We design and evaluate three computer vision modeling approaches to classify the driver's stress levels: (1) object presence features, where features are computed using automatic scene segmentation; (2) end-to-end image classification; and (3) end-to-end video classification. All three approaches show promising results, suggesting that it is possible to approximate the drivers' subjective stress from the information found in the visual scene. We observe that the video classification, which processes the temporal information integrated with the visual information, obtains the highest accuracy of 0 . 72 , compared to a random baseline accuracy of 0 . 33 when tested on a set of nine drivers.


Large areas of northern peatlands have been drained and afforested with conifers in the 20 century. This has led to changes in the hydrology of the peatlands, the quality and quantity of organic matter inputs and soil microbial communities, which are all likely to impact on greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes. Considerable areas of these forest plantations are undergoing restoration, and our aim was to assess whether contrasting compositions of peat, in conjunction with hydrological changes in a controlled lab experiment, impact on GHG fluxes. We incubated vegetation free cores (at 8 °C) from a near-natural bog, restoration sites felled in 1998, 2006, 2012 and a current forest plantation at (a) low water tables, (b) high tables or (c) water tables that were changed from low to high. Results show that peat quality and nutrient availability in the pore water have been altered by the forest plantations, which resulted in dissimilar carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes between the sites under the same temperature and water table conditions. Higher CO2 fluxes were found in the peat cores from the forest plantations than from sites that have undergone restoration and from the near-natural bog. However, there were few differences in methane (CH4) fluxes from the different sites, indicating that on its own (i.e., in the absence of biotic interactions under field conditions) the effects of forestry on CH4 flux are limited.


Much of neuroscience has to do with relating neural activity and behavior or environment. One common measure of this relationship is the firing rates of neurons as functions of behavioral or environmental parameters, often called tuning functions and receptive fields. Firing rates are estimated from the spike trains of neurons recorded by electrodes implanted in the brain. Individual neurons' spike trains are not typically readily available, because the signal collected at an electrode is often a mixture of activities from different neurons and noise. Extracting individual neurons' spike trains from voltage signals, which is known as spike sorting, is one of the most important data analysis problems in neuroscience, because it has to be undertaken prior to any analysis of neurophysiological data in which more than one neuron is believed to be recorded on a single electrode. All current spike-sorting methods consist of clustering the characteristic spike waveforms of neurons. The sequence of first spike sorting based on waveforms, then estimating tuning functions, has long been the accepted way to proceed. Here, we argue that the covariates that modulate tuning functions also contain information about spike identities, and that if tuning information is ignored for spike sorting, the resulting tuning function estimates are biased and inconsistent, unless spikes can be classified with perfect accuracy. This means, for example, that the commonly used peristimulus time histogram is a biased estimate of the firing rate of a neuron that is not perfectly isolated. We further argue that the correct conceptual way to view the problem out is to note that spike sorting provides information about rate estimation and vice versa, so that the two relationships should be considered simultaneously rather than sequentially. Indeed we show that when spike sorting and tuning-curve estimation are performed in parallel, unbiased estimates of tuning curves can be recovered even from imperfectly sorted neurons.


We consider the task of training classifiers without labels. We propose a weakly supervised method—adversarial label learning—that trains classifiers to perform well against an adversary that chooses labels for training data. The weak supervision constrains what labels the adversary can choose. The method therefore minimizes an upper bound of the classifier's error rate using projected primal-dual subgradient descent. Minimizing this bound protects against bias and dependencies in the weak supervision. Experiments on real datasets show that our method can train without labels and outperforms other approaches for weakly supervised learning.


Iron-coated sand (ICS) prepared by using FeCl 3 and Joomoonjin sand widely used in Korea was used in this study. In batch adsorption kinetics, As(V) adsorption onto ICS was completed within 20 minutes, while adsorption of Pb(II), Cd(II), and Cu(II) onto ICS was slower than that of As(V) and strongly depended on initial pH. At pH 3.5, ICS showed a selective adsorption of Pb(II) compared to Cd( II) and Cu(II) . However, above pH 4.5, near complete removal of Pb(II), Cd(II), and Cu(II) was observed through adsorption or precipitation depending on pH. As(V) adsorption onto ICS occurred through an anionic-type and followed a Langmuir-type adsorption behaviour. In column experiments, pH was identified as an important parameter in the breakthrough of As(V). As(V) breakthrough at pH 4.5 was much slower than at pH 9 due to a strong chemical bonding between As(V) and ICS as similar with batch adsorption behaviour. With variation of ICS amounts, the optimum amount of ICS at pH 4.5 was identified as 5.0 grams in this research. At this condition, ICS could be used to treat 200 mg of As(V) with 1 kg of ICS until 50 ppb of As(V) appeared in the effluent. In this research, as a new treatment system, ICS can be potentially used to treat As(V) and cationic heavy metals.


Objective To determine the efficacy of liquid ventilation using a medical-grade perfluorocarbon (perflubron) combined with parenteral or intratracheal antibiotics in a rat model of pneumonia. Design Prospective, laboratory investigation. Setting Experimental laboratory in a university medical center. Subjects Wistar rats (n = 112). Interventions One day after intratracheal inoculation with Streptococcus pneumoniae, rats received one of five experimental treatments or no treatment (control): modified liquid ventilation (MLV), intramuscular ampicillin, MLV plus intramuscular ampicillin, MLV with intratracheal ampicillin, or MLV plus ampicillin PulmoSpheres. Measurements and Main Results Animals receiving MLV plus intramuscular ampicillin, MLV with intratracheal ampicillin, or MLV plus ampicillin PulmoSpheres had significantly improved 10-day survival rates (85%, 72%, and 72%, respectively) compared with all other groups (0% to 25%). Conclusions MLV in combination with either intramuscular, intratracheal, or PulmoSpheres ampicillin improved survival as compared with MLV alone or the same dose of antibiotics delivered intramuscularly.


Time signals provide a sense of "despatialized simultaneity," a rhythm to the everyday lives of billions of people, and experiences of liveness. This article offers a history of time signals from the 19th to the 21st centuries, identifying three typologies: scheduled time signals, sent mainly by radio and TV; on-demand, such as those of the speaking clock; and automatized, transmitted by the Network Time Protocol for digital devices. The article stresses the importance of time signals in media history and the significance of an infrastructural network of timekeeping/timesharing for the functioning of media themselves.


There is an increasing demand of multifunctional materials for a wide variety of technological developments. Bipolar plates for proton exchange membrane fuel cells are an example of complex functionality components that must show among other properties high mechanical strength, electrical, and thermal conductivity. The present research explored the possibility of using alumina–carbon nanofibers (CNFs) nanocomposites for this purpose. In this study, it was studied for the first time the whole range of powder compositions in this system. Homogeneous powders mixtures were prepared and subsequently sintered by spark plasma sintering. The materials obtained were thoroughly characterized and compared in terms of properties required to be used as bipolar plates. The control on material microstructure and composition allows designing materials where mechanical or electrical performances are enhanced. A 50/50 vol.% alumina–CNFs composite appears to be a very promising material for this kind of application.


Federated learning and analytics are a distributed approach for collaboratively learning models (or statistics) from decentralized data, motivated by and designed for privacy protection. The distributed learning process can be formulated as solving federated optimization problems, which emphasize communication efficiency, data heterogeneity, compatibility with privacy and system requirements, and other constraints that are not primary considerations in other problem settings. This paper provides recommendations and guidelines on formulating, designing, evaluating and analyzing federated optimization algorithms through concrete examples and practical implementation, with a focus on conducting effective simulations to infer real-world performance. The goal of this work is not to survey the current literature, but to inspire researchers and practitioners to design federated learning algorithms that can be used in various practical applications.


Solar radiation is the primary source of energy for the Earth's climate system. Although the incoming and outgoing solar fluxes at the top of atmosphere can be quantified with high accuracy, large uncertainties still exist in the partitioning of solar absorption between surface and atmosphere. To compute best estimates of absorbed solar radiation at the surface and within the atmosphere representative for Europe during 2000–2010, we combine temporally homogeneous and spatially representative ground‐based observations of surface downwelling solar radiation with collocated satellite‐retrieved surface albedo and top‐of‐atmosphere net irradiance. We find best estimates of Europe land annual mean surface and atmospheric absorption of 117.3 ± 6 W m−2 (41.6 ± 2% of top‐of‐atmosphere incident irradiance) and 65.0 ± 3 W m−2 (23.0 ± 1%). The fractional atmospheric absorption of 23% represents a robust estimate largely unaffected by variations in latitude and season, thus, making it a potentially useful quantity for first‐order validation of regional climate models. Uncertainties of the individual absorption estimates arise mostly from the measurements themselves. In this context, the surface albedo and the ground‐based solar radiation data are the most critical variables. Other sources of uncertainty, like the multiplicative combination of spatially averaged surface solar radiation and surface albedo estimates, and the spatial representativeness of the point observations, are either negligibly small or can be corrected for.


Abstract In this letter, we consider a density-level detection (DLD) problem by a coefficient-based classification framework with -regularizer and data-dependent hypothesis spaces. Although the data-dependent characteristic of the algorithm provides flexibility and adaptivity for DLD, it leads to difficulty in generalization error analysis. To overcome this difficulty, an error decomposition is introduced from an established classification framework. On the basis of this decomposition, the estimate of the learning rate is obtained by using Rademacher average and stepping-stone techniques. In particular, the estimate is independent of the capacity assumption used in the previous literature.


Three Jordanian medicinal plants; Peganum harmala (P. harmala), Geropogon hybridus (G. hybridus), and Salvia officinalis ( S. officinalis ) were selected from Al-karak region in order to investigate their antibacterial and antioxidant activities. The crude extract yield of all used plants were varied from 10.6% in Salvia officinalis and 15.6% in P. harmala, to 18 % in G. hybridus . The antibacterial activity of these plants was carried out on four bacterial strain ( S. aureus, E.coli, E. aerogenes and B. subtilis ). These plant ethanol extracts have effects on the gram positive strains and gram negative bacteria except S. officinalis did not show activity against E. Coli . The minimal inhibition concentration (MIC) of P. harmala S. officinalis and G. hybridus (MIC) ranged from 125 µg/ml to 500 µg/ml. The ethanol crude extract of G. hybridus gave 10 fractions using TLC method, fraction 1,3 and 10 exhibited antibacterial activity against all bacterial strains. Their total phenolic contents were evaluated; the highest total phenol content was observed in G. hybridus with 410 mgGAE/g plant extract followed by P. harmala and S. officinalis with 305 and 203.7 mg/g plant extract, respectively. The antioxidant activity was estimated by using DPPH method. The highest antioxidant activity was obtained with G. hybridus extract and found to be 0.89 mg Trolox/g plant extract. The lowest antioxidant activity was obtained with S. officinalis which was 0.53 mg Trolox/g plant extract. The lowest IC 50 (highest antioxidant activity) was observed in G. hybridus with 0.83 mg/ml. Intermediate effect observed in P. harmala with IC 50 1.1 mg/ml. The lowest antioxidant activity was obtained in S. officinalis with IC 50 1.38 mg/ml.


This book offers an independent, wide-ranging and in-depth analysis of a possible Free Trade Area between the EU and China. The design of the FTA is suggested to be 'deep and comprehensive', with extensive qualitative evidence in nine different domains of such a FTA, including investment. In addition, it provides a cutting-edge quantitative impact analysis (based on the newest CGE modelling).The study, commissioned by the Foreign Trade Association, was carried out by CEPS, in cooperation with the World Trade Institute (WTI) at the University of Bern. Jacques Pelkmans, CEPS Senior Research Fellow, served as overall study leader and Joseph Francois, Managing Director and Professor of Economics at the World Trade Institute, led the WTI team.


This essay argues that in conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, France9s president, Emmanuel Macron, has been mistaken on two counts: one, historical, since a majority of Jews have historically rejected the Zionist project, with the majority of them living outside Israel, and hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens choosing to do the same; and the second, political, as it has opened the way for the Conseil representatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF) to demand legislation banning anti-Zionism, in the same vein as earlier efforts to criminalize the French Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. France9s juridical foundation is strong, however, and it does not allow for the criminalization of speech: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), the Constitution of the Fifth Republic (1958), and the European Convention on Human Rights all stand as safeguards of the fundamental right to freedom of expression—at least for the time being.


The measurement of left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) plays a key role in many strategies for managing patients after acute myocardial infarction. We tested the hypothesis that exercise capacity 1 month after myocardial infarction provides additional information in patients with a low LVEF and therefore assists in risk stratification. One hundred fifteen patients, with documented myocardial infarction and LVEF less than 35% by gated radionuclide scan 1 month after acute myocardial infarction, were followed up for 2 months to 7 years. Exercise capacity was estimated from a treadmill test 1 month after infarction. Using the Cox proportional hazards model, exercise capacity was a significant predictor of death or reinfarction. The relative risk of death, based on a comparison between the lowermost quintile (less than 4 METS) and uppermost quintile (greater than 7 METS), was 3.5 (95% confidence interval, 1.1-9.7); the relative risk in the fourth, third, and second quintile was 2.7, 2.1, and 1.6, respectively. In a multivariate analysis, the observed effect of a good exercise capacity was independent of LVEF. These data indicate that in patients with a low LVEF after myocardial infarction, useful prognostic information can be obtained from exercise testing.


We model and describe the spatial coherence and mutual intensity of focused synchrotron radiation x-ray beams, based on ensemble averages of stochastic superpositions. Within this framework, we present numerical calculations for typical synchrotron sources with focusing mirrors, and simulate the evolution of coherence inside x-ray waveguides used for filtering by analytical and numerical methods. Simulated focus fields are compared with an experimental setup, including figure errors and vibrations.


Background Both elevated homocysteine and decreased folic acid concentrations are observed in human patients with hypothyroidism and can influence the development of numerous secondary disorders. Objectives The aim of the study was to assess total homocysteine concentration in serum and to examine its relationship with the concentration of folic acid and thyroid hormones (tT4 and fT4). Animals Ten healthy and 19 hypothyroid client‐owned dogs. Methods Dogs with clinical signs of hypothyroidism had the diagnosis confirmed by additional tests. Total homocysteine, folic acid, total thyroxine, and free thyroxine concentrations in serum were evaluated. Results Hypothyroid dogs were diagnosed with increased homocysteine (median 22.20 μmol/L; range, 16.50–37.75) and decreased folic acid (median 20.62 nmol/L; range, 10.54–26.35) concentrations, as compared to healthy dogs (11.52 μmol/L; range, 10.00–16.65 and 30.68 nmol/L; range, 22.84–38.52, respectively). In sick dogs, total homocysteine was inversely correlated with folic acid (ρ = −0.47, P < 0.001), total thyroxine (ρ = −0.69, P = 0.0092), and free thyroxine (ρ = −0.56, P = 0.0302). Conclusions Hypothyroidism in dogs causes hyperhomocysteinemia. Concomitant mild folic acid decrease in hypothyroid dogs might be as a result of hyperhomocysteinemia.


The Hellmann heated siphon pluviograph with wind shield shows 56 % less winter precipitation than measured on a snow board at an altitude of 2,540 m a.s.l. For the Swiss heated tipping bucket gauge and the storage gauge precipitation was 31 % less. A relationship between the deficit and wind speed was only found for the storage gauge. The effect of the parameter of snowfall structure, defined as the portion of snowfall on days with temperature lower than -8°C, is small. The results can be used to make a preliminary adjustment of precipitation sums at Alpine gauge sites where wind speeds and temperature can be assessed.


The research presented here was conducted in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, in the Surface Science Center, under the supervision of Prof. John T. Yates, Jr. The work described can be divided into two main parts. As the size of materials decreases, they experience confinement. The electronic properties of materials are strongly correlated to the confinement experienced by the material or device being studied. New tools and experimental techniques need to be developed in order to probe the properties of such objects at sub-micrometer scales in a non-interfering way. The development of such an instrument and its usefulness in measuring electronic properties of confined objects is the topic of the first part of this dissertation, covering sections 1, 5 and 6. The Nanoworkbench is a unique multiple-probe instrument operating under ultrahigh vacuum conditions. It combines a molecular-beam epitaxy chamber for nucleation of quantum dots or the growth of thin films, a preparation and analysis chamber equipped with standard surface science tools such as Auger electron spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. The core of the system is the multiple-probe STM chamber combined with a scanning electron microscope, allowing precise controlled motion of the probes and the realization of sub-micrometer scale four-point probe measurements. This instrument was fully conceived, designed and assembled in the Department of Chemistry, at the University of Pittsburgh. The application of the Nanoworkbench to sub-micrometer four-point probe conductivity measurements and the formation of a roaming field-effect transistor on a silicon-on-insulator surface is demonstrated in section 5. Additionally the Nanoworkbench was used to electrically sense the normal motion of the interface between a metal (Al(111)) and its oxide coating, and a semiconductor (Si(100)) during its oxidation, finding that Al(111) oxidizes in conformance with the Mott-Cabrera model. Here Al3+ ions move away from the Al/Al2O3 interface to the outer Al2O3 surface when oxide film growth occurs. In contrast, oxygen penetration into covalent Si(100) occurs during oxide film formation. The second part of this dissertation - sections 7 to 10 - deals with the formation of dense arrays of sub-10nm Ge islands on Si(100). Upon deposition of Ge on Si(100), Ge islands are randomly nucleated on the surface by self-assembly after the formation of a wetting layer, whose thickness depends on the experimental conditions. These islands have rather large diameters and a broad size distribution and are therefore not suitable for application in quantum computing architecture for instance. The object of this study is the formation of arrays of Ge islands with control over both the island diameter (10nm, ± 2nm) and the islands spacing (as small as 35nm, ± 1nm). We will show that the pre-adsorption of small islands of carbon on Si(100) leads to the formation of Ge islands that are smaller than Ge islands nucleated on a clean Si(100) substrate. We can use this carbon effect" by creating a carbon template on the Si(100) surface by electron-beam-induced deposition. These carbon deposits transform into SiC after annealing under UHV conditions. Upon subsequent Ge deposition, ultra-small Ge islands will nucleate by directed self-assembly on the surface in perfect registry with the carbon template.Conceptual ideas will be provided as a background for the research described in sections 5 to 10. These conceptual ideas include a description of the four-point probe measurement technique, the framework of the Mott-Cabrera theory for oxide film growth on metal surfaces, a description of heteroepitaxy, and finally the description of the formation of Ge islands in Si/Ge and Si/C/Ge system along with the attempts at ordering these islands.


AdBlue is an ultra pure solution of urea in demineralised water, used in the latest generation of commercial diesel vehicles for the removal of Nitrous Oxide, an environmental pollutant. It consists of high purity urea dissolved and suspended within deionized water. The ratio of the mix is approximately 32.5% urea and 67.5% deionized water. It is used by modern diesel engines which are equipped with an SCR, AdBlue never comes into contact with the fuel, and it is a common misconception that it is an additive. AdBlue is carried onboard the vehicle in a separate vessel to the fuel storage tank. It is injected into the exhaust gases as a post combustion process through an SCR where it breaks harmful Nitrous Oxide emissions down into mostly Nitrogen and Oxygen. The use of AdBlue benefits everyone it helps the environment by reducing the number of harmful emissions created by diesel engines and it helps fleet operators and drivers reduce fuel costs. It is likely that further savings will be made in the future as governments are anticipated to introduce new carbon taxes and penalties for individuals who do not take necessary action to reduce damage impacted on the environment.


Patient falls contribute to unnecessary injury and incapacitation for patients and are also a major source of stress for the nurses caring for patients who fall. Hospitals are no longer being reimbursed for extended hospital stays related to injuries caused by patient falls and action is needed to decrease such events. Nurse staffing has been shown to play a critical role in determining the incidence of patient falls, with better nurse staffing decreasing the likelihood of a patient falling. The purpose of this study was to determine nurses' perceptions of nurse staffing and its impact on the incidence of patient falls. The methodology included a short, self-administered survey developed by the researcher. Nurses answered 15 questions related to the number of patients they cared for, number of patient falls, and factors that could influence falls. Nurses who completed the survey reported caring for between 2-7 patients on their last shift and reported between 0-2 falls on their assignment within the previous three months. Nurses indicated that factors such as admission and discharge activity, the number of available staff on the unit, and the acuity of patients on the unit impacted patient falls. Further research is needed to determine the relationship between nurse staffing and the incidence of patient falls. Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) are in an ideal position to participate in research related to this topic as well to advocate for nursing's role in preventing patient falls.


In tropical areas, Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) still have deficiencies in simulating the timing of vegetation phenology. To start addressing this problem, standard Fourier‐based methods are applied to aerosol screened monthly remotely sensed phenology time series (Enhanced Vegetation Index, EVI) and two major driving factors of phenology: solar radiation and precipitation (for March 2000 through December 2006 over northern South America). At 1 × 1 km scale using, power (or variance) spectra on good quality aerosol screened time series, annual cycles in EVI are detected across 58.24% of the study area, the strongest (largest amplitude) occurring in the savanna. Terra Firme forest have weak but significant annual cycles in comparison with savannas because of the heterogeneity of vegetation and nonsynchronous phenological events within 1 × 1 km scale pixels. Significant annual cycles for radiation and precipitation account for 86% and 90% of the region, respectively, with different spatial patterns to phenology. Cross‐spectral analysis was used to compare separately radiation with phenology/EVI, precipitation with phenology/EVI and radiation with precipitation. Overall the majority of the Terra Firme forest appears to have radiation as the driver of phenology (either radiation is in phase or leading phenology/EVI at the annual scale). These results are in agreement with previous research, although in Acre, central and eastern Peru and northern Bolivia there is a coexistence of 'in phase' precipitation over Terra Firme forest. In contrast in most areas of savanna precipitation appears to be a driver and savanna areas experiencing an inverse (antiphase) relationship between radiation and phenology is consistent with inhibited grassland growth due to soil moisture limitation. The resulting maps provide a better spatial understanding of phenology–driver relationships offering a bench mark to parameterize ecological models.


Stated-preference research supports $17.2B in protections When large-scale accidents cause catastrophic damage to natural or cultural resources, government and industry are faced with the challenge of assessing the extent of damages and the magnitude of restoration that is warranted. Although market transactions for privately owned assets provide information about how valuable they are to the people involved, the public services of natural assets are not exchanged on markets; thus, efforts to learn about people's values involve either untestable assumptions about how other things people do relate to these services or empirical estimates based on responses to stated-preference surveys. Valuation based on such surveys has been criticized because the respondents are not engaged in real transactions. Our research in the aftermath of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill addresses these criticisms using the first, nationally representative, stated-preference survey that tests whether responses are consistent with rational economic choices that are expected with real transactions. Our results confirm that the survey findings are consistent with economic decisions and would support investing at least $17.2 billion to prevent such injuries in the future to the Gulf of Mexico's natural resources.


Abstract. Information on recent biomass distribution and biogeography of photosynthetic marine protists with adequate temporal and spatial resolution is urgently needed to better understand the consequences of environmental change for marine ecosystems. Here we introduce and review a molecular-based observation strategy for high-resolution assessment of these protists in space and time. It is the result of extensive technology developments, adaptations and evaluations which are documented in a number of different publications, and the results of the recently completed field testing which are introduced in this paper. The observation strategy is organized at four different levels. At level 1, samples are collected at high spatiotemporal resolution using the remotely controlled automated filtration system AUTOFIM. Resulting samples can either be preserved for later laboratory analyses, or directly subjected to molecular surveillance of key species aboard the ship via an automated biosensor system or quantitative polymerase chain reaction (level 2). Preserved samples are analyzed at the next observational levels in the laboratory (levels 3 and 4). At level 3 this involves molecular fingerprinting methods for a quick and reliable overview of differences in protist community composition. Finally, selected samples can be used to generate a detailed analysis of taxonomic protist composition via the latest next generation sequencing technology (NGS) at level 4. An overall integrated dataset of the results based on the different analyses provides comprehensive information on the diversity and biogeography of protists, including all related size classes. At the same time the cost of the observation is optimized with respect to analysis effort and time.


In this paper we examine the effects of having a baby during a period of separation on the probability of divorce, and the impact of bearing a child while divorced on the likelihood of remarriage in the United States. Among whites, neither a first nor a second birth during separation had any significant effect on the probability of divorce. Among blacks, either a first or second birth significantly increased the chance of divorce. The function of post-marital childbearing among black women as an incentive to obtaining divorces (presumably to allow them to establish new unions formally) is important, because a large proportion remain separated indefinitely. Whereas the occurrence of both first and second births during divorce significantly increased the probability of remarriage among whites, only a second birth did so among blacks. Further analysis suggests that while the legitimization of births was an important factor among whites, there was little evidence of a comparable effect among blacks.


In the context of custom map design, handling more artistic and expressive tools has been identified as a carto-graphic need, in order to design stylized and expressive maps. Based on previous works on style formalization, an approach for specifying the map style has been proposed and experimented for particular use cases. A first step deals with the analysis of inspiration sources, in order to extract 'what does make the style of the source', i.e. the salient visual characteristics to be automatically reproduced (textures, spatial arrangements, linear stylization, etc.). In a second step, in order to mimic and generate those visual characteristics, existing and innovative rendering techniques have been implemented in our GIS engine, thus extending the capabilities to generate expressive renderings. Therefore, an extension of the existing cartographic pipeline has been proposed based on the following aspects: 1- extension of the symbolization specifications OGC SLD/SE in order to provide a formalism to specify and reference expressive rendering methods; 2- separate the specification of each rendering method and its parameterization, as metadata. The main contribution has been described in (Christophe et al. 2016). In this paper, we focus firstly on the extension of the cartographic pipeline (SLD++ and metadata) and secondly on map design capabilities which have been experimented on various topographic styles: old cartographic styles (Cassini), artistic styles (watercolor, impressionism, Japanese print), hybrid topographic styles (ortho-imagery & vector data) and finally abstract and photo-realist styles for the geovisualization of costal area. The genericity and interoperability of our approach are promising and have already been tested for 3D visualization.


Dispersal and philopatry are fundamental processes influencing the genetic structure and persistence of populations, and might be affected by isolation and habitat perturbation. Habitat degradation induced by human activities could have detrimental consequences on the genetic structure of populations. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the role of human impact in promoting or disrupting the genetic structure. Here, we conducted a genetic analysis using 12 polymorphic microsatellite markers of 70 lesser kestrels Falco naumanni from 10 breeding colonies of two subpopulations in Sicily (southern Italy). Genetic differentiation between the two subpopulations was negligible, and linear distances played no role in the level of genetic relatedness recorded in the two sites. Linear distances between nests also resulted in no effects on the relatedness recorded within and between colonies in the largest subpopulation. Clusters of more-versus less-related individuals resulted when the two-dimensional positions of colonies (i.e., latitude and longitude) were tested as predictors of genetic proximity instead of linear distances. Specifically, analyses of colony features showed colony size and human disturbance as factors negatively affecting the relatedness among chicks from different nests. Regardless of colony size, less-related individuals were born in colonies located in the core of the agricultural plain, where we quantified a higher level of human disturbance. In contrast, more related individuals were in colonies located in the marginal, less disturbed, agricultural area. Given the high philopatry of this species, our results are consistent with disruption of colony fidelity related to intensification of agricultural practices. We discuss the possible implications of long-term effects of genetic variability in small and disturbed colonies on fitness and population viability.


Home Territories examines how traditional ideas of home, homeland and nation have been destabilised both by new patterns of migration and by new communication technologies which routinely transgress the symbolic boundaries around both the private household and the nation state. David Morley analyses the varieties of exile, diaspora, displacement, connectedness, mobility experienced by members of social groups, and relates the micro structures of the home, the family and the domestic realm, to contemporary debates about the nation, community and cultural identities. He explores issues such as the role of gender in the construction of domesticity, and the conflation of ideas of maternity and home, and engages with recent debates about the 'territorialisation of culture'.


Social justice has been the animating ideal of democratic governments throughout the 20th century. even those who oppose it recognize its potency. Yet the meaning of social justice remains obscure, and existing theories put forward by political philosophers to explain it have failed to capture the way people in general think about issues of social justice. This book develops a new theory. The author argues that principles of justice must be understood contextually, with each principle finding its natural home in a different form of human association. Because modern societies are complex, the theory of justice must be complex, too. The three primary components in Miller's scheme are the principles of desert, need, and equality. The book uses empirical research to demonstrate the central role played by these principles in popular conceptions of justice. It then offers a close analysis of each concept, defending principles of desert and need against a range of critical attacks, and exploring instances when justice requires equal distribution and attacks, and exploring instances when justice requires equal distribution and when it does not. Finally, it argues that social justice understood in this way remains a viable political ideal even in a world characterized by economic globalization and political multiculturalism. This book will appeal to readers with interest in public policy as well as to students of politics, philosophy, and sociology.


Background/Objectives Ambient air pollution can alter cytokine concentrations as shown in vitro and following short-term exposure to high air pollution levels in vivo. Exposure to pollution during late pregnancy has been shown to affect fetal lymphocytic immunophenotypes. However, effects of prenatal exposure to moderate levels of air pollutants on cytokine regulation in cord blood of healthy infants are unknown. Methods In a birth cohort of 265 healthy term-born neonates, we assessed maternal exposure to particles with an aerodynamic diameter of 10 µm or less (PM10), as well as to indoor air pollution during the last trimester, specifically the last 21, 14, 7, 3 and 1 days of pregnancy. As a proxy for traffic-related air pollution, we determined the distance of mothers' homes to major roads. We measured cytokine and chemokine levels (MCP-1, IL-6, IL-10, IL-1ß, TNF-α and GM-CSF) in cord blood serum using LUMINEX technology. Their association with pollution levels was assessed using regression analysis, adjusted for possible confounders. Results Mean (95%-CI) PM10 exposure for the last 7 days of pregnancy was 18.3 (10.3–38.4 µg/m3). PM10 exposure during the last 3 days of pregnancy was significantly associated with reduced IL-10 and during the last 3 months of pregnancy with increased IL-1ß levels in cord blood after adjustment for relevant confounders. Maternal smoking was associated with reduced IL-6 levels. For the other cytokines no association was found. Conclusions Our results suggest that even naturally occurring prenatal exposure to moderate amounts of indoor and outdoor air pollution may lead to changes in cord blood cytokine levels in a population based cohort.


When plants colonize new habitats altered by natural or anthropogenic disturbances, those individuals may encounter biotic and abiotic conditions novel to the species, which can cause plant functional trait divergence. Over time, site-driven adaptation can give rise to population-level genetic variation, with consequences for plant community dynamics and ecosystem processes. We used a series of 3000-yr-old, lava-created forest fragments on the Island of Hawai`i to examine whether disturbance and subsequent colonization can lead to genetically differentiated populations, and where differentiation occurs, if there are ecosystem consequences of trait-driven changes. These fragments are dominated by a single tree species, Metrosideros polymorpha (Myrtaceae) or ʻōhiʻa, which have been actively colonizing the surrounding lava flow created in 1858. To test our ideas about differentiation of genetically determined traits, we (1) created rooted cuttings of ʻōhiʻa individuals sampled from fragment interiors and open lava sites, raised these individuals in a greenhouse, and then used these cuttings to create a common garden where plant growth was monitored for three years; and (2) assessed genetic variation and made QST/FST comparisons using microsatellite repeat markers. Results from the greenhouse showed quantitative trait divergence in plant height and pubescence across plants sampled from fragment interior and matrix sites. Results from the subsequent common garden study confirmed that the matrix environment can select for individuals with 9.1% less shoot production and 17.3% higher leaf pubescence. We found no difference in molecular genetic variation indicating gene flow among the populations. The strongest QST level was greater than the FST estimate, indicating sympatric genetic divergence in growth traits. Tree height was correlated with ecosystem properties such as soil carbon and nitrogen storage, soil carbon turnover rates, and soil phosphatase activity, indicating that selection for growth traits will influence structure, function, and dynamics of developing ecosystems. These data show that divergence can occur on centennial timescales of early colonization.


Transaction management in wireless environment poses challenging issues in preserving data consistency and fault tolerance. As the mobile databases are prone to frequent disconnections, bandwidth limitations, mobility, etc. efficient execution of the transaction may not always be guaranteed. Replicating data at several sites is a powerful mechanism which not only increases performance but also provides fault tolerance for demanding database applications. However the major concern is to keep the replicated copies always consistent. In this paper various replication techniques and their applicability in the mobile environments are presented. Based on the requirements of the services provider and the type of execution model used, one of the replication strategies may be implemented.


The late Miocene Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC) was an extraordinary geologic event in the Mediterranean Basin marked by massive salt accumulation and presumably basin desiccation as a consequence of the reduced water exchange with the Atlantic Ocean. The discovery of a desiccation deposit in the Black Sea, the so-called Pebbly Breccia unit, was used to claim that the Black Sea also became desiccated during the MSC. Erosional features interpreted from seismic profiles of the Black Sea margin, correlated by some to the Pebbly Breccia unit, were used to support this hypothesis. However, the age of the Pebbly Breccia is poorly constrained, and its origin and relevance to the MSC subject to controversy. Here we present new biostratigraphic (dinoflagellate cyst) data from two key sedimentary successions located in a deep and a marginal setting of the Black Sea Basin. These records demonstrate that the Pebbly Breccia predates the Mediterranean water-level drop during the MSC. We argue that the presumed erosional features in the Black Sea Basin are not related to the MSC and likely represent an older Miocene event.


Ultrashort pulses are generated in a Ti:Al(2)O(3) laser by using a coupled nonlinear external cavity. The external cavity uses self-phase modulation in an optical fiber to achieve passive mode locking without the need for synchronous pumping or acousto-optic modulation. A stable train of chirped 1.4-psec pulses is generated. After dispersive compensation, pulses as short as 200 fsec are obtained.


In analyzing the recent economic literature on black women workers, this book offers forthright recommendations for improving their status in the labor market.Black Women in the Labor Force serves as a welcome balance to the disproportionate efforts devoted to research on black women outside the labor force, particularly welfare recipients. At the same time it fills a significant gap by providing a comprehensive and detailed study of this large segment of the minority working population. Different types of black women workers -- young, old, professional, service workers, wives, single heads of families -- are included in the study, which examines the effects of many variables on the participation of these women in the labor force, an approach that provides insights on how to utilize better all women in the labor market.The book begins by reviewing recent material on black women workers, including the works of several leading labor economists, as well as other data from official government sources. The next four chapters examine: selected supply characteristics of black women workers, including occupational status, work schedules, educational attainment, age and presence of children; labor market policies, including employment and training programs, unemployment, employment discrimination, public sector jobs, and unions; earnings, contribution of wives to family income, relative economic status of black women, with a technical appendix on the relative economic status of women, 1960-1970; special groups, including teenagers, black women heads of family, and domestic workers.The book concludes with several suggestions for additional research and a number of policy recommendations for upgrading the economic status of black women workers, especially the single heads of families.


This thesis discusses plantwide control configuration with focus on maximizing throughput. The most important plantwide control issue is to maintain the mass balances in the plant. The inventory control system must be consistent, which means that the mass balances are satisfied. Self-consistency is usually required, meaning that the steady-state balances are maintained with the local inventory loops only. We propose the self-consistency rule to evaluate consistency of an inventory control system. In many cases, economic optimal operation is the same as maximum plant throughput, which corresponds to maximum flow through the bottleneck(s). This insight may greatly simplify implementation of optimal operation, without the need for dynamic optimization based on a detailed model of the entire plant. Throughput maximization requires tight bottleneck control. In the simplest case when the bottleneck is fixed to one unit, maximum throughput can be realized with single-loop control. The throughput manipulator should then be located at the bottleneck unit. This gives a short effective delay in the control loop. Effective delay determines the necessary back off from constraints to ensure feasible operation. Back off implies a reduction in throughput and an unrecoverable economic loss and should therefore be minimized. We obtain a rough estimate of the necessary back off based on controllability analysis. In some cases it is not desirable to locate the throughput manipulator at the bottleneck. To reduce the effective time delay in the control loop from the throughput manipulator to the bottleneck unit, dynamic degrees of freedom, like most inventories, can be used to reduce the effective time delay. In larger plants there may be several independent feeds, crossovers and splits that should all be utilized to obtain maximum throughput. The proposed coordinator MPC both identifies the bottlenecks and implements the optimal policy. A key idea in the coordinator MPC is to decompose the plantwide control problem by estimating the remaining capacity for each unit using models and constraint in the local MPC applications. The coordinator MPC is demonstrated by dynamic simulation and by implementation on a large-scale gas processing plant.


We present exact and approximate analytic expressions for the time-averaged electromagnetic energy within dielectric spheres on the basis of rigorous Mie theory. Such information is of importance for the study of photochemical reactions within atmospheric water spheres. Numerical results show that on the average the energy inside a cloud droplet is enlarged by a factor exceeding 2 compared with that of a sphere of the same radius of the surrounding medium. In regions of resonance peaks the electromagnetic energy may be increased by more than 2 orders of magnitude.


. High-latitude atmospheric warming is impacting freshwater cycling, requiring techniques for monitoring the hydrology of sparsely-gauged regions. The submarine runoff of tidewater glaciers pre-sents a particular challenge. We evaluate the utility of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imagery for monitoring turbid meltwater plume variability in the glacier lagoon Jökulsárlón, Iceland, for a short interval before the onset of the main melt season. Total Suspended Solids concentrations ( TSS ) of surface waters are related to remotely-sensed reflectance via empirical calibration between in-situ-sampled TSS and reflectance in a MODIS band 1-equivalent wavelength window. This study differs from previous ones in its application to an overturning tidewater glacier plume, rather than one derived from river runoff. The linear calibration improves on previous studies by facilitating a wider range of plume metrics than areal extent, notably pixel-by-pixel TSS values. Increasing values of minimum plume TSS over the study interval credibly represent rising overall turbidity in the lagoon as melting accumulates. Plume extent responds principally to consistently-strong offshore winds. Further work is required to determine the temporal persistence of the calibration, but remote plume observation holds promise for monitoring hydrological outputs from ungauged or ungaugeable systems.


AIM
To evaluate the feasibility of this novel surgical approach for treatment of cervical discitis and vertebral osteomyelitis.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
This is a report of two patients who underwent anterior cervical decompression for discitis and vertebral osteomyelitis (DVO) with cervical spine reconstruction with polymethylmethacrylate impregnated with antibiotics (AI-PMMA).

RESULTS
Both patients had successful procedures that were followed by 6 weeks of intravenous antibiotics. Stabilization and eradication of infection was achieved with clinical and radiographic stabilization seen in both. Follow-up is greater than 18 months and both patients remain off antibiotics.

CONCLUSION
The described technique using AI-PMMA offers immediate structural stability and local delivery of high concentration of antibiotics. Use in two patients has demonstrated a cost effective, long-term biomechanically stable construct and infection control.


The recent financial crisis was a powerful reminder that the inherent instability of the monetary-financial system is likely to entail serious consequences for the real economy. In the U.S., the monumental Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 ("Dodd-Frank Act") has provided legislation that aims to institutionalise several aspects a new thinking on financial stability. In addition to the interagency Financial Stability Oversight Council ("FSOC"), the creation of the The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ("CFPB") marks an important departure from the U.S. regulatory tradition of de-centralized agencies whereby the institutional locus of financial oversight depended on the precise nature of the legal structure of and business activities pursued by individual financial intermediaries. In its mandate and institutional structure, the CFPB unifies both "micro-prudential" and "macroprudential" principles of financial regulation to enhance overall financial stability. From an historical perspective, the creation of the CFPB does not change the regulatory landscape to the same extent as did the creation of the Federal Reserve after the Panic of 1907 or the creation of the FDIC after the 1933 Banking Crisis. At the same time, however, the CFPB represents an important historical shift in the policy focus of U.S. financial regulation away from bank stability bank to a broad notion of financial stability that recognises the increased financialisation of households' welfare.


Summary. Excessive fructose intake promotes the development of metabolic syndrome through the deregulation of metabolic pathways in the hypothalamus, liver and adipose tissue, which play crucial roles in metabolic homeostasis by responding to the body's nutritional and energy requirements. Variable amounts and modes of fructose intake have been shown to result in different patterns of expression of metabolic disturbances, which generally include adiposity, insulin and leptin resistance, dyslipidemia and hypertension. We explored the possible mediatory role of glucocorticoid signaling on the effects of two different dietary fructose loads on hypothalamic leptin sensitivity and hepatic and adipose tissue lipid metabolism, which are responsible for the development of signs of metabolic syndrome. Experimental rats were provided with 10% and 60% fructose solutions ad libitum over a period of nine weeks. Our results revealed that the applied fructose had different impacts on leptin and glucocorticoid signaling and different consequences on visceral adiposity and hepatic lipid metabolism. Only rats maintained on the high-burden 60% fructose diet accumulated visceral fat through the activation of adipogenic transcription factors and adipogenesis. This was paralleled by diminished glucocorticoid signaling in the adipose tissue and the establishment of the state of hypothalamic leptin resistance. The high-burden dietary fructose triggered hepatic de novo lipogenesis and a concomitant inhibition of β oxidation. Consumption of 10% fructose enhanced glucocorticoid signaling and lipolysis in the adipose tissue, creating a circulatory influx of free fatty acids and providing substrates for enhanced β oxidation and triglyceride synthesis in the liver. In summary, our results show that a long-term high dietary fructose load leads to hypothalamic leptin resistance, the development of visceral adiposity and increased hepatic de novo lipogenesis. Glucocorticoids regulate adipocyte storage functionality and thus may indirectly contribute to the observed changes in hepatic lipid metabolism, aggravating the metabolic disturbance.


Open Agoras of information are distributed environments of independent systems, where seeking for information is similar to real-life searching for material goods. Interaction with these systems may occur in several unconventional modalities, user behavior may be personalized and context-dependent, system reaction may be unpredictable, and the information produced as a result may also be personalized and context-dependent, negotiable and of uncertain origin or quality. This paper explores open Agoras of information and identifies some technical challenges that they raise.