In this paper, I argue that, contrary to common opinion, a counterexample against a philosophical theory does not amount to conclusive evidence against that theory. Instead , the method of counterexamples allows for the derivation of a disjunction, i.e., 'ei-ther the theory is false or an auxiliary assumption is false', not a negation of the target theory. This is so because, whenever the method of counterexamples is used in an attempt to refute a philosophical theory, there is a crucial auxiliary assumption that needs to be taken into account. The auxiliary assumption is that making intuitive judgments in response to hypothetical cases about the subject matter in question (e.g., knowledge or proper names) is a good method for finding out truths about that subject matter. Without good reasons to think that this assumption is warranted, the negation of a philosophical theory whose content is alleged to be in conflict with the content of an intuition cannot be justifiably derived using an argument that employs the method of counterexamples.


relaciones precedentes). Abstract T his paper explores the implications of one aspect of intercultural theory –the dimension of power distance– in order to comment on the nature of commitments in the mediation process. The familiar model of Western mediation assumes that parties can identify core interests and negotiate around those, through prioritising, trading and bal-ancing. At the heart of our thinking about commitments are our ideas about agency, autonomy, and accountability. However, a core implication of empirical work on power distance suggests that expectations of deference may lead some participants to avoid direct decision-making responsibility and, rather than work towards commitments, to act on the commitments or obligations they already have. Thus, low-power distance culture members are more able and willing to make commitments; high-power distance culture members are more constrained by having commitments. Whereas the Western model of negotiation and mediation addresses the means to reach commitments (the legitimacy of which stems from the choices the autonomous agents make), the norms that shape conduct in high-PD cultures are those the reflect having commitments and obligations (the legitimacy of which derives from antecedent rela-tionships).


The speech signal moving objects regarding the speaker's personality. A speaker recognition field is about retrieving the name of the individual voicing the speech. The effectiveness of accurately identifying a speaker is focused solely on vocal features, as voice contact with machines is becoming more prevalent in tasks like telephone, banking transactions, and the transformation of data from speech databases. This review illustrates the detection of text-dependent speakers, which identifies a single speaker from a known population. The program asks the user to utter voice. Program recognizes the person through evaluating the voice utterance codebook with the voice utterance codebook held in the database and records that may have provided the voice speech. Furthermore the features are removed; the speech signal is registered for 6 speakers. Extraction of the function is achieved using LPC coefficients, AMDF calculation and DFT. By adding certain features as input data, the neural network is equipped. For further comparison the characteristics are stored in models. The characteristics that need to be defined for the speakers were obtained and analysed using Back Propagation Algorithm to a template image. Now this framework trained correlates to the outcome; the source is the characteristics retrieved from the speaker to be described. The weight adjustment is done by the system, and the similarity score is discovered to recognise the speaker. The number of iterations needed for achieving the goal determines the efficiency of the network. Keywords— Speech Recognition, Artificial Neural Network, LibROSA feature


Roles are a key aspect of social interactions, as they contribute to the overall predictability of social behavior (a necessary requirement to deal effectively with the people around us), and they result in stable, possibly machine-detectable behavioral patterns (a key condition for the application of machine intelligence technologies). This paper proposes an approach for the automatic recognition of roles in conversational broadcast data, in particular, news and talk shows. The approach makes use of behavioral evidence extracted from speaker turns and applies conditional random fields to infer the roles played by different individuals. The experiments are performed over a large amount of broadcast material (around 50 h), and the results show an accuracy higher than 85%.


Existential rules, also known as data dependencies in Databases, have been recently rediscovered as a promising family of languages for Ontology-based Query Answering. In this paper, we prove that disjunctive embedded dependencies exactly capture the class of recursively enumerable ontologies in Ontology-based Conjunctive Query Answering (OCQA). Our expressive completeness result does not rely on any built-in linear order on the database. To establish the expressive completeness, we introduce a novel semantic definition for OCQA ontologies. We also show that neither the class of disjunctive tuple-generating dependencies nor the class of embedded dependencies is expressively complete for recursively enumerable OCQA ontologies.


A series of imbibition tests were conducted in soil samples that were contaminated or clean. The imbibition tests were done in a counter current fashion with controlled water rates, so that instant and complete saturation was explicitly avoided. Low-field NMR was used to monitor the imbibition process as a function of time. The spectra obtained were compared to "standard" spectra obtained with unconsolidated media. A number of unexpected and seemingly counter intuitive observations were made. It was found that the NMR spectra could be resolved into peaks that correspond to different pore sizes (as expected). However, the intensities and maxima of the peaks changed as a function of time, thus allowing for the monitoring of the redistribution of water in the porous media. Water ultimately migrated towards smaller pores from larger pores. As this migration occurred, the peaks corresponding to larger pores shrunk and the peaks corresponding to smaller pores increased. It is probable that substances in or on the surfaces of smaller pores develop as colloidal components or gels. It was possible to take these peaks and perform a kinetic analysis of water uptake in the porous medium. Kinetic data for wettable soils pointed to zero order kinetics for water uptake in the small pores. It was also found that soils previously contaminated and denoted as water-repellent appeared to follow second order kinetics for the water uptake in small pores. A kinetic model of imbibition can be formulated, with constants that describe the water uptake by different pore sizes. Furthermore, NMR offered an alternative for measurements of wettability in soils. This alternative is considered to be very important because there is no quantitative tool for measuring wetting properties of soils today. Qualitative measurement tests currently used are not theoretically sound.


With the latest advancements and improvements in recording equipment, field management systems, and vibrator mechanical and hydraulic systems, along with lighter detector/channel receiver station distributions, the quest for broadband acquisition, processing, and interpretation is more intense than ever. In an effort to reduce the acquisition cycle time and improve seismic imaging and resolution while optimizing costs, a number of unique land acquisition experiments were conducted, employing aggressive and nonaggressive blended source effort rules. The acquired data were used to demonstrate the effectiveness of source deblending technologies and full-waveform inversion (FWI) capabilities in such a unique data set. These experiments were unique in that the key field parameters needed for FWI, such as low frequencies (1.5–6 Hz), were recorded in combination with mid- and high-sweep frequency bandwidths and variable sweep lengths. This concept is described in the industry as a dispersed source array field ac...


The aim of this monograph is to analyze how international criminal courts /tribunals have resorted to proportionality and other limitation techniques when placing external limits upon the exercise of substantive and procedural human rights triggered by international criminal proceedings.


Today, Kabul municipality "KM" is highly dependent on landfilling method, for their disposing municipal waste materials. Where there is no an appropriate solid waste landfills system, while landfills only means as open dumpsites. The central problem in untreated landfill disposal and leachate control. Among the reasons that landfills remain a popular alternative for KM are their simplicity and versatility. The main objective of this study is to establish a standard sanitary landfill system of solid waste landfilling based on Fukuoka method (semiaerobic landfills). this method consisted on a leachate collection pipe is set up at the floor of landfill in order to remove water from the landfill. In addition, examines the environmental impact assessment of current situation of solid waste open dumped sites, open-burning, and standard sanitary landfilling system. By examining this important environmental case, the risk of open burning and untreated landfill are much higher and will cause a lot of consequences soon at the future. The results from both case sugested that the current parcticing landills must stop immediately and move froward for well engineering landfill system. In order to, create environmentally friendly landfills, Fukuoka landfill is a rational method that should be stimulated by municipal institutional which is responsible for solid waste


Social interactions may positively influence developmental and quality of life outcomes. Research in persons with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) mostly investigated interactions with caregivers. This literature review focuses on peer interactions of persons with PIMD. A computerized literature search of three databases was conducted. Based on specific inclusion criteria eight articles were selected. In these studies, social peer interaction was not clearly operationalized. More interactions with typically developing peers were observed compared to interactions with peers with PIMD. Both groups of peers can be trained to interact or to use technological support systems during peer interactions. After training, interactions with peers increased and interactions with professionals during peer interactions decreased. Interactions with normally developing peers positively influenced specific behaviours of persons with PIMD. Not much research is available on peer interactions of persons with PIMD, especially peer interactions between persons with PIMD remain unclear.


Author(s): Caldas, Blanca | Abstract: Freire (2005) encourages people to take "critical ownership of the formation of ourselves" (p. 44) in order to be able to act upon the world in what he (1993) calls "praxis." This praxis consists of the development of critical consciousness leading to transformative action. Critical consciousness and praxis should be conceived as an ongoing and creative process through the actual doing within spaces of authoring (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, a Cain, 2003). Boal's Theater of the Oppressed might provide Freire's ideas with a stage where liberation and praxis can be concretized, rehearsed and imagined. A discussion of this Freire-Boal complementation is offered by providing examples of two studies I conducted among Mexican-American/Latinx bilingual pre-service teachers to 1) prepare them linguistically after years of subtractive anglo-centric schooling, 2) to develop political and ideological clarity (Bartolome a Balderrama, 2001), and 3) to encourage them to engage in leadership and advocacy inside and outside of the classroom.


True tinnitus is a phantom auditory perception arising from a source or trigger in the cochlea, brainstem, or at higher centers and has no detectable acoustic generator. The most accepted is the famous neurophysiologic model of Jastreboff, which stresses that tinnitus, is a subcortical perception and results from the processing of weak neural activity in the periphery. The aim of this study is to determine the role of Vitamin B12 in treatment of chronic tinnitus. In this randomized, double-blind pilot study, total 40 patients were enrolled, of which 20 in Group A (cases) received intramuscular therapy of 1 ml Vitamin B12 (2500 mcg) weekly for a period of 6 weeks and Group B (20) patients received placebo isotonic saline 01 ml intramuscular. The patients were subjected to Vitamin B12 assay and audiometry pre- and post-therapy. Of the total patients of tinnitus, 17 were Vitamin B12 deficient that is 42.5% showed deficiency when the normal levels were considered to be 250 pg/ml. A paired t-test showed that in Group A, patients with Vitamin B12 deficiency showed significant improvement in mean tinnitus severity index score and visual analog scale (VAS) after Vitamin B12 therapy. This pilot study highlights the significant prevalence of Vitamin B12 deficiency in North Indian population and improvement in tinnitus severity scores and VAS in cobalamin-deficient patients receiving intramuscular Vitamin B12 weekly for 6 weeks further provides a link between cobalamin deficiency and tinnitus thereby suggestive of a therapeutic role of B12 in cobalamin-deficient patients of tinnitus.


Loss Aversion and Perspective Taking in the Sunk-Cost Fallacy Veronika Rudd Tait Department of Psychology, BYU Doctor of Philosophy The sunk-cost fallacy (SCF) occurs when an individual makes an investment with a low probability of a payoff because an earlier investment has already been made. It is considered an error because a rational decision should not factor in now-irretrievable investments, as they do not affect current outcome likelihoods. Previous research has measured the tendency to commit the SCF by using hypothetical scenarios in which participants must choose to make a future investment or not after making an initial investment. There are many theories as to why people commit the SCF. Loss aversion, which is the preference for uncertain over certain losses, may be related to the SCF. Dual-process theory, which views decision-making in terms of a fast, automatic process called system 1 and a slow, deliberate process called system 2, may also help to explain the SCF. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to complete a sunk-cost questionnaire in which the initial-investment types and amounts varied. They also completed an endowment-effect task as a measure of loss aversion. The SCF was committed most often when the initial investment was large compared to small and most often with money, less with time, and least with effort. There was an interaction effect in which small differences were seen in the SCF between time, effort, and money when the initial investment was small, and differences grew larger as the initial investment increased. Loss aversion displayed a non-significant negative relation with the SCF. In Experiment 2, participants completed a sunk-cost questionnaire in which they were asked to respond as they normally would and then from the perspective of a fictional person described as a logical decision maker. In cases in which they committed the SCF, they were asked to indicate why they continued to invest. They also completed a risky-lottery lossaversion task. As seen in Experiment 1, the SCF was more likely when initial investments were greater and occurred most when the initial investment was money, less when it was time, and least when it was effort. Loss aversion had a significant but small negative relation with SCF scores. There was no effect of perspective taking. It may be that the SCF is simply due to the over-application of the personal rule "don't waste", as not wanting to be wasteful was the mostcommon reason participants gave for why they committed the SCF.


A major source of risk in project management is inaccurate forecasts of project costs, demand, and other impacts. The paper presents a promising new approach to mitigating such risk based on theories of decision-making under uncertainty, which won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. First, the paper documents inaccuracy and risk in project management. Second, it explains inaccuracy in terms of optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Third, the theoretical basis is presented for a promising new method called "reference class forecasting," which achieves accuracy by basing forecasts on actual performance in a reference class of comparable projects and thereby bypassing both optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Fourth, the paper presents the first instance of practical reference class forecasting, which concerns cost forecasts for large transportation infrastructure projects. Finally, potentials for and barriers to reference class forecasting are assessed.


Senior emergency management personnel face more extreme events and more complex challenges
than their predecessors and these challenges will increase in the future. One of the key challenges
that senior emergency managers face is the evaluation of operational performance in the context
of increasing scrutiny from media, legal and political spheres. To investigate this issue we collected
survey data from 38 senior emergency management leaders who operate at the strategic level
(above the local IMT) as part of a broader survey examining the challenges of strategic emergency
management (funded by the Bushfire CRC, Owen et al., 2013). Participants reported concerns that
operational performance is currently judged by external sources (such as the media) in an often
post- hoc and arbitrary manner and is dependent on whether or not what happened in the end was
perceived as a good outcome. Reliance on the outcome of a complex event is problematic because
there is not an absolute correlation between the process of managing an emergency and the
outcome. Bad outcomes can occur despite good operational processes and good outcomes can
occur despite bad operational processes. For example, all the best processes might have been in
place and performed well but the outcome was bad because of unexpected climatic conditions,
such as a wind change. This paper will outline the views of senior leaders in emergency management
about what needs to be taken into account when measuring operational performance


The absolute and relative lack of infrastructure in Africa suggests that the continent's competitiveness could be boosted by scaling up investments in infrastructure. Such investments would facilitate domestic and international trade, enhance Africa's integration into the global economy and promote better human development outcomes, especially, by bringing unconnected rural communities into the mainstream economy. While there are yawning gaps in all infrastructure subsectors, inadequate energy supply is directly correlated to low education levels, poor health outcomes, as well as limited economic opportunities and technology choices. Efforts by government to invest in infrastructure have proved inadequate to close the infrastructure gap. These investment opportunities have not been seized by the private sector due to the unfavourable business environment, poor incentives and regulatory frameworks. Therefore, Africa's infrastructure challenge is not only in closing the huge financing gap, but also in building the necessary skills and capacity to attract investments. Although scaling up infrastructure investments offers the private sector enormous opportunities, unlocking these investments should be preceded by appropriate policy and structural reforms. The good news is that there is hope, and current developments are signalling an increased awareness by African governments. Development partners should therefore take advantage of the increasing political will for reform through knowledge and capacity building activities, especially, in fragile and post-conflict countries where the need is greatest.


This article discusses aspects of artistic inventio in landscape painting in the 17th and 18th centuries with a special interest in the changing role of the cultural understanding of memory and its growing influence on art theory. The main focus is on two discourses about artistic invention –an artistic anecdote by the Dutch painter and theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678) that is part of his treatise on painting Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (1678), and the blotting system, which the English landscape painter Alexander Cozens (1717–1786) presents in New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785/86). The article argues that while the earlier text already reflects an increasing awareness of a fundamental shift in traditional concepts of human memory, the latter one finally demonstrates new paradigms of scientific systematization, which gave rise to a different model of creative imagination.


On July 27, 2017, the Prevention Project convened some 40 representatives from multilateral and national development agencies, Ministries of Foreign Affairs, international NGOs and other relevant development actors for a roundtable discussion hosted at The Brookings Institution. The purpose was to share experiences and lessons learned on integrating preventing violent extremism (PVE)2 into broader development efforts. The meeting also provided an opportunity to highlight some of the challenges faced and make recommendations for overcoming them. The discussion recognized the continuing erosion of longstanding divides between development and security actors and assistance based on solid evidence that violent extremism poses a serious threat to development and that effective strategies for preventing and countering violent extremism need to include a development response.


Objectives The aim of this study was to examine the effect of metered dose inhaler (MDI) counselling on the inhalation technique and pulmonary function test scores of patients with asthma. Methods 491 subjects with asthma (281 female) attending the Beni Suef University hospital outpatient clinics were enrolled during a 2-year period. Their mean (SD) age was 42.1 (17.1) years. Their MDI inhalation technique was checked and the number of mistakes was noted and corrected at the first visit and at each of two following monthly visits (three visits in total). Their peak expiratory flow and forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1) as a percentage of the forced vital capacity were checked at each visit. Results Most MDIs contained salbutamol, although some patients were using MDIs containing beclomethasone or a combination of beclomethasone and salbutamol. The mean number of mistakes observed decreased significantly (p<0.001) as the number of visits increased, especially in the children's group. The most common repeated mistake was failure to maintain a slow inhalation rate until the lungs were full. There was a significant improvement (p<0.001) in pulmonary function test scores after counselling in all age groups, particularly in those aged >60 years. Conclusions MDI counselling should be frequently repeated to improve and maintain the recommended MDI inhalation technique and possibly improve patients' pulmonary function tests scores.


The purpose of this investigation was to explore the issues of people with disabilities regarding their sexual development and sexual expression. This thesis adds to the growing body of literature regarding the sexuality of people with disabilities by highlighting the complexity of accommodating the sexuality of people with disabilities into society. Four major topics are explored: barriers, advocacy, sexual identity, and ethics. The individual sexual experiences of people with disabilities often runs counter to the broad-based assumptions faced by those


This study describes quantitative results from one of the three methods in need assessments for nutrition counseling in a research series between 1999 and 2000. Three structured, semi open-ended, self-administered questionnaires designed for dietitians (11 hospitals), gout patients (two clinics), and medical staff including physicians and nurses in internal medicine departments (four hospitals) were designed to collect opinions regarding nutrition counseling. Total 54 dietitians from nine hospitals, 124 gout patients from two physicians' clinics and 127 medical staff from three hospitals completed the questionnaires. Fifteen percent of the gout patients had experiences on nutrition counseling. The order of credibility for gout-related education information was from medical staff, dietitians, newspapers magazines, television radio, friends relatives, then traditional medicine staff and direct sales(with 60% participants considering direct sales to be an unreliable source). Almost half(48.6%)of patients had the opinion that the duration of nutrition counseling should be 15 to 30 min. Nearly half of the patients did not consider the fee charged to be the limiting factor for the motivation for nutrition counseling. Nevertheless, 38% of the participating patients thought that the charge would be an influential factor and the acceptable range was NT $50 to 200. Eight percent of the medical staff did not aware that the nutrition counseling service existed in the hospital, with 98% of them regarding this as a very important service to patients. The participating dietitians thought that communication skills, contents, human skills, and patient motivation were important contributing factors for the success of nutrition counseling. Moreover, most dietitians and medical staff did not have preferences for the charging systems. They suggested that the fee could be NT $100 to 300 per section. Most dietitians disagreed with providing free services; however, 85% of them agreed with the co-payment system.


This study aims to investigate the current patterns and determinants of sustainability disclosure in the global forest industry. Under the extensive quantifiable measures and occurrences of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework, a content analysis is performed on the voluntary disclosure of 66 largest forest companies worldwide to evaluate their economic, environmental and social performance. By taking industry and firm characteristics into account, the study also seeks to shed more light on the key determinants influencing the quality and level of disclosure. Significant emphasis was found to be placed on environmental and economic issues in contrast to areas such as human rights, labour practices, social and product responsibilities in the forest industry. The results of regression analysis suggest that company size and business diversity are significantly associated with disclosure, whereas profitability and regional differences are not decisive factors in formulating sustainability reporting strategies in the forest


Studies of the effect of climate change on fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air quality using general circulation models (GCMs) show inconsistent results including in the sign of the effect. This reflects uncertainty in the GCM simulations of the regional meteorological variables affecting PM2.5. Here we use the CMIP3 archive of data from fifteen different IPCC AR4 GCMs to obtain improved statistics of 21st-century trends in the meteorological modes driving PM2.5 variability over the contiguous US. We analyze 1999– 2010 observations to identify the dominant meteorological modes driving interannual PM 2.5 variability and their synoptic periods T. We find robust correlations ( r > 0.5) of annual mean PM2.5 with T, especially in the eastern US where the dominant modes represent frontal passages. The GCMs all have significant skill in reproducing present-day statistics for T and we show that this reflects their ability to simulate atmospheric baroclinicity. We then use the local PM 2.5-toperiod sensitivity (dPM2.5/dT) from the 1999–2010 observations to project PM2.5 changes from the 2000–2050 changes in T simulated by the 15 GCMs following the SRES A1B greenhouse warming scenario. By weighted-average statistics of GCM results we project a likely 2000–2050 increase of ∼ 0.1 μg m−3 in annual mean PM2.5 in the eastern US arising from less frequent frontal ventilation, and a likely decrease albeit with greater inter-GCM variability in the Pacific Northwest due to more frequent maritime inflows. Potentially larger regional effects of 2000–2050 climate change on PM2.5 may arise from changes in temperature, biogenic emissions, wildfires, and vegetation, but are still unlikely to affect annual PM2.5 by more than 0.5 μg m−3.


The behavioural school of valuation thought believed that the practitioners and academics should reflect market behaviour in valuation. Previous research has identified various variables that affect/ determine property prices. However there is little research into how the major market players such as developer perceive those price determinants and how such perceptions affect the process of making real-life decisions. This research employs a practitioner experiment to investigate how developers make their pricing decision in a simulated situation. The process tracing protocol that tries to follow the human decision-making processes is widely employed in the behavioural research. The professionals, usually the appraisers, and the novices are requested to solve a problem that involves decision making, in which the researcher needs to observe the sequence of requested and utilized information; this traces the problem solving process. The findings come from 23 practitioner experiments of the Hong Kong and Beijing developers, who were requested to give opinion on the price ranges of four residential developments in an unfamiliar city. The research reveals that financial factors are considered at an earlier stage than other distance, environment and property factors. Hong Kong developers would consider affordability (average personal income), land and construction cost, number of apartments completed per annum and future market trends. Beijing developers would consider sale situation, rental rate and living standard. In terms of the first factor considered, there is a clear trend that developers from the two cities would first consider distance to transport, location, distance to central business district and environment. Generally the sequence of how developers consider the factors does reflect the importance of the factors in developersi perception; most of the first considered factors are major factors in the final pricing decisions but there are exceptions. This reflects the complexity of real-life decision when developers need to decide whether the desirable characteristics/features of individual apartments can compensate the undesirable ones. The final pricing result of all developers demonstrates certain level of consent to which development should be priced the highest and the 2nd highest etc. However Hong Kong developers show more deviation in their pricing opinion as compared to the Beijing developers. This implies even professional such as developers might not have an agreement on what factors are most significant in constituting the price.


Relative clauses of which the predicate contains a present, past, or passive participle can be used in a reduced form. Although it has been shown that participial relative clauses cannot always be considered to be non-complete variants of full relative clauses, they are generally called reduced relative clauses in the literature. Since they differ from full relative clauses in containing a non-finite predicate, they are also called non-finite relative clauses. Another type of non-finite relative clause is the infinitival relative clause. In English, in participial relative clauses, the antecedent noun is interpreted as the subject of the predicate of the relative clause. Because of this restriction, the status of relative clause has been put into doubt for participial adnominal modifiers, especially, because in a language such as English, they can occur in pre-nominal position, whereas a full relative clause cannot. While some linguists analyze both pre-nominal and post-nominal participles as verbal, others have argued that participles are essentially adjectival categories. In a third type of analysis, participles are divided into verbal and adjectival ones. This also holds for adnominal participles. Besides the relation to full relative clauses and the category of the participle, participial relative clauses raise a number of other interesting questions, which have been discussed in the literature. These questions concern the similarity or difference in interpretation of the pre-nominal and the post-nominal participial clause, restrictions on the type of verb used in past participial relative clauses, and similarities and differences between the syntax and semantics of participial clauses in English and other languages. Besides syntactic and semantic issues, participial relative clauses have raised other questions, such as their use in texts. Participial relative clauses have been studied from a diachronic and a stylistic point of view. It has been shown that the use of reduced forms such as participial relative clauses has increased over time and that, because of their condensed form, they are used more in academic styles than in colloquial speech. Nonetheless, they have proven to be used already by very young children, although in second language acquisition they are used late, because their condensed form is associated with an academic style of writing. Since passive or past participles often have the same form as the past tense, it has been shown that sentences containing a subject noun modified by a post-nominal past or passive participle are difficult to process, although certain factors may facilitate the processing of the sentence.


We explore the potential of continuous local search (CLS) in SAT solving by proposing a novel approach for finding a solution of a hybrid system of Boolean constraints. The algorithm is based on CLS combined with belief propagation on binary decision diagrams (BDDs). Our framework accepts all Boolean constraints that admit compact BDDs, including symmetric Boolean constraints and small-coefficient pseudo-Boolean constraints as interesting families. We propose a novel algorithm for efficiently computing the gradient needed by CLS. We study the capabilities and limitations of our versatile CLS solver, GradSAT, by applying it on many benchmark instances. The experimental results indicate that GradSAT can be a useful addition to the portfolio of existing SAT and MaxSAT solvers for solving Boolean satisfiability and optimization problems.


Since 1986, the immunization programmes throughout the world have changed their focus to the control or elimination of major childhood diseases, and new vaccines have become available, while yet others are being developed. Challenges included the reduction of measles incidence and elimination of neonatal tetanus by 1995, global eradication of poliomyelitis by the year 2000, and the achievement of 90% immunization coverage for all vaccines by the year 2000. These challenges were reinforced in the declaration on the survival, protection, and development of children, which was endorsed at the world summit for children held at United Nations in September 1990 (World Summit Child 1990). Immunization programmes in different countries now present a broad spectrum of progress. Some countries, particularly the poorest and those affected by war or civil disturbance, continue to have low immunization coverage, while others are close to eliminating certain of the target diseases. This article provides a review of present immunization policies.


During the first five months of 2018 Russian fuel exports grew by 28%. Exports of other goods moved up by 26%, surpassing the pre-crisis level of 2013. Imports went up by 16%, for the first time in five years its dynamics did not correspond to the dynamics of the exchange rate: imported goods have significantly increased in value terms while the real effective ruble-dollar exchange rate has barely gained any new positions.


The present study sought to fill a research void on adolescent problem behaviours in South Africa by examining individual and contextual factors that affect sexual-risk taking behaviours amongst black African adolescents in a poor community of the North West Province of South Africa. Using the logistic and Poisson regression analytical techniques, we find that individual and contextual factors such as gender, grade, religiosity, peer influence, parental value of children, parent-child communication, school attachment, the use of alcohol and substance like tobacco and marijuana all affect sexual risk behaviours like lifetime sex, recent sexual activity and involvement with multiple sexual partners. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.


At the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition's annual conference in Milan, Italy last month, nutrition, food, and agriculture experts from around the world gathered to discuss how to x the world's broken food system. Guido Barilla, President of the Barilla pasta company, talked about the need for companies and corporations to take responsibility for the food they produce--products that have the potential to nourish people, but also can cause great harm. In fact, agriculture has been blamed for the world's worst environmental and social problems--everything from deforestation and land degradation to rising greenhouse gas emissions and obesity. But today, agriculture is changing--so is its image. Thanks to recent reports by the Barilla Center, the World Bank supported International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, and the UK Foresight Alliance, agriculture is now seen as the solution to some of the world's most pressing challenges. From sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to Europe and the United States, farmers are using agriculture to not only improve their food security and livelihoods, but they are growing and processing food in ways that contribute to environmental sustainability. Businesses, too, are changing their practices and finding ways to appeal to a customer base that is interested in knowing where its food comes from and how it is produced. Agricultural innovations are helping farmers and consumers alike prevent the enormous amount of food waste in the world, cities are becoming centers of sustainable food production, and farming is becoming something that youth want to do, rather than something they're forced to do. These innovations that are working on the ground are changing the image of agriculture from a creator of problems to a provider of solutions. Feeding the Cities In 2007, for the first time in human history, more people were living in cities than in rural areas. By 2050, the United Nations estimates that up to 65 percent of the world's population will live in cities. In Africa, for example, 395 million people lived in cities in 2009, representing approximately 40 percent of the continent's total population. And at least 14 million people move to African cities each year, a migration that is second only to the massive rural to urban shift happening in China. By 2020, some 35 to 40 million Africans will depend entirely on food grown in cities to meet their daily food requirements. And in 2050 nearly 60 percent of Africa's population will be living in urban areas. According to the United Nations' 2010-201! State of the World's Cities report, the belief that urban residents are more food secure than rural dwellers is a myth. In rural areas, access to food is determined by crop yields, while in cities, whether a family eats is determined by its income. Although there's enough food to feed every man, woman, and child alive today, the simple fact is that many people simply lack the money to buy it. Urban agriculture is often the only way for poor urbanites living in the favelas of Rio, the barrios of Mexico City, or the slums of Accra or Hanoi to get access to fresh food. It's unknown how many city residents are actually growing, selling, and eating food that they've harvested themselves, but researchers at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN Development Programme estimate that nearly a billion people worldwide are eating food grown in cities. And that number will only grow as food prices continue to rise. Fortunately, there are no shortages of successful models of productive urban farms and these farms are often found in some unlikely places. Kibera in Kenya, for example, is the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa with roughly one million people. It's everything you imagine a slum in a developing country to be--it's extremely crowded, it's noisy, it doesn't smell very pood, and it's not a place you would expect crops to flourish. …


We present an overview of NP-hard problems and methods related to deployment, resource sharing, load balancing and fairness among multiple users in 5G mobile networks. We provide a general model of the system considering the E2E computational latency of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) applications. An evaluation of a multi-user MEC offloading model reducible to the Multiple Knapsack Problem (MKP) is performed. We study the behaviour of an exact and a heuristic algorithm. We also show the performance results of these in a real-life small-cell deployment scenario.


Improving the energy efficiency levels of housing is of particular concern in the private rental market where capital costs and subsequent utility cost savings are not shared in equal measure by landlords and tenants. This problem is particularly pronounced in Germany where rental properties make up the majority of the housing stock. The present study is the largest and most comprehensive study of the value of energy efficiency in the German housing market and investigates the effect of energy efficiency ratings on rental values across 412 markets in Germany. Using a semiparametric hedonic model and an empirical sample of nearly 300k observations with full hedonic characteristics, we find strong evidence that energy-efficient rental units are rented at a premium. A survival hazard model is then used to study the impact of the ratings on time-on-market. It is found that energy-efficient rental properties tend to lease up more quickly than their non-efficient peers. This study provides a robust framework for policy makers and property companies for understanding how energy efficiency and expected utility costs of a rental property affect asking and effective rents.


Visualizing flow fields has a wide variety of applications in scientific simulation and computer graphics. Existing approaches either depict a static flow field on a single image, or animate a dynamic flow field through multiple frames. In this paper, we demonstrate a system that attempts to combine the advantages of both. Our approach allows users to perceive flow motion via one single, static image. The system is extremely simple to implement and requires no display computation resources. It can also be deployed on a variety of mediums, including papers.


The moral tale was foremost among the new genres of children's literature that emerged in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Written expressly to impart moral lessons to their young readers, such tales had a profound impact on the generation we now know as the Victorians, including such esteemed novelists as Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and George Eliot. In this original and discerning study, Patrick Fleming traces the rise and subsequent impact of the moral tale through the works of representative authors like Thomas Day, whose Sandford and Merton was a perennial best-seller, and Maria Edgeworth, whose stories Queen Victoria herself was reading on the eve of her coronation. We then see how the popular "Newgate novels" of the 1830s, a genre portraying the lives of criminals, adapted the moral tale's narrative conventions to guide readers' reactions to the characters' vices, and how Dickens, from Oliver Twist (1837) through such later writings as Hard Times (1854) and Great Expectations (1860), developed his own brand of experiential didacticism, which clearly had roots in the moral tales he read as a child. By 1859, Fleming shows, the impact of the moral tale began to decline amid growing skepticism over systematized education and as Darwinian theory complicated the link between experience and character. Scholars studying Victorians' childhood reading have typically emphasized fairy tales and eighteenth-century novels rather than works especially written for children, while children's literature scholars have focused on the "Golden Age," which began around 1860 and is epitomized by such works as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). However, as The Legacy of the Moral Tale makes clear, children's literature began long before the Golden Age,and the moral tale was prominent among the genres the Victorians remembered. In revealing this long-overlooked connection, the book expands our understanding of the history of the novel and highlights the moral instruction to which nineteenth-century readers were accustomed.


[1] Instrumental temperature series are often affected by artificial breaks ("break points") due to (e.g.,) changes in station location, land-use, or instrumentation. The Swiss climate observation network offers a high number and density of stations, many long and relatively complete daily to sub-daily temperature series, and well-documented station histories (i.e., metadata). However, for many climate observation networks outside of Switzerland, detailed station histories are missing, incomplete, or inaccessible. To correct these records, the use of reliable statistical break detection methods is necessary. Here, we apply three statistical break detection methods to high-quality Swiss temperature series and use the available metadata to assess the methods. Due to the complex terrain in Switzerland, we are able to assess these methods under specific local conditions such as the Foehn or crest situations. We find that the temperature series of all stations are affected by artificial breaks (average = 1 break point / 48 years) with discrepancies in the abilities of the methods to detect breaks. However, by combining the three statistical methods, almost all of the detected break points are confirmed by metadata. In most cases, these break points are ascribed to a combination of factors in the station history.


Discrimination in the workplace has become increasingly complex. Its complexity can be seen in the subtle ways in which bias creeps into everyday social interactions and perceptions and in the unsettling tension between honest adherence to an egalitarian norm and continued reliance on stereotypical categorization and judgment. But its complexity emerges perhaps most significantly for the modern antidiscrimination project in the blurring of boundaries between individual and organizational sources of harm. Even as we recognize its complex human dimensions at the individual level, we must also recognize that continuing workplace inequity and discrimination is equally an institutional and organizational problem. This article explores the implications of the complexity inherent in modern workplace discrimination for the task of identifying its sources and of devising programs for reform. Drawing on a variety of sociolegal and organizational research and theory, including a body of work concerning the context of decision making that shaped the disastrous launching of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger, Professor Tristin Green lays a foundation for a legal inquiry that recognizes organizational as well as individual sources of harm. From there, she considers a number of recent privately instituted Title VII class action lawsuits as a starting point for such an inquiry. She argues that these lawsuits represent the emergence of an important new form of institutional reform litigation and rejects employer efforts to characterize the lawsuits as an inappropriate use of the class action vehicle. At the same time, she identifies several significant differences in the remedial task undertaken by these recent lawsuits as compared with earlier institutional reform efforts and explores the danger that these differences pose of private co-option of larger public antidiscrimination goals.


The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) Major Bridge Maintenance Engineer has proposed an in-house pile repair scheme for decayed piles. This repair scheme involves removing decayed area within the pile leaving a 2" outer shell, filling it up with rapid strength concrete and then placing a steel splice post with a ½" plate welded on the bottom. The design has not been validated by test results. The overall goal of the project was to characterize the new timber pile repair design. More specifically, the objectives of the study were to (a) characterize flexural and compressional properties of the timber splice repair design and (b) discern any influence of concrete plug length on the performance of the piles. The objective was achieved by conducting two tests on pile splices – compression (3) and flexure (3). Overall, the repair design performed well during testing. In compression, the piles did not fail and the testing had to be stopped as the capacity of the actuator was exceeded. The loads achieved in compression were higher than the nominal capacity of wood. In flexure the piles performed adequately albeit with a reduced moment capacity. The pile splice repair design reinforces the pile in the axial direction but expectedly reduces the moment capacity. The dependence of compressional performance of the piles on concrete plug length was not discernible from the current data set. These results cannot be statistically validated because of limited sample size and additional testing is required to achieve statistical significance. The results suggest that the design can be used in practice after accounting for the reduction in moment capacity.


African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literature - and to change the terms with which we discuss it. Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In Warren's view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrow? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole. Finally, Warren's work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.


1 2 - 1 Abstract Chemical bonded resin sand mould system has high dimensional accuracy, surface finish and sand mould properties compared to green sand mould system. The mould cavity prepared under chemical bonded sand mould system must produce sufficient permeability and hardness to withstand sand drop while pouring molten metal through ladle. The demand for improved values of permeability and mould hardness depends on systematic study and analysis of influencing variables namely grain fineness number, setting time, percent of resin and hardener. Try-error experiment methods and analysis were considered impractical in actual foundry practice due to the associated cost. Experimental matrices of central composite design allow conducting minimum experiments that provide complete insight of the process. Statistical significance of influencing variables and their interaction were determined to control the process. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) test was conducted to validate the model statistically. Mathematical equation was derived separately for mould hardness and permeability, which are expressed as a non-linear function of input variables based on the collected experimental input-output data. The developed model prediction accuracy for practical usefulness was tested with 10 random experimental conditions. The decision variables for higher mould hardness and permeability were determined using desirability function approach. The prediction results were found to be consistent with experimental values.


Dr Jason L. Stienmetz is a Lecturer in Tourism at the University of Surrey, UK where he is developing a program of research in destination management, the digital visitor economy, and big data analytics.  Jason was awarded a PhD in Business Administration from Temple University, USA in 2016.  His PhD dissertation "Foundations for a Network Model of Destination Value Creation" involved deconstructing visitor experiences using social media postings (over 4 million photos posted on Flickr) in order to model destinations' value creation processes and identify characteristics of destination systems that maximize economic impact and improve destination competitiveness.  This research made contributions to both the academic literature and the practical management of destinations in a number of ways.  First and foremost, the study established that network principles hold true for tourism destinations and validates the "value network" paradigm of destination value creation.  This work also suggests that destination systems can be managed through an understanding of their network structures and that tourism destinations should not be considered as amalgams of independent touchpoints, but instead as dynamic systems where outcomes are dependent on the relationships between touchpoints.  The network model of destination value creation provides a framework upon which "smarter" destination systems will enable destination managers to gain competitive advantage.  Jason's more recent research looks at the relationship between the structure of tourists' sequence of activities within a destination trip and tourists' expressed sentiment of those activities.  Using a moments-based paradigm grounded in the psychology, economics, geography, services management, and tourism literature, Jason continues to use big data methodologies to deconstruct visitor experiences based on social media postings and volunteered geographic information.  Results have indicated that some degree of structure exists in terms of how travelers organize their visits, and that trip characteristics and trip sequencing can influence value in terms of visitor satisfaction.  This research gains greater importance within tourism as new technologies have enabled the industry to capture moments-based experiences with the goal of designing and managing visitor experiences. Jason's future research agenda includes continued development of the network model of destination value creation, and, in particular, the next step is to understand the antecedents of destination network structure formation and the ways in which optimal network structures can be managed to achieve competitive, sustainable, and resilient destinations.  Future research will also investigate how the sequence of tourist experiences may or may not impact destination value (in terms of visitor satisfaction and visitor expenditures), the influence of discrete experiences on the overall evaluation of a journey, and the degree to which travelers intentionally bundle various types of experiences before and during the trip.  Jason also collaborates with colleagues in the Digital Laboratory within University of Surrey's School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, where he explores the role of new digital technologies (such as robotics, augmented reality, and virtual reality) in shaping the emotions and experiences of tourists. At the University of Surrey Jason teaches undergraduate modules in the Business Environment, Tourism Management, and Technology, Media & Data.  At the post-graduate level Jason teaches modules in Digital Marketing & Social Media and Tourism Social Science.  Jason also supervises masters and PhD students conducting research related to the digital visitor economy.  His other activities at the University of Surrey include organizing weekly School research seminars for the academic staff and PhD students, identifying and working with industry partners to develop research opportunities for post-graduate students, and serving on the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee. Jason has conducted numerous research consultancy projects with tourism industry practitioners in the USA, UK, and Peru, and he has published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Travel Research and Tourism Management.  Jason is an active member of the Travel and Tourism Research Association and the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Travel Research and the Journal of Information Technology and Tourism. Jason earned an undergraduate degree in Hotel, Restaurant & Tourism Management from the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated with honors.  Jason also has over 15 years of experience working in hospitality, including two years as a chef at a boutique country inn.  Jason is extremely proud to have served as a Community Economic Development Specialist with the United States Peace Corps in Costa Rica for two years after completing his undergraduate degree.  Living and working in a rural village, he was involved in a number of projects related to eco-tourism, technology education, and micro-finance.  His experiences volunteering with his wife in Costa Rica were fundamental in developing his interests in tourism systems and destination management and led to his pursuit of an advanced degree. After the Peace Corps, Jason earned a Master of Tourism Administration degree from the George Washington University Business School in Washington, D.C.  It was while working on his thesis "Usability Factors Influencing the Success of Mobile Optimized Destination Websites" that Jason realised that he had fallen forever in love with research.  While studying in Washington, D.C. Jason also had wonderful experiences as a research intern for both the International Institute for Tourism Studies and the U.S. Travel Association. After defending his PhD research proposal at Temple University, Jason moved to the University of Florida to work as a Research Coordinator for the National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce.  At the University of Florida Jason developed and designed numerous tourism and technology related research projects and he also taught Research Methods to both undergraduate and post-graduate tourism students as an Adjunct Lecturer.  Jason enjoys traveling with his wife and son, camping, drinking beer, and playing with Lego.


With an increasing pressure in UK HE institutions to demonstrate scholarly impact, academics are being challenged with developing ways to engage wider audiences with their research. High-achieving students who wish to pursue a career in academia or in private research are therefore implicitly expected to go beyond simply mastering the academic presentation, and must instead develop their public engagement skills.

We will present our experiences of organising and delivering an interdisciplinary undergraduate research conference, as well as the findings of our research into the benefits perceived by those who took part. Both the presenter pool and the audience were comprised of undergraduate students who attended voluntarily as an extracurricular activity. Engagement in undergraduate research is one of the key determiners in continued academic success and development into further, advanced study (Laursen et al., 2012), but research carried out by undergraduates provides a contribution to knowledge which is often overlooked or undervalued. We sought, therefore, to allow students a new platform on which to present their scholarly contributions.

To enhance the students' presentation skills we drew on a team of postgraduate mentors to work alongside the presenters in developing all the elements of their presentation. The mentors were paired with students from outside their discipline, giving them the ability to shape their mentees' presentations into formats that could be understood by a non-specialist audience. This emphasis on public engagement was designed to develop the presenters' Graduate Attributes, particularly in light of the emphasis placed on research impact within benchmarking initiatives such as the REF. In feedback from both mentors and presenters, the mentoring process has been repeatedly heralded as a significant and novel strength in the conference organisation. Without this mentoring, many of the presenters felt they would not have been able to talk comfortably and ably to a large audience.

This is an opportunity that has never before been provided at the University of Glasgow and, to our knowledge, outside a few independently organised events, is not widely practised at UK HE institutions. We would hope to impress upon delegates the importance of increased, diverse engagement with high-performing students, the untapped ability of undergraduate researchers, the impact of mentoring in developing public engagement and research dissemination skills, and ways to consider organising such an event.


We carried out femtosecond magic-angle and polarized pump-probe spectroscopies for the light-harvesting complex 2 (LH2) from Thermochromatium (Tch.) tepidum in aqueous phase and in chromatophores. To examine the effects of LH2 aggregation on the dynamics of excitation energy transfer, dominant monodispersed and aggregated LH2s were prepared by controlling the surfactant concentrations. The aqueous preparations solubilized with different concentrations of n-dodecyl-β-D-maltoside (DDM) show similar visible-to-near-infrared absorption spectra, but distinctively different aggregation states, as revealed by using dynamic light scattering. The B800 → B850 intra-LH2 energy transfer time was determined to be 1.3 ps for isolated LH2, which, upon aggregation in aqueous phase or clustering in chromatophores, shortened to 1.1 or 0.9 ps, respectively. The light-harvesting complex 1 (LH1) of this thermophilic purple sulfur bacterium contains bacteriochlorophyll a absorbing at 915 nm (B915), and the LH2(B850) → LH1(B915) intercomplex transfer time in chromatophores was found to be 6.6 ps. For chromatophores, a depolarization time of 21 ps was derived from the anisotropy kinetics of B850*, which is attributed to the migration of B850* excitation before being trapped by LH1. In addition, the B850* annihilation is accelerated upon LH2 aggregation in aqueous phase, but it is much less severe upon LH2 clustering in the intracytoplasmic membrane. These results are helpful in understanding the light-harvesting function of a bacterial photosynthetic membrane incorporating different types of antenna complexes.


rdquoApplication-level multicast is a promising alternative to IP multicast due to its independence from the IP routing infrastructure and its flexibility in constructing the delivery trees. The existing overlay multicast systems either support a single data source or have high maintenance overhead when multiple sources are allowed. They are inefficient for applications that require any-source multicast with varied host capacities and dynamic membership. This paper proposes ACOM, an any-source capacity-constrained overlay multicast system, consisting of three distributed multicast algorithms on top of a non-DHT overlay network with simple structures (random overlay with a non-DHT ring) that are easy to manage as nodes join and depart. The nodes have different capacities, and they can support different numbers of direct children during a multicast session. No explicit multicast trees are maintained on top of the overlay. The distributed execution of the algorithms naturally defines an implicit, roughly balanced, capacity-constrained multicast tree for each source node. We prove that the system can deliver a multicast message from any source to all nodes in expected O(logc n) hops, which is asymptotically optimal, where c is the average node capacity and n is the number of members in a multicast group.


NUTS is a student satellite program at NTNU with a goal of launching a cube satellite into space. Students contribute through projects, master theses or voluntary work. The satellite will shoot pictures of earth with a camera that will be fixed to the satellite's body.In order to accurately point the camera towards the desired target an Attitude Determination and Control System is required. In this thesis, a prototype of the ADCS has been developed along with a platform for testing software and control algorithms. Further, the b-dot algorithm has successfully been tested using the testbed developed. B-dot is a detumbling algorithm that will be used to stop the satellite's initial spin after it is ejected from its pod.


This research focuses on the development of engineered materials, also known as metamaterials, with desirable effective constitutive parameters: electric permittivity eff and magnetic permeability μeff to decouple antennas and noise mitigation from electromagnetic systems. An interesting phenomenon of strong relevance to a wide range of problems, where electromagnetic interference is of concern, is the elimination of propagation when one of the constitutive parameters is negative. In such a scenario, transmission of electromagnetic energy would cease, and hence the coupling between radiating systems is reduced. In the first part of this dissertation, novel electromagnetic artificial media have been developed to alleviate the problem of mutual coupling between high-profile and low-profile antenna systems. The developed design configurations are numerically simulated, and experimentally validated. In the mutual coupling problem between highprofile antennas, a decoupling layer based on artificial magnetic materials (AMM) has been developed and placed between highly-coupled monopole antenna elements spaced by less than λ/6, where λ is the operating wavelength of the radiating elements. The decoupling layer not only provides high mutual coupling suppression (more than 20-dB) but also maintains good impedance matching and low correlation between the antenna elements suitable for use in Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication systems. In the mutual coupling problem between low-profile antennas, novel sub-wavelength complementary split-ring resonators (CSRRs) are developed to decouple microstrip patch antenna elements. The proposed design configuration has the advantage of low-cost production and maintaining the profile of the antenna system unchanged without the need for extra layers. Using the designed structure, a 10-dB reduction in the mutual coupling between two patch antennas has been achieved. The second part of this dissertation utilizes electromagnetic artificial media for noise mitigation and reduction of undesirable electromagnetic radiation from high-speed printedcircuit boards (PCBs) and modern electronic enclosures with openings (apertures). Numerical results based on the developed design configurations are presented, discussed, and compared with measurements. To alleviate the problem of simultaneous switching noise (SSN) in high-speed microprocessors and personal computers, a novel technique based on cascaded CSRRs has been proposed. The proposed design has achieved a wideband suppression of SSN and maintained a robust signal integrity performance. A novel use of electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structures has been proposed to mitigate undesirable electromagnetic radiation from enclosures with openings. By using ribbon of EBG surfaces, a significant suppression of electromagnetic radiation from openings has been achieved.


The intention of this thesis is twofold: firstly, to define precisely the degree to which John Henry Newman anticipated the teaching of Vatican II on the nature and transmission of Revelation and on the Church's theological understanding of herself; and secondly, to assess the significance of this for contemporary ecumenical discussions between Roman Catholics and Anglicans on authority in the Church. The first section of this thesis, then, is an exploration of Newman's thought on Revelation and ecclesiology. This includes an analysis of some unpublished and hitherto unconsidered material from the Birmingham Oratory Archives, which reveals that Newman had formulated an organic theory of development by 1840; three years before this is generally reckoned to have been the case. This discussion is set within the historical context of Newman's life, and the relevant scholarly material is also surveyed. The second section compares Newman's views, as set out above, with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in the appropriate sections of its two Dogmatic Constitutions, Dei Verbum (on Revelation) and Lumen Gentium (on the Church).The third section begins with a discussion of the principles upon which Roman Catholics conduct ecumenical dialogue. These are found primarily in the Vatican II document Unitatis Redintegratio, but also in the new Ecumenical Directory; scholarly opinion is also reviewed. There then follows an analysis of the two ARCIC documents on 'Authority in the Church', and the major criticisms of them are considered in detail. Many of these are irreconcilable not only with the documents, but also with one another. It is therefore suggested in the conclusion, that a possible way to overcome some of these divisions is through a discussion of theological method. A brief outline of a potentially helpful method, the seeds of which were sown by Newman, is then provided.


Recent developments in service-oriented and distributed computing have created exciting opportunities for the integration of models in service chains to create the Model Web. This offers the potential for orchestrating web data and processing services, in complex chains; a flexible approach which exploits the increased access to products and tools, and the scalability offered by the Web. However, the uncertainty inherent in data and models must be quantified and communicated in an interoperable way, in order for its effects to be effectively assessed as errors propagate through complex automated model chains. We describe a proposed set of tools for handling, characterizing and communicating uncertainty in this context, and show how they can be used to 'uncertainty- enable' Web Services in a model chain. An example implementation is presented, which combines environmental and publicly-contributed data to produce estimates of sea-level air pressure, with estimates of uncertainty which incorporate the effects of model approximation as well as the uncertainty inherent in the observational and derived data.


Abstract Statistics in the 20th century has been enlivened by a passionate, occasionally bitter, and still vibrant debate on the foundations of statistics and in particular on Bayesian vs. frequentist approaches to inference. In 1975 D. V. Lindley predicted a Bayesian 21st century for statistics. This prediction has often been discussed since, but there is still no consensus on the probability of its correctness. Recent developments in the asymptotic theory of statistics are, surprisingly, shedding new light on this debate, and may have the potential to provide a common middle ground.


The analysis and comparison of large numbers of immunoglobulin (Ig) sequences that arise during an antibody selection campaign can be time‐consuming and tedious. Typically, the identification and annotation of framework as well as complementarity‐determining regions (CDRs) is based on multiple sequence alignments using standardized numbering schemes, which allow identification of equivalent residues among different family members but often necessitate expert knowledge and manual intervention. Moreover, due to the enormous length variability of some CDRs the benefit of conventional Ig numbering schemes is limited and the calculation of correct sequence alignments can become challenging. Whereas, in principle, a well established set of rules permits the assignment of CDRs from the amino acid sequence alone, no currently available sequence alignment editor provides an algorithm to annotate new Ig sequences accordingly. Here we present a unique pattern matching method implemented into our recently developed ANTICALIgN editor that automatically identifies all hypervariable and framework regions in experimentally elucidated antibody sequences using so‐called "regular expressions." By combination of this widely supported software syntax with the unique capabilities of real‐time aligning, editing and analyzing extended sets of amino acid and/or nucleotide sequences simultaneously on a local workstation, ANTICALIgN provides a powerful utility for antibody engineering. Proteins 2016; 85:65–71. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


Interconnect parasitics are playing a significant role in design and analysis in deep sub-micron (DSM) technologies. Interconnect process variations could play a significant role in achieving predictable yield. Crosstalk noise is one of the increasingly important careabouts in DSM designs. In this paper, a practical method to analyze the crosstalk noise effects with interconnect process variations using corner-based approach is described. The results from application of this method on a large DSP design implemented in 0.18/spl mu/ technology is presented. Application of the proposed method resulted in detection of a new worst case interconnect process corner that was not included in the design methodology.


While regressive and discriminatory criminal justice fees have been described and critiqued in the criminal justice system for adults, this is the first in-depth study of the practice of charging families for their children's involvement in the juvenile justice system in a state (California).

Our research over the last three years reveals that juvenile administrative fees undermine the rehabilitative purpose of the juvenile system. They cause financial hardship to families, weaken family ties, and undermine family reunification. Because Black and Latino youth are overrepresented and overpunished relative to White youth in the juvenile system, families of color bear a disproportionate burden of the fees.

Some counties charge juvenile administrative fees to families in violation of state and federal law. Counties also engage in fee practices that may violate the Constitution by depriving families of due process of law through inadequate ability to pay determinations and by denying families equal protection of the law.

Finally, counties net little revenue from the fees. Because of the high costs and low returns associated with trying to collect fees from low-income families, most of the fee revenue pays for collection activity, not for the care and supervision of youth. Fee debt can cause families to spend less on positive social goods, such as education and healthcare, which imposes long term costs on families, communities, and society by prolonging and exacerbating poverty.

In light of our findings that fees are harmful, unlawful, and costly, we make the following recommendations to California policymakers:
1. To end their harmful impact on youth and families, the state should repeal laws that permit the assessment and collection of juvenile administrative fees.
2. To redress unlawful practices, counties should reimburse families for all payments they made on improperly charged juvenile administrative fees.
3. To understand the consequences of costly practices like juvenile administrative fees, the state and counties should collect and maintain better data in the juvenile system.


This article considers the impact of A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Tax Act 1999 (Cth) on health services, health practitioners and their patients. It discusses the basis for the concessionary treatment of healthcare in Australia and other jurisdictions. The difficulty of determining the tax status of a service not covered by Medicare is highlighted; so too the conflict between the medical and allied health provisions.


This Note examines the phenomenon of deregulation through nonenforcement, drawing on examples from the George W. Bush Administration. It argues that the presumption of nonreviewability afforded to agency refusals to prosecute creates incentives for presidential administrations pursuing deregulatory agendas to manipulate agency enforcement practices. Furthermore, it contends that deregulation through nonenforcement is undesirable because it shields executive branch policy decisions from public view, thereby reducing accountability. Perhaps counterintuitively, the Note suggests that one way to counteract the negative effects of the presumption of nonreviewability is to reduce the level of review applied to other categories of agency action, such as notice-and-comment rulemaking, thus increasing the executive's ability to act through more accountable means.


Exosuits show much promise as a method for augmenting the body with lightweight, portable, and compliant wearable systems. We envision that such systems can be further refined so that they can be sufficiently low profile to fit under a wearer's existing clothing. Our focus is on creating an assistive device that provides a fraction of the nominal biological torques and does not provide external load transfer. In early work, we showed that the system can substantially maintain normal biomechanics and positively affect a wearer's metabolic rate. Many basic fundamental research and development challenges remain in actuator development, textile innovation, soft sensor development, human-machine interface (control), biomechanics, and physiology, which provides fertile ground for academic research in many disciplines. While we have focused on gait assistance thus far, numerous other applications are possible, including rehabilitation, upper body support, and assistance for other motions. We look forward to a future where wearable robots provide benefits for people across many areas of our society.


Public transport systems in Johannesburg, South Africa, rely on a large number of diesel-powered buses. These buses are fuel economical and durable. However, filling station attendants, bus drivers and the public are exposed to the diesel fuel and fumes associated with them. Fuel attendants are exposed to diesel exhaust fumes, as well as emissions from fuel pumps on a daily basis, and are at risk to adverse health effects associated with inhalation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released. The VOCs released include benzene, toluene, ethyl-benzene and xylenes (BTEX), which have a high level of toxicity. Studies relating to the concentrations of BTEX at diesel stations are limited, as most studies focus on petrol refuelling stations. Thus, analyses of these concentrations are significant within developing countries whose transport systems rely on diesel-powered buses, and where public health measures are often less rigorously enforced. As this research falls within a larger study relating to the health impact of BTEX on fuel attendants at a diesel-refuelling bay, an initial study was undertaken to analyse the two main external factors that are influential on fluctuations of ambient concentrations. Thus, an analysis of total volume dispensed, and ambient temperature at the station, both affecting the concentrations of BTEX released, was conducted. It was established that BTEXtotal concentrations were positively correlated to the volume of diesel dispensed daily and inversely correlated to temperature. Additionally, ethylbenzene and o-xylene indicated a positive correlation with volume of fuel dispensed, while toluene and p-xylene were negatively correlated to temperature.


Abstract The conference on Global Change and the World's Mountains held in Perth, Scotland, in 2010 offered a unique opportunity to analyze the state and progress of mountain research and its contribution to sustainable mountain development, as well as to reflect on required reorientations of research agendas. In this paper we provide the results of a three-step assessment of the research presented by 450 researchers from around the world. First, we determined the state of the art of mountain research and categorized it based on the analytical structure of the Global Land Project (GLP 2005). Second, we identified emerging themes for future research. Finally, we assessed the contribution of mountain research to sustainable development along the lines of the Grand Challenges in Global Sustainability Research (International Council for Science 2010). Analysis revealed that despite the growing recognition of the importance of more integrative research (inter- and transdisciplinary), the research community gathered in Perth still focuses on environmental drivers of change and on interactions within ecological systems. Only a small percentage of current research seeks to enhance understanding of social systems and of interactions between social and ecological systems. From the ecological systems perspective, a greater effort is needed to disentangle and assess different drivers of change and to investigate impacts on the rendering of ecosystem services. From the social systems perspective, significant shortcomings remain in understanding the characteristics, trends, and impacts of human movements to, within, and out of mountain areas as a form of global change. Likewise, sociocultural drivers affecting collective behavior as well as incentive systems devised by policy and decision makers are little understood and require more in-depth investigation. Both the complexity of coupled social–ecological systems and incomplete data sets hinder integrated systems research. Increased understanding of linkages and feedbacks between social and ecological systems will help to identify nonlinearities and thresholds (tipping points) in both system types. This presupposes effective collaboration between ecological and social sciences. Reflections on the Grand Challenges in Sustainability Research put forth by the International Council for Science (2010) reveal the need to intensify research on effective responses and innovations. This will help to achieve sustainable development in mountain regions while maintaining the core competence of mountain research in forecasting and observation.


We study in the laboratory a variant of the house allocation with existing tenants problem where subjects are partitioned into tiers with hierarchical privileges, and they know their position in the priority queue before making their decision. We evaluate the performance of the modified versions of three well-known mechanisms: Top Trading Cycle (TTC), Gale-Shapley, and Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD) with Squatting Rights. For all three mechanisms, we find low rates of participation (around 40%), high rates of truth-telling conditional on participation (around 90%), high proportions of fair allocations (above 90%), and significant efficiency losses. We also observe differences across mechanisms: RSD is ranked highest in efficiency and TTC is ranked lowest in fairness. We then show that position in the queue has a positive and significant impact on participation whereas tier has little effect on behavior. Finally, the individual analysis reveals that the majority of subjects who do not play according to the theory still follow discernible patterns of participation and preference revelation.


ABSTRACT Compared to traditional athletes and PE students, self-organized lifestyle sport practitioners usually have no podiums to reach or grades to earn. They have no authorized instructor available, but seem to treat this apparent deficiency as an opportunity to facilitate their own learning processes. However, from a traditional learning perspective, it can be challenging to understand how these processes unfold. Drawing on theoretical concepts from the educational sociologist Knorr Cetina, the aim of this study is therefore to understand how a self-organized mixed group of trickers, B-boys, and free-runners facilitate knowledge creation when no instructors guide or control their work. Based on observations and interviews we found that the practitioners' knowledge developed in a continuous and invigorating circuit between a worldwide gym on the internet where the practitioners searched for updated knowledge, and the local gym where they practiced knowledge development as intra- and inter-disciplinary embodied interactions. The knowledge object conveyed by the practitioners as 'kinesthetic understanding' was not a fixed a-priori product that could be completely achieved, and the practitioners' acceptance of the knowledge object's essential incompleteness seemed to create a never-ending desire to glimpse the unattainable. The group of tumblers studied in this paper represent an alternative epistemic practice that should be explored in physical education contexts. However, such exploration requires the development of an affective and processual language that reflects the relational intimacy between students and their knowledge objects, rather than a constative language reflecting distance, achievement, and external assessment.


Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown impressive performance in computer vision tasks such as image classification, detection, and segmentation. Moreover, recent work in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has highlighted the importance of learning by progressively increasing the difficulty of a learning task [26]. When learning a network from scratch, the information propagated within the network during the earlier stages of training can contain distortion artifacts due to noise which can be detrimental to training. In this paper, we propose an elegant curriculum based scheme that smoothes the feature embedding of a CNN using anti-aliasing or low-pass filters. We propose to augment the train-ing of CNNs by controlling the amount of high frequency information propagated within the CNNs as training progresses, by convolving the output of a CNN feature map of each layer with a Gaussian kernel. By decreasing the variance of the Gaussian kernel, we gradually increase the amount of high-frequency information available within the network for inference. As the amount of information in the feature maps increases during training, the network is able to progressively learn better representations of the data. Our proposed augmented training scheme significantly improves the performance of CNNs on various vision tasks without either adding additional trainable parameters or an auxiliary regularization objective. The generality of our method is demonstrated through empirical performance gains in CNN architectures across four different tasks: transfer learning, cross-task transfer learning, and generative models.


The impact by freshwater and marine mesozooplankton on phytoplankton particle size and stoichiometry was studied. Additionally, zooplankton d15N were determined as an inidicator of trophic level. Mesocosm studies, using logarithmically scaled zooplankton density gradients, were performed at three locations (lake Schoehsee, the marine Hopavagen lagoon, Norway, and Kiel Fjord) in August 2000, July 2001 and September 2002. In two of the three studies (Schoehsee, Hopavagen), zooplankton shifted phytoplankton size structure predictably to small or large species, respectively, with freshwater zooplankton (copepods, Daphnia) being complementary in their impact. Stoichiometrically, both Daphnia and marine copepods increased the carbon to nutrient ratios (C:P or C:N) of POM, indicative of phytoplankton nutrient limitation. Yet, while the depletion of P in freshwater POM was due to its retention in 'new' Daphnia biomass (numerical increase), the mechanism for marine copepods was different: copepods triggered the growth of nanoflagellates via a a trophic cascade ('copepods-ciliates-nanoflagellates'), which increased at the expense of their intracellular nitrogen pool. Measurements of zooplankton d15N showed that differences were large between Daphnia and freshwater copepods (3.2 to 4.8‰), while negligible between marine copepods and the appendicularian Oikopleura dioica. Moreover, stable isotope analysis revealed different patterns of d15N enrichment for cruising versus stationary suspension feeding copepods, and also traced the (indirect) transfer of isotopically 'light' nitrogen from diazotrophic cyanobacteria to zooplankton.


This paper provides our approach to co-articulation for a text-to-audiovisual speech synthesizer (TTAVS), a system for converting the input text to video realistic audio-visual sequence. It is an image-based system, where the face is modeled using a set of images of a human subject. A concatination of visemes -the corresponding lip shapes for phonemes- can be used for modeling visual speech. However, in actual speech production, there is overlap in the production of syllables and phonemes that are a sequence of discrete units of speech. Due to this overlap, boundaries between these discrete speech units are blurred, i.e., vocal tract motions associated with producing one phonetic segment overlap the motions for producing surrounding phonetic segments. This overlap is called as co-articulation. The lack of parameterization in the image-based model makes it difficult to use the techniques employed in 3D facial animation models for co-articulation. We introduce a method using polymorphing to incorporate co-articulation in our TTAVS. Further, we add temporal smoothing for viseme transitions to avoid jerky animation.


Recent studies have demonstrated that embryonic stem cells (ESCs) have an underdeveloped innate immune system, but the biological implications of this finding are poorly understood. In this study, we compared the responses of mouse ESCs (mESCs) and mESC differentiated fibroblasts (mESC-FBs) to tumor necrosis factor α (TNFα) and interferons (IFNs). Our data revealed that TNFα, IFNα, IFNβ, or IFNγ alone do not cause apparent effects on mESCs and mESC-FBs, but the combination of TNFα and IFNγ (TNFα/IFNγ) showed toxicity to mESC-FBs as indicated by cell cycle inhibition and reduced cell viability, correlating with the expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS). However, none of these effects were observed in mESCs that were treated with TNFα/IFNγ. Furthermore, mESC-FBs, but not mESCs, are vulnerable to cytotoxicity resulting from lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-activated macrophages. The insensitivity of mESCs to cytotoxicity in all cases is correlated with their lack of responses to TNFα and IFNγ. Similar to mESCs, human ESCs (hESCs) and iPSCs (hiPSCs) do not respond to TNFα and are not susceptible to the cytotoxicity of TNFα, IFNβ, or IFNγ alone or in combination that significantly affects human foreskin fibroblast (hFBs) and Hela cells. However, unlike mESCs, hESCs and hiPSCs can respond to IFNγ, but this does not cause significant cytotoxicity in hESCs and hiPSCs. Our findings in both mouse and human PSCs together support the hypothesis that attenuated innate immune responses could be a protective mechanism that limits immunologic cytotoxicity resulting from inflammatory and immune responses.


Cloud computing is the long dreamed vision of computing as a utility, where data owners can remotely store their data in the cloud to enjoy on-demand high-quality applications and services from a shared pool of configurable computing resources. While data outsourcing relieves the owners of the burden of local data storage and maintenance, it also eliminates their physical control of storage dependability and security, which traditionally has been expected by both enterprises and individuals with high service-level requirements. In order to facilitate rapid deployment of cloud data storage service and regain security assurances with outsourced data dependability, efficient methods that enable on-demand data correctness verification on behalf of cloud data owners have to be designed. In this article we propose that publicly auditable cloud data storage is able to help this nascent cloud economy become fully established. With public auditability, a trusted entity with expertise and capabilities data owners do not possess can be delegated as an external audit party to assess the risk of outsourced data when needed. Such an auditing service not only helps save data owners¿ computation resources but also provides a transparent yet cost-effective method for data owners to gain trust in the cloud. We describe approaches and system requirements that should be brought into consideration, and outline challenges that need to be resolved for such a publicly auditable secure cloud storage service to become a reality.


Background: Although the linkage between germline mutations of BRCA1 and hereditary breast/ovarian cancers is well established, recent evidence suggests that altered expression of wild type BRCA1 might contribute to the sporadic forms of breast cancer. The mechanism underlying the downregulation BRCA1 expression is not well understood. It might be dependent upon repressor activity that governs histone acetylation and DNA accessibility at the BRCA1 promoter. TNRC9 (TOX3) gene, highly associated with breast cancer susceptibility, encodes a nuclear protein of uncertain function but can modify chromatin structure. We hypothesized that constitutive expression of TNRC9 could be relevant to breast cancer biology through the modulation of BRCA1 activity. Methods: We assessed the associations of TNRC9 gene amplification with breast cancer onset and survival. The search for targets and effects of TNRC9 was performed using multifaceted molecular approaches. Results: The TNRC9 gene is often amplified and overexpressed in breast cancer, particularly in advanced breast cancer. TNRC9 gene amplification is associated with reduced disease-free and metastasis-free survival rates. TNRC9 significantly increased breast cancer cell proliferation, migration and survival of exposure to apoptotic stimuli, and tumor progression both in vitro and in mice models. Gene expression profiling, protein analysis and in silico assays of large datasets of breast and ovarian cancer samples suggested that TNRC9 and BRCA1 expression are inversely correlated. TNRC9 binds not only to BRCA1 promoter but also to the CREB complex, a BRCA1-transcriptional regulator. TNRC9 downregulates the expression of BRCA1 by altering the methylation status of its promoter. Conclusions: Our study unveils a molecular basis for a TNRC9 role in breast cancer and highlights a new paradigm in BRCA1 regulation.


Lockdowns and "stay-at-home" orders, starting in March 2020, shuttered bench and field dependent research across the world as a consequence of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic continues to have an impact on research progress and career development, especially for graduate students and early career researchers, as strict social distance limitations stifle ongoing research and impede in-person educational programs. The goal of the Bioinformatics Virtual Coordination Network (BVCN) was to reduce some of these impacts by helping research biologists learn new skills and initiate computational projects as alternative ways to carry out their research. The BVCN was founded in April 2020, at the peak of initial shutdowns, by an international group of early-career microbiology researchers with expertise in bioinformatics and computational biology. The BVCN instructors identified several foundational bioinformatic topics and organized hands-on tutorials through cloud-based platforms that had minimal hardware requirements (in order to maximize accessibility) such as RStudio Cloud and MyBinder. The major topics included the Unix terminal interface, R and Python programming languages, amplicon analysis, metagenomics, functional protein annotation, transcriptome analysis, network science, and population genetics and comparative genomics. The BVCN was structured as an open-access resource with a central hub providing access to all lesson content and hands-on tutorials (https://biovcnet.github.io/). As laboratories reopened and participants returned to previous commitments, the BVCN evolved: while the platform continues to enable "a la carte" lessons for learning computational skills, new and ongoing collaborative projects were initiated among instructors and participants, including a virtual, open-access bioinformatics conference in June 2021. In this manuscript we discuss the history, successes, and challenges of the BVCN initiative, highlighting how the lessons learned and strategies implemented may be applicable to the development and planning of future courses, workshops, and training programs.


The Motion Picture Association of America is responsible for assigning all movies one of five movie ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17). Previous research has found that G and PG-rated movies perform better at the box office, yet movie studios continue to make more PG-13 and R-rated movies. Other research has used data on a filmi?½s levels of sex, violence and profanity (SVP), to explore the link between SVP, movie rating, and box office revenues. In this paper, we use a more recent data set and include additional variables to account for movie quality to further explore this relationship. We investigate the issue of how the amount of SVP has changed in the last fifteen years. We also use theater-level data for a major Midwestern theater chain to extend our analysis beyond total box office revenues, examining the effects on revenues in four ticket categories: adult, child, senior citizen, and student. Finally, we explore the difference between foreign and domestic box office responses to SVP levels and suggest that there is a justifiable reason why movie studios continue to produce far more PG-13 and R movies than G and PG movies.