The accuracy of remote sensing algorithms for phytoplankton biomass and physiology is difficult to test under natural conditions due to rapid changes in physical and biological forcings and the practical inability to manipulate nutrient conditions and phytoplankton composition in the sea. Therefore, an indoor mesocosm was designed to examine the optical properties of phytoplankton under controlled and manipulated conditions of irradiance, temperature, turbulence, and nutrient availability. Equipped with hyperspectral radiometers and bottom irradiance meters, it is shown that under semi‐natural environmental conditions biogeochemically relevant species as Emiliania huxleyi and Phaeocystis globosa can be grown with good precision (± 20%) between duplicate mesocosms and between duplicate sensors (<5% deviation). The accuracy of chlorophyll estimates by absorption, using an Integrating Cavity Absorption Meter, and fluorescence using water‐leaving radiance was 74% to 80%, respectively, as it was negatively influenced by changes in phytoplankton physiology. Biomass detection was limitedto 1 to 2 µg chlorophyll/L with an apparent linearity to 50 µg chlorophyll/L. Estimates of the quantum efficiency of fluorescence (φ ≈ 0.01) were comparable to real‐world estimates derived from satellite observations. It is concluded that the mesocosms adequately simulate natural conditions with sufficient accuracy and precision and that they offer an important tool in validating assumptions and hypotheses underlying remote sensing algorithms and models.


This text serves as a primer for risk management professionals. It covers basic concepts of risk management, employment practices, and general risk management strategies. It also goes over specific risk areas including medical malpractice, strategies to reduce liability, managing positions and litigation alternatives. It includes an emphasis on outpatient medicine and the risks associated with electronic medical records. This new edition covers academic medical settings and the impact on healthcare delivery, ambulatory and outpatient surgery, and office based surgery (OBS). Each and every chapter will be updated, and more emphasis will be placed on electronic medical records including security and encryption issues. New chapters cover Risk Management for Infection Control Programs, Telemedicine, Risk Management in Ambulatory Care Settings, and Risk Management in Office-Based Surgery.


Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, by Peter Eli Gordon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 328 pp. $25.95. Peter Eli Gordon, in his provocative and brilliant book, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, uses Franz Rosenzweig's concept of redemption to examine the intellectual kinship between the two contemporaries of Weimar, Germany. Redemption, in Gordon's understanding, is more than just a point of similarity between the German and Jewish thinkers. It becomes a tool for rethinking the relationship between Jewish and German philosophy and, at its most speculative, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Gordon argues that comparing the Jewish Rosenzweig and the German Heidegger is historically appropriate because, until the 1930s, German and Jewish culture were intertwined. "Jewish philosophical and national distinctiveness was the fruit of imagination, a performance of difference that gained its very identity in borrowing from the German philosophical tradition. . . ." Gordon argues that to separate Jewish from German thought "cannot be [intellectually] sustained without attributing essential and nonhistorical features to each." Karl Lowith, Heidegger's Jewish pupil, for instance, thought of himself as a German, and he believed that the Jews would emancipate themselves "into Germanness." The real subject of Gordons study is thus neither Germanness nor Jewishness. It is what links them together, and in Weimar these were the "modernist" themes of "finitude and isolation." Finitude and isolation were central to Heidegger's philosophy. In his lecture "What is Metaphysics" (1929), Heidegger argued that the proper object of metaphysics is not logic or science ("the infinite") but "nothingness." While science and philosophy imagine they are self sufficient ("infinite"), it is the task of metaphysics to reveal the finitude, or "nothingness," upon which all human experience, philosophical or otherwise, rests. To grasp this "finite" and unconceptualizable reality as the basis of one's scientific understanding of the world. Heidegger declared, is to experience the world as one's "own-most possibility." Heidegger called this experience "authenticity." In his opaque language, he wrote: "Being held out into the nothing-as Dasein is-on the ground of concealed anxiety makes man a lieutenant of the nothing." The central chapters of Gordons book, an exegesis of Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, argue that Rosenzweig's concept of redemption is similar to Heidegger's notion of authenticity. Karl Lowith had famously argued that Rosenzweigs concept of redemption was a "transcendent Jewish" and religious reference, distinguishing it from Heidegger's atheistic philosophy (and German philosophy in general). Gordon argues that Lowith was wrong. Because Rosenzweig embraced "the New Thinking" ("Das Neue Denken"), that is, the themes of finitude and isolation as the basis for modern thought, his understanding of Eternity must reflect the culture of Weimar, Germany and not traditional Jewish metaphysics. Gordon argues that Rosenzweig's philosophy is an attempt to "wrest itself free of traditional, theological categories . . . even while it struggle[s] to find theological purpose within the confines of human, temporal life." Rosenzweig's concept of redemption must be understood as"redemption-in-the-world." In this sense, redemption is similar to Heidegger's notion of nothingness-but a nothingness which is the basis of authentic Being. Rosenzweig writes: "Of God we know nothing. But this Nothingknowledge is a Nothing-knowledge of God. As such it is the beginning of our knowledge of him." An obvious objection presents itself: If "redemption" is an indefinable, preconceptual "nothingness," what in truth distinguishes it from Heidegger's "authenticity"? …


We present OpenFace, our new open-source face recognition system that approaches state-of-the-art accuracy. Integrating OpenFace with inter-frame tracking, we build RTFace, a mechanism for denaturing video streams that selectively blurs faces according to specified policies at full frame rates. This enables privacy management for live video analytics while providing a secure approach for handling retrospective policy exceptions. Finally, we present a scalable, privacy-aware architecture for large camera networks using RTFace.


In this paper, we analyse how traders select marketplaces and bid in a setting with multiple competing marketplaces. Specifically, we use a fictitious play algorithm to analyse the traders' equilibrium strategies for market selection and bidding when their types are continuous. To achieve this, we first analyse traders' equilibrium bidding strategies in a single marketplace and find that they shade their offers in equilibrium and the degree to which they do this depends on the amount and types of fees that are charged by the marketplace. Building on this, we then analyse equilibrium strategies for traders in competing marketplaces in two particular cases. In the first, we assume that traders can only select one marketplace at a time. For this, we show that, in equilibrium, all traders who choose one of the marketplaces eventually converge to the same one. In the second case, we allow buyers to participate in multiple marketplaces at a time, while sellers can only select one marketplace. For this, we show that sellers eventually distribute in different marketplaces in equilibrium and that buyers shade less and sellers shade more in the equilibrium bidding strategy (since sellers have more market power than buyers).


Under climate change, future species assemblages will be driven by the movements and poleward shift of local species and the arrival of more thermophilic species from lower latitudes. To evaluate the impacts of climate change on marine communities in the Bay of Biscay, we used the hierarchical filters modelling approach. Models integrated 3 vertical depth layers and considered 2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathway, RCP2.6 and RCP8.5) and 2 periods (2041-2050 and 2091-2100) to simulate potential future species distributions. Results predicted potentially suitable future ranges for 163 species as well as future arrivals of non-indigenous southern species. We aggregated these results to map changes in species assemblages. Results revealed that coastal areas would undergo the highest species loss among the Bay of Biscay species, depending on their vertical habitat (benthic, demersal, benthopelagic or pelagic). Benthic and demersal species were projected to experience a westward shift, which would induce a deepening of those species. In contrast, pelagic species were projected to shift northward. The potential ecological niche for half of the studied species, mostly benthic and demersal, was projected to decrease under climate change. In addition, a high rate of southern species arrivals is expected (+28%). Assessment of community composition showed high species replacement within the 0-50 m isobath, driven by the replacement of native species by southern ones. This could lead to a major reorganization of trophic networks and have socio-economic impacts.


Colour imaging technology has become almost ubiquitous in modern life in the form of monitors, liquid crystal screens, colour printers, scanners, and digital cameras. This book is a comprehensive guide to the scientific and engineering principles of colour imaging. It covers the physics of light and colour, how the eye and physical devices capture colour images, how colour is measured and calibrated, and how images are processed. It stresses physical principles and includes a wealth of real-world examples. The book will be of value to scientists and engineers in the colour imaging industry and, with homework problems, can also be used as a text for graduate courses on colour imaging.


Aim: To evaluate and categorize the medication errors occurred in Cardiology department of tertiary care hospital, Erode, Tamil Nadu to improve the treatment outcomes. Settings and Design: The prospective observational study was carried out in the cardiology department of tertiary care hospital. Subjects and Methods: The study included the patients with cardiovascular disease admitted in the hospital. A separate medication error reporting form was designed and data were collected and analyzed. Results: A total of 417 cases of patients with cardiovascular diseases were collected. Out of 417 cardiac cases, medication errors were found in 301 cases, which counted to a total of 516 medication errors. Incomplete prescriptions (48.83%) were the most common errors occurred in cardiac patients followed by inappropriate use of decimal (11.04%) contraindication (8.33%), omission errors (7.55%) and monitoring errors (6.20%). Physician related factors (61.43%) were responsible for most of the errors. Majority of medication errors were coming under Category A (51.88%) and Category B (35.45%), this may be due to an environment which is susceptible to medication errors. Conclusion: The study concluded that more than half of the patients in the cardiology department would experience medication errors. Since there is always a possibility for the occurrence of errors due to mistakes that can be easily rectified, so making necessary interventions will reduce the incidence of medication errors and thus can improve the quality of care to the patients.


Telecommunications regulation has experienced a fundamental shift from rate regulation to increased reliance on compelled access, perhaps best exemplified by the Telecommunications Act of 1996's imposition of no fewer than four new access requirements. Unfortunately, each access requirement is governed by a separate set of rules for determining both the scope and the price of access. The resulting ad hoc regime has created difficult definitional problems and opportunities for regulatory arbitrage. In this article we propose a system inspired by the discipline of mathematics known as graph theory that integrates all of the different forms of access into a single analytical framework. This system separates different access regimes into five categories: (1) retail access, (2) wholesale access, (3) interconnection access, (4) platform access, and (5) unbundled access. It also provides insights into how each type of access complicates the already difficult problems of network configuration and management and introduces inefficient biases into decisions about network capacity and design. The approach we propose also provides insights into the transaction cost implications of the different types of access. Drawing on the Coasean theory of the firm, our approach examines the tradeoffs between internal governance costs and the external transaction costs of providing access to offer a theory of network boundaries. This framework shows how access regulation distorts networks' natural boundaries and provides a basis for evaluating whether private ordering through markets would lead to more efficient network design.


British International Relations (IR) theory is distinguished by a concern with institutions and norms, and by an emphasis on history, philosophy, and law rather than the formal methods of the social sciences; in both respects, but especially the latter, it differs from American IR theory. The origins of British IR theory are traced, and the importance of the 'English School' (ES) is stressed, partly because of the work it stimulates, but also because of its role as a brand which helps to establish the independence of British IR from the otherwise dominant American profession. Along with ES scholarship (pluralist and solidarist), political theory and IR, and critical theory, including critical security studies, are the major areas where contemporary IR theory in Britain is located. This is likely to persist, but the generally critical approach taken to social scientific theorizing may be changing, with the increasing importance of historical sociology and critical realist work. It may also be the case that the privileged status of IR theory in British IR may be under challenge.


This thesis offers a pragmatic analysis of subjectless sentences in non-null subject
languages, focusing on English 'diary drop' (as in 'Saw a good film yesterday'). In
chapter 1, I survey the data and discuss existing syntactic analyses (Haegeman & Ihsane
1999, 2001). While these generally acknowledge the importance of pragmatic factors in
an overall account, no detailed investigation of their contribution has been proposed.
In chapter 2, I consider subjectless sentences in child language, and suggest that
relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95) can shed light on why such utterances
occur. In chapter 3, I revisit the adult data, and having established that null subjects
function as referring expressions, I consider two pragmatically-oriented approaches to
the analysis of referring expressions: Accessibility Theory (Ariel, 1990) and the
Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski, 1993). Both adopt the relevance-theoretic
framework, but claim that relevance alone is insufficient to account for the
data.
In chapters 4 and 5, I develop a relevance-based account of referring expressions,
and argue that we can do without the machinery of Accessibility Theory and the
Givenness Hierarchy on two assumptions: first, that referring expressions encode
procedural as well as conceptual meaning (Blakemore 1987, 2002), and second, that this
procedural meaning does not identify the intended referent by appeal to considerations
of Accessibility or Givenness. An important implication of my account is that the
choice of referring expression not only affects reference resolution but can also
contribute to what is implicitly communicated by an utterance. I provide detailed
evidence for this.
In chapter 6, I return to the original null subject data and show that my relevance-based
approach sheds new light on how these utterances function in a non-null subject
language. In Chapter 7, I draw general conclusions and revisit the conceptual-procedural
distinction in light of the analyses proposed.


—Internal models (IMs) can represent relations between sensors and actuators in natural and artificial agents. In autonomous robots, the adaptation of IMs and the adaptation of the behaviour are interdependent processes which have been studied under paradigms for self-organisation of behaviour such as homeokinesis. We compare the effect of various types of IMs on the generation of behaviour in order to evaluate model quality across different behaviours. The considered IMs differ in the degree of flexibility and expressivity related to, respectively, learning speed and structural complexity of the model. We show that the different IMs generate different error characteristics which in turn lead to variations of the self-generated behaviour of the robot. Due to the trade-off between error minimisation and complexity of the explored environment, we compare the models in the sense of Pareto optimality. Among the linear and nonlinear models that we analyse, echo-state networks achieve a particularly high performance which we explain as a result of the combination of fast learning and complex internal dynamics. More generally, we provide evidence that Pareto optimisation is preferable in autonomous learning as it allows that a special solution can be negotiated in any particular environment.


The electricity generation sector is broadly cited among the most promising domains for implementation of greenhouse gases (GHG) abatement measures intended to achieve the targets set up in the Kyoto Protocol. Meanwhile, considered through the perspective of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the electricity sector offers attractive business opportunities for investment in GHG mitigation projects which may be beneficial for both industrialised and developing countries. This work aims to identify such GHG emissions reduction projects within the electricity sector that can be eligible for CDM. It is assumed that revenues from sale of the certified emission reductions (CERs) would increase competitiveness of the power generation technologies with lower carbon emission rates, thereby altering economically efficient load order and capacity deployment. Possible range of CDM projects as well as economical and environmental benefits from their implementation were estimated using a least cost electricity system expansion planning model PLANELEC-Pro. It is found that in a reference Chinese province of Shandong the Clean Development Mechanism may contribute to the reduction of CO2 emissions by 46.8 million tons (1.64%) compared to the baseline case through the deployment of wind power and advanced clean coal technologies. The total cost of the electricity generation system can be decreased by up to US$ 86 million (0.24%) due to sale of CERs in the international market. Sensitivity analyses were made on the price of CERs which is the main factor having effect on the economical benefits from CDM and the resulting structure of the power generation mix.


Summary : Almost fifteen years have passed since the publication of the National Research Council's seminal report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which provided research-based recommendations on what could be done to better position students in prekindergarten through third grade for success in grade four and above. This article by Nell Duke and Meghan Block first examines whether specific key recommendations from the report have been implemented in U.S. classrooms. They find that recommendations regarding increased access to kindergarten and greater attention to and improvement of students' word-reading skills have been widely adopted. Others have not. Vocabulary and comprehension, long neglected in the primary grades, still appear to be neglected. Contrary to the report's recommendations, attention to building conceptual and content knowledge in science and social studies has actually decreased in the past fifteen years. In other words, the easier-to-master skills are being attended to, but the broader domains of accomplishment that constitute preparation for comprehension and learning in the later grades—vocabulary knowledge, comprehension strategy use, and conceptual and content knowledge—are being neglected. Near stagnation in fourth-grade students' comprehension achievement is thus unsurprising.  The authors then turn to research and reviews of research on improving primary-grade reading published since 1998, when Preventing Reading Difficulties was issued. They discuss several instructional approaches identified as effective in improving word-reading skill, vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, comprehension strategies, and reading outside of school; they discuss advances in interventions for struggling readers, and in whole-school literacy reform.  Duke and Block then identify three key obstacles that have prevented widespread adoption of these best practices in teaching reading. The first obstacle is a short-term orientation toward instruction and instructional reform that perpetuates a focus on the easier-to-learn reading skills at the expense of vocabulary, conceptual and content knowledge, and reading comprehension strategies. The second is a lack of expertise among many educators in how to effectively teach these harder-to-master reading skills, and the third is the limited time available in the school day and year to meet unprecedented expectations for children's learning. Policy makers, the education community, and parents must attend to these three challenges if they wish to see meaningful improvements in the reading skills of American children.


The magnetic dipole G_M(Q^2), electric quadrupole G_E(Q^2), and Coulomb quadrupole G_C(Q^2) form factors, describing the spin-3/2 to spin-1/2 electromagnetic transitions, are investigated within the light cone QCD sum rules. The Q^2 dependence of these form factors, as well as ratios of electric quadrupole and Coulomb quadrupole form factors to the magnetic dipole form factors are studied. We also compare our results on the magnetic dipole form factor with the prediction of the covariant spectator quark model.


Cells can sense and respond to mechanical signals over relatively long distances across fibrous extracellular matrices. Recently proposed models suggest that long-range force transmission can be attributed to the nonlinear elasticity or fibrous nature of collagen matrices, yet the mechanism whereby fibers align remains unknown. Moreover, cell shape and anisotropy of cellular contraction are not considered in existing models, although recent experiments have shown that they play crucial roles. Here, we explore all of the key factors that influence long-range force transmission in cell-populated collagen matrices: alignment of collagen fibers, responses to applied force, strain stiffening properties of the aligned fibers, aspect ratios of the cells, and the polarization of cellular contraction. A constitutive law accounting for mechanically-driven collagen fiber reorientation is proposed. We systematically investigate the range of collagen fiber alignment using both finite element simulations and analytical calculations. Our results show that tension-driven collagen fiber alignment plays a crucial role in force transmission. Small critical stretch for fiber alignment, large fiber stiffness and fiber strain-hardening behavior enable long-range interaction. Furthermore, the range of collagen fiber alignment for elliptical cells with polarized contraction is much larger than that for spherical cells with diagonal contraction. A phase diagram showing the range of force transmission as a function of cell shape and polarization and matrix properties is presented. Our results are in good agreement with recent experiments, and highlight the factors that influence long-range force transmission, in particular tension-driven alignment of fibers. Our work has important relevance to biological processes including development, cancer metastasis and wound healing, suggesting conditions whereby cells communicate over long distances.


In the standard reinforcement learning setting, the agent learns optimal policy solely from state transitions and rewards from the environment. We consider an extended setting where a trainer additionally provides feedback on the actions executed by the agent. This requires appropriately incorporating the feedback, even when the feedback is not necessarily accurate. In this paper, we present a Bayesian approach to this extended reinforcement learning setting. Specifically, we extend Kalman Temporal Difference learning to compute the posterior distribution over Q-values given the state transitions and rewards from the environment as well as the feedback from the trainer. Through experiments on standard reinforcement learning tasks, we show that learning performance can be significantly improved even with inaccurate feedback.


In the summer of 1987, the Texas Education Agency enlisted the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in such a project and began a joint effort to examine the relationship between public education and the economy of Texas. Professors Ray Marshall, John Gronouski, and Robert Glover and students at the LBJ School worked closely with TEA staff in the Division of Research and Information to examine the relationship between the Texas public schools and the economic future of the state. The result of this joint effort is a series of reports concerning education, technology, and the economy. The first of these reports, Economics of Education, by Professor Ray Marshall, focuses on current economic and demographic trends in Texas and their implications for public education. This report is followed by two additional volumes prepared by students and edited by Robert Glover and John Gronouski, addressing the issues of technology and the Texas public schools and vocational preparation and the Texas economy.


An integral formulation for the analysis of electromagnetic fields distribution in systems with bodies in motion is presented. This formulation is based on the subdivision of conductive and ferromagnetic regions in elementary volumes in which a uniform distribution of current density J and magnetization M is assumed. By integrating in every volume Ohm's law in term of the magnetic vector potential produced by the conduction and magnetization currents we obtain an equivalent electric network whose lumped parameters vary during every time step interval as the moving parts of the system change their positions. The proposed model has been tested by comparison with analytical solutions.


In 1989, Kai Wiedenhofer photographed the fall of the Berlin Wall in his hometown, and was deeply moved by this experience of history unfolding. At the time, Wiedenhofer, like many, believed this event would mark the end of walls being employed as political tools and dismissed them as anachronistic instruments of division. Over twenty years later, history has proved us wrong; indeed, walls have enjoyed a barbaric renaissance. Border barriers have been erected in the US, Europe, and the Middle East in the aftermath of political, economic, religious and ethnic conflicts. Wiedenhofer has documented walls in Belfast, Ceuta and Melilla, Baghdad, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the American- Mexican border, Cyprus, Korea as well as the remains of the Iron Curtain. Confrontier presents Wiedenhofer's comprehensive project and evidences his conviction that walls are not solutions to today's political and economic problems, but proof of human weakness, error and our inability to communicate with one another. Kai Wiedenhofer, born in Schwenningen, Germany, in 1966, received a Masters in photography and editorial design from the Folkwang School in Essen and studied Arabic in Damascus, Syria. Since 1989 the focus of his work has been the Middle East. Wiedenhofer has received numerous awards including the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Alexia Foundation For World Peace Grant, World Press Photo Awards, the Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography and the Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award. Steidl has published Wiedenhofer's Perfect Peace (2002), Wall (2007) and The Book of Destruction (2010), the photos of which comprised a solo exhibition at the Musee dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris.


In many practical situations, different types of waves may coexist within a structure. If control is limited to a single wave type, other kinds of waves may be generated unintentionally by the action of the control forces. In this paper an experimental study of the simultaneous control of multiple wave types in a semi‐infinite beam has been undertaken. The ability of the piezoelectric control sources to provide adequate system control and the ability of the accelerometer error sensors to provide adequate observability of the power flow associated with each wave type was also evaluated.


The scientific journal has been greatly affected by the advent of its online digital accessibility. It is the priority publication medium for scientific communication, one of the document categories where changes in the electronic format uncover an extensive action, different from traditional practices. The extensive communication -- a.k.a. the emblematic model of network interactions -- comes as much in new forms of document production, as well as in the organization of the technical landscape in which scientific information adapts to flexible and unstable forms. Gradual changes (in support, format, content, and publication type) were observed in 400 online electronic journals, being all by main international publishers, as made available at CAPES portal (www.periodicos.capes.gov.br). The portal offers access to the complete text of a lot of publication, encyclopedias, databases, etc., supplied by editors and international distributors. In all the platforms we can find specific search tools that make possible bibliographical researches, alert services and other products and services, as well as information of technical and scientific interest. A data collection was assembled through a checklist for 70 variables, and the results were inserted in a spreadsheet for an initial analysis. Afterwards, data were cross-examined through the use of the SPSS software for statistical analysis. This investigation has shown that the new format stand out through the insertion of tools and services, strengthening extensive communication by means of interactivity, hypertextuality, and hypermediation, a. k. a., the main distinctive features of the electronic format. After technological resources mature the online format, they establish a new perception of the journal contents. The variables were grouped according to their pertinence to the studied aspects in the electronic format, and were expressed in percentage ratios. The results display the dependence of the electronic on the printed format. By combining all the variables once again to measure the levels of interactivity, hypertextuality, and hypermediation, journals were grouped by platform (i. e., the online publishing base as, for example, Scielo, Science Direct, Gale, OVID, etc.) to test for interactivity, hypertextuality, and hypermediation levels among platforms. The descriptive measures of indexes were first calculated: average, standard deviation, minimum value, maximum value, percentage ratios -- among other data -- to confirm level variations of each one of the characteristics among the platforms. Observing the grouping by platform, the results have shown evidence that a direct relationship (in other words, the most interactive groups are not necessarily the most hypertextual or hypermediatic ones) does not exist among the three characteristic features of the online electronic format. The online journal is using a communication in a differentiated dimension from the traditional system. The performance of the journals was also evaluated comparatively among platforms. At this stage in the evolution of electronic publishing, serious experimentation is needed. Models like CAPES Portal should be developed, allowing for continued expansion and enhancement of scholarly communication.


Frauds have no constant patterns. They always change their behavior; so, we need to use an unsupervised learning. Fraudsters learn about new technology that allows them to execute frauds through online transactions. Fraudsters assume the regular behavior of consumers, and fraud patterns change fast. So, fraud detection systems need to detect online transactions by using unsupervised learning, because some fraudsters commit frauds once through online mediums and then switch to other techniques. This paper aims to 1) focus on fraud cases that cannot be detected based on previous history or supervised learning, 2) create a model of deep Auto-encoder and restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) that can reconstruct normal transactions to find anomalies from normal patterns. The proposed deep learning based on auto-encoder (AE) is an unsupervised learning algorithm that applies backpropagation by setting the inputs equal to the outputs. The RBM has two layers, the input layer (visible) and hidden layer. In this research, we use the Tensorflow library from Google to implement AE, RBM, and H2O by using deep learning. The results show the mean squared error, root mean squared error, and area under curve.


The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of ball temperature on impact ball speed and carry distance during golf drives in a blind randomized test design. The balls were exposed to a temperature-controlled environment (4 °C, 18 °C, 32 °C, and 46 °C) for 24 h prior to the test and each temperature group consisted of 30 balls. The 120 drives were performed by an elite male golfer (handicap: 0.0) in an indoor driving range. All drives were measured by a Doppler-radar system to determine the club-head speed, launch angle, spin rate, ball speed, and carry distance. Differences between the groups were investigated using a one-way analysis of variance. The results indicated that ball-speed and carry-distance differences occurred within the four groups (p < 0.001 and p < 0.01, respectively). The post hoc analyses showed that the ball temperatures of 18 °C and 32 °C had greater ball speeds and carry distances than balls at 4 °C and 46 °C (all p < 0.05). The intervals for the between-group differences were 0.6–0.7 m s−1 and 2.9–3.9 m for ball speed and carry distance, respectively. Hence, the results showed that ball temperature influences both the ball speed and the carry distance. Based on the findings in this study, standardization of ball temperature should be factored into governing body regulation tests for golf equipment.


HVAC operations play a significant role among various driving factors to improve energy performance of buildings. Extensive researches have been conducted on the design efficiencies and control strategies of HVAC system, but very few focused on the impacts of its operational faults on the building energy efficiency. Modeling and simulation of operational faults can lead to better understandings of the fault impacts and thus support decision making of timely fault corrections which can further benefit the efficient system operation, improve the indoor thermal comfort, and prolong the equipment service life. Fault modeling is also critical to achieve more accurate and reliable model calibrations. This paper introduces the modeling and simulation of operational faults using EnergyPlus, a comprehensive whole building performance simulation tool. The paper discusses the challenges of operational fault modeling, and compares three approaches to simulate operational faults using EnergyPlus. The paper also introduces the latest development of native fault objects within EnergyPlus. As an example, EnergyPlus version 8.4 is used to investigate the impacts of the integrated thermostat and humidistat faults in a typical office building across several U.S. climate zones. The results demonstrate that the faults create significant impacts on the building energy performance as well as occupant thermal comfort. At last, the paper introduces the future development plan of EnergyPlus for the further improvement of its fault modeling capability.


Identifying and examining traits that influence the distribution of species is crucial to the understanding of community structure. Theory predicts that traits should differ between species that live in temporary and permanent waters because of differing major environmental variables; viz drying out and predator presence, respectively. Species, however, will also be influenced by their evolutionary history, i.e. by the traits of their common ancestors. We studied differences in life history and behaviour traits in a series of laboratory experiments using pairs of dragonfly species out of three genera of Namibian Libellulidae (Odonata) with one species from each type of habitat. As predicted, growth rates were significantly higher in the temporary water species compared to the permanent water species. Activity and foraging, in contrast, differed between the genera, but did not differ between the habitat types. Hence, our study implies that the behavioural traits are influenced by phylogenetic inertia rather than by the habitat variables, while growth rate is adapted to the habitat. We argue that in all three genera one species has diverged recently from a sister species that lives in the original habitat of the genus, which may be temporary waters in Crocothemis Brauer and in Orthetrum Newman, and permanent waters in Trithemis Brauer. The behavioural traits may therefore be less well adapted. Rapid growth may be the more relevant trait because it is crucial to survival in temporary waters.


Concrete undergoes volume change as it changes phases from plastic to solid. Volume change due to water movement and losses within the concrete are referred to as chemical and autogenous shrinkage and drying and plastic shrinkage are due to water exchange with the surrounding environment. Shrinkage strains need to be investigated as they can have detrimental effects on the serviceability and durability of concrete. For this study, an experimental program was developed using fractional factorial principles to investigate the effects of curing regime and concrete mixture namely, water to cement ratio (w/c) , water content (w), maximum aggregate size (size), silica fume replacement percent (SF), ground granulated furnace slag replacement percent (GGBFS), and volume of coarse aggregate (CA), on the magnitude of autogenous and dlying shrinkage. A new test setup was developed to measure autogenous shrinkage, capillary pressure and temperature. The results were found to concur with those reported in the literature, i.e., moist cured samples exhibit chemical shrinkage and that air cured samples exhibit both chemical and drying shrinkage and that the magnitude of the latter is much greater than the former. Values of drying shrinkage are found to range from 450 to 800 flmlm. The results also revealed that all the parameters studied do contribute to shrinkage but not to the same degree. An increase in the volume and size of coarse aggregate is found to produce concrete that exhibits less drying shrinkage strains. The addition of SF as cement replacement is found in general to increase shrinkage strains. The statistical investigation has revealed that the following parameters, CA volume, w/c, CA, w/c*SF, w/c*GGBFS, size*SF, size*CA, w/c*w*size, w/c*SF*GGBFS, and w/c*SF*CA are statically significant to a 90% confidence level. For autogenous shrinkage, w/c is found to be a significant parameter. The results also revealed that increasing the amount of chemical admixtures, WRA and VEA, has led to a significant increase in strains. Autogenous strains were found to occur when there is a rise in capillary suction pressure, occurring due to self-desiccation. Seven models proposed in the literature to estimate strains due to shrinkage were evaluated using the experimental data. The majority of these models have been adopted by North American, European or Japanese concrete standards. The assessment has revealed that only two models, namely B3 and ACI 209 are somewhat adequate in their predictions of strains in concrete that is 28 days or older. Regression models developed in this study are found to provide a better estimation of the concrete shrinkage strains at 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, 28 days and 119 days.


Interactions of various xenobiotic compounds with deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) represent the most important aspects of biological studies in clinical and toxicological analyses, drug discovery, and pharmaceutical development processes. In recent years, a growing interest in electrochemical investigation of such supramolecular interactions has arisen. Monitoring the changes in electrochemical signals of DNA and/or observing the mutual interactions of DNA with examined analytes provide good evidence for the interaction mechanism to be elucidated. Moreover, the DNA–analyte interactions can also be used for sensitive determination of the analyte itself. This short review summarizes our results obtained during the last five years in the field of novel electrochemical DNA biosensors utilizing carbon-based transducers as substrates for immobilization of DNA. Its aim is to provide evidence that the electrochemical approach (employing simple, fast, sensitive, and inexpensive DNA biosensors as tools for investigation and detection of DNA damage) brings a new insight into human health protection and leads to better understanding of the interaction mechanism between xenobiotic compounds and DNA.


Water scarcity and food insecurity are pervasive issues in the developing world and are also intrinsically linked to one another. Through the connection of the water cycle and the carbon cycle this study illustrates that synergistic benefits can be realized by small scale farmers through the implementation of waste water irrigated agroforestry. The WaNuLCAS model is employed using La Huerta agroforestry site in Texcoco, South Central Mexico, as the basis for parameterization. The results of model simulations depicting scenarios of water scarcity and waste water irrigation clearly show that the addition of waste water greatly increases the agroforestry system's generation of crop yields, above- and below-ground biomass, soil organic matter and carbon storage potential. This increase in carbon sequestration by the system translates into better local food security, diversified household income through payments for ecosystem services and contributes to the mitigation of global climate change. Keywords: agroforestry; wastewater irrigation; carbon sequestration; water scarcity; food security; ecosystem services Submitted: 13 January 2014; Revised 31 May 2014; Accepted for publication: 2 June 2014; Published: 10 June 2014 urn:nbn:de:hebis:34-2014062645548


A method of calculating 2×2 reflection and transmission-coefficient matrices for a multilayer birefringent system, developed for use in a plane stratified magnetoplasma, is applied to an optical system. The diagonal matrix elements refer to the direct reflection and transmission coefficients of the two characteristic or normal modes, and off-diagonal elements refer to inter-mode coupling between them. For waves normally incident on the plane stratified system, in the positive or negative z directions, corresponding reflection and transmission-coefficient matrices, R± and T±, are defined in terms of suitably normalized wave fields. A reciprocity theorem is established wherein it is shown that the matrices R+ and R− are symmetric, and the matrix T+ is the transpose of T−, provided that the dielectric tensors of the layers composing the system are either (a) all symmetric, or (b) all gyrotropic (magnetoactive), having a common principal axis that is generally the external magnetic-field direction. Optically inactive, isotropic layers may be included in either class, but care must be taken in defining characteristic modes for such layers. Some applications are discussed, including the feasibility of constructing light valves.


One of the ways that machine learning algorithms can help control the spread of an infectious disease is by building models that predict who is likely to become infected making them good candidates for preemptive interventions. In this work we ask: can we build reliable infection prediction models when the observed data is collected under limited, and biased testing that prioritizes testing symptomatic individuals? Our analysis suggests that when the infection is highly transmissible, incomplete testing might be sufficient to achieve good out-of-sample prediction error. Guided by this insight, we develop an algorithm that predicts infections, and show that it outperforms baselines on simulated data. We apply our model to data from a large hospital to predict Clostridioides difficile infections; a communicable disease that is characterized by both symptomatically infected and asymptomatic (i.e., untested) carriers. Using a proxy instead of the unobserved untested-infected state, we show that our model outperforms benchmarks in predicting infections.


In our accelerating world even education has become market-oriented. Learners have to acquire greater and greater amount of knowledge while the number of contact lessons, especially in higher education, become less and less. That is why giving particular information belonging to a certain topic should be raised â?? one method for this would be visualisation. This means that lectures would be structured in a way that the usual verbal lessons are supplemented by diversed and spectacular visual information. If the informations were followed by pictures, such as diversed diagrams and shown in an interactive way, accompanied by sound effects, the efficacy of teaching would get intensified. The fact that education-supporting new means and circumstances of learning, calls for changes in the methodology of teaching and learning; the educators are required to apply new teaching strategies. Here we would like to present the means and use of Informational and Communicational Technology (in the following: ICT), applied in informatics major. Besides, we also intend to introduce a new framework which plays an important role in forwarding learning material to students. An international lecture course serves as basis for the complex introduction of this framework.


Mistaken eyewitness identification is a major source of miscarriages of justice. In England and Wales, procedures for obtaining identification evidence are set out in legislation. The vast majority of identifications are obtained using a traditional 'live' identity parade (or line-up). However, in some circumstances video identifications are being used more frequently. Records of line-ups and video identifications used in actual criminal cases were obtained. The fairness of these two procedures was compared by use of a mock witness procedure. In a perfectly fair line-up the suspect would be chosen, by chance, by 11% of the mock witnesses. However, 25% of mock witnesses selected the suspect from 25 photographs of live line-ups, compared to 15% of mock witnesses who selected the suspect from video identifications. An analysis of covariance, taking the number of visual features mentioned in the original witness's first description as the covariate, showed that the proportion choosing the suspect was significantly smaller from video identifications. It is concluded that the video line-ups were fairer than the live line-ups, and therefore that wider use of video identifications has the potential to improve the reliability of eyewitness identification evidence.


This article aimed to describe administration of curriculum. Curriculum development requires a strong foundation and is based on the results of deep thought and research. In addition, evaluation or assessment in the curriculum is useful to determine the level of achievement of the curriculum. Based on this we can know that the role of the curriculum in formal education in schools is very important and has a major influence in determining the achievement of educational goals. In the process, the teacher acts as a technical implementer, such as implementers, adapters, developers, and researchers.


Copyright resides with the authors in terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 South African Licence. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/za Condition of use: The user may copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the work, but must recognise the authors and the South African Journal of Animal Science ________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Livestock production in South Africa contributes substantially to food security. It is also a topic of public debate because of lack of knowledge and wrong information. This article aims to provide information on the worth and impact of the livestock sector; information and statistics providing a baseline to guiding sustainability towards 2050. Seventy percent of agricultural land in South Africa can be utilized only by livestock and game and species are found in all provinces with high concentrations in the eastern higher rainfall regions. Statistics in 2010 indicate 13.6 million beef cattle, 1.4 million dairy cattle, 24.6 million sheep, 7.0 million goats, 3 million game species (farmed), 1.1 million pigs, 113 million broilers, 31.8 million layers and 1.6 million ostriches. The gross value of livestock products increased by 185% from 1995/2000 to 2006/2010. In relation to field crops and horticulture, livestock products increased their position from 42% to 47% of gross agricultural value. The main reason was a rise in the value and demand for livestock foods, particularly meat. Livestock foods contribute 27% of the consumer food basket on a weight basis. Consumption of livestock foods resembles that of developing countries with meat consumption being 50 90 g/capita/day, milk and dairy products 120 130 g /capita/day and eggs 15 20 g/capita/day. Since this is the average for the country with consumption by the rich and poor often differing tenfold, consumption of livestock foods by the poor is of concern, given the many health attributes of livestock foods. The livestock sector in South Africa is a major role player in the conservation of biodiversity through a variety of welladapted indigenous and non-indigenous breeds and rare game species. It has also shown commitment to rangeland/ecosystem conservation through conservative stocking rates, with several studies and observations reporting improvement in the condition of the natural resource. The sector has always been a major employer, but employment rate has declined steadily since 2000 because of increased minimum wages, fewer commercial farmers and increased property size. Some 245 000 employees with 1.45 million dependants, in addition to dependants on communal land and emerging farms, are employed on 38 500 commercial farms and intensive units with wages amounting to R 6 100 million (South African rand). Livestock farming is the backbone of the socio-economy and provides the sustenance of most nonmetropolitan towns and rural communities. ________________________________________________________________________________


This study compared the writing products of 60 third grade students who drew before writing a story on a self-selected topic (Experimental Group) with the writing products of 59 third grade students who simply wrote without drawing (Control Group). An analysis of the students' writing products revealed two important findings. First, students who drew be fore writing tended to produce more words, more sentences, and more idea units, and their overall writing performance was higher than the students who wrote without drawing. Second, these results were consistent for boys and girls regardless of group membership. The findings indicate that the differences in writing performance were probably due to the integration of drawing and writing. Implications for writing research and instruction are discussed.


Abstract. A two-unit experimental sweet cherry harvester was modified with a goal to improve its harvest performance by changing each unit's rapid impact fruit removal mechanism to a continuous impact (shaking) mechanism. During harvest, an end effector (rapid impactor) was placed at selected actuation points on fruiting scaffold branches to transfer vibrational energy for fruit release. Removed fruit was caught by a catching system and was collected into a lug or bin placed on a platform. Remote control capability was incorporated into each harvester unit to improve its operability. This article reports details on these added features and results from field evaluation studies conducted in 2012 and 2013 harvest seasons in Washington State. Harvest performance was evaluated in terms of harvesting rate and harvest efficiency. Harvesting rate consisted of two parts: tree coverage rate (number of trees harvested per unit time) and fruit removal rate (weight of fruit removed per unit time). Harvest efficiency included fruit removal efficiency (weight of removed fruit per weight of total fruit on tree) and collection efficiency (weight of machine-caught fruit per weight of removed fruit). In the first of two tests conducted in 2012, using only the left half of the harvester to harvest the left half of trees, average fruit removal efficiency of 83% was achieved and of those removed, over 85% was collected. Tree coverage rate was on average 19 and 15 trees/h, respectively, for 10 and 15 s shaking per actuation point with fruit removal rate of 7.4 kg/min. In the second test conducted in 2012, tree coverage rate averaging 30 trees/h was achieved. It was observed in 2012 tests that a variable shaking duration would be necessary to not shake branches after most of the cherries are detached. The 2013 tests used actuation point-specific shaking periods on Ethephon-treated trees, resulting in an average tree coverage rate of 36 trees/h, removal efficiency of 87%, and collection efficiency of 79%. Harvest-induced fruit damage in 2013 tests ranged from 0% to 20% with an average of 10%, which was better or comparable to previously reported values. Use of remote control, compared to control from the operator's seat, increased operator's visibility of target branches up to two times and contributed to 16% less time with 9% more accuracy in positioning the continuous impactor on target branches. These results show promise for practical applicability of this harvest system in commercial operation.


The recent increased emphasis on impact assessment is due in part to the rapidly changing nature of funding for agricultural research and the shifts that have occurred in what is expected of the agricultural research community. The reasons for doing impact assessment are relatively clear: ex post studies can determine the impact of past investment in research on target beneficiaries and are a way to learn some of the lessons of the past. Ex ante studies can provide information to assist in the allocation of scarce research resources to activities that best match donors' development objectives. In practice, impact assessment is often contentious and almost always difficult, particularly when livestock are involved. In this paper, we outline methods that can be used in ex ante impact assessment, and illustrate some of these in relation to three recent studies on improved food-feed crops in different places: improving the quality of millet and sorghum stover in India, using dual-purpose cowpea in West Africa, and alternatives for utilizing maize stover in the mixed systems of East and Southern Africa. Such impact assessments are neither cheap nor quick, and the methods that are most appropriate in any situation will depend not only on the resources and expertise available but most importantly on the exact nature of the questions being asked and the end-users of the results. Much remains to be done to maximize the utility of such assessments, particularly in the areas of quantitative model development, rapid qualitative method development, more effective integration of biophysical and socio-cultural indicators and approaches, and provision of baseline data against which to measure progress. Research resource allocation may well retain its somewhat haphazard nature in the future, but given the challenges facing agriculture in developing countries, a mechanism for attempting to ensure that research and extension really do contribute to widely held development goals has to be based on more than trial and error. # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.


Optical phenomena that occur when polarized light passes through an inhomogeneous birefringent medium are complicated, especially when the principal directions of the dielectric tensor rotate on the light ray. This case is typical in three-dimensional photoelasticity, in particular in integrated photoelasticity by stress analysis on the basis of measured polarization transformations. Analysis of polarization transformations in integrated photoelasticity has been based primarily on a system of two first-order differential equations. Using a transformed coordinate in the direction of light propagation, we have derived a single fourth-order differential equation of three-dimensional photoelasticity. For the case of uniform rotation of the principal directions we have obtained an analytical solution.


Correct preparation is important in all aspects of life, but if you fail to warm up properly before playing tennis it could land you in the hospital for weeks. Just look how often professional tennis players are getting injured--sometimes bringing an early end to a promising career--and consider that these athletes are in peak physical shape. So just imagine the risk you are putting yourself at when you venture out for your weekly tennis match. With images illustrating the exercises to accompany the text, Safe Tennis teaches you how to avoid these injuries and how to properly prepare yourself with detailed warm-up plans and exercises that specifically strengthen you for the sport of tennis. This includes stretching exercises that are designed by physical therapists who specialize in sports medicine. You will also learn the correct way to cool down after your match because injuries can arise if you let your body cool too quickly. Without the worry of nagging injuries, your time on the court will be that much more enjoyable. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Sports Publishing imprint, is proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in sports--books about baseball, pro football, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, or soccer, we have a book about your sport or your team. In addition to books on popular team sports, we also publish books for a wide variety of athletes and sports enthusiasts, including books on running, cycling, horseback riding, swimming, tennis, martial arts, golf, camping, hiking, aviation, boating, and so much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.


We use a Massachusetts merit aid program to provide the first clear causal evidence on the impact of college quality on students' postsecondary enrollment decisions and rates of degree completion, where college quality is defined by a variety of measures including on-time graduation rates. High school students with test scores above multiple thresholds were granted tuition waivers at in-state public colleges of lower quality than the average alternative available to such students. A binding score regression discontinuity design comparing students just above and below these thresholds yields two main findings. First, students are remarkably willing to forego college quality for relatively small amounts of money. Second, choosing a lower quality college significantly lowers on-time completion rates, a result driven by highskilled students who would otherwise have attended higher quality colleges. For the marginal student, enrolling at an in-state public college lowered the probability of graduating on time by more than 40%. The low completion rates of scholarship users imply the program had little impact on the in-state production of college degrees. More broadly, these results suggest that the critically important task of improving college quality requires steps beyond merely changing the composition of the student body.


The present article discusses and presents a new comprehensive approach aimed at measuring the maturity and quality of software processes. This method has been designed on the basis of software Capability Maturity Model (SW-CMM) and the multi-level fuzzy inference model and is used as a measurement and analysis tool. Among the most important characteristics of this method one can mention simple usage, accuracy, quantitative measures and comparability. Fuzzy logic-based tools are designed to provide such functions.


The title of this book reflects my desire to capture some of the very real activities that communities in Western Australia have established 'for themselves'. Community engagement is a cornerstone of sustainable development. It is based on the concept of encouraging an active citizenry, empowered to make choices and become involved in decision-making processes, policy formation and resulting implementation at the local, national and global scale. If the community is not engaged with attempts to effect the changes needed to ensure a sustainable society then there is little hope of achieving widespread acceptance of the need for such change and its promulgation on the local and global scale is considerably weakened. The refusal of the United States and Australian Governments to sign the Kyoto Agreement is a stark example of the primacy of economic and political considerations over the concerns of the wider community to implement cleaner production and create improved outcomes for their local and global environment.

The premise of this book, therefore, is to provide some theoretical background from a social science viewpoint coupled with a series of practical case studies to illustrate how community engagement and civic participation is taking place in Western Australia within the space created by the concept of sustainability. The book's limited geographical focus does not preclude the lessons from being widely applicable both in Australia and internationally. The case studies range from stories of activists saving forests from logging, to efforts by Indigenous communities to retain aspects of their culture and claim a voice in matters which concern them. They focus on the different ways in which people come together in the community to achieve sustainability outcomes, encompassing environmental, social, cultural and economic goals. Some of these groups are purely community supported, but others have forged relationships with corporate groups or governments. Some of the groups have been very successful and have achieved productive longevity, while one was less successful with miscommunication contributing to its ultimate demise. Where groups of people come together to work as a community interest group, they experience many of the issues that also face corporate entities such as leadership and group dynamics, funding needs, marketing and the need for continuing relevance to their memberships; all or some of which may create particular challenges which need to be addressed.


This thesis is concerned with the use of L-squared or square integrable functions in electron atom scattering at intermediate energies, and tests the success of various L-squared approximations in model problems of electron hydrogen atom scattering. The representation of part or all of the wave and Green's functions by a set of L-squared pseudostates, and the associated occurrence of unphysical pseudoresonances at the pseudostate thresholds is discussed. The original work of this thesis is in two parts. In the first, a model coupled channel problem is considered in which an L-squared optical potential is used to represent the effect of additional (Q space) channels on the first (P space) channel. A method of Bransden and Stelbovics used successfully for a two channel problem is extended to the case of several channels. Numerical results are presented for the cases of two and three channels and the success of the procedure is assessed. The rest of the research presented here concerns the use of the Schwinger variational method in a restricted model of electron hydrogen atom scattering in which all states are assumed to be spherically symmetric. The method is used successfully to solve coupled channel problems using L-squared pseudostates to represent the s-wave continuum. The origins of the pseudoresonances that occur in these problems are investigated and a method of removing pseudoresonances before T matrix elements are calculated is considered. The limitations and instabilities of the Schwinger method when applied to the full model problem with different representations of hydrogen states in the trial and Green's functions are investigated, and various modifications are considered in attempts to stabilise results where necessary in these more general cases.


Although almost all motor activities are silent, the modality of sound can be used to inform about the correctness of the ongoing movement, without interfering with the visual and proprioceptive feedback. Furthermore, the dynamic features of sounds make them particularly relevant for informing about the spatiotemporal characteristics of movements. Finally, because of their (potentially) playful character, sounds are potentially efficient for motivating patients, children for instance, in particular need of such assistance. From these theoretical considerations, we proposed to sonify handwriting movements in order to facilitate the rehabilitation of dysgraphia. Dysgraphia refers to mechanical difficulties in handwriting production related to a lack of motor control in children having neither neurological nor other motor deficits. Nowadays, handwriting movements can be recorded with graphic tablets at high temporal and spatial resolution. Two challenges appeared: first, finding the relevant variables associated with the different sounds; second, finding the appropriate auditory dimension(s) on which to map the handwriting movements. We hypothesized that sound is well suited to inform about hidden variables of handwriting movement (which cannot be supplied by vision) and we decided to sonify two kinematic variables: the instantaneous tangential velocity and the unexpected velocity peaks. Unexpected velocity peaks have been shown to be directly related to non-fluent handwriting movements. Finally, the pressure applied by the pen on the graphic tablet was associated with the global volume of the sound. We are currently testing these movement/sound associations in seven dysgraphic children in a longitudinal protocol of handwriting rehabilitation. The experiment is divided into six 20-minutes weekly sessions. Each session is organized in identical manner, including a pre-test without sound, a practice with auditory feedback and a post-test without sound. In the pre- and post-tests, tasks are strictly identical and thus can be used to follow the rehabilitation evolution, within and between sessions. Preliminary data from the three first sessions revealed a positive effect of the sonification procedure: Dysgraphic children appeared to be able to write faster and with more fluent movements. These first promising results will be soon completed with an additional control group in which other dysgraphic children will run the same protocol without auditory feedback, in order to confirm the positive effect of adding sounds. We propose that sounds may be used as a palliative way to inform about kinematics of handwriting movements and, maybe, to assist movement rehabilitation in general.


The purpose of this study to determine the effect of service quality dimensions including physical evidence, responsiveness, reliability, assurance, and empathy provided by Swalayan Mentari Malang on customer satisfaction and to determine variables that affect service quality on customer satisfaction dominant Swalayan Mentari Malang. Data analysis tool used is multiple linear regression with the F test and t test Based on the results of research and discussion by using multiple linear regression analysis has been done it can be concluded that the dimensions of service quality include the physical evidence, responsiveness, reliability, assurance, and empathy
provided by Swalayan Mentari Malang significantly affect customer satisfaction. Variable dimensions of empathy is the quality of services the dominant influence on consumer satisfaction Swalayan Mentari Malang. Based on the conclusions of the research has been done then proposed some suggestions that the department to further enhance customer satisfaction, it is expected that the department is always trying to improve customer service during the transaction process must be conducted and supported by the attitude of a friendly and courteous staff at the when the transactions are made. On the other hand employees a good quality of education and work experience directly owned it will provide coverage for services provided. It is expected that the department improve the quality of facilities and infrastructure are owned and supported by an increase in the ease to leave luggage at the shop. On the other side of the supermarket is expected to increase the number of products and diversity of products offered to consumers. It is expected the department to immediately respond to various forms of complaints submitted by consumers, it is done in order to give maximum attention to the wishes of the consumers. Concrete steps that can be done is by providing a suggestion box placed at strategic locations so that they can easily be known by consumers.


Information technology (IT) can play a key role as a necessary, but not sufficient, source of value. Contemporary research on the strategic role of IT is more and more taking the increasing dynamic and volatile business environment with its increasing intensity of market competition, demand for shortening time to market and pressure of first mover advantage into account. Following this approach, the strategic value of IT can be regarded as an enabler of organizational change. In order to be able to produce value to firms, especially in turbulent environments, IT has not only to adapt itself to a firm's continuously changing competitive environment, IT has furthermore to enable the adaptation of firms core competences. This study investigates IT's ability to enable these adaptations by introducing and validating a concept of adaptive IT capability which measures the extent that IT enables the adaptations of firms core competences. The result of this study is a validated research instrument that can be utilized in future research to investigate its antecedent enabling capabilities (upstream factors) as well its effect on organizations and their performance (downstream factors).


The objective of this scoping mission is to assess and prioritise the most important English language training needs in South Sudan, in the period following independence, in relation to four thematic areas:
• conducting central and state level official business;
• creating a new national identity;
• integrating with global and regional trade and commerce;
• introducing pedagogic change in the education sector.
A team of two specialists gathered data from 19-22 July 2011. This consisted of meetings with representatives of Ministries, SPLA, SSPS, NGOs, DFID, USAID, BC, HEIs, TTIs, and public and private sector organisations.

Whilst there are a number of current activities intended to improve competence in English language, these are typically small scale, working face-to-face with small groups (of around 20-60 people) over short time frames (typically 3-6 months). WTI are perhaps the largest provider of such training, currently reaching some 3,000 teachers, but much of the training offered appears to be in the form of 'grammar translation', which is not the most effective approach for improving the ability to communicate in the target language. In relation to the scale of need, current approaches seem piecemeal. There is a need for coherent and strategic activity in relation to English language teaching within South Sudan. Effective approaches need to be deployed at an appropriate scale, proportionate to need. Interventions should acknowledge the broader issues around basic literacy, numeracy and communication skills, as well as English language needs.

In particular, the opportunities for using appropriate, low-cost communications technologies (e.g. radio and mobile phone) should be thoroughly explored in relation to all interventions. The role of such technologies is likely to be critical in widening exposure to spoken English language, particularly in contexts where levels of literacy are generally very low. (The opportunity to supplement such resources through print, for example, through ELT pages in newspapers, should be explored, perhaps particularly for more literate audiences, such as Arabic speaking teachers, or ELT facilitators in the workplace.) In addition, for the general population, the opportunity for community based, peer-supported initiatives should be explored.

"Can English really make a difference"? The short answer is "yes": English language training is not a 'quick fix' for South Sudan's problems, but it can stimulate development, is relatively inexpensive and sustainable, and may underpin a range of skills transformation projects.


The global economy is changing and with this, the expectations placed on Higher Education from Governments, employers and learners across the world. In response, Higher Education is reviewing and re-evaluating what graduates need from a careers perspective and how the delivery of the curriculum changes learner capability. It is within this context that Higher Education is developing innovative forms of learning that aim to empower learners and promote the idea of life-long learning. The key to this empowerment of learners is the shift away from didactic, top-down teaching that is designed to transfer knowledge to a passive audience, to an approach where learners are actively engaged in the learning process. The added-value contribution, which enhances the learning experience, is the richness of the technologies that support this approach and enhances learning. This paper describes Northumbria University's Business School move to a research-rich technology enhanced curriculum that introduced an inquiry-based technology enhanced, collaborative approach to learning.


A few years after its foundation (1993), the Centre for Physical Anthro pology at the University started cooperation with the Estonian Anthropometric Register. Together, it was decided to publish the Estonian-language Yearbook of the Estonian Anthropometric Register to preserve and develop Estonian as the language of research in anthropology. By that time, the Centre for Physical Anthropology had also started to publish the collection Papers on Anthropology in English. The article provides an overview of the Yearbooks of the Estonian Anthropometric Register 1998–2002. The covers of the yearbooks were designed by Michael Walsh and the language editor was Leelo Jago. From 1999, all the articles were accompanied by summaries in English. The Yearbook of 2002 is indexed in SPORTDiscus database. All the Yearbooks were printed by University of Tartu Press. The overview presents the cover, title page and contents of the first Yearbook; the following Yearbooks are represented only by the contents and summaries of prefaces by editor-in-chief Helje Kaarma. General characterisation of the five Yearbooks: 1129 pages in total, 125 published publications, 125 researchers as their first authors, in addition to them 171 co-authors; thus, 296 researchers participated as authors of articles. Actually, these numbers turn out to be smaller, as the number of authors of articles ranges between one and eight. Based on this, a table has been compiled about the distribution of articles per number of authors. The second part of the overview presents, as Tables, the distribution of articles according to their first authors by years and the distribution of articles between the authors from Tartu and Tallinn, and from the institutions of these towns. We also add the list of co-authors and the numbers of their participation in the articles of the Yearbooks. Based on the overview, it can be said that the five Yearbooks of the Estonian Anthropometric Register published from 1998–2002, their 125 publications and 56 researchers as first authors and their 77 co-authors, thus a total of 133 authors have a definite and constant role and significance in the preservation and development of Estonian as a language of research in this period. The question arises whether there is any other branch of research in Estonia, the representatives of which would have done anything similar in these years or earlier for the preservation and development of Estonian as a research language in their area, not only published articles in English.


The following research involves an engagement with what will become known as 'the problem of the city' as it pertains to twentieth century British and American poetics. What this amounts to is an analysis of how the extremely palpable 'occlusion' of the city in contemporary poetry is necessarily premised on various socio-political factors rooted in inadequate conceptions of a 'common identity' that have undergirded urban social being since the foundation of Aristotle's polis. Isolating the root cause of this situation in romantic and modernist aesthetic practice seen as promoting a desire for 'closure' in the poem, the research goes on to examine a variety of approaches that tackle this situation in terms of its opposite. The end of the research pitches writing on the city as a 'perilous' undertaking skirting a fine line between the demands for authorial control of the materials, and the necessity to engender a more 'open' poetics independent of the writing itself.
The introduction acquaints the reader with the concept of urban anxieties, as well as the key terms 'urbicide', 'necropolis' and 'melee' in relation to Jean Luc Nancy's text Being Singular Plural (1996) and Bill Griffiths' A Book of Spilt Cities (1999). Following on from this chapter one looks, briefly, at the roots of the problem of the city in both romantic and modernist writers, ending with an exposition of George Oppen's work as a different approach stemming from his engagement with objectivism in the thirties. Chapters three, four and five will branch out to incorporate various postwar understandings of the city that promote aesthetic strategies most able to counter this dilemma in the light of work like Oppen's. The third chapter sees the boldest attempt in Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, specifically as they continue in that tradition of objectivism. Olson's 'root city' is juxtaposed with Walt Whitman's New York, Susan Howe's text Singularities (1990) and William Carlos Williams' Paterson sequence, in order to see how effectively the desire for closure was surmounted from within the bounds of a conservative poetic tradition founded on 'cratylism'.
It is in chapters four and five, however, that the conclusions of the thesis really begin to take shape. By examining the influence of Olson and Williams on the English writers Roy Fisher, Iain Sinclair and Allen Fisher, a way forward is determined for the city and poetry albeit perched between a the desire for hope and a profound despair. Allen Fisher's Place (2005) and his later Gravity as a Consequence of Shape (2004) project are positioned as fundamental to this approach particularly in how they work towards an interruption of linguistic closure enshrined in the very materials themselves. In chapter five romantic aesthetic ideals are firmly questioned in line with the innovations made by Lisa Robertson in both The Weather (2001) and her longer project on the city Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture (2003). Her impulse to see social space in terms of noise or 'cacophony' – that is, not the place of a single interpretation of urbanity as much as a residue of different voices – sets the standard by which an open poetics becomes possible. The conclusion and appendix aim to situate this 'delusional' poetics within the context of a city that is both 'panicked' and subject to ever-greater interference by state historical versions of urban space. Francis Crot's text Hax (2011) remains fundamental in this climate specifically in how it seeks to disrupt notions of linguistic closure through a determined focus on harnessing the tensions manifest in the city itself.


We present numerical simulations of hydrodynamic overshooting convection in local Cartesian domains. We find that a substantial fraction of the lower part of the convection zone (CZ) is stably stratified according to the Schwarzschild criterion while the enthalpy flux is outward directed. This occurs when the heat conduction profile at the bottom of the CZ is smoothly varying, based either on a Kramers-like opacity prescription as a function of temperature and density or a static profile of a similar shape. We show that the subadiabatic layer arises due to nonlocal energy transport by buoyantly driven downflows in the upper parts of the CZ. Analysis of the force balance of the upflows and downflows confirms that convection is driven by cooling at the surface. We find that the commonly used prescription for the convective enthalpy flux being proportional to the negative entropy gradient does not hold in the stably stratified layers where the flux is positive. We demonstrate the existence of a non-gradient contribution to the enthalpy flux, which is estimated to be important throughout the convective layer. A quantitative analysis of downflows indicates a transition from a tree-like structure where smaller downdrafts merge into larger ones in the upper parts to a structure in the deeper parts where a height-independent number of strong downdrafts persist. This change of flow topology occurs when a substantial subadiabatic layer is present in the lower part of the CZ.


Background After cerebral injury blood-brain barrier disruption significantly impairs brain homeostasis. Volatile anesthetics have been shown to be protective in ischemia-reperfusion injury scenarios. Their impact on brain endothelial cells after hypoxia-reoxygenation (H/R) has not yet been studied in detail. Methods Rat brain endothelial cells (RBE4) were exposed to severe hypoxia and reoxygenated in air in the presence or absence of sevoflurane. Changes in dextran permeability and architecture of the cellular junctional proteins ZO-1 and β-catenin were measured. To determine necrosis and apoptosis rate DNA content, LDH release and caspase activity were quantified. The role of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) as an inflammatory mediator increasing vascular permeability was assessed. At the same time, it was evaluated if sevoflurane effects are mediated through VEGF. Results were analyzed by unpaired t-tests or one way-analysis of variance followed by Bonferroni's correction. Results H/R led to a 172% increase in permeability (p<0.001), cell swelling and qualitatively but not quantitatively modified expression of ZO-1, β-catenin and F-actin. In the presence of sevoflurane during reoxygenation, barrier function improved by 96% (p = 0.042) in parallel to a decrease of the cell size and less re-arranged junction proteins and F-actin. Sevoflurane-induced improvement of the barrier function could not be explained on the level of necrosis or apoptosis as they remained unchanged independent of the presence or absence of the volatile anesthetic. Increased expression of VEGF after H/R was attenuated by sevoflurane by 34% (p = 0.004). Barrier protection provided by sevoflurane was similar to the application of a blocking VEGF-antibody. Furthermore, the protective effect of sevoflurane was abolished in the presence of recombinant VEGF. Conclusions In H/R-induced rat brain endothelial cell injury sevoflurane maintains endothelial barrier function through downregulation of VEGF, which is a key player not only in mediating injury, but also with regard to the protective effect of sevoflurane.


Samples from Neogene limestones of the Indonesian islands of Nias and Tuangku, west of Sumatra, have yielded assemblages of foraminifera which include Alanlordia niasensis niasensis n.gen., n.sp., in the Late Pliocene, a new Acervulinid which grossly homeomorphs the Maastrichtian Vanderbeekia of the Middle East, while the Serravallian limestones contain the ancestral A. niasensis primitiva, n. subsp., and the deeper marine and morphologically simpler A. banyakensis n. sp., which grossly homeomorphs Wilfordia of the Eocene.


In circuits implementing system level functions, the correctness of the overall operation is critically dependent on the correctness of the control part. Therefore, concurrent error detection techniques for controllers implemented in integrated circuits have previously received wide attention. This paper presents a new technique for concurrent error detection in finite state machine (FSM) controllers. It is based on the use of monitoring machines. In a monitored FSM controller, an auxiliary monitoring machine operates in lock-step with the main FSM, such that any fault in either of the two machines is immediately detected. It is shown how the monitoring machine provides a uniform mechanism for the detection of stuck-at faults as well as delay faults. Besides being less costly than the main machine, it is also not identical to it. These features yield designs which compare very favourably with previous implementations. Not only is the fault coverage higher, also the hardware cost of the monitored sequential circuit is significantly lower.


Abstract Post-communist Central and Eastern Europe has seen far right movements and parties gain considerable ground by drawing on nativist and ethnic claims to call for a return to an imagined past. In Romania, far right groups have been able to capitalize on a sense of injustice while also playing on historically negative feelings towards the Roma community. These patterns have been observed in Timi?oara, where the group Noua Dreapt? (New Right) has established a foothold over the past decade by emphasizing claims that blame the Roma for loss of built heritage and corruption in the administration of property restitution. The aims of this article are to examine the emergence of Noua Dreapt? and its use of Roma stigmatization, and to consider the ways in which extreme views are normalized by appealing to beliefs and perceptions. The findings of the article show that pre-existing prejudices can be a powerful force that not only targets marginalized communities, but also challenges administrative practices and builds organizational support. At the level of the city, it is possible to identify the way in which these claims can be more precisely calibrated to draw on concerns that circulate within the community.


Context-based modeling is an important step in high-performance lossless data compression. To effectively define and utilize contexts for natural images is, however, a difficult problem. This is primarily due to the huge number of contexts available in natural images, which typically results in higher modeling costs, leading to reduced compression efficiency. Motivated by the prediction by partial matching context model that has been very successful in text compression, we present prediction by partial approximate matching (PPAM), a method for compression and context modeling for images. Unlike the PPM modeling method that uses exact contexts, PPAM introduces the notion of approximate contexts. Thus, PPAM models the probability of the encoding symbol based on its previous contexts, whereby context occurrences are considered in an approximate manner. The proposed method has competitive compression performance when compared with other popular lossless image compression algorithms. It shows a particularly superior performance when compressing images that have common features, such as biomedical images.


Over the past three decades, the financial system has been going through a historical phase of major structural change. This paper traces the implications of this financial revolution for the dynamics of financial distress and for policy. It argues that, despite this revolution, some fundamental characteristics of the financial system have not changed and that these hold the key to the dynamics of financial instability. These characteristics relate to imperfect information in financial contracts, to risk perceptions and incentives, and to powerful feedback mechanisms operating both within the financial system and between that system and the macro-economy. As a result, the primary cause of financial instability has always been, and will continue to be, overextension in risk-taking and balance-sheets. The challenge is to design a policy response that is firmly anchored to the more enduring features of financial instability while at the same time tailoring it to the evolving financial system. Using an analogy with road safety, policy has so far largely focused quite effectively on improving the state of the roads and on introducing buffers. More attention, however, could usefully be devoted to the design and implementation of speed limit.


The Lutheran tradition places a pronounced emphasis on the universal aspects of theological ethics. The present article draws attention to particular aspects of the theological ethics of Martin Luther, which support the existence of a Christian ethics in several meanings of this concept. It argues that a Christian ethics exists in the sense that it presupposes Christian faith, is only for Christians, is realized as a consequence of receiving the Christian faith, is shaped by the Christian faith, and leads to a distinct way of life. Moreover, it concludes that there exists a remarkable convergence between natural law and what is identified as a Christian ethics in the theology of Luther. But it is still possible to argue that, according to Luther, something special is demanded of Christians: They must be willing to endure suffering and persecution because of their Christian faith.


A new and challenging concept for optical storage is being developed, in which the information written on the disc has a two-dimensional characteristic, with the aim of realizing an increase of a factor of two in data density and a factor of ten in data rate over the current 3rd generation of optical storage (Blu-Ray Disc, BD). Experimental channel characterization provides insight into the magnitude of intersymbol interference, signal levels, modulation and noise distribution from the measured signal waveform. This information is used to evaluate the quality of the mastered discs, and provide feedback in the optimization process. It also yields essential input to the actual design of the signal processing solutions. The stages involved in characterizing the channel are downsampling and model fitting using a scalar diffraction model. The information gathered from channel characterization is demonstrated with experimental measurements from discs with an initial density of 1.4/spl times/BD using the same physical read-out system (blue laser and high-NA lens).


Abstract. Differential equations posed over immersed manifolds are of particular importance in studying geophysical flows; for instance, ocean and atmosphere simulations crucially rely on the capability to solve equations over the sphere. This paper presents the extension of the FEniCS software components to the automated solution of finite element formulations of differential equations defined over general, immersed manifolds. We describe the implementation and, in particular detail, how the required extensions essentially reduce to the extension of the FEniCS form compiler to cover this case. The resulting implementation has all the properties of the FEniCS pipeline and we demonstrate its flexibility by an extensive range of numerical examples covering a number of geophysical benchmark examples and test cases. The results are all in agreement with the expected values. The description here relates to DOLFIN/FEniCS 1.2.


Cadastral maps are an important component of land administration in most countries. In virtually all developed countries, the needs of computerized land and geographic information systems (LIS/GIS) has given urgent impetus to computerizing cadastral maps and creating digital cadastral data bases (DCDB). This process is creating many institutional, legal, technical and administrative problems. This desire to establish DCDBs is being given increased impetus due to a new range of enabling technologies such as satellite position fixing (GPS), improved spatial data collection techniques such as digital theodolites and "soft copy" photogrammetry, as well as a vast range of new information and communications technological tools, thus contributing to the advancement and keep up with the great countries. This paper presents the problem of cadastral maps. The hitherto existing cadastre, consisting of paper maps and land registers, is now becoming insufficient. Its shortcomings force developments leading to its improvement. One of the ways is the creation of a Land Information System. A digital cadastral map is the main component of this system. The structure and information content of the map is presented, its differences from analogue maps are shown, and the process of map creation is described. A digital cadastral map can be the basis for additional thematic layers, successively converting it into a complex system for management of administrative units.


The U.S. Supreme Court has shown a notable willingness to reconsider its First Amendment precedents. In recent years the Court has departed from its prior statements regarding the constitutional value of false speech. It has revamped its process for identifying categorical exceptions to First Amendment protection. It has changed its position on corporate electioneering and aggregate campaign contributions. In short, it has revised the ground rules of expressive freedom in ways both large and small.The Court generally describes its past decisions as enjoying a presumption of validity through the doctrine of stare decisis. This Article contends that within the First Amendment context, there is no such presumption. When the Court concludes that a precedent reflects a cramped vision of expressive liberty, adherence to the past gives way. Unfettered speech, not legal continuity, is the touchstone.This practice is understandable. After all, free expression is crucial to political and social life. Yet departures from precedent can compromise the notion of constitutional law as enduring and impersonal. Responding to the tension between legal continuity and the undiluted protection of speech, this Article defends precedent as a tool for separating the trajectory of constitutional law from contested matters of interpretive philosophy. The key premise is that a precedent's perceived harmfulness should generally be irrelevant to whether it is retained or overruled. Perspectives on harmfulness track underlying interpretive commitments that vary from judge to judge, creating a conceptual gulf that the doctrine of precedent is meant to bridge rather than widen. As an alternative, the Article contends that even within the Supreme Court's existing framework, a renewed emphasis on principles of concreteness and content-sensitivity would facilitate a more nuanced approach to precedent. Such a development would embrace the reality that not all speech is created equal — and not all limitations on speech are equally bad. That recognition opens a path toward reaffirming the Court's commitment to free expression while leveraging the value of precedent in promoting a unified and stable system of constitutional law.


Mucosa-associated E Coli are reported to be increased in Crohn's disease

There is a widespread assumption that both of the major inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, arise as a result of a host response to intestinal bacteria. Evidence to support this includes the involvement of non-pathogenic bacteria in the development of colitis in genetically altered animals, knowledge that the Crohn's disease-associated gene NOD2/CARD15 is a receptor for bacterial cell-wall peptidoglycan, the common presence of circulating anti-bacterial antibodies in Crohn's disease, and the role of known pathogens in precipitating relapse in ulcerative colitis.1 We still need to know which bacteria are the culprits, where they are (intraluminal, intramucosal, intracellular) and whether there is an abnormal host response to "commensal" bacteria or whether the bacteria themselves have pathogenic features.

Study of the gut microbiota is not easy. The human gut contains 500–1000 bacterial species2 and around 80% of these have yet to be cultured.3 There is growing evidence that the bacteria that are closely related to or adherent to the mucosa may be more relevant to mucosal inflammation than those in the faeces. Studies of the mucosa-associated bacteria are, however, affected by the method used. The colonic mucosa, unlike the small intestine, has a near-continuous mucus coat4 and bacteria adherent to the surface of this coat will differ in number and nature from those underneath the mucus. Moreover, the surface of the mucus layer, like the faeces, is likely to suit the growth predominantly of anaerobic bacteria, whereas mucus represents a significant barrier to oxygen diffusion,5 so the sub-mucus niche may be relatively well oxygenated by the underlying mucosa and more suitable for micro-aerophilic bacteria. We have found that aerobic culture of colonoscopic biopsies after removal of the mucus layer with dithiothreitol is often …