We show that the popular reinforcement learning (RL) strategy of estimating the state-action value (Q-function) by minimizing the mean squared Bellman error leads to a regression problem with confounding, the inputs and output noise being correlated. Hence, direct minimization of the Bellman error can result in significantly biased Q-function estimates. We explain why fixing the target Q-network in Deep Q-Networks and Fitted Q Evaluation provides a way of overcoming this confounding, thus shedding new light on this popular but not well understood trick in the deep RL literature. An alternative approach to address confounding is to leverage techniques developed in the causality literature, notably instrumental variables (IV). We bring together here the literature on IV and RL by investigating whether IV approaches can lead to improved Q-function estimates. This paper analyzes and compares a wide range of recent IV methods in the context of offline policy evaluation (OPE), where the goal is to estimate the value of a policy using logged data only. By applying different IV techniques to OPE, we are not only able to recover previously proposed OPE methods such as model-based techniques but also to obtain competitive new techniques. We find empirically that state-of-the-art OPE methods are closely matched in performance by some IV methods such as AGMM, which were not developed for OPE. We open-source all our code and datasets at https://github.com/liyuan9988/IVOPEwithACME.


This thesis discovers that a form of caseflow management was practised by Official Referees in England more than 70 years before the Woolf reforms. It also describes an innovative concept of judicial sponsorship of settlement at an early interlocutory stage. For its time it was revolutionary. Such process created a distinct subordinate judicial culture which promoted economy and expedition in the management of complex technical cases. This culture was facilitated by the referees' subordinate function as officers of the High Court and the type of casework undertaken. The essential elements of my theory of rudimentary micro caseflow management emerge from a study of the methods used by Sir Francis Newbolt K.C. These are analysed and discussed by way of a literature review, qualitative and quantitative analysis. I conclude that this form of rudimentary caseflow management and judicial settlement process made the court more efficient. This process, identified as Newbolt's "Scheme," is traced from its inception through the judicial activities of Newbolt and other referees who followed this approach whether actively or passively. Having traced the origin and reasons for such officers this study considers the senior and subordinate judicial figures involved, their influence and encouragement as to the employment of innovative interlocutory techniques. Contemporaneous records including reports and correspondence are analysed in considering these innovations. The analysis is supported by the results of a quantitative study of Judicial Statistics between 1919 and 1970 and other contemporaneous judicial records including the referees' notebooks and judicial time records known as Minute Books. A number of conclusions are drawn which suggest a correlation between such techniques and levels of efficiency providing an interesting comparison for those interested in wider questions of civil justice reform.


The human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2) protein has been associated with breast cancer progression and the HER2 status can be used to determine the type of treatment for each breast cancer patient. The purpose of this study was to examine the HER2 protein and gene statuses in breast cancer tissue samples using two methods and analyze the concordance between them. Ten paraffin-embedded, formaldehyde-fixed breast cancer tissue samples from the Biobank at the Department of Pathology and Cytology at Sundsvall Hospital were analyzed in this study. All samples were from women born between 1931 and 1976. The methods used were immunohistochemistry (IHC) to visualise the HER2 protein and silver in situ hybridization (SISH) to detect gene amplification. The IHC staining method is an indirect detection of the HER2 protein using antibodies. The SISH method used in this study is a Dual ISH which detects both the HER2 gene and the centromere region of Chromosome 17 on the same tissue slide. A HER2 gene/Chromosome 17 ratio was calculated according to the manufacturer's instructions. This ratio was used to determine HER2 gene status. Out of ten samples, seven were positive with IHC and three were negative. The results from the SISH staining exposed a gene amplification in three of the IHC positive samples, while seven samples did not contain any amplified HER2 genes. The conclusion was that the concordance between IHC and SISH for HER2 was 60 percent.


this commentary explores the use of interaction between moral heuristics and emotional intelligence (ei). the main insight presented is that the quality of moral decisions is very sensitive to emotions, and hence this may lead us to a better understanding of the role of emotional abilities in moral choices. in doing so, we consider how individual differences (specifically, ei) are related to moral decisions. we summarize evidence bearing on some of the ways in which ei might moderate framing effects in different moral tasks such as "the asian disease problem" and other more real-life problems like "a divorce decision."


This paper discusses Franco Moretti's concept of "distant reading" in the light of Foucauldian genealogy. It confronts Moretti's evolutionary understanding of literary history — as represented in his adoption of the figure of the Darwinian tree — with Foucault's interpretation of Darwin's evolutionary theory. With reference to Foucault's transition from 'Darwinian' discourse analysis to 'Nietzschean' genealogy, the author argues that Moretti's conception of literary history could benefit from the genealogical practice of a 'meticulous' close reading in order to keep sight of hidden power relations behind literary production.


Stephen Nathanson's clear-sighted abridgment of Principles of Political Economy , Mill's first major work in moral and political philosophy, provides a challenging, sometimes surprising account of Mill's views on many important topics: socialism, population, the status of women, the cultural bases of economic productivity, the causes and possible cures of poverty, the nature of property rights, taxation, and the legitimate functions of government. Nathanson cuts through the dated and less relevant sections of this large work and includes significant material omitted in other editions, making it possible to see the connections between the views Mill expressed in Principles of Political Economy and the ideas he defended in his later works, particularly On Liberty . Indeed, studying Principles of Political Economy , Nathanson argues in his general Introduction, can help to resolve the apparent contradiction between Mill's views in On Liberty and those in Utilitarianism , making it a key text for understanding Mill's philosophy as a whole.


Development finance institutions which provide equity capital have been used to stimulate economic growth worldwide. The potential uses for equity development finance organizations in the United States have been recognized. Probably the most dramatic use, and one with broad economic ramifications is the establishment of an equity development finance institution to correct imperfections in the private capital market system of this country. One of the major flaws of the American capital market has been that the supply of capital for new small sized businesses has been artificially scarce. The focus of this Note will be , first to examine the reasons that the private capital market has failed to be an adequate source of equity capital for new small businesses. Second, this Note will review the structure and operations of the Canada Development Corporation, a development finance institution which makes equity investments in the Canadian economy. Finally, this Note will make recommendations as to how an equity development finance corporation modeled after the Canada Development Corporation, could be established in the United States to increase the availability of equity capital for small businesses.


The ability of building robust semantic space representations of environments is crucial for the development of truly autonomous robots. This task, inherently connected with cognition, is traditionally achieved by training the robot with a supervised learning phase. We argue that the design of robust and autonomous systems would greatly benefit from adopting a semi-supervised online learning approach. Indeed, the support of open-ended, lifelong learning is fundamental in order to cope with the dazzling variability of the real world, and online learning provides precisely this kind of ability. Here we focus on the robot place recognition problem, and we present an online place classification algorithm that is able to detect gap in its own knowledge based on a confidence measure. For every incoming new image frame, the method is able to decide if (a) it is a known room with a familiar appearance, (b) it is a known room with a challenging appearance, or (c) it is a new, unknown room. Experiments on a subset of the challenging COLD database show the promise of our approach.


Nearest neighbor is a popular class of classification methods with many desirable properties. For a large data set which cannot be loaded into the memory of a single machine due to computation, communication, privacy, or ownership limitations, we consider the divide and conquer scheme: the entire data set is divided into small subsamples, on which nearest neighbor predictions are made, and then a final decision is reached by aggregating the predictions on subsamples by majority voting. We name this method the big Nearest Neighbor (bigNN) classifier, and provide its rates of convergence under minimal assumptions, in terms of both the excess risk and the classification instability, which are proven to be the same rates as the oracle nearest neighbor classifier and cannot be improved. To significantly reduce the prediction time that is required for achieving the optimal rate, we also consider the pre-training acceleration technique applied to the bigNN method, with proven convergence rate. We find that in the distributed setting, the optimal choice of the neighbor k should scale with both the total sample size and the number of partitions, and there is a theoretical upper limit for the latter. Numerical studies have verified the theoretical findings.


This is a pivotal moment in legal education. Revisions in American Bar Association accreditation standards, approved in August 2014, impose new requirements, including practice-based requirements, on law schools. Other external regulators and critics are pushing for significant changes too. For example, the California bar licensing body is proposing to add a practice-based, experiential requirement to its licensing requirements, and the New York Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, is giving third-year, second semester students the opportunity to practice full-time in indigent legal services programs and projects. Unbeknown to many, there have been significant recent changes in legal education that have added practice-based courses, or practice-based components to courses, in all three years of legal education. Increasingly, law schools are reaching beyond the JD to establish projects in which graduates learn while practicing law. The innovations include first-year courses in which students engage in actual legal work to help provide legal services to clients; technology clinics in which students use or build state-of-the-art technology to help pro se litigants more effectively represent themselves; diversified experiential courses, including "practicums;" and post-JD "incubator," "fellowship," "residency," "apprenticeship," and "job corps" programs in which law graduates, and sometimes law students, practice and learn from practice. It is a dynamic period in which law schools, including through comprehensive strategic planning, should regain the leadership in facing the present and future challenges. The factors contributing to change — for example, the tough job market, reduced law school applications, interventions of regulators, U.S. News & World Report rankings and increased competition among law schools — are not likely to substantially change in the near future. Law schools are in, should be in, and will be in a period that calls for sustained innovation.


Alexander Pushkin was Russia's first true literary genius. Best known for his poetry, he also wrote sparkling prose that revealed his national culture with elegance and understated humour. Here, his gift for portraying the Russian people is fully revealed. "The Tales of Belkin", his first prose masterpiece, presents a series of interlinked stories narrated by a good-hearted Russian squire - among them "The Shot", in which a duel is revisited after many years, and the grotesque "The Undertaker". Elsewhere, works such as the novel-fragment "Roslavlev" and the "Egyptian Nights", the tale of an Italian balladeer seeking an audience in St. Petersberg, demonstrate the wide range of Pushkin's fiction. "A Journey to Arzrum", the final piece in this collection, offers an autobiographical account of Pushkin's own experiences in the 1829 war between Russia and Turkey, and remains one of the greatest of all pieces of journalistic adventure writing.


Simulating and predicting dynamics of quantum many-body systems is extremely challenging, even for state-of-the-art computational methods, due to the spread of entanglement across the system. However, in the long-wavelength limit, quantum systems often admit a simplified description, which involves a small set of physical observables and requires only a few parameters such as sound velocity or viscosity. Unveiling the relationship between these hydrodynamic equations and the underlying microscopic theory usually requires a great effort by condensed matter theorists. In the present paper, we develop a new machine-learning framework for automated discovery of effective equations from a limited set of available data, thus bypassing complicated analytical derivations. The data can be generated from numerical simulations or come from experimental quantum simulator platforms. Using integrable models, where direct comparisons can be made, we reproduce previously known hydrodynamic equations, strikingly discover novel equations and provide their derivation whenever possible. We discover new hydrodynamic equations describing dynamics of interacting systems, for which the derivation remains an outstanding challenge. Our approach provides a new interpretable method to study properties of quantum materials and quantum simulators in non-perturbative regimes.


Audio and visual modalities are two common output channels in the user interfaces embedded in today's mobile devices. However, these user interfaces typically center on the visual modality as the primary output channel, with audio output serving a secondary role. This paper argues for an increased need for shared input multimodal user interfaces for mobile devices. A shared input multimodal interface can be operated independently using a specific output modality, leaving users to choose the preferred method of interaction in different scenarios. We evaluate the value of a shared input multimodal menu system in both a single-task desktop setting and in a dynamic dual-task setting, in which the user was required to interact with the shared input multimodal menu system while driving a simulated vehicle. Results indicate that users were faster at locating a target item in the menu when visual feedback was provided in the single-task desktop setting, but in the dual-task driving setting, visual output presented a significant source of visual distraction that interfered with driving performance. In contrast, auditory output mitigated some of the risk associated with menu selection while driving. A shared input multimodal interface allows users to take advantage of multiple feedback modalities properly, providing a better overall experience.


A Pilot Study to Determine the Performance of Tension Lap Splices in Reinforced Masonry Made with Light-Weight Grout Brandon Richard Corbett Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, BYU Master of Science The use of light-weight building materials in modern construction has resulted in efficient designs and considerable cost savings by reducing structural weight and supporting sections. This has only been possible because of many years of research to better understand the properties of the light-weight material, and its structural behaviors. However, light-weight grout is a relatively new building material in reinforced masonry construction and little is known about its structural properties. The main objective of this study was to determine if the use of light-weight grout would impact the performance of reinforcing steel, specifically development length, in masonry construction. The research included testing masonry wallettes made with normal and light-weight grout containing No. 4 (12 mm) bars with splice lengths as prescribed by the current design equation as well as splices with a modification factor. The modification factor was based on preliminary grout testing, using the procedure given in the concrete building code. The wallettes were tested in a tension test to determine if the splices were of sufficient length to fully develop the yield stress of the reinforcement. For small bar sizes, No. 4 or smaller, it is not necessary to include a modification factor when calculating development length. The minimum length of lap of 12 in. governs when No. 4 or smaller bars are used, and provides sufficient length to fully develop the yield stress of the reinforcement both for normal and light-weight grout types.


Iterative context-bounding is a technique for performing prioritized search of the state-space of multithreaded programs. A context switch occurs in a concurrent execution when a thread temporarily stops and a different thread resumes. Iterative context-bounding gives priority to executions with fewer context switches during state-space search, exploring for a given context-bound c only those executions in which the number of context switches is at most c. Prior work has shown that this search algorithm is effective in finding many subtle concurrency errors in large programs. Partial-order reduction has traditionally been applied in complete statespace search and depth-bounded search for reducing the cost of state exploration; however, these techniques have not been applied to contextbounded search. As we show in our paper, it is difficult to perform partialorder reduction during a context-bounded search because of subtle interactions between the two techniques. The main contribution of our paper is an algorithm for performing partial-order reduction for contextbounded state exploration.


A private PEZ protocol is a variant of secure multi-party computation performed using a (long) PEZ dispenser. The original paper by Balogh et al. presented a private PEZ protocol for computing an arbitrary function with n inputs. This result is interesting, but no follow-up work has been presented since then, to the best of our knowledge. We show herein that it is possible to shorten the initial string (the sequence of candies lled in a PEZ dispenser) and the number of moves (a player pops out a speci ed number of candies in each move) drastically if the function is symmetric. Concretely, it turns out that the length of the initial string is reduced from O(2!) for general functions in Balogh et al.'s results to O(n · n!) for symmetric functions, and 2 moves for general functions are reduced to n moves for symmetric functions. Our main idea is to utilize the recursive structure of symmetric functions to construct the protocol recursively. This idea originates from a new initial string we found for a private PEZ protocol for the three-input majority function, which is di erent from the one with the same length given by Balogh et al. without describing how they derived it.


Movers and Shakers We tend to view earthquakes as unpredictable phenomena caused by naturally shifting stresses in Earth's crust. In reality, however, a range of human activity can also induce earthquakes. Ellsworth (p. 10.1126/science.1225942) reviews the current understanding of the causes and mechanics of earthquakes caused by human activity and the means to decrease their associated risk. Notable examples include injection of wastewater into deep formations and emerging technologies related to oil and gas recovery, including hydraulic fracturing. In addition to directly causing increased local seismic activity, activities such as deep fluid injection may have other ramifications related to earthquake occurrence. Van der Elst et al. (p. 164; see the news story by Kerr) demonstrate that in the midwestern United States, some areas with increased human-induced seismicity are also more prone to further earthquakes triggered by the seismic waves from large, remote earthquakes. Improved seismic monitoring and injection data near deep disposal sites will help to identify regions prone to remote triggering and, more broadly, suggest times when activities should, at least temporarily, be put on hold. Wastewater injected deep underground can make some faults more susceptible to triggering by large remote earthquakes. A recent dramatic increase in seismicity in the midwestern United States may be related to increases in deep wastewater injection. Here, we demonstrate that areas with suspected anthropogenic earthquakes are also more susceptible to earthquake-triggering from natural transient stresses generated by the seismic waves of large remote earthquakes. Enhanced triggering susceptibility suggests the presence of critically loaded faults and potentially high fluid pressures. Sensitivity to remote triggering is most clearly seen in sites with a long delay between the start of injection and the onset of seismicity and in regions that went on to host moderate magnitude earthquakes within 6 to 20 months. Triggering in induced seismic zones could therefore be an indicator that fluid injection has brought the fault system to a critical state.


Many types of interactive applications, including video games, raise particular challenges when it comes to testing and debugging. Reasons include de-facto lack of reproducibility and difficulties of automatically generating suitable test data. This paper demonstrates that certain variants of Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) implemented in pure functional languages can mitigate such difficulties by offering referential transparency at the level of whole programs. This opens up for a multi-pronged approach for assisting with testing and debugging that works across platforms, including assertions based on temporal logic, recording and replaying of runs (also from deployed code), and automated random testing using QuickCheck. The approach has been validated on real, non-trivial games implemented in the FRP system Yampa through a tool providing a convenient Graphical User Interface that allows the execution of the code under scrutiny to be controlled, moving along the execution time line, and pin-pointing of violations of assertions on PCs as well as mobile platforms.


One of the key tasks of the university in the 21st century is to nurture visually literate students in the information age. Given that we live in a very highly visualized world, it is increasingly important that students are educated as critical viewers who are able to respond to visual images in an analytical and selective manner. The education of critical viewers starts with art teachers who appreciate and understand the embedded value of imagery within cultures, cultural differences, students' knowledge and experience, critical thought, and reflection. The creation of progressive models in art teacher education that connect art and everyday life can help achieve this goal. One vehicle that may help teachers arrive at this goal is visual culture. This study explores the state of art education in Turkey as revealed by pre-service art education university instructors, and the potential of incorporating visual culture studies in pre-service art education in Turkey. It examines the instructors' perceptions of visual culture, popular culture, and its impact on society.


Impact cratering is arguably the most ubiquitous geological process in the Solar System. It has played an important role in Earth's history, shaping the geological landscape, affecting the evolution of life, and generating economic resources. However, it was only in the latter half of the 20th century that the importance of impact cratering as a geological process was recognized and only during the past couple of decades that the study of meteorite impact structures has moved into the mainstream. This book seeks to fill a critical gap in the literature by providing an overview text covering broad aspects of the impact cratering process and aimed at graduate students, professionals and researchers alike. It introduces readers to the threat and nature of impactors, the impact cratering process, the products, and the effects – both destructive and beneficial. A series of chapters on the various techniques used to study impact craters provide a foundation for anyone studying impact craters for the first time.


Over the time period, the structure of the economy does not remain same. This study examines the interaction between economic growth and its determinants for Pakistan. Since fixed parameter approaches do not take into account effect of structural changes on parameter constancy, the study employs Kalman Filter based time-varying parameter approach for the empirical analysis. Result shows significant effect of inflation, gross fixed capital formation, gross national expenditures and remittances received on economic growth of the country. However, the effect of significant macroeconomic determinants on growth process of the country is not constant but time-varying.


The HIV/Aids pandemic is a major concern in Africa, and South Africa's major marketing communication campaigns do not seem to be producing the expected results. This study investigates whether the use of fear appeal marketing communication increases the likelihood of adopting appropriate social behaviour, and if different cultural or racial groups vary in their perception of different fear appeals, namely high, medium, and low fear, pertaining to HIV/Aids marketing communication. The role of fear and efficacy beliefs is analysed by using experimental research techniques to ascertain the influence of different levels of fear appeals. The findings indicate differences amongst cultural or racial groups pertaining to levels of fear and efficacy experienced after exposure to high fear appeals compared with lower fear appeals. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) pose a profound challenge for the world. Is it possible for the global community to set ambitious goals and then work together to achieve them? The MDGs address the scourges of extreme poverty, hunger, and disease, but the larger question they pose--about the world's capacity to cooperate in order to achieve common and bold objectives--applies as well to nuclear proliferation, the control of climate change, and other global public goods. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This article steps back and examines the broad contours of the global social movement to end extreme poverty and how the MDGs have helped to shape and energize that effort. Strengths and weaknesses of current MDG efforts will be discussed and suggestions made as to how we can proceed after the MDG target date of 2015. The MDGs may not be enough to end extreme poverty, but the goals are definitely playing an enormously important and salutary role in that effort. It is easy to be cynical about the MDGs. After all, the "world community" is not much of a community. Working together across countries, continents, and classes is not the hallmark of this era. The many partners in the MDG effort--national governments, international agencies, private businesses, civil society--all have their separate agendas, glaring imperfections and inconsistencies, and propensities to be distracted from any prolonged effort, especially one without direct and easily captured economic and political returns. However, such cynicism blinds us to the larger reality of the MDGs. The MDGs are still very much with us a decade after their adoption by world leaders in September 2000. This is the best evidence of their deep staying power. The MDGs in fact play a surprisingly important role in shaping the formal development agendas of dozens of low-income countries. They have also captured the attention of the international business community, major nongovernmental organizations, donor agencies, and scientific and professional bodies. Despite all the flaws of the international system, the MDGs have gradually yet powerfully given rise to a new awareness about the remediable conditions of extreme poverty on the planet. Lessons learned from the MDGs have also shed light on how to meet several other urgent global challenges, especially those concerning environmental threats and sustainable development, since the same kinds of complex efforts and alliances needed to meet the MDGs will be needed to fight climate change and preserve biodiversity. The MDG Effort in Perspective Ending extreme poverty is an epochal challenge, on the historic scale of ending slavery and colonial rule. It is partly an ongoing historical process, linked with the economic growth and technological advancement that occurs even without national or international directed efforts. It is partly a matter of high politics, in which governments and international organizations mobilize in light of specific challenges such as HIV/AIDS. It is also partly a matter of social action and the realization of human rights, so that excluded groups (such as indigenous populations, religious minorities, and girls and women) can obtain the rights of citizenship already enjoyed by others in society. Critics find it easy to mock or scorn the MDG effort as an attempt to "accelerate history." However, the MDG outcomes--reductions in poverty, hunger, disease, and environmental threats--will be the result of vast economic, social, political, and technological processes. Ending extreme poverty cannot be achieved by simply turning a policy dial, though policy dials must indeed be turned. A serious fight against hunger, poverty, and disease must be understood as part of a large and deep flow of history. If the world economy is barreling forward down a great and tortuous river, people can at best help to steer through the rapids, stay away from the banks, miss the dangerous and jagged rocks in the way, and pull the oars with all their strength when opportunities arise. …


Translational research aims to provide a transition between basic science and clinical research trials in a streamlined process. Within a hospital context, this would be represented by a medical student conducting an investigation that does not require patients involvement and evolving it into a full clinical trial study using the basic science project as platform. The difficulties to achieve such goal are multiple, one of which being the effort required to preserve the processes and documentation regarding a study in an environment that allows for materials to be re-used and re-purposed. In addition, the need to maintain a database of those people collaborating in multiple studies simultaneously at times, and maintain a record of the roles played in a particular study proves a challenging task for hospital organisation and medical researchers. The aim of the project is to build a framework for the integration of basic science and clinical research to manage research lifecycles and allow for the integration of scientific approaches throughout these lifecycles into the everyday work practice of the consortia that manage translational clinical research at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH). In order to meet those aims, the user community participates as co-designers of the virtual framework providing input in relation to the inherent characteristics of medical research. The VRE integrates both with the RNOH institutional systems, research life cycle, and with the national systems such as the National Health Service (NHS).


We discuss a few selected hypotheses on how the visual system ju dges differences of color images. We then derivefive image-difference features from these hypotheses and address their relation to the visual processing. Three models are proposed to combine these features for the prediction of perceived image differences. The parameters of the image-difference features are optimized on human image-difference assessments. For each model, we investigate the impact of individual features on the overall prediction performance. If chromatic features are combined with lightness-based features, the prediction accuracy on a test dataset is significantly higher than that of the SSIM index, which only operates on the achromatic component.


In order to move towards a more sustainable development, it is necessary not only to minimize the use of materials in the design stage and to find new materials as alternatives to nonrenewable ones (e.g. optical fiber instead of copper, biopolymers instead of polymers from oil) but also to reclaim as much as possible material value through effective recycling. To this extent, recycling can play a key role in multiple dimensions, while providing new business opportunities for innovative companies, having positive impacts on the society and the environment and fostering an effective circular economy as well. Because of the advanced waste management infrastructures available in developed countries, it is possible to achieve an almost complete collection of solid wastes into a variety of controlled bulk material flows. However, the picture for the follow-up step, the recycling of raw materials such as steel, non-ferrous metals, polymers and glass from these flows, is less positive. Materials value recovered from waste represents a very small fraction of European GDP. The fundamental issue is that policymakers still lack an effective key performance indicator for stimulating the recycling industry. Therefore although recycling plays an important role in the circular economy perspective, it is necessary to radically change the metric used so far to compute the recycling rate. Nowadays, the recycling rate is computed measuring the amount of material entering the recycling facilities. This approach has brought about an inaccurate and somehow misleading indicator (the recycling rate) which contributed to wrong decision making and to poor innovation in the industry. The new approach proposed in this paper considers the use of a Circular Economy Index (CEI) as the ratio of the material value produced by the recycler (market value) by the intrinsic material value1 entering the recycling facility. It is argued that this index is related to strategic, economic and environmental aspects of recycling and it has very important implications as decision making tool. To compute the CEI it is necessary to know detailed information of the components and materials contained in each end of life (EOL) product entering the recycling facilities and how they end up in the recycled raw materials. Therefore an accurate accounting of materials (with standards if available), mass, chemical composition and smallest dimension (e.g. a screw, a plastic foil) is proposed.


It is no secret today that we are facing a planetary environmental emergency, endangering most species on the planet, including our own, and that this impending catastrophe has its roots in the capitalist economic system. Nevertheless, the extreme dangers that capitalism inherently poses to the environment are often inadequately understood, giving rise to the belief that it is possible to create a new "natural capitalism" or "climate capitalism" in which the system is turned from being the enemy of the environment into its savior. The chief problem with all such views is that they underestimate the cumulative threat to humanity and the earth arising from the existing relations of production. Indeed, the full enormity of the planetary ecological crisis, I shall contend, can only be understood from a standpoint informed by the Marxian critique of capitalism. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


In this paper we propose a new methodology to improve the estimation of structural budget balances in Slovakia. Major innovations compared to currently used methods are in using more robust output gap estimates, inclusion of pensions in the analysis, imposing consistency between various gap measures, elimination of effects of different deflators and using time-varying elasticities. Significant attention is attached also to one-off and temporary measures, where we define 10 principles for identification. The estimation is complemented with bottom-up approaches which focus more directly on discretionary fiscal action. Latest changes to the European fiscal framework have strengthened significantly the role of structural budget balances. With the adoption of the Fiscal Compact there is a numerical threshold each year for the deviation of the structural balance from the medium - term objective (or the adjustment path toward it). Moreover, automatic correction mechanisms are activated if the deviation is above the threshold. The basic motivation of this paper was that independent fiscal institutions are going to play an important role in triggering these correction mechanisms.


The orbital-specific interfacial and intermolecular interactions in crystalline films of iron phthalocyanine (FePc) grown on an Au(111) surface were studied by means of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) with synchrotron radiation. The temperature-dependent ARPES measurement on the FePc monolayer reveals the formation of the molecule–metal hybrid state together with the Kondo resonance state below the Fermi level. These interface-specific states are derived from the electronic coupling of the Fe 3d orbital in the molecule with the Au(111) surface electron. For the flat-lying FePc multilayer on Au(111), the photon-energy-dependent ARPES spectra reveal the intermolecular valence-band dispersion for the C 2p-derived state, while the Fe 3d-derived state does not show such dispersion, indicating the localized Fe 3d spin state. These orbital-specific interactions play crucial roles in the unique electronic and magnetic properties of FePc.


The following thesis surveys artistic utilizations of the archive and underscores its role as a tool for knowledge disruption. Fluctuating between theoretical meanderings, autobiographical reflections, and the analysis of artwork, I propose one avenue in which to reinvigorate conversations around the archive began by Derrida in Archive Fever and by Hal Foster in "Archival Impulse." Approaching the archive as both a theoretical container and as a charged artist medium, I argue for a new archival impulse — one that embraces opaqueness and mess over clarity and order. Comprised of eight individual sections, and a parallel dialogue presented in the form of extended footnotes, the thesis borrows formal and stylistic strategies from arenas of creative non-fiction, diaristic writing, and art historical analysis. Archive scholars — Derrida, Foster, Michel Foucault, Annet Dekker — are cross-examined with thinkers in fields of queer theory, ecology, art history, philosophy, media studies, performance studies, and cultural studies — Jose Munoz, Lee Edelman, Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Hito Steyerl, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Nicholas de Villiers. Contextualizing artwork made during my time in graduate school through contemporary artists working in the fields of painting, performance and installation, I outline how this research has led me to define a particularly artistic subcategory of archival discourse capable of capturing the pulse of an American undercurrent. Artists building with and through the counter-archive look backward to engage with the potentiality of what has not yet come to pass. Their unorthodox strategies for collecting and sharing history employ the archive not as merely a bank of historical knowledge, but in fact, as a formally antagonistic counter to the ways in which history and other forms of knowledge production are weaponized as systems of oppression.


As the importance of water use in the power generation sector increases across the nation, the ability to obtain and analyze real power plant data is pivotal in understanding the water energy nexus. The Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama are examples of where water shortages have threatened the operation of power generators. The availability of freshwater in the United States is beginning to dictate how and where new power plants are constructed. The purpose of this study is to provide and analyze cooling system parameters using 2008 data provided by the Energy Information Administration. Additionally, the cost of water saved among different categories of power plants is calculated. In general, the conditions which cause cooling systems to withdraw less water are not necessarily the more expensive conditions, and vice versa. While not all the variability in the cost of cooling systems is being accounted for, the results from this study prove that nameplate capacity, capacity factor, age of power plant, and region affect the costs of installed cooling systems. This study also indicates that it would be most cost effective for once-through cooling systems to be replaced with recirculatingpond instead of recirculatingtower systems. The implications of this study are that as power plant owner's struggle in balancing cost with water dependence, several parameters must first be considered in the decision-making process.


Recent studies on the functional significance of pit membranes in water conducting cells have renewed general interest in their micromorphology. At least two types of pit membrane thickenings have been described in angiosperm families, i.e. genuine tori and pseudo-tori. This study explores the distribution and morphology of pit membrane thickenings in 69 species and 23 genera within Oleaceae using light and electron microscopy. Torus-bearing pit membranes are confirmed for Osmanthus, and new records are reported for Chionanthus retusa, Picconia azorica, and P. excelsa, but not for the other species studied of Chionanthus. This infrageneric variation suggests that tori represent a plastic feature that has evolved more than once within the family as the result of functional adaptation to efficient and safe water transport. Pseudo-tori are observed in species of Abeliophyllum, Fontanesia, Forsythia, Jasminum, Ligustrum, Menodora, and Syringa. Based on structural differences, we state that tori and pseudo-tori can be distinguished as non-homologous features.


The authors have developed, in the field of a national project, an innovative communication system based on a web cloud platform oriented on the home-monitoring and home-assistance useful for de-hospitalization process. The goal of the work is to provide a tool for the hospital, able to manage different certified medical devices measuring data from patients at home. This management is provided by a web server system compatible with different devices and by a front-end panel able to register and to store data coming from these devices. The innovation is manly in the possibility to transfer the analyses from home to hospital thus reducing costs and providing more assistance and support to patients. The implemented database system represents a first step for future scientific studies and predictions requiring BigData storage.


The main purpose of this work has been to examine the correctness of my hypothesis that the Bergen School in the 1930s, through their social interaction, works and writings formed a "school" and were an alternative to international functionalism, the urban planning ideals of the day and industrial building designs, and that the school may be the last manifestation of the international Arts and Crafts movement. And furthermore, that within the Bergen School, we find the only architects in Scandinavia in the interwar years who embraced Frank Lloyd Wright's (1869-1959) organic architecture as an ideal.In the context of architectural history, the term "school" is frequently used of a group of practising architects with more or less the same thoughts and ideals, who design buildings that have so many features in common that together they stand out from the main stream of contemporary architecture. "The Bergen School" is a movement in Norwegian architecture that came into being around 1930. The school continued a view on architecture and conservation that had its roots in the English Arts and Crafts movement and that created a synthesis between traditional West Norwegian building styles and architecture.The School renewed its design form inspired by English and American Arts and Crafts architecture, and in its monumental buildings, we glimpse lines connecting it both to medieval building designs and to the Austrian and German secessionists – an urban version of the Arts and Crafts ideals that found their inspiration in pre-classical architecture. A number of architects made up the Bergen School, some of the most prominent of whom were Frederik Konow Lund (1889-1970), Per Grieg (1897-1962), Johan Lindstrom (1893-1958) and Kristian Bjeknes (1901-81).This thesis aims to shed light on the factors that shaped the Bergen School, what affected their views on architecture, characterised their buildings and conservation work, and what formed the core of their agitation and writings. It covers a period from around 1850 to around 1980, but focuses mainly on the School's architecture and writings from the 1930s when the Bergen School most clearly expressed its individuality in its encounter with international functionalism. We may well say that the 1930s were the decade of the Bergen School. The Bergen School continued to build on an architectural philosophy that manifested itself nationally and internationally in the decade prior to World War I and that was based on the ideals of the English Arts and Crafts movement as they were first introduced and developed by John Ruskin and William Morris in the latter part of the 19th century. Several of the architects discussed in this thesis were themselves associated with this tradition, and through their studies in Norway and abroad, they were stimulated to continue, develop and practise this architectural philosophy in the interwar years.The interest for traditional West Norwegian building styles within the Bergen School was expressed in the architects' strong commitment to conserving the past, through surveying and restoration work and in their arguments for improved styles of architecture in Western Norway. In this way they became a manifestation of the dualism in the Arts and Crafts ideals, "the architect creates by preserving". The concept "local building styles" therefore became synonymous with an organic connection between tradition and innovation, and between location and building. In this there is a close link to architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright who must have been familiar to the members of the Bergen School through Frederik Konow Lund. In 1934, Raymond McGrath's book Twentieth Century Houses referred to Konow Lund together with, among others, Frank Lloyd Wright. This book discussed and made clear the differences between the ideals of functionalism and the Arts and Crafts movement, and may have influenced the School's architects to distance themselves more clearly from functionalism and to continue developing their own regional architecture. The time around 1934 seems to mark a clear shift in the architecture and agitation of the Bergen School. From this time on, the architectural devices in the School's houses became fewer and fewer, though there was no reduction in the strict demands to detail and the high quality of the craftsmanship. Instead of a more or less replicating approach to the urban wood and brick buildings of middle-class and bureaucratic circles in the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, they found their inspiration in the more anonymous West Norwegian building style. Through an abstraction and reinterpretation of the design language of West Norwegian architectural styles, and through a resumption and continuation of regional building styles, Konow Lund and his colleagues in the Bergen School created a unique style of architecture in both a Norwegian and an international perspective. Somewhat simplified, we can say that the Bergen School, as it was in the 1930s, recounted the history of the struggle of regional building styles against international architectural styles, the struggle of craft traditions against industrial presentation and standardisation, the struggle of the peripheral districts against the capital, and last but not least, the struggle of the creative architect against the increased influence of the engineer and the entrepreneur.International research on the development of the Arts and Crafts movement has concluded that this movement came to an end in the 1920s. In this perspective, the Bergen School is interesting because it continued the ideals into the 1930s and beyond, and thus may well be considered the last manifestation of the Arts and Crafts movement.The thesis is divided into the following chapters:I. THEORETICAL CONNECTING LINESHere I have explained the factors that affected and shaped the School's architecture and architectural philosophy, and the influence the architectural environment had on Bergen and the country in general, as well as possible international influences that may have come from where the architects studied, their travels, professional contacts, as well as from contemporary literature and writings.II. THE HOUSE AS A LOCAL ART FORMThrough building analyses of selected houses, I have identified formal and structural traits that characterise the architecture of the Bergen School, such as the influences from traditional West Norwegian building styles. These characteristics I have subsequently discussed in the light of the ideals of the international Arts and Crafts movement.III. MAJOR BUILDING PROJECTSSeveral of the architects in the Bergen School received major commissions that resulted in monumental and urban buildings of high artistic quality and craftsmanship. Through an analysis of selected buildings, I have tried to identify characteristic traits and lines of influence that place them in the context of architectural history.IV. CONSERVATION THEORY AND CONSERVATION STRATEGIESThe architects in the Bergen School were all firmly committed to conservation work. I have explained which conservation philosophies the School represented and how these are expressed in their conservation work and restoration projects.V. AGITATION AND ARCHITECTURAL PHILOSOPHYIn the light of the School's agitation and writings, I have attempted to study their architectural philosophy in depth and to shed light on the symbiotic relationship between conservation work (recording, surveying and restoration) and the School's own architecture. Against this background, I have discussed whether the architects of the Bergen School stand out from other Norwegian architects who were seeking a "traditional" design form in the 1930s.In conclusion, I have summarised the features that characterised the Bergen School and its architectural philosophy, and assessed the School's contribution to Norwegian and international architectural history.It is my hope that this work can contribute towards giving the Bergen School's architecture and values their rightful place in the history of architecture, and that the School's many and varied activities can act as a source of knowledge and a reference base for the architects, architectural students and antiquarian authorities of our times.


The media reporting of the Ethiopian Famine in 1984-5 was an iconic news event. It is widely believed to have had an unprecedented impact, challenging perceptions of Africa and mobilising public opinion and philanthropic action in a dramatic new way. The contemporary international configuration of aid, media pressure, and official policy is still directly affected and sometimes distorted by what was - - as this narrative shows - - also an inaccurate and misleading story. In popular memory, the reporting of Ethiopia and the resulting humanitarian intervention were a great success. Yet alternative interpretations give a radically different picture of misleading journalism and an aid effort which did more harm than good. Using privileged access to BBC and Government archives, Reporting Disasters ex- amines and reveals the internal factors which drove BBC news and offers a rare case study of how the media can affect public opinion and policymaking. It constructs the process that accounts for the immensity of the news event, following the response at the heart of government to the pressure of public opinion. And it shows that while the reporting and the altruistic festival that it produced triggered remarkable and identifiable changes, the on- going impact was not what the conventional account claims it to have been.


Radiation therapy (RT) is a common treatment for brain neoplasms and is used alone or in combination with other therapies. The use of RT has been found to be successful in controlling tumors and extending the overall survival of patients; however, there are many unanswered questions regarding radiotherapy effects in the normal brain surrounding or infiltrated by tumor. Changes to the vascular and parenchyma have been documented, and more recently inflammatory mechanisms have been postulated to play a role in radiation injury. Traditional imaging techniques used within the clinic (CT and MRI) are often lacking in their ability to differentiate between recurrent tumor, transient treatment effects, or radiation necrosis. The primary goal of this thesis is to demonstrate an MRI acquisition method that has been shown to be sensitive to deoxygenated blood and iron content as a potential biomarker of radiation effect on the normal brain. Specifically, post-processing techniques are used to determine the applicability of qualitative images such as Susceptibility-Weighted Imaging (SWI) and quantitative methods such as Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) and apparent traverse relaxation (R2 ) using the same sequence. These methods are potential surrogate markers for vascular changes and neuroinflammatory components that could predict sub-acute and long-term radiation effects. Within this thesis, R2 * is shown to be a promising marker for the prediction of radiation necrosis, whereas SWI and QSM are shown to be excellent modalities for detecting longterm effects such as microbleeds. Additionally, R2 * is shown to be a potentially useful technique in identifying post-imaging treatment changes (pseudoprogression) following chemoradiotherapy for malignant glioma. Finally, the use of this non-contrast method shows promise for integration within a clinical setting and the potential for expansion to multicenter clinical trials.


In 2008, the OECD launched the AHELO feasibility study, an initiative with the objective to assess whether it is possible to develop international measures of learning outcomes in higher education. Learning outcomes are indeed key to a meaningful education, and focusing on learning outcomes is essential to inform diagnosis and improve teaching processes and student learning. While there is a long tradition of learning outcomes' assessment within institutions'courses and programmes, emphasis on learning outcomes has become more important in recent years. Interest in developing comparative measures of learning outcomes has increased in response to a range of higher education trends, challenges and paradigm shifts. AHELO aims to complement institution-based assessments by providing a direct evaluation of student learning outcomes at the global level and to enable institutions to benchmark the performance of their students against their peers as part of their mprovement efforts. Given AHELO's global scope, it is essential that measures of learning outcomes are valid across diverse cultures and languages as well as different types of higher education institutions (HEIs). The purpose of the feasibility study is to see whether it is practically and scientifically feasibleto assess what students in higher education know and can do upon graduation within and across these diverse contexts. The feasibility study should demonstrate what is feasible and what could be feasible, what has worked well and what has not, as well as provide lessons and stimulate reflection on how learning outcomes might be most effectively measured in the future.


This paper studies how the subsidy support, e.g. price support and reimbursed investment cost support, affects the investment decision of a monopoly firm under uncertainty and analyzes the implications for social welfare. The analytical results show that the unconditional, i.e., subsidy support that is introduced from the beginning, makes the firm invest earlier. Under a linear demand structure, the unconditional subsidy cannot align the firm's investment decision to the social optimal one. However, a conditional subsidy, i.e., subsidy support introduced at the social optimal investment threshold, can align the two decisions. For a non-linear demand structure, it is possible for the unconditional subsidy to make the firm invest according to the social optimum. When the investment decisions are aligned, the firm's investment leads to the first-best outcome.


The Chinese Family Planning (FP) programme mainly focuses on married couples, and young unmarried women have limited access. This cross-sectional study aims to identify risk factors related to repeat abortions in Chinese adolescents receiving abortions. Data were collected using a questionnaire for all women seeking abortions within 12 weeks of pregnancy during a period of 2 months in 297 participating hospitals randomly selected across 30 provinces of China in 2013. Only the adolescents (younger than the minimum legal married age of 20 years) were included in this study. Of the 2370 adolescents who were receiving abortions, 927 (39%) were undergoing repeat abortions. The primary reason for the current unintended pregnancies was non-use of contraception (68%). Adolescents receiving abortions who had an increased risk of repeat abortions were those who had children (OR 2.57, 95% CI 1.80–3.67), those who resided in a middle-developed region (OR 1.81, 95% CI 1.30–2.50), those who resided in a relatively poor region (OR 2.40, 95% CI 1.78–3.23), and those who had used contraception during the 6 months preceding the survey (OR 1.38, 95% CI 1.12–1.71 for condom use). The occupation as a student was a protective factor for adolescents (OR 0.64, 95% CI 0.50–0.83). Adolescents should be offered equal access to FP to that of married women in China to reduce unintended pregnancies and repeat abortions. Correct and consistent contraception practice should be promoted.


This paper explores whether or not our online social media persona is viewed as authentic. The selfie is a fundamental part of the structure of the online identity for young people in today's digital world. The relationship between an individual's self-identity in the physical face-to-face environment was analysed and compared to a carefully constructed, modified virtual representation in a selfie posted on social media platforms. Data was obtained through four focus groups at the University of Adelaide. Two key theoretical frameworks provide a basis for this study: Erving Goffman's concept of the self as a performance, and Charles Horton Cooley's concept of the looking glass self. In examining the focus group discussions in light of these two frameworks as well as associated literature, we conclude that the authenticity of the selfie as a way of visualising a social media persona is subjective and dependent on the individual posting a selfie. Ultimately, authenticity involves a degree of subjectivity. It was on this basis that focus group participants argued that selfies could be considered authentic expressions of identity.


In a few years the Kepler and TESS missions will provide ultra-precise photometry for thousands of RR Lyrae and hundreds of Cepheid stars. In the extended Kepler mission all targets are proposed in the Guest Observer (GO) Program, while the TESS space telescope will work with full frame images and a ~15-16th mag brightness limit with the possibility of short cadence measurements for a limited number of pre-selected objects. This paper highlights some details of the enormous and important work of the target selection process made by the members of Working Group 7 (WG#7) of the Kepler and TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium.


Humans are remarkably good at recognizing biological motion, even when depicted as point-light animations. There is currently some debate as to the relative importance of form and motion cues in the perception of biological motion from the simple dot displays. To investigate this issue, we adapted the "Bubbles" technique, most commonly used in face and object perception, to isolate the critical features for point-light biological motion perception. We find that observer sensitivity waxes and wanes during the course of an action, with peak discrimination performance most strongly correlated with moments of local opponent motion of the extremities. When dynamic cues are removed, instances that are most perceptually salient become the least salient, evidence that the strategies employed during point-light biological motion perception are not effective for recognizing human actions from static patterns. We conclude that local motion features, not global form templates, are most critical for perceiving point-light biological motion. These experiments also present a useful technique for identifying key features of dynamic events.


Biological research has experienced a paradigm shift from in vivo or in vitro experimentation to in silico experimentation, a development that relies upon bioinformatics. The beginning of bioinformatics stems from the fortuitous timing of the adoption of new DNA sequencing methods and the availability of mini-and bench-top computers, which became the tools to store and to analyze the sequence data. Another fortunate coincidence was the popularization of the Internet, which provided a means to exchange sequence data and sequence analysis software, and the establishment of the Human Genome Project, which stimulated the need for sophisticated data management and analysis tools. Market pull has rapidly stimulated bioinformatics commercialization as pharmaceutical companies discovered a potential means to cure their innovation deficit. One of the early models for commercializing bioinformatics was simply to sell access to databases of human nucleotide sequences. This strategy is heading toward obsolescence as the public consortium nears its goal of sequencing the human genome. The key to future commercialization of sequence data will be to develop informatics technology that transforms this data into information that is useful for diagnosis and therapy. A competitive transformation of sequence data into information will require improvements in data integration and data mining.


Substantial net improvements in programming quality and productivity have been obtained through the use of formal inspections of design and of code. Improvements are made possible by a systematic and efficient design and code verification process, with well-defined roles for inspection participants. The manner in which inspection data is categorized and made suitable for process analysis is an important factor in attaining the improvements. It is shown that by using inspection results, a mechanism for initial error reduction followed by ever-improving error rates can be achieved.


Background: Balance, mobility, falls, and foot problems are serious detriments for the diabetic patients undergoing hemodialysis (HD) treatment. In addition, the HD process often leaves them too fatigued to engage in any physical activity or daily exercise, further deteriorating their motor functions. Exercise would be effective for this population. However, due to the time availability, post-dialysis fatigue, as well as limitation of transportation to exercise facility, the conventional exercise is impractical. Objective: We are developing an interactive foot and ankle exercise game that can be played during HD sessions to improve mobility and balance, as well as reduce foot problems. In this study, we examined the feasibility and effectiveness of this innovative wearable sensor based non-weight bearing exercise (Exergame) to improve daily physical activity in diabetic patients undergoing HD treatment. Methods: Thirty-three diabetic subjects receiving HD treatment were recruited and randomized into an intervention group (IG: n = 15, age = 62.2 ± 7.6 years, BMI = 29.1 ± 6.1 kg/m2) and a control group (CG: n = 18, age = 66.6 ± 8.7 years, BMI = 32.5 ± 9.0 kg/m2). Both groups underwent a 4-week ankle and foot exercise program (30 minutes per session, two sessions per week) during HD process. The IG received exercise via the Exergame program, which uses wearable sensors attached on subject's feet. The subject's 3-dementional ankle and foot movements were visualized in real-time on a computer screen placed in front of him/her. The subject played some game-like tasks by moving and rotating the foot and ankle. The difficulty level of the task was gradually increased depends on ability of the subject (like a game) from a simple flexion-extension movement to more complex movements including medial-lateral movement with different range of motion. The CG received traditional foot and ankle exercise without technology. Daily physical activity data was assessed for 48 hours (day and night) at baseline and post 4-week exercise, using a validated wearable sensor (PAMSysTM). Daily physical activity was quantified by duration spent in each main posture (i.e. lying, sitting, standing, and walking) and activities (e.g. postural transition, sedentary behavior, etc). Results: All IG subjects achieved to complete all exercise tasks indicating the feasibility of the Exergame platform. No adverse event or difficulty were reported indicating practicality of the exercise program. None subject in the IG was dropped out during the 4-week exercise program. Low dropout rate may indicate acceptability of the proposed Exergame platform. At the end of intervention, subjects in the IG were more active than subjects in the CG. In summary, the IG performed 53% more posture transitions to walking (Cohen's d effect size = 0.5) and 39% more posture transitions between sitting and walking (d = 0.5), when compared to the CG. Subjects in the IG also had significant less sedentary behavior than subjects in the CG. In summary, subjects in the IG spent 5% less time on sitting and lying (p = 0.049, d = 0.7), as well as 47% more time on standing and walking (p = 0.049, d = 0.7), when compared to subjects in the CG. Conclusions: This study demonstrated feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of an innovative Exergame program to improve daily physical activity in diabetic patients undergoing HD treatment. The key innovation of the proposed intervention is its practicality to be done during HD process, which could address the limitations of prior exercise interventions in HD patients, for example the low adherence of therapeutic exercise. Further studies should be addressed to confirm the observation with larger sample sizes.


A primary school in Cali, Colombia, has implemented major changes intended to give students a more active role in their own education. Mr. Denby focuses on one of these changes--a new format for parent/teacher conferences. DURING THE PAST several years, the faculty of the primary section of Colegio Bolivar in Cali, Colombia, has been striving to implement a student-centered curriculum and a school environment that reflects the needs and interests of students. Until recently, however, one area lagged behind: student assessment. Then, during the 1994-95 school year -- encouraged by a Colombian law that set new guidelines for reporting student progress--the primary teachers decided to stop giving letter grades and to try to eliminate the tendency to compare students that is inherent in traditional grading systems. Instead, we teachers began to assess students on whether they met the objectives set forth in the curriculum. On the new report card that was developed jointly by teachers and administrators, students would either surpass objectives, meet objectives, or not meet objectives. Most students meet objectives (although this designation admittedly covers a wide range of achievement). "Average" students may simply have more difficulty meeting objectives than "excellent" students. At Bolfvar, individual students and their teachers now pay attention to what the students have accomplished, rather than to what others have done. The new anecdotal format of the report cards allows teachers to detail each student's strengths and weaknesses. This approach to assessment inspired even more changes. In December 1994 the principal, Peggy Pastor, passed along to the primary faculty an article about student-led parent/teacher conferences, and the idea was an instant hit. Most teachers agreed that such conferences were a logical extension of our earlier reforms. Our reforms had been aimed at having students take an active role in their education and having them feel a sense of ownership of their work. Now, with parent conferences scheduled for the end of February, some teachers set to work immediately, preparing students to take an active role in their own evaluations. Under the old system, teachers spent a few minutes several times a year informing parents of their children's successes and failures. Now students would actively evaluate all aspects of their schoolwork. Their opinions of their products and behavior would be the focus of the meetings with parents. IN PRACTICE, students in grades 2 through 5 proved themselves able to speak authoritatively about all aspects of their school lives and to identify with remarkable accuracy their academic and behavioral strengths and weaknesses. That children so young would have such a clear view of themselves amazed the adults. According to Sandy Waite, a third-grade teacher, parents "sat in awe, watching their youngsters speak with such confidence about themselves." The time allotted to each conference was 30 minutes. During this interval, each child--using work samples, journals, and self-evaluations--led his or her family through a detailed tour of his or her academic life. Parents listened attentively and asked probing questions about work habits, successes, difficulties, relations with peers and teachers, and school behavior. The students were amazingly honest in their self-evaluations. Carole Jenkins, a fourth-grade teacher, noted that, "if anything, they were sometimes too hard on themselves." In identifying their own problems, the children also began to develop strategies to improve their work or behavior. Parents took part in this process, offering suggestions as to how they could help at home. Teachers served as facilitators, asking questions of students and parents. They also helped parents to refocus attention on their children. Unaccustomed to the new style of conference, many parents--especially at the beginning--tended to direct their questions to the teacher. …


It is unclear whether positive emotionality in general, or some specific positive emotions (e.g. other-oriented ones), but not others (e.g. self-oriented and, possibly, stimulus-oriented ones), enhance prosocial thoughts, dispositions, and behavior. We focus here on awe and argue that, although being primarily stimulus-oriented and not necessarily social in its very nature, awe should enhance prosociality for several theoretical reasons. In replicating and extending previous initial research, we found in two online experiments that the induction of awe (video clip or recall), compared to the induction of amusement or a neutral condition, leads to increased prosocial behavioral intentions of generosity (spontaneous sharing of hypothetical gains) and help of a person in need – in hypothetical everyday life situations. Awe's effect on prosociality was independent from participants' religiosity (in both experiments) but seemed to be clearer for those in need of such affective stimulation, i.e. less agreeable participants (Experiment 2).


Background: An important step in accelerometer data analysis is the classification of continuous, 24-hour data into sleep, wake, and non-wear time. We compared classification times and physical activity metrics across different data processing and classification methods.Methods: Participants (n = 576) from the Finnish Retirement and Aging Study (FIREA) wore an accelerometer on their non-dominant wrist for seven days and nights and filled in daily logs with sleep and waking times. Accelerometer data were first classified as sleep or wake time by log, and Tudor-Locke, Tracy, and ActiGraph algorithms. Then, wake periods were classified as wear or non-wear by log, Choi algorithm, and wear sensor. We compared time classification (sleep, wake, and wake wear time) as well as physical activity measures (total activity volume and sedentary time) across these classification methods.Results:M(SD) nightly sleep time was 467 (49) minutes by log and 419 (88), 522 (86), and 453 (74) minutes by Tudor-Locke, Tracy, and ActiGraph algorithms, respectively. Wake wear time did not differ substantially when comparing Choi algorithm and the log. The wear sensor did not work properly in about 29% of the participants. Daily sedentary time varied by 8–81 minutes after excluding sleep by different methods and by 1–18 minutes after excluding non-wear time by different methods. Total activity volume did not substantially differ across the methods.Conclusion: The differences in wear and sedentary time were larger than differences in total activity volume. Methods for defining sleep periods had larger impact on outcomes than methods for defining wear time.


While the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges resolved a dispute about access to legal marriage, it also exposed a rift between the Justices about what rights, obligations, and social meanings marriage should entail. The majority opinion described marriage as a "unified whole" comprised of "essential attributes," both legal and extralegal. The dissents, in contrast, were more skeptical about marriage's inherent legal content. Justice Scalia, for instance, characterized marriage as a mere bundle of "civil consequences" attached to "whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements [the law] wishes." This side debate has taken center stage in several recent disputes. In the years following Obergefell, courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have considered whether the First Amendment limits a state's authority to require public accommodations to provide equal access to services related to a wedding celebration, whether the right to marry encompasses the right to be deemed a parent to a child born to one's spouse, and whether states can withhold valuable employment benefits from married same-sex couples. And numerous state legislatures have considered proposals to get states "out of the marriage business." All of these disputes ultimately question how the positive law of marriage should be constituted and whether marriage is indeed a unified or integrated whole.

Some scholars have analyzed these questions from a historical or functional perspective. This Article starts from a different point. It accepts Obergefell's invitation to think of marriage as an institution that can be more or less "unified" or "integrated." Along these lines, it proposes a new framework for analyzing questions about the positive law of marriage: the continuum of integration and disintegration. This continuum has two interrelated dimensions. The first involves the rights and duties that the law imposes upon spouses. The second involves the uniformity of those legal rules across jurisdictions. Marriage becomes more integrated when rights and social norms mutually reinforce each other, and less integrated when rights and norms conflict. The package of rights and norms becomes more integrated when it is uniform across jurisdictions, and less integrated when jurisdictional differences prevent marriage from acquiring a singular meaning. This integration framework has two benefits. First, by focusing attention on the relationship between the functions, laws, and norms of marriage, the integration framework provides a methodology for assessing claims that changes to marriage laws are bringing about marriage's disintegration, rendering visible whether and how disintegration occurs. Second, it identifies benefits and costs of integration, demonstrating the extent to which marriage relies on effectively communicating information about its content but noting the downsides of centralization and state control. This integration framework enables a more principled analysis of efforts targeted at reforming marriage laws and recognizing nonmarital relationships.


In this thesis, we study sustainable harvesting strategies for tilapia fish farming. Modified logistic growth models with constant harvest rate as well as periodic harvesting have all been studied. Modified logistic growth model is applied to fishery systems and animal production where overcrowding and competition of resources are considered. Although, tilapia fish farming is being done on commercial basis in Ghana, there is much less literature in studying sustainable harvesting strategies. Specific objectives of this thesis were to develop a modified logistic growth model to include harvesting rates. Finally, to determine Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) of fish that will ensure the tilapia fish supply is continuous and sustainable. Analytical and numerical methods were used to determine the maximum sustainable yield of fish population in a pond. The existence of equilibrium solutions and their stabilities of the modified logistic growth model were theoretically studied. Periodic harvesting strategy is strongly recommended for the selected tilapia fish farm and inland fish harvesters. This thesis will help improve productivity and reduce risk from changes in sale price of tilapia fish.


EFFECTS OF PARENTAL DIVORCE ON UNCERTAINTY FOLLOWING INITIAL COMMUNICATION WITH A POTENTIAL ROMANTIC PARTNER Julia A. Hansch Marquette University, 2010 Decades of research have supported Berger and Calabrese's (1975) Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT), which posits that reducing uncertainty is a chief goal of initial communication between strangers. This study extends the scope of URT, focusing on initial communication between strangers who see themselves as potential romantic partners. Further, this study specifically examines the potential influence of a wellresearched external factor that has been found to negatively affect the way people communicate and behave within romantic relationships: parental divorce. Although many studies have assessed the impact of parental divorce on communication in developed relationships, there is little research examining its impact on initial communication, specifically, uncertainty levels, between potential romantic partners. This study provides an initial examination of this question. A review of existing research suggests that the presence of parental divorce may result in increased negative communication patterns and distrust toward potential romantic partners, and that these effects are more pronounced the younger the child is when divorce occurs. These findings guided the hypothesis that individuals with divorced parents would express higher levels of uncertainty than those whose parents are not divorced. A second hypothesis predicted that the younger individuals were when their parents divorced, the higher their level of uncertainty would be. A research question asks whether current number of friends and similarity to a potential partner will affect uncertainty levels. To test these hypotheses and answer this question, a convenience sample of university students filled out a survey, which contained a hypothetical conversation that could have taken place between the participant and a potential romantic partner. Then, respondents completed the CL7 confidence scale (Clatterbuck, 1979) and answered a series of demographic questions, including whether their parents divorced, and if so, at what age the divorce occurred. A multiple regression analysis of the data indicated that neither parental divorce nor age at which divorce occurred influenced respondents' level of uncertainty. Other findings demonstrated statistically significant relationships in the non-divorced parents data subset between respondents' perceived similarity to the potential romantic partner, ethnicity and sex and respondents' level of certainty. Potential explanations for these findings and theoretical implications are discussed.


Suppose you turn on your laptop while sitting at the kitchen table at home and respond OK to a prompt about accessing a nearby wireless Internet access point owned and operated by a neighbor. What potential liability may ensue from accessing someone else's wireless access point? How about intercepting wireless connection signals? What about setting up an open or unsecured wireless access point in your house or business? Attorneys can expect to grapple with these issues and other related questions as the popularity of wireless technology continues to increase. This paper explores several theories of liability involving both the accessing and operating of wireless Internet, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, wiretap laws, as well as trespass to chattels and other areas of common law. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of key policy considerations.


The true potential of three dimensional System-OnPackage (SOP) technology lies in its capability to integrate both active and passive components into a single high speed/density multi-layer packaging substrate. We propose a new interconnect-centric SOP global routing algorithm that handles arbitrary routing topologies and produces near optimal results. The contribution of this work is threefold: (i) modeling of the SOP routing resource, (ii) formulation of the new SOP global routing problem, and (iii) development of a fast and novel algorithm that considers the various design constraints unique to SOP. Our related experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.


Incubators started to appear in Brazil towards the end of the 1980s and the original concept arose within a context of changes in policy direction for Brazilian science and technology. They were considered to be a useful mechanism, or organisational format, for bringing about the greater participation of the universities in the country's socio-economic development, particularly by forging closer links between the academic world, industry and government. The incubators operating in Brazil cover a wealth of different types, including Technology Based Incubators, Traditional Incubators, Mixed Incubators, Cooperative Incubators and Private Incubators. The take-off of the Brazilian incubator movement is analysed as a non-linear triple helix science policy, the result of a series of initiatives taken from the institutional spheres of university, industry and government, which built upon and supported each other's efforts.


The trend towards activation has been one of the major issues in recent welfare and labour market reforms in Europe and the US. Despite considerable initial variation across national models with respect to the scope and intensity of activation, redefining the link between social protection and labour market policies on the one hand and employment on the other has been a common issue in labour market reforms. The paper shows the development of activation policies in terms of basic principles, instruments, target groups and governance in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the US, Sweden and Denmark. It assesses the effectiveness and efficiency of activation policies in terms of bringing the jobless into work and ensuring sustainable independence from social benefits. Based on national activation trajectories, the paper argues that we can observe a contingent convergence of instruments, target groups, governance modes and outcomes so that established typologies of activation strategies have to be questioned.


MicroRNAs (miRNAs) belong to a class of small noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), which regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. They are approximately 22 nucleotide sequences in length and have been predicted to control expression of up to 30-60% of all protein-coding genes in mammals. Considering this wide involvement in gene control, aberrant miRNA expression has a strong association with the presence and progression of a disease, hence generating much anticipation in using miRNAs as biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of human cancers. The majority of these miRNAs are intracellular, but recently they have been discovered in bodily fluids. This review will provide an insight into these circulatory miRNA molecules and discuss their potential as cancer biomarkers.


The decisions in Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Bd. ("Bush I") and Bush v. Gore, ("Bush II") evidence the extent to which it now appears unremarkable for courts to play a role in even the most basic of political issues. While the doctrinal value of the Bush decisions is certainly important, the Bush decisions are far more valuable for their endorsement of methodologies available to anyone seeking political advantage under the cover of judicial legitimacy. This article explores those principles, practices and procedures. I start with an appropriate theoretical context. For that purpose I look to LatCrit theory rather than more ideologically traditional or doctrinal theory. Ironically, this expression of critical theory, grounded in progressive political programs, provides the best conceptual basis for interpreting the ostensibly traditionalist Bush cases. I use this theoretical context to identify eight core methodological lessons of the Bush cases: (1) "Be Consciously Political;" (2) "Be Literal;" (3) "Attack Precedent;" (4) "Create Contradiction;" (5) "Appropriate;" (6) "Exploit Uncertainty and Sentimentality;" (7) "Recruit Legitimacy;" and (8) "If All Else Fails, Overwhelm Law Through its Own Devices." I then explore the way these lessons have been internalized by the courts and applied in nearly one hundred published and unpublished judicial opinions issued since the publication of the Bush cases. Those opinions are windows through which one can see the ways in which litigants have attempted to extract meaning from the Bush decisions far beyond their officially sanctioned reading, and the ways in which judges have attempted to situate the Bush decisions within the body of American case law. In their least dangerous sense, the lessons, as applied, suggest the ways in which the juridification of politics has become institutionalized in federal and state courts. The courts now rival the legislature as the venue par excellence for the resolution of political issues of every description. But the lessons also suggest the naturalization, within an ostensibly conservative political jurisprudence, of methodologies of legal perversion, of the use of law against itself. Having made a vocation of criticizing the political left for the nihilistic evils of critical and other progressive approaches to law, a so-called conservative court has gone a long way to implement a jurispruence of ultimate relativism and indeterminacy. Now that is irony!


The present article deals with the argumentative function of reported speech in a specific discourse genre: economic-financial newspaper articles. Economic-financial discourse results are very interesting for the present investigation, at least, for two reasons. Firstly, being oriented towards the decision making of investors it is, for the most part, overtly or covertly argumentative. Secondly, the argumentation is, for the most part, attributed to expert sources. Theoretically, the research is based on the pragmatic and text linguistic research on reported discourse as well as on argumentation theory. The proposed integrated approach to reported speech combining linguistic and argumentation theoretic insights revealed the relations between linguistic characteristics of reported speech with its different argumentative functions.


This study used a time series of remote sensing data from 1973, 1990 and 1994 to assess sustainability of forest use in three villages in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. This time period is characterised by a shift among three separate, recognised management systems: indigenous management; timber concessionaire management; and management as a wildlife reserve. Comparing remotely sensed data from three different sources with different spatial and spectral resolutions presented a technical challenge. A combined digital and visual classification methodology was adopted to produce comparable forest cover maps. These maps were combined within a geographical information system (GIS) with socioeconomic and cultural data. Quantitative change analysis over such a long period provided a valuable insight into forest cover dynamics in this area. The three villages selected for the study are characterised by two distinct patterns of resource use: shifting cultivation and capture fishery. Comparison of the forest change maps over the 21-year period shows that forest loss among the community of shifting cultivators is 7% less than forest loss for one of the fishing communities. Remarkably, the other fishing community examined shows only a 1.5% loss in forest over the 21-year period. Through this work we have combined forest cover change with ethnographic and socioeconomic data (both in a GIS and by conventional means). We feel that this approach can make a valuable contribution to assessing sustainability.


As revealed in the previous studies, the earning decomposition based on secondary data has appeared less informative with respect to the actual and perceived barriers to the integration of labour markets. Hence, additional information is needed to determine what are the biggest constraints of finding good jobs? What are the perceived chances of finding good jobs and how stable are they? What other individual characteristics besides formal human capital increase the chances of finding good jobs? Do certain labour market segments carry a stigma such that it becomes more difficult to move to other segments? As such, the fieldwork has been designed to gather this additional information among a number of the poor wage workers. It is expected that this information is both corroborate the earlier market segmentation analysis based on secondary data as well as provides additional insights into the functioning of labour markets in Vietnam, especially those for the poor.


Countries, small and large, developed, or developing, all have issues relating to water in terms of quality, quantity, and access. These issues need imminent and efficient solutions because of the critical importance of water to human health, life, and dignity; A lack of water can lead to death from dehydration, as well as other serious diseases and risks. Women, children, minority groups, indigenous peoples, refugees, and prisoners are most vulnerable to water problems. The goal 7.C of the Millennium Development goals ("MDGs") based on the United Nations Millennium Declaration ("Millennium Declaration") set a target to reduce by half the portion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. The goal, however, could not be fully reached due to the various reasons, including physical water scarcity, the failure of institutions, lack of infrastructure, poverty, and rapid growth of population. A wide variety of solutions to solve the issues and problems relating to water have been suggested by international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and human rights activists as well as national governments. The solutions were provided in order to address the matters directly or indirectly originated from various roots, such as poverty, inequality, and political, social, cultural, and environmental challenges. In addition, one of the most promising approaches to solve the water issues is to legally recognize access to water as a human right. Researching right to water issues involves a wide variety of documents produced by various entities, including inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations and states. Research is made more difficult by the complex reasons and motivations behind the right to water, the difficulty of defining water and the right to water, the diversity of stakeholders involved — including indigenous people and minority groups — the complicated and interdisciplinary nature of research — including data, statistics, strategies, and implementation plans — many different types of legal sources to search — including international treaties, custom, general principles of law, jurisprudence, soft law, and domestic statutes. The research is a mixture of international and domestic legal research and non-legal research. In order to ease away the difficulty of researching right to water, this article first investigates various definitions of water and right to water and identifies the difficulties of this research. Next, this article delineates the history of laws relating to water and various mechanisms and international principles that can be useful for protecting the rights of indigenous and local people. Finally, the article selectively reviews several books and articles that provide excellent starting points for right to water research.


A straightforward strategy to synthesize loop-stabilized particles in water via PISA is developed. These particular structures can in theory be obtained through the synthesis of amphiphilic BAB triblock copolymers, starting from a hydrophilic middle block A, which is chain extended in an aqueous PISA process with two hydrophobic external blocks B. For this purpose, symmetrical bifunctional poly(N,N-dimethylacrylamide) macroRAFT agents with a central benzoic acid group and an alkyl chain as the Z group are used in the aqueous dispersion polymerization of diacetone acrylamide. For the first time, stable BAB flower-like particles are formed via PISA in pure water. It is shown that the colloidal stability and the resulting particle morphology (spheres, worms, vesicles) strongly depend on the degree of ionization of the central charge in the stabilizer loop, and thus on the pH at which PISA is performed. Moreover, the influence of the length of the alkyl Z group (dodecyl and butyl alkyl chains) on the colloidal stability is studied.


The purpose of this narrative review was to highlight the research on the influence of weather conditions on patients with osteoarthritis, the pathophysiological mechanisms and the therapeutic consequences. A search was conducted using the Pubmed, Medline and Web of Science databases. Barometric pressure, temperature and humidity are the weather conditions that are found to be correlated most to the worsening of pain complaints. But, due to the difficulty of measuring the impact of these variables and the great diversity in study protocols, an analysis of studies regarding this topic shows conflicting results. Central sensitization mechanisms and the function of a Transient Receptor Potential channel might explain the pain hypersensitivity to cold weather. Joint pain, caused by central sensitization mechanisms, cannot always be treated with joint arthroplasty. When pain remains present after joint arthroplasty, centrally mediated pain constitutes an important role.


One way of improving the performance, at least in theory, of kernel estimators of curves such as probability densities, regression functions and spectral densities is to use "higher order" kernel functions. In this paper, we investigate how one might obtain higher order kernels from lower.order ones, and put forward a wide variety of existing and novel formulae under the unifying concept of generalized jackknifing (Schucany, Gray and Owen, 1971). We thus greatly expand on the approach of Schucany and Sommers (1977). Spinoffs include links with more "direct" bias correction methods, a simplified understanding of how the "optimal" polynomial kernels of, for example, Gasser, Muller and Mammitzsch (1985) relate to one another, connections with the Gaussian-based kernels of Wand and Schucany (1990), and many extensions of Terrell and Scott's (1980) method of enforcing nonnegativity in estimates based on higher order kernel ideas.


Recent advances in the cognitive sciences along with theoretical perspectives from a Vygotskian learning paradigm are used to provide a justification for direct instruction in religious education. Direct instruction is not seen as the end of the learning process but one way in which students can be equipped to engage in more complex learning tasks which both challenge and engage them. To be pedagogically effective, direct instruction must be part of a wider teaching strategy and be based on a number of key principles, such as coherence, signalling and recognition of prior learning. The paper argues that direct instruction is especially relevant when dealing with conceptually difficult material. In addition, it also has a place when working with students who lack strong content knowledge.