Bishop Juan Gerardi, Guatemala s leading human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death in his garage on a Sunday night in 1998, two days after the presentation of a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some two hundred thousand civilians. Realizing that it could not rely on police investigators or the legal system to solve the murder, the church formed its own investigative team, a group of secular young men in their twenties who called themselves Los Intocables (the Untouchables). Known in Guatemala as The Crime of the Century, the Bishop Gerardi murder case, with its unexpectedly outlandish scenarios and sensational developments, confounded observers and generated extraordinary controversy. In his first nonfiction book, acclaimed novelist Francisco Goldman has spoken to witnesses no other reporter has reached, and observed firsthand some of the most crucial developments in the case. Now he has produced "The Art of Political Murder," a tense and astonishing true detective story that opens a window on the new Latin American reality of mara youth gangs and organized crime, and tells the story of a remarkable group of engaging, courageous young people, and of their remarkable fight for justice."


Various types of spectral interferences in atomic absorption spectroscopy were investigated. Of particular concern were interferences in which atomic electronic processes are a problem. Source emission of multiplets and other radiation near the analysis line can cause nonlinear analytical curves and poor detection limits. Direct absorption spectral overlaps were found to be of importance in some analyses, particularly for transition elements. Comprehensive lists of observed and predicted spectral interferences are presented. It is concluded that spectral interferences may be of more importance than previously supposed in routine analytical situations. Further, there should be an optimal spectral bandpass for each analytical transition.


Background Alcohol misuse, as well as being a major form of psychiatric morbidity, is also commonly associated with other psychiatric disorders. A greater understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying the adverse effects of alcohol is now possible, thanks to significant research advances made over the past decade. Aims To elucidate for psychiatrists the growing knowledge of the importance of specific neurotransmitter interactions in the effects of alcohol. Method A survey of the literature, extracting current knowledge of interest to psychiatrists. Results There is good evidence that the acute effects of alcohol are mediated through interactions with amino acid neurotransmitters plus parallel changes in amines such as noradrenaline, dopamine and serotonin. Neuroadaptive responses at amino acid receptors probably underlie significant components of the withdrawal syndrome and probably also contribute to neuronal death found in chronic alcoholism. Conclusions An understanding of the pharmacology of alcohol use may lead to greater ability to treat psychiatric consequences of alcoholism, and may also prevent some of the secondary psychiatric comorbidity and later brain damage.


Background. Lymphoid neogenesis is associated with the development of chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD). Activation of stromal resident cells may be an important mechanism of lymphoid neogenesis. Methods. Twenty CLAD lungs explanted for retransplantation were immunohistochemically examined for lymphoid neogenesis, ectopic lymphoid chemokines, and dendritic cells (DCs). Formation of peripheral lymph node addressin (PNAd)+ high endothelial venule (HEV)-like vessels was examined in 134 transbronchial biopsies taken over 2 years posttransplant from 20 consecutive lung transplant recipients. Results. CLAD lungs were characterized by higher grades of CXCL12 in alveolar (P=0.002) and airway epithelial cells (P=0.001), CCL21+ lymph vessels (P=0.01), and infiltration of DC-specific intercellular adhesion molecule-grabbing nonintegrin+ immature DCs (P=0.056) than normal control lungs. Activation of stromal resident cells in CLAD lungs was highlighted by formation of lymphoid-like stroma including expression of CCL21 and CXCL13, fibroblastic reticular-like cells and DC-specific lysosome-associated membrane protein+ mature DCs in association with a significantly larger number of lymphoid aggregates (P<0.001) with lymphangitc distribution compared with normal lungs. A larger number of PNAd+ HEV-like vessels were also observed outside of lymphoid aggregates with a lymphangitic distribution (P<0.001). HEV-like vessels in transbronchial biopsies were more graded in lungs that eventually developed CLAD (n=7) than those that did not (n=13) by 3 years after transplantation (P=0.001). Conclusion. Lymphoid neogenesis associated with CLAD accompanies activation of stromal resident cells and formation of lymphoid-like stroma. Induction of PNAd+ HEV-like vessels occurs before the manifestation of CLAD.


Effective overlap of computation and communication is a well understood technique for latency hiding and can yield significant performance gains for applications on high-end computers. In this paper, we propose an instrumentation framework for message-passing systems to characterize the degree of overlap of communication with computation in the execution of parallel applications. The inability to obtain precise time-stamps for pertinent communication events is a significant problem, and is addressed by generation of minimum and maximum bounds on achieved overlap. The overlap measures can aid application developers and system designers in investigating scalability issues. The approach has been used to instrument two MPI implementations as well as the ARMCI system. The implementation resides entirely within the communication library and thus integrates well with existing approaches that operate outside the library. The usefulness of the framework is shown by analyzing available overlap for microbenchmarks and NAS benchmarks, and the insights obtained are used to improve achieved overlap by modifying the NAS SP benchmark


Increased sulfur loads originating from polluted surface water and groundwater, and from enhanced atmospheric input, are a major threat to the biogeochemical functioning and biodiversity of freshwater wetlands. Sulfate reduction, normally playing a modest role in these systems, becomes the most important biogeochemical process, inducing severe eutrophication and sulfide toxicity. In field enclosure experiments we observed striking differences between the responses of two freshwater marshes to sulfate. On one location sulfate addition resulted in strong phosphorus mobilization without sulfide accumulation, whereas high sediment sulfide concentrations, known to be toxic to wetland macrophytes, were reached in the other marsh without eutrophication occurring. The results could be explained by differences in groundwater iron discharge and nutrient contents of the peat sediments. Sulfate reduction rates appeared to be limited by either electron donor availability (first marsh) or electron acceptor availability (second marsh). The implications of these findings are explained in relation to freshwater wetland management.


Provisioning of rich routing building blocks to mobile ad-hoc networking applications has been of high interest. Several multi-hop wireless network applications need flexibility in describing paths their traffic will follow. To accommodate this need, previous work has proposed several viable routing schemes such as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Trajectory-Based Routing (TBR). However, tradeoffs involved in the interaction of these routing schemes and the application-specific requirements or constraints have not been explored. Particularly, techniques to help the application to do the right routing choices based on a desired metric are much needed. Depending on the application's goals, routing choices should be steered for different metrics rather than the traditional notion of shortest-path in terms of distance. For instance, obstacle or hostility avoidance would require "accurate" paths, end-to-end traffic engineering/balancing would require "minimum utilization" paths, low delay routing for multimedia traffic would require "short distance" paths, and, finally, low loss routing for reliable end-to-end transfers would require "minimum congestion" paths. Our focus in this dissertation is the "accuracy" of paths.
First, we consider techniques that minimize routing protocol state costs under application-based constraints. We study the constraint of "accuracy" of the application's desired route, as this constraint provides a range of choices to the applications. As a crucial part of this optimization framework, we investigate the tradeoff between the packet header size and the network state. We, then, apply our framework to the case of TBR with application-based accuracy constraints in obeying a given trajectory and show that approximating trajectories under such accuracy constraints is NP-hard. We develop heuristics solving this problem and illustrate their performance.
Second, we take our TBR framework to a more general solution by adding automated trajectory generator and end-to-end traffic engineering support. We focus on the context of multi-hop wireless protocols for which application-specific needs are emphasized along with a highly dynamic underlying network environment. We propose a framework supporting a standardized way of interfacing between the network routing and the wireless applications. We use this framework to develop a roadmap-based trajectory planning scheme to engineer the end-to-end traffic over multi-hop wireless networks. We illustrate how our roadmap-based approach can automate the process of planning/selecting the trajectories so that better balancing of the traffic is achieved. We compare our roadmap-based trajectory planning approach to its shortest-path routing counterpart, Greedy Parameter Stateless Routing (GPSR), and show that beneficial tradeoffs can be attained.


After vivid discussions led by the emergence of the buzzword "Big Data", it seems that industry and academia have reached an objective understanding about data properties (volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value), the resources and "know how" it requires, and the opportunities it opens. Indeed, new applications promising fundamental changes in society, industry and science, include face recognition, machine translation, digital assistants, self-driving cars, ad-serving, chat-bots, personalized healthcare, smart industry and more.
The first lesson of the era of "Big Data" is that it is possible to access and exploit representative "samples" of available data collections thanks to the availability of the necessary resources for storing it and running greedy processing tasks on it. The second lesson is that computer science and mathematics disciplines must generate synergy with other sciences in order to exploit these new available "value". The consequence is the emergence of "new" data centric sciences: data science, digital humanities, social data science, network science, computational science. These sciences with their new requirements and challenges call for a need to revisit the fundaments of databases, artificial intelligence and other disciplines used for addressing them with new perspectives.
This novel and multidisciplinary data centric and scientific movement, promises new and not yet imagined applications that rely on massive amounts of evolving data that need to be cleaned, integrated and analysed for modelling purposes. Yet, data management issues are not usually perceived as central. In this lecture I will explore the key challenges and opportunities for data management in this new scientific world, and discuss how a possible data centric artificial intelligence community can best contribute to these exciting domains. If the moto is not academic, huge numbers of dollars being devoted to related applications are moving industry and academia to analyse these directions.


PURPOSE
A number of different techniques have been developed to reduce radiation dose in x-ray computed tomography (CT) imaging. In this paper, the authors will compare task-based measures of image quality of CT images reconstructed by two algorithms: conventional filtered back projection (FBP), and a new iterative reconstruction algorithm (IR).

METHODS
To assess image quality, the authors used the performance of a channelized Hotelling observer acting on reconstructed image slices. The selected channels are dense difference Gaussian channels (DDOG).A body phantom and a head phantom were imaged 50 times at different dose levels to obtain the data needed to assess image quality. The phantoms consisted of uniform backgrounds with low contrast signals embedded at various locations. The tasks the observer model performed included (1) detection of a signal of known location and shape, and (2) detection and localization of a signal of known shape. The employed DDOG channels are based on the response of the human visual system. Performance was assessed using the areas under ROC curves and areas under localization ROC curves.

RESULTS
For signal known exactly (SKE) and location unknown/signal shape known tasks with circular signals of different sizes and contrasts, the authors' task-based measures showed that a FBP equivalent image quality can be achieved at lower dose levels using the IR algorithm. For the SKE case, the range of dose reduction is 50%-67% (head phantom) and 68%-82% (body phantom). For the study of location unknown/signal shape known, the dose reduction range can be reached at 67%-75% for head phantom and 67%-77% for body phantom case. These results suggest that the IR images at lower dose settings can reach the same image quality when compared to full dose conventional FBP images.

CONCLUSIONS
The work presented provides an objective way to quantitatively assess the image quality of a newly introduced CT IR algorithm. The performance of the model observers using the IR images was always higher than that seen using the FBP images in the authors' SKE and SKE location unknown detection tasks. To achieve a FBP-equivalent image quality in CT systems, the authors can lower the radiation dose by using this IR image reconstruction algorithm. Further studies are warranted using clinical data and human observer to validate these results for more complicated and realistic tasks.


Context. Public procurement is an important factor in procurement of products and services by government organizations. It also helps in protection of corruption by applying the principles of non-discrimination and transparency for procurement of Software products and services along with their distribution and maintenance. As India has its own procurement laws and policies, international bidders who wish to participate in procurement cannot take part in the procurement. Also there is a need to verify how the pragmatic requirements can be used in India to maintain non-discrimination. Due to this it has become a challenge to maintain fairness and transparency in its rules and policies. Objectives. This study mainly investigates the differences between procurement process in India and Sweden. The study also identifies the changes that India should adopt in order to be a member of WTO. Methods. In order to conduct this study, a literature review is used to find the public procurement processes in India and Sweden. This is followed by a case study by conducting interviews with industrial practitioners and to validate the above said process with artifact analysis. Results. The contributions are the differences in procurement process of India when compared to Sweden, which is a member of WTO GPA. Recommendations are made to make India to comply with WTO GPA. Conclusions. The study helped in understanding the procurement process in India and Sweden. From the study it is clear that some rules and regulations in India that are used for procurement process lack transparency and non-discrimination. To avoid this India should make a fair procurement policy which is in compliance with WTO GPA. This makes the global suppliers to participate in the software procurements of India. As a result companies can procure new technologies for their software needs.


Context : Pathological process in the gallbladder occur commonly in association with ageing and includes cholelithiasis, cholecystitis and gallbladder carinoma. Detailed histological knowledge will help surgeon, sonologist and pathologist to adopt appropriate plan for diagnosis and treatment of gallbladder disease. Study type : Descriptive type of study. Place and period of study : Department of Anatomy, Dhaka Medical College, Dhaka from November 2008 to April 2009. Materials : 70 post mortem human gallbladder were collected from unclaimed dead bodies that were under examination in the department of Forensic Medicine of Dhaka Medical College, Dhaka. Method : The samples were divided into three age groups i.e. group A (10-20 years), Group B (21-40 years), group C (41-60 years). Histological study was carried out on relatively 20 fresh samples. Result : The mean thickness of the mucosal layer ranges from 0.403± 0.004 to 0.428± 0.010 mm, fibromuscular layer ranges from 0.933 ± 0.012 to 0.948± 0.003 mm and the serosal layer ranges from 0.397± 0.006 to 0.425± 0.018 mm. Statistically significant positive correlation (p<0.001) was found between age and thickness of different layer of gallbladder. There was no statistically significant sex difference was found in between any age group. Conclusion : There was change in thickness of different layers of gallbladder in relation to age. Key words : Gallbladder; Histology; Thickness. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.3329/bja.v9i1.8147 Bangladesh Journal of Anatomy January 2011, Vol. 9 No. 1 pp 41-44


This volume on globalisation and development is part of a larger Elgar Handbook series on globalisation. Its chapters engage two multidimensional concepts: globalisation and development. In doing so, it does not impose a particular conception of either. Rather, authors were given full rein to treat these subjects as they thought best in light of their particular subjects. The volume is structured around seven subjects: international trade, international production, international finance, migration, foreign aid, a broader view and challenges. The volume's chapters provide important insights into each of these realms of globalisation and development.


This paper explores how fragile masculinity has been portrayed in Medieval and Renaissance literature by analyzing the impact of female-crossing dressing on male characters in Heldris of Cornwall's Le Roman de Silence and William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. In the 13 century French Romance that centers on the debate between nature and nurture, Silence is a female raised as a male to circumvent patrilineal inheritance laws who becomes a celebrated knight. In Twelfth Night, Viola cross-dresses as Cesario, an act that results in the unintentional winning of Olivia's love as well as confused (and ultimately resolved) romantic feelings from Count Orsino. By disrupting the traditional gender expectations for women and succeeding in masculine spaces, Silence and Viola reveal the malleability of the constructed gender binary, the complexity of the concept of "nature," and the fragility of other cultural categories, particularly socioeconomic classes. Both texts are implicitly subversive by creating a sense of distance by using an ironic narrator or a carnivalesque inversion, and both end in culturally necessary stabilizing gestures that on the surface, undercut the subversive messaging. However, the successful crossing of the gender boundary highlights the superficiality and flexibility of the boundaries themselves, resulting in enduring subversion.


This article describes FoAM's transdisciplinary, participatory approach to experiential futures. We introduce several practices with a primary focus on "prehearsals" and "pre-enactments", interactive, immersive situations where participants can experience futures in the present at human scale. We explore aptitudes and techniques that are inclusive of multiple ways of knowing and learning, in order to probe futures from different perspectives, as well as foster engagement and commitment amongst diverse groups of people. We discuss why working with futures is particularly relevant in times of social and environmental turbulence and suggest that a more widespread futures literacy can increase agency in uncertain conditions. We focus on "future preparedness" and "inhabiting uncertainty" as mindsets to be developed alongside a futures practice through experiential learning, using techniques from improvisation, play and meditation. We investigate how experiential futures can extend the field by looking at embodied, multi-modal, holistic explorations of futures. We provide examples of FoAM's recent works to illustrate our experimental approach to futures, aiming to bridge the gap between future visions and the uncertainty of everyday life.


SnS2 nanosheets with unique properties are excellent candidate materials for fabricating high-performance NO2 gas sensors. However, serious restacking and aggregation during sensor fabrication have greatly impacted the sensing response. In this study, flower-like hierarchical SnS2 was prepared by a simple microwave method and partially thermally oxidized to form hierarchical SnS2/SnO2 nanocomposites to further improve the sensing performance at low operating temperature. The fabricated SnS2/SnO2 sensor exhibited ultrahigh response (resistance ratio = 51.1) toward 1 ppm NO2 at 100 °C, roughly 10.2 times higher than that of pure SnS2 nanoflowers. The excellent and enhanced NO2 sensing performances of hierarchical SnS2/SnO2 nanocomposites were attributed to the novel hierarchical structure of SnS2 and the nanoheterojunction between SnS2 and the ultrafine SnO2 nanoparticles. The SnS2/SnO2 sensors also exhibited excellent selectivity and reliable repeatability. The simple fabrication of high performance sensing materials may facilitate the large-scale production of NO2 gas sensors.

publisher-specific, author manuscript: http://rsc.li/journals-terms-of-use


Many mathematical models exist for the simultaneous optimization of transportation and inventory functions. A simultaneous model, while giving the lowest total cost, may not be easily implemented in a firm with decentralized transportation and inventory departments. As such, this thesis studies sequential models, where the primary department is artificially given the authority to make some set of decisions prior to the decisions made by the secondary department. Some known formulations for simultaneous models are studied in an attempt to create a sequential process for the same environment. Finally, a generalized sequential approach is developed that can be applied to any transportation and inventory model with separable costs. The generalized approach allows for the full optimization of the primary departmental costs, and then sequentially allows the optimization of the secondary departmental costs subject to a maximum allowable increase in the costs of the primary department. The analysis of this sequential approach notably reveals that when the relative deviation from the optimal cost of each department is equal, a reasonable solution with respect to total cost is attained. This balance in relative deviation is defined as the fairness point solution. Differing cost scenarios are thus tested to determine the relationship between the cost ratio among departments and the performance of the fairness point solution. The fairness point solution provides an average deviation of total cost from the total optimal cost of less than 1% in four of the seven scenarios tested. Other sequential approaches are discussed and fairness with respect to these new approaches is considered.


Federated Learning (FL) refers to the paradigm where multiple worker nodes (WNs) build a joint model by using local data. Despite extensive research, for a generic non-convex FL problem, it is not clear, how to choose the WNs' and the server's update directions, the minibatch sizes, and the local update frequency, so that the WNs use the minimum number of samples and communication rounds to achieve the desired solution. This work addresses the above question and considers a class of stochastic algorithms where the WNs perform a few local updates before communication. We show that when both the WN's and the server's directions are chosen based on a stochastic momentum estimator, the algorithm requires $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ samples and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-1})$ communication rounds to compute an $\epsilon$-stationary solution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first FL algorithm that achieves such {\it near-optimal} sample and communication complexities simultaneously. Further, we show that there is a trade-off curve between local update frequencies and local minibatch sizes, on which the above sample and communication complexities can be maintained. Finally, we show that for the classical FedAvg (a.k.a. Local SGD, which is a momentum-less special case of the STEM), a similar trade-off curve exists, albeit with worse sample and communication complexities. Our insights on this trade-off provides guidelines for choosing the four important design elements for FL algorithms, the update frequency, directions, and minibatch sizes to achieve the best performance.


Insurance and privacy are two important issues in our society. Insurance, in the way that we know it nowadays, had its origin in the 14 century, in Genoa, where one of the first legislative initiatives took place. Since then, insurance has become more important in the international scenario, becoming one of the main guarantees for trade and industry. It has played a fundamental role in the maintenance of individual property, in the preservation of family and in the preservation of health. However, the need to protect the right to privacy started to be discussed only at the end of the 19 century, after the publication of the famous article "The Right to Privacy," written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren. In this article the authors recognize the need to protect privacy, but they do not take into account the protection of personal data, which started to be discussed only in the second half of the 20 century. Since "the right to be let alone," the right to privacy acquired a much larger and protective scope than the one thought by those authors. This enlargement of the scope of privacy is confirmed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which recognizes, in its article 8, the right to the protection of personal data as an autonomous right, demonstrating its importance for our society. Moreover, the advance of information technologies, biomedicine, and genetic engineering in the last decades has led to discussions about the necessity to protect genetic data with the objective of preventing discrimination, since specific genetic exams can accurately determine whether a person will develop a certain disease. These new forms of identifying individuals and of collecting their personal data have enormous relevance for insurance contracts, since the main element of the insurance is risk, and, for that reason, insurers collect and use information about individuals to analyze the risk they represent ∗LLM in Private Law (Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil), Master of Research in European Law (European University Institute, Italy) and PhD Candidate in Law (European University Institute, Italy). A preliminary version of this article was presented at the IUC Conference in Turin, Italy. I would like to thank Professors Giovanni Sartor and Jacques Ziller for their comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article. and to establish premiums. Taking into account this close relationship between insurance, privacy and new technologies, this paper aims to establish the limits on collection and use of personal data on risk analysis and insurance underwriting in EU Law, using as a method the analysis of the EU Directives concerning data protection, specially the Directive 95/46/EC and the recommendations of the Article 29 Working Party, together with a bibliographic review of the European and international doctrine about the


Several sterols and related substances were tested for ability to promote sexual reproduction in Phytophthora cactorum. These compounds were classified as active (oospores formed), partially active (oogonia and antheridia formed, but no oospores), or inactive (no oogonia). Quantitative differences between active substances were noted in respect of the numbers of oospores produced and the time of their appearance. The most active substances tested were 29-isofucosterol and p-sitosterol. Loss of activity was associated with shortening of the side chain of the sterol molecule or change in its configuration, absence of a double bond in the B ring or of a hydroxyl group a t position 3 on the A ring.


The poster describes Pustaka's collaborative strategy on Family Literacy project in 2016 known as "Reading Seeds", which is a program that foster the development of important social skills among children and strong emotional bonds between parent and their children and provides children an essential foundation for engaging with the wider community. Program objectives, (1) to start reading culture as early as possible amongst Sarawakians, (2) create sustainable community based early literacy program opportunities for all children in Sarawak, particularly for those living in socio-economic disadvantaged rural areas. Parents, care givers, toddlers, clinic
assistants and nurses at mother and child clinics are engaged (through community based reading workshop and evaluation) to help enhance the skills required for independent reading, while fostering growth in children's vocabulary, building their confidence in expression and
expanding the background knowledge that they bring to every reading task. In term of urban rural disparities, literacy rates for the rural areas of Sarawak were significantly lower compared to urban areas. From 2003 to 2016, the Sarawak State Library have implemented 3 phases of
Family Literacy initiatives, phase 1 (Born To Read: 2001 - 2011); phase 2 (Every Child Ready To Read; 2012 - 2015 and phase 3 (Reading Seeds: 2015 - ). Through the Reading Seeds program, each baby born in Sarawak's hospital will get a free reading kit (Reading Seeds Baby Pack). The reading kit includes one bag, two baby books, one reading manual for the parent, library registration card and information of the nearest libraries. The Sarawak State library
partnership with the State and Federal Government namely, Ministry of Welfare, Women and Family Development; Ministry of Local Government; Sarawak Health Department; Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development, Ministry of Tourism and Culture Malaysia and the National Library of Malaysia. Estimated projected target from 2016 to 2020, the program expected to reach more than 180,000 children and parents and distributes 370,000 of books to
families state wide. Reading Seeds program creates significant social value for parents, children and the state of Sarawak, Malaysia.


In the recent decades gerrymandering became one of the effective tactics to guarantee the outcomes of general elections. Since elected officials know that they are safe in the next election cycle, they only are to appeal to one partisan interest group. This discourages congressmen from working across party lines and leads to congressional gridlock. In this paper we discuss our approach to measuring gerrymandering of a congressional district. Starting with the ratio of the shape's area to its perimeter as compactness we analyzed which congressional districts are gerrymandered. Furthermore, we deployed Partisan Voting Index data to identify Swing districts and districts with one-party leaning. Comparing mean compactness of all three groups we concluded that the Swing districts are less gerrymandered compared to party-aligned ones. We discuss the challenges, results and future work in analyzing congressional data to understand the impact of gerrymandering.


Informal urban settlements and trade zones represent an increasingly pressing issue for urban heritage developers. In light of the recent revisitation of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, this article explores the current challenges faced at the intersection of heritage practice, urban planning, and informal communities. Heritage recommendations operate within the domain of soft law and their implementation relies on the voluntarism of public parties and the private sector. Such heritage recommendations are thus rarely taken up outside of city improvement districts with recognizable property-owning stakeholders, commercial infrastructures for security, maintenance, and investor marketing. In South Africa, the particular circumstances of the post-apartheid landscape render urban planning frameworks prone to reinforcing the marginalization of informal stakeholder engagement, ultimately perpetuating a socio-spatial inequality such programs set out to mitigate. The civic practices of new social movements and historical knowledge that emerges from the context of informal and neglected urban environments illustrate emergent answers to the exclusionary dynamics of urban heritage planning.


Metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) is a rare group of genetically-transmitted, autosomal-recessive, lipid-storage disorders characterised by accumulation of glycosphingolipids caused by deficiency of Arylsulfatase-A enzyme in lysosomes of cells necessary for formation of normal myelin sheath. The disease can present anytime from infancy to adulthood and is characterised by progressive deterioration of motor & neurocognitive functions with variable prognosis. Though till date, there is no definitive treatment / cure for the disease yet bone marrow transplantation in infancy has shown to delay the progression of disease & gene therapy in animal experiments has shown promising future, making early diagnosis very imperative. Diagnosis is usually suspected on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brain and confirmed by enzyme assays. Hence, in this article we are describing the classical brain MRI and clinical features to make the readers aware of this uncommon but important neurological entity. *Corresponding author: Dr. Rajul Rastogi, MD, ADND, MNAMS, FIMSA, FICRI, Department of Radiodiagnosis, Teerthanker Mahaveer Medical College and Research Center, Moradabad, U.P, India, E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com Received Date: November 14, 2016 Accepted Date: December 15, 2016 Published Date: December 20, 2016 Citation: Rastogi, R., et al. MRI Diagnosis in Classical Metachromatic Leukodystrophy. (2016) Int J Neuro Brain Dis 4(1): 13. Int J Neurol Brain Disord | Volume 4: Issue 1 www.ommegaonline.org


The use of automated action planning techniques is essential for efficient mission execution of mobile robots. However, a tremendous effort is needed to represent planning problem domains realistically to meet the real-world constraints. Therefore, there is another source of uncertainty for mobile robot systems due to the impossibility of perfectly representing action representations (e.g., preconditions and effects) in all circumstances. When domain representations are not complete, a planner may not be capable of constructing a valid plan for dynamic events even when it is possible. This research focuses on a generic domain update method to construct alternative plans against real-time execution failures which are detected either during runtime or earlier by a plan simulation process. Based on the updated domain representations, a new executable plan is constructed even when the outcomes of existing operators are not completely known in advance or valid plans are not possible with the existing representation of the domain. A failure resolution scenario is given in the realistic Webots simulator with mobile robots. Since TLPlan is used as the base temporal planner, makespan optimization is achieved with the available knowledge of the robots.


Reports about mobile wireless technology in the media may be confusing. While we know that the telecommunication industry is in distress, we also observe a phenomenal, indeed unprecedented explosion of the use of mobile wireless devices and services all over the globe. This paper presents a balanced introduction to wireless technology including devices, mobile operating systems, and communication protocols. It discusses standardization efforts, technology evolution paths, and several new and potentially disruptive technologies, some still in the research stage. The paper lists leading global wireless service providers in terms of the number of domestic subscribers and presents an analysis of the six U.S. national operators including their strengths and weaknesses. Only four of them are profitable now. Although the consumer market currently dictates technology evolution, several examples of successful business applications of wireless mobile technology are presented. Finally, the question presented in the title is addressed.


Abstract Background. Intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) has been increasingly employed for treating head and neck (H&N) tumours due to its ability to produce isodoses suitable for the complex anatomy of the region. The aim of this study was to assess possible differences between IMRT and conformal radiation therapy (CRT) with regard to risk of radiation-induced secondary malignancies for H&N tumours. Material and methods. IMRT and CRT plans were made for 10 H&N adult patients and the resulting treatment planning data were used to calculate the risk of radiation-induced malignancies in four different tissues. Three risk models with biologically relevant parameters were used for calculations. The influence of scatter radiation and repeated imaging sessions has also been investigated. Results. The results showed that the total lifetime risks of developing radiation-induced secondary malignancies from the two treatment techniques, CRT and IMRT, were comparable and in the interval 0.9–2.5%. The risk contributions from the primary beam and scatter radiation were comparable, whereas the contribution from repeated diagnostic imaging was considerably smaller. Conclusion. The results indicated that the redistribution of the dose characteristic to IMRT leads to a redistribution of the risks in individual tissues. However, the total levels of risk were similar between the two irradiation techniques considered.


Recent research has discussed the possible role of unsystematic risk in explaining equity returns. Simultaneously, but somehow independently, numerous other studies have documented the failure of the static and conditional capital asset pricing models to explain the differences in returns between value and growth stocks. This paper examines the post-1963 value premium by employing a model that captures the time-varying total risk of the value-minus-growth portfolios. In accordance with existing studies, we find that the static CAPM has no explanatory power for the value premium, and that firm size has only a limited role to play. Our results show that the conditional variance specification incorporating time-varying idiosyncratic risk can fully capture the post-1963 value premium and that the value premium is a compensation for exposure to time-varying risk. This conclusion is robust to different characteristics of value and growth stocks and to the country under review (US and UK).


What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin's Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum's various work practices, this book highlights the Museum's embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum's everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum – the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections – and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum's present – processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn.


The well-known shift to parallelism in CPUs is often associated with multicores. However another trend is equally salient: the increasing parallelism in per-core single-instruction multiple-date (SIMD) vector units. Intel's SSE and IBM's VMX (compatible to AltiVec) both offer 4-way (single precision) floating point, but the recent Intel instruction sets AVX and Larrabee (LRB) offer 8-way and 16-way, respectively. Compilation and optimization for vector extensions is hard, and often the achievable speed-up by using vectorizing compilers is small compared to hand-optimization using intrinsic function interfaces. Unfortunately, the complexity of these intrinsics interfaces increases considerably with the vector length, making hand-optimization a nightmare. In this paper, we present a peephole-based vectorization system that takes as input the vector instruction semantics and outputs a library of basic data reorganization blocks such as small transpositions and perfect shuffles that are needed in a variety of high performance computing applications. We evaluate the system by generating the blocks needed by the program generator Spiral for vectorized fast Fourier transforms (FFTs). With the generated FFTs we achieve a vectorization speed-up of 5.5--6.5 for 8-way AVX and 10--12.5 for 16-way LRB. For the latter instruction counts are used since no timing information is available. The combination of the proposed system and Spiral thus automates the production of high performance FFTs for current and future vector architectures.


In this chapter we look into earlier empirical research on the barriers to e-commerce (EC) adoption and diffusion for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We explore research conducted in the context of information and communications technologies (ICT) in general, as well as EDI and Internet-based e-commerce. What we are interested in is whether these barriers are something new created by the new wave of Internet based technologies. We divide the barriers, inhibitors, or factors slowing down the diffusion of new technologies found in previous literature into those internal to an organization and those imposed by external forces. The basic premise of this chapter is that technologies advance or change, but the barriers for SMEs to adopt them do not. The authors hope that understanding this will help researchers, small companies, and policy makers to move on and do something active to reduce such barriers.


ABSTRACT In the past decade, Brazil became a model for social policies, 'exporting' ideas and techniques to tackle issues on social participation, poverty and hunger mostly to Southern countries, but also to the Northern States. International policy diffusion is immersed in a complex web of relations established among a plethora of actors participating in various moments and spaces. How policies become models for exporting? Why Brazil was elected as a showcase for social policies? Which actors were engaged in this process? The literature presents different arguments that focus on international organizations, think-tanks, epistemic communities, private agents, networks and so on to explain how policy models travel from a place to another. In this study, the action of exporting elites and their circulation between various institutions are put under analysis to understand diffusion. We introduce in this article a new concept of 'Policy Ambassador', a transnational transfer agent, to explain the diffusion of Brazilian social policy ideas and instruments in the areas of participatory democracy, fight against poverty and hunger eradication.


Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) represents a paradigm shift from conventional orthogonal multiple-access (MA) concepts and has been recognized as one of the key enabling technologies for fifth-generation mobile networks. In this paper, the impact of user pairing on the performance of two NOMA systems, i.e., NOMA with fixed power allocation (F-NOMA) and cognitive-radio-inspired NOMA (CR-NOMA), is characterized. For F-NOMA, both analytical and numerical results are provided to demonstrate that F-NOMA can offer a larger sum rate than orthogonal MA, and the performance gain of F-NOMA over conventional MA can be further enlarged by selecting users whose channel conditions are more distinctive. For CR-NOMA, the quality of service (QoS) for users with poorer channel conditions can be guaranteed since the transmit power allocated to other users is constrained following the concept of cognitive radio networks. Because of this constraint, CR-NOMA exhibits a different behavior compared with F-NOMA. For example, for the user with the best channel condition, CR-NOMA prefers to pair it with the user with the second best channel condition, whereas the user with the worst channel condition is preferred by F-NOMA.


Efficient reasoning in large knowledge bases is an important problem for AI systems. Hand-optimization of reasoning becomes impractical as KBs grow, and impossible as knowledge is automatically added via knowledge capture or machine learning. This paper describes a method for automatic extraction of axioms for efficient inference over large knowledge bases, given a set of query types and information about the types of facts in the KB currently as well as what might be learned. We use the highly right skewed distribution of predicate connectivity in large knowledge bases to prune intractable regions of the search space. We show the efficacy of these techniques via experiments using queries from a learning by reading system. Results show that these methods lead to an order of magnitude improvement in time with minimal loss in coverage.


AIM
Oral antifungal agent-induced liver injury is a common safety concern that may lead to patients' hesitation in treating fungal infections such as onychomycosis. This study evaluated risk of drug-induced liver injury (DILI) caused by oral antifungal agents in Taiwanese populations.

METHODS
A population-based study was conducted by analyzing who used oral antifungal agents from 2002 to 2008 from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Database. A comparison control group was randomly extracted from the remainder of the original cohort.

RESULTS
Of the 90,847 oral antifungal agents users, 52 patients had DILI. Twenty-eight DILI cases used ketoconazole, 12 fluconazole, eight griseofulvin, three itraconazole and two terbinafine. The incidence rates (IR) of DILI per 10,000 persons were 31.6, 4.9, 4.3, 3.6 and 1.6 for fluconazole, ketoconazole, griseofulvin, itraconazole and terbinafine, respectively. Longer exposure duration increased the risk of DILI, with IR for exposure duration ≥ 60 defined daily dose (DDD) of 170.9, 62.5, and 36.1 per 10,000 persons for ketoconazole, itraconazole and terbinafine, respectively. Patients taking antifungal agents had higher incidences of developing DILI compared with those in the control group after adjusting for age, gender and co-morbidities (relative risk 2.38, P < 0.001). All of the six patients with fatal DILI used fluconazole. Old age and fluconazole increased the risk of oral antifungal-induced fatal DILI.

CONCLUSIONS
Oral antifungal agents are associated with low incidence of acute liver injury, but which may be fatal, especially for the elderly. Longer treatment duration may increase the risk of antifungal agent-induced liver injury, especially ketoconazole.


This paper reported a three-dimensional microfluidic channel structure, which was fabricated by Yb:YAG 1026?nm femtosecond laser irradiation on a single-crystalline diamond substrate. The femtosecond laser irradiation energy level was optimized at 100?kHz repetition rate with a sub-500 femtosecond pulse duration. The morphology and topography of the microfluidic channel were characterized by a scanning electron microscope and an atomic force microscope. Raman spectroscopy indicated that the irradiated area was covered by graphitic materials. By comparing the cross-sectional profiles before/after removing the graphitic materials, it could be deduced that the microfluidic channel has an average depth of ~410?nm with periodical ripples perpendicular to the irradiation direction. This work proves the feasibility of using ultra-fast laser inscription technology to fabricate microfluidic channels on biocompatible diamond substrates, which offers a great potential for biomedical sensing applications.


A Society for International Development: Prospectus 1984 is a collection of studies that examines the current problems of world development in light of the past twenty-five years but goes beyond an examination of that experience to project practical and workable plans for the future. In this book the authors ask the question what is development? and they invite the people of the world to respond. Is development economic growth, or is it the creation of a new basis for preserving cultural identity? Who should determine developmental policies? On whom should we rely to see these policies through? Combining broad questions with specific case studies, the authors suggest that a new world order is both attainable and desirable.


This study explores the antecedents, mechanisms, influencing variables, and consequences of choking in sport and identifies interventions that may alleviate choking. Through the use of qualitative methods, the experiences of six elite golfers who choked frequently under pressure were examined and compared with five elite golfers who excelled frequently under pressure. The perspectives of four coaches who had worked extensively with elite golfers who had choked and excelled, were also considered. The study indicated that the participants choked as a result of distraction, which was caused by various stressors. Self-confidence, preparation, and perfectionism were identified as key influencing variables of the participants' choking episodes, and the consequence of choking was a significant drop in performance that affected negatively future performances. Process goals, cognitive restructuring, imagery, simulated training, and a pre/postshot routine were perceived as interventions that may possibly prevent ch...


It appears that in mixed quotations like the following, the quoted expression is used and mentioned at the same time:George says Tony is his 'bestest friend'.Most theories seek to account for this observation by assuming that mixed quotations operate at two levels of content at once. In contradistinction to such two-dimensional theories, we propose that quotation involves just a single level of content. Quotation always produces a change in meaning of the quoted expression, and if the quotation is mixed the shift is, to a first approximation at least, from α to 'what x calls 'α'', where x is a variable whose value is determined by the context. We argue that quotation is generally context dependent in various ways, and that some of these ways are presuppositional in nature; we present a detailed analysis of the presuppositions in question.


Background: The electrical field (E-field) of the biventricular (BV) stimulation is important for the success of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) in patients with cardiac insufficiency and widened QRS complex. The 3D modeling allows the simulation of CRT and high frequency (HF) ablation.
Purpose: The aim of the study was to model different pacing and ablation electrodes and to integrate them into a heart model for the static and dynamic simulation of atrial and BV stimulation and high frequency (HF) ablation in atrial fibrillation (AF).
Methods: The modeling and simulation was carried out using the electromagnetic simulation software CST (CST Darmstadt). Five multipolar left ventricular (LV) electrodes, one epicardial LV electrode, four bipolar right atrial (RA) electrodes, two right ventricular (RV) electrodes and one HF ablation catheter were modeled. Selected electrodes were integrated into the Offenburg heart rhythm model for the electrical field simulation. The simulation of an AV node ablation at CRT was performed with RA, RV and LV electrodes and integrated ablation catheter with an 8 mm gold tip.
Results: The right atrial stimulation was performed with an amplitude of 1.5 V with a pulse width of 0.5. The far-field potentials generated by the atrial stimulation were perceived by the right and left ventricular electrode. The far-field potential at a distance of 1 mm from the right ventricular electrode tip was 36.1 mV. The far-field potential at a distance of 1 mm from the left ventricular electrode tip was measured with 37.1 mV. The RV and LV stimulation were performed simultaneously at amplitude of 3 V at the LV electrode and 1 V at the RV electrode with a pulse width of 0.5 ms each. The far-field potentials generated by the BV stimulations could be perceived by the RA electrode. The far-field potential at the RA electrode tip was 32.86 mV. AV node ablation was simulated with an applied power of 5 W at 420 kHz and 10 W at 500 kHz at the distal 8 mm ablation electrode.
Conclusions: Virtual heart and electrode models as well as the simulations of electrical fields and temperature profiles allow the static and dynamic simulation of atrial synchronous BV stimulation and HF ablation at AF. The 3D simulation of the electrical field and temperature profile may be used to optimize the CRT and AF ablation.


The exact solution of scattering by a two-dimensional random rough surface (three-dimensional scattering problem) of an area of 80 square wavelengths with 4096 surface unknowns is computed, and the results show backscattering enhancement. The computation is based on a new numerical method called the sparse-matrix flat-surface iterative approach. The approach decomposes the matrix of the integral equation as a sum of a sparse matrix, a flat-surface block Toeplitz matrix, and a weak remainder that is followed by an iterative solution until convergence is achieved.


Advocates of 'slow scholarship' have called for building relations of care and solidarity across the university. This requires tracing how academia's unequal temporal architecture makes some people's temporally privileged situations interdependent with others' more oppressed temporalities. Understanding such interdependencies is necessary for going beyond mere allyship and toward becoming accomplices in a shared struggle for mutual liberation. But these relations can be obscured by romanticizing the academic project. To de-romanticize academia, we offer a critical, decolonial history of the university. We highlight how, on the one hand, intertemporal relations are mediated through people's inter-relations with and through the land and, on the other hand, how they are masked by colonial ways of thinking. Nostalgia for the university is often tied with an ideal of liberal democracy. Feelings of anxiety about 'speed-up' originate in the liberal ideal of the slowly deliberative citizen in the public sphere. Against giving into anxieties about 'speed-up,' we show that this over-politicizing of temporality has the converse effect of depoliticizing other important political struggles. While jettisoning these problematic assumptions of 'slow scholarship' advocates, we maintain their desires for building relations of care and solidarity. Revealing the university's temporal architectures involves tracing, for example, how the (slow) scholarship of (tenured) faculty is already dependent on the (sped-up) time and labor of graduate students, lecturers, and service workers  – as well as the temporalities of off-campus domestic workers and incarcerated persons. Further, these intertemporal relations intersect with other dynamics, including racism, sexism, labor exploitation, and bureaucracy. We offer an experiment with this approach of inter-temporally reflective scholarship through analyses of the #theRealUW and #DismantleDukePlantation movements at our own campuses of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Duke University. This allows us to envision possibilities for solidarity across different struggles, for expanding alternative temporal sub-architectures, and for amplifying already existing forms of resistance in the university's undercommons.


Background:The effects of HIV infection, highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), and specific antiretroviral agents on lipoproteins in women are not well described. Methods:In a cross-sectional substudy of the Women's Interagency HIV Study with 623 HIV-negative and 1556 HIV-positive women (636 untreated, 419 on non-protease inhibitor [PI] HAART, and 501 on PI-containing HAART), we performed multivariate analyses of associations among fasting lipoprotein levels, HIV infection, and HAART. Results:Untreated HIV-positive women had lower high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and higher triglycerides (TGs) but not lower low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) than HIV-negative women and were the most likely to have unfavorable HDL-C by National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) guidelines. PI HAART users had higher LDL-C than untreated HIV-infected women (107 vs. 100 mg/dL, P = 0.0006) and were the most likely to have unfavorable LDL-C and TGs by NCEP guidelines. HIV-negative women and non-PI HAART users had similar HDL-C levels (55 and 53 mg/dL, respectively), which were higher than those in untreated HIV-infected women and PI HAART users (42 and 49 mg/dL, respectively; P < 0.001 for all). Lamivudine, didanosine, nevirapine, and efavirenz were independently associated with higher HDL-C (P < 0.001 for all). Ritonavir, indinavir/ritonavir, and nelfinavir were associated with higher LDL-C (P < 0.01 for all). Stavudine, abacavir, and all ritonavir-containing regimens were associated with higher TGs (P < 0.05 for all), and tenofovir was associated with lower TGs (P = 0.009). Conclusions:A dyslipidemic pattern was associated with HIV infection itself, was more severe in users of PI-containing HAART, but was not present in women taking non-PI HAART.


The boron–oxygen compound LiB3O5 is recognized as a new nonlinear-optical crystal. This follows theoretical calculations of the second-harmonic generation (SHG) coefficients using the anionic group theory and the complete neglect of differential overlap approximation to obtain the localized wave functions of component groups. An optically perfect single crystal with space group Pna21, grown at the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter by the high-temperature flux method, is found to be transparent from 160 nm to 2.6 μm. It has a SHG coefficient comparable with that of β-BaB2O4 as well as two other outstanding advantages: a high damage threshold of 25 GW/cm2 (at 1.064 μm, 0.1 nsec) and a wide acceptance angle of 25 mrad for θ ≠ 90° and 95 mrad for θ = 90° with a 6-mm-long crystal.


Many end-user sites in the Internet today still have predominantly
IPv4 internal infrastructures. These sites range in size from small
home/office networks to large corporate enterprise networks, but share
the commonality that IPv4 provides satisfactory internal routing and
addressing services for most applications. As more and more IPv6-only
services are deployed, however, end-user devices within such sites
will increasingly require at least basic IPv6 functionality. This
document therefore provides operational guidance for deployment of
IPv6 within predominantly IPv4 sites using the Intra-Site Automatic
Tunnel Addressing Protocol (ISATAP).


Armenia has experienced massive outflows of its people over years. Emigrants' share of the Armenian population stood at approximately thirty-two percent in 2017, according to migration data from the United Nations (UN). Half of Armenian emigrants reside in Russia. Other key destinations include Azerbaijan, the United States and Ukraine. Recent migration is primarily temporary labor migration, unlike the permanent emigration that occurred in the 1990s. Remittances resulting from migration constitute important support to the welfare of households and the domestic economy. Nevertheless, the effects of remittances and migration on labor markets are not fully understood. As migration is likely to continue, such questions are still timely and relevant. The Russian-Armenian University (RAU) survey data indicate that about as many people would like to migrate as are current first-time migrants. This policy brief aims to explore and address the two questions about migration and its effects on the labor market in Armenia. It uses data from the household migration surveys conducted by the RAU over the three-year period of 2015-2017. The brief describes the general landscape of temporary labor migration and presents relevant policy recommendations.


Objective indicators suggest that economic and political conditions improved in Chile between the country's democratization in 1990 and 2011. Average incomes increased, poverty rates decreased, and the number of positive reviews of Chilean democratic institutions rose. Despite this progress, massive student-led protest waves in 2006 and 2011 demonstrated high levels of subjective discontent in Chile. This paper proposes a three-part explanation for the paradoxical emergence and escalation of the post-Pinochet-era Chilean student protests, and, in so doing, contributes to the broader understanding of social movements and political action. The first two parts of the argument relate to generational change. Firstly, a gap between expectations and capabilities provoked discontent amongst a new generation of Chilean students. Secondly, the new generation's collective identity as "la generación sin miedo" (the fearless generation) motivated the students to turn discontent into political action. Thirdly, government and student actor agency influenced the variance in protest strength between 2005 and 2011.


Word embeddings are commonly used as a starting point in many NLP models to achieve state-of-the-art performances. However, with a large vocabulary and many dimensions, these floating-point representations are expensive both in terms of memory and calculations which makes them unsuitable for use on low-resource devices. The method proposed in this paper transforms real-valued embeddings into binary embeddings while preserving semantic information, requiring only 128 or 256 bits for each vector. This leads to a small memory footprint and fast vector operations. The model is based on an autoencoder architecture, which also allows to reconstruct original vectors from the binary ones. Experimental results on semantic similarity, text classification and sentiment analysis tasks show that the binarization of word embeddings only leads to a loss of ∼2% in accuracy while vector size is reduced by 97%. Furthermore, a top-k benchmark demonstrates that using these binary vectors is 30 times faster than using real-valued vectors.


The Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO play an important role in monitoring, analysing and communicating observed changes in Australia's climate. This fourth, biennial State of the Climate report draws on the latest monitoring, science and projection information to describe variability and changes in Australia's climate, and how it is likely to change in the future. Observations and climate modelling paint a consistent picture of ongoing, long-term climate change interacting with underlying natural variability. These changes affect many Australians, particularly changes associated with increases in the frequency or intensity of heat events, fire weather and drought. Australia will need to plan for and adapt to some level of climate change. This report is a synthesis of the science informing our understanding of climate in Australia, and includes new information about Australia's climate of the past, present and future. The science underpinning this report will help inform a range of economic, environmental and social decision-making and local vulnerability assessments, by government, industry and communities.


The U.S. national electric grid is facing significant changes due to aggressive federal and state targets to decrease emissions while improving grid efficiency and reliability. Additional challenges include supply/demand imbalances, transmission constraints, and aging infrastructure. A significant number of technologies are emerging under this environment including renewable generation, distributed storage, and energy management systems. In this paper, we claim that predictive energy management systems can play a significant role in achieving federal and state targets. These systems can merge sensor data and predictive statistical models, thereby allowing for a more proactive modulation of building energy usage as external weather and market signals change. A key observation is that these predictive capabilities, coupled with the fast responsiveness of air handling units and storage devices, can enable participation in several markets such as the day-ahead and real-time pricing markets, demand and reserves markets, and ancillary services markets. Participation in these markets has implications for both market prices and reliability and can help balance the integration of intermittent renewable resources. In addition, these emerging predictive energy management systems are inexpensive and easy to deploy, allowing for broad building participation in utility centric programs.


This thesis surveys the interface between a small rural development and conservation nongovernmental
organisation (NGO) in the north Indian state of Rajasthan and two of the
villages in which it operates. It looks at the genealogy of ideas that have guided this liaison
and at their variegated interpretation and implementation by multiply sited actors. This
ultimately contingent process of mediation, in which mainstream discourses of
development and conservation are diffracted through manifold media, has fostered a
grassroots encounter predicated on the tacit pursuit of second-order conservation (the
preservation of a socioecological system in toto). Using qualitative data derived from 14
months' fieldwork in Alwar district, this study seeks to assess the day-to-day workings and
effects of this emergent discourse in its specific historical, political and psycho-social
structural context(s).
This work is divided into three main parts. Part one introduces the setting of this study,
paying heed, in particular, to extant projects of conservation and development in Alwar and
their historical antecedents. The second section presents an ethnography of the concept of
rational self-interest, which looks at two core instantiations of development economism: the
bureaucratic institutions designed to bring about collective action in resource management
and conservation; and the agency ascribed to actors in participatory modes of development.
Then, in the final part of this thesis, attention turns to the NGO's mediation of conservation
and development discourses, the forms of grassroots action thus engendered and some
consequent changes in subjectivities.
The current study stimulates debate on the lived experience of development and
conservation projects, commonly conceived by critics as monolithic and hegemonic
enterprises. By attending to the dynamic manifestations of these endeavours at a microsociological
level, it serves to undermine such essentialist portrayals in favour of a
relational approach that allows for the complex, contingent and creative corollaries of the
grassroots encounter.


Like the chorus in Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth, those who proceed on behalf of society at large should have both the first and last word. They should possess the capacity to undertake this act of representation, whether in or out of court, with forcefulness and finality. Indeed, a genuine representative should not have to run the risk of others thereafter embarking upon the matter anew and standing in for whomever she is representing, as well as casting aside her effort as irrelevant, insufficient, or illegitimate. Therefore, a societal settlement, particularly when negotiated by the authorities, may have not only contractual but also procedural (or preclusive) implications, which (partly independently of intent) shield the contractors from litigation as well as liability. To that end, it may or may not, depending on the jurisdiction, require the judiciary's endorsement in order to constitute the functional equivalent of a judgment. U.S. and civil-law principles of preclusion bar a subsequent suit insofar as it involves the same real party in interest (namely, the whole citizenry) and assertion (or cause and object) as its amicably averted antecedent counterpart. Judges and lawmakers in the United States, as well as Latin America, have invariably conceded these actions an erga omnes effect; in other words, against anyone with standing who might try to reignite the controversy. Settlers in these cases normally neither compromise on the underlying entitlements nor contract on the rights of someone else. In fact, they may and should vindicate these entitlements fully and facilitate the collective conciliation of claims based on collectivity's own rights. The government, for its part, enjoys plenty of legitimacy to play this role and to settle on, as well as prosecute, these entitlements. In these disputes, the settling or suing actor steps into the shoes of the broader community. The latter, as the interested claimant, may not subsequently take another bite at the apple through a different spokesperson. Otherwise, it would unfairly and inefficiently burden, respectively, its opponents and the adjudicating tribunals in its quest for a windfall. Consequently, the trans-individual settlements and suits at stake should strengthen, rather than weaken, from a punctilious adherence to the requirements of res judicata. They should thereby further legitimate themselves and perhaps even solidify the political and social support from which they benefit.


The purpose of this research is studying and analyzing immigrant's perception of their integration into the labor market in Sweden. It is qualitative study and the data consist from six in-depth interviews with immigrants who live in Ostersund, Sweden and arrived to Sweden at least one year ago. The theoretical starting point of the thematic analysis of the collected data is following concepts: social integration and social segregation, discrimination (statistical, preference, ethnical, racial, religious), cultural distance, self-confidence and self-perception, human capital and social capital.The results have shown that the majority of the immigrants perceive themselves as segregated from the Swedish labor market due to the unemployment, discrimination towards them, cultural differences between them and Swedes, the unadjustment to the Swedish society, and the exclusion from the Swedish social network. However, the employment was not considered by all interviewed immigrants as a prerequisite for the integration into the job market in Sweden. Such country-specific skills as Swedish education and Swedish work experience were identified by the interviewed immigrants as important factors for their acceptance by the Swedish employers.


In his 1999 book, "Disposable People", Kevin Bales brought to light the shocking fact of modern slavery and described how, nearly two hundred years after the slave trade was abolished (legal slavery would have to wait another fifty years), global slavery stubbornly persists. In "Ending Slavery", Bales again grapples with the struggle to end this ancient evil and presents the ideas and insights that can finally lead to slavery's extinction. Recalling his own involvement in the antislavery movement, he recounts a personal journey in search of the solution and explains how governments and citizens can build a world without slavery.


Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, operating in more than 145 countries and employing nearly 120,000 people. Shell produces circa 3% of the world's oil and circa 3.5% of the world's gas. Most people know the company for its retail outlets and its oil and natural gas exploration and production activity. Other Shell activities include:  marketing, transporting and trading oil and gas  providing oil products for industrial uses, including fuel and lubricant for ships and aircraft  generating electricity, including wind power and producing solar panels  producing petrochemicals used for plastics, coatings and detergents  developing technology for hydrogen vehicles. Shell considers it a business priority to diversify its business portfolio to include more unconventional fuels in order to meet the worlds increasing demand for energy whilst minimising the impact on the environment. Hence the need for the development of 'future fuels'. At the present time, any company seeking merely to exploit resources for immediate gain and at the expense of the environment or customers' best long-term interests is likely to generate government scrutiny, public hostility, customer resistance and, possibly, prosecution. Like any well-run business, Shell takes a long term view of what constitutes 'best possible use' of the resources available to it. One key challenge facing Shell is how to use its profits and accumulated reserves to promote sustainable business growth. Like all companies, Shell distributes some of its profits to shareholders in the form of dividends. It needs to invest any retained profit in developing the business in sustainable ways e.g. investing in new oil and gas drilling projects, refinery improvements, and research into, and development of, new products such as 'future fuels'. A company like Shell makes an operating profit from its manufacturing and trading activities. Some of this operating profit  goes to government in the form of Corporation Tax payments and other tax revenues  is distributed to shareholders in the form of dividends  is retained in the business, and invested in exploration, operational improvement and research and development. Together with other major companies, Shell participated in the Sustainable Mobility Project run by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which has highlighted the complexity and importance of making transport systems more sustainable. Some of the initiatives being developed by Shell to contribute to sustainable mobility are outlined in section 5, e.g. developing lower sulphur fuels and building a worldscale Gas to Liquids plant in Qatar.


This paper was stimulated by a striking discrepancy which exists between the frequency with which the concept of potential output is dealt with in every basic macroeconomic textbook and nearly complete absence of any comprehension of what might have happened to potential output in economies in transition. Although the search for this macroeconomic pivotal point may look like solving an intellectual puzzle, the real challenge lies in implications of changes in potential output for effective policy-making during the transformation period. This paper points out some weaknesses of applying standard macroeconomic concepts (like Okun's law) and illuminates the necessity of using indirect and mezzo-economic approaches. Despite the difficulty of making a new definition of potential output operational, this paper suggests the usefulness of introducing a kind of transformation bridge which should methodologically facilitate understanding the concept of potential output when moving from a centrally planned economy to a market one.


Islamic philosophy, which has been an accumulation of relation between pure logic and religious texts ( naql ), has a uniquely different features from the philosophy of Aristotle. This is because the Islamic philosophy has met not only with the pre-Islamic sciences but it also has thoroughly interacted with various branches of the Islamic knowledge such as theology, ta ṣ awwuf , u ṣ ul al-fiqh , and târikh al-tashri ʻ . The interaction has resulted in numerous different thoughts within the Islamic philosophy itself as can be identified among the peripatetic Islamic philosophers. The article is intended to describe that in discussing cosmological matter, the majority of these philosophers put emphasis on Plotinus's concept of emanation. However, the concept has led to distinctively diverse schools of philosophy in Islam. The study finds that the philoso-phers with strong background of scientific disciplines produced considerably different thought of emanation from those with strong background of Islamic knowledge. The first school consists of scientists-philosophers affiliated to the thought of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle though with new concepts they proposed. The second school comprises Sufi-philosophers whose concepts have been strongly influenced by intuition though there have been conceptual differences based on their spiritual experiences.


In this paper, we illustrate our work on improving the accessibility of Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS), presenting a study on human–robot interaction where the end-users are either deaf or hearing-impaired people. Current trends in robotic designs include devices with robotic arms and hands capable of performing manipulation and grasping tasks. This paper focuses on how these devices can be used for a different purpose, which is that of enabling robotic communication via sign language. For the study, several tests and questionnaires are run to check and measure how end-users feel about interpreting sign language represented by a humanoid robotic assistant as opposed to subtitles on a screen. Stemming from this dichotomy, dactylology, basic vocabulary representation and end-user satisfaction are the main topics covered by a delivered form, in which additional commentaries are valued and taken into consideration for further decision taking regarding robot-human interaction. The experiments were performed using TEO, a household companion humanoid robot developed at the University Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), via representations in Spanish Sign Language (LSE), and a total of 16 deaf and hearing-impaired participants.


We propose DeepChannel, a robust, data-efficient, and interpretable neural model for extractive document summarization. Given any document-summary pair, we estimate a salience score, which is modeled using an attention-based deep neural network, to represent the salience degree of the summary for yielding the document. We devise a contrastive training strategy to learn the salience estimation network, and then use the learned salience score as a guide and iteratively extract the most salient sentences from the document as our generated summary. In experiments, our model not only achieves state-of-the-art ROUGE scores on CNN/Daily Mail dataset, but also shows strong robustness in the out-of-domain test on DUC2007 test set. Moreover, our model reaches a ROUGE-1 F-1 score of 39.41 on CNN/Daily Mail test set with merely 1/100 training set, demonstrating a tremendous data efficiency.


Nostalgic descriptions of Italian-American communities have become part of the American cultural landscape. From Mulberry Street in New York to India Street in San Diego, America's" Little Italies" have become artifacts of an earlier period that celebrate the culture and contributions of Italian Americans. While most people are aware of the restaurants, specialty shops, and festivals that are located in these communities, few, outside of academic circles, are aware of the contributions that many of these areas have made to social science. Studies conducted in New York, Boston, and Chicago, detailing the immigrant experience, have become mainstays of the sociological literature. One of the earliest such studies was Harvey Zorbaugh's 1929 classic book, The Social Order of the Slum. Chapter 8 of Zorbuagh's book is entitled "Little Hell," referring to Chicago's "Little Sicily" neighborhood. This article is the story of Little Sicily. Little Sicily does not exist today. It was replaced in the 1950s by public housing, but the community lives on in the hearts and minds of former residents and their children who have stubbornly held on to their memories. There have been a number of articles written about Chicago's Italian communities. Scholars including Humbert Nelli, Rudolph Vecoli, and Dominick Candelore have greatly added to our knowledge of Italian immigration and settlement in Chicago, including Little Sicily.1 No essay, however, has provided a history of Little Sicily after its initial settlement. This article tells the rest of the story. It not only describes the backgrounds of the people and how they came to settle in the area, but also informs the reader of the struggles that they faced in their efforts at assimilation-many of which, are still being shared by immigrants today. In particular, this essay highlights the often adverse effects that public housing has had on Illinois communities. Zorbaugh described Little Sicily as the greatest concentration of poverty in Chicago.2 Zorbaugh was a student of the Chicago School of Sociology, which argued that communities with the highest rates of criminal behavior were occupied by the most disadvantaged segments of the population. In spite of the strength of the relationship between disadvantage and crime, sociologists have come to realize that not all distressed communities are crime ridden. This fact was established for the Chicago School in Little Sicily. It was in Little Sicily that social disorganization theory was challenged by arguing that distressed communities can have a social organization of their own; one that differed from that of the larger society, but one that was effective, nevertheless, in controlling aberrant behavior. Following the tradition of the Chicago School, this article begins with a review of the ecological, social, and cultural conditions that led to the formation of the Little Sicily community. The discussion then centers on the efforts of community residents to establish a socially organized, functioning community in the midst of an urban slum; one that truly provided for the establishment of social order and the needs of its residents. Finally, this article will describe the government efforts that led to the end of the Little Sicily neighborhood and their implication for the larger Italian community in Chicago. Little Sicily was located in the Near North Side community area of Chicago. The Near North Side was included in the original incorporation of the city in 1837. In 1856, a bridge was constructed across the Chicago River at Erie Street bringing settlers to the district.3 By 1860, large numbers of German and Irish immigrants had settled in the Near North Side. They were soon followed by Swedes and other Scandinavians. Although most of the Near North Side was destroyed by the Chicago Fire, the area quickly rebuilt. Immediately after the fire, destitute and homeless families moved back into the district and built small wooden cottages in spite of a new ordinance defining "fire limits" where only brick and stone buildings were allowed. …


Background Most of what we know about concussions has been generated from research findings with adult subjects (i.e., athletes with uncomplicated, first concussions achieve full recovery within 7 to 14 days). Emerging research suggests that younger athletes may take longer to recover from concussion than their older counterparts. However, there is little evidence that quantifies the recovery-from-concussion process in younger athletes. Objective To describe recovery time and the contribution of pre-existing psychosocial and learning disabilities in concussion recovery in a population of high school students. Design Retrospective chart review (January 2012-June 2013) of concussions where there was a documented medical clearance date to return to sport or physical activity. Setting Sport medicine clinic. All concussions included occurred in subjects attending an all-boys' high school. Participants 106 sport-related concussions were identified by chart review. 84 of the charts reviewed had definitive medical clearance dates. Of these, 33 (39%) of the students were identified with at least one of the following pre-existing conditions (PEC): Anxiety, Depression, ADHD, or Learning Disability. Main outcome measurements Days to medical clearance. Results Students were medically cleared to return to play on average 38 days following concussion (range 4–243 days). Significant differences were identified between the group of students with PEC and the group without PEC. Specifically, Wilcoxon Rank-Sum tests (due to non-normal distributions) identified that the PEC group had significantly longer recovery times compared to those students with PEC (P=.03). Conclusions High school students with concussions returned to full activity well beyond the currently accepted "normal recovery" period of 7–14 days in adults. In addition, pre-existing psychosocial and/or learning disabilities resulted in significantly longer recovery times. This information is clinically useful in post-concussive recovery assessment and education of patients and the team supporting their recovery.


The study was conducted to evaluate and analyze the ocular side effects of antihypertensive drugs in the patients and to determine the effects of antihypertensive drugs in causing dry eye disease and intra ocular pressure changes. This was a case-control, noninterventional study of 140 patients (70 cases and 70 controls) conducted from June 2014 to May 2015 in Dr. Rajendra Prasad Government Medical College, Kangra at Tanda, Himachal Pradesh (India). Patients were subjected to detailed history and examination using standardized protocol and Performa. The prevalence of dry eye in this study was 44.3% in cases and 7.1% in controls, with p value of 0.0001 (<0.05), which is significant. Dry eye was present in all the patients on beta blockers and thiazide diuretics (alone or with combination). Dry eye disease was significantly associated with increasing age and longer duration of antihypertensive treatment. It was observed that average IOP was lower in patients on antihypertensive treatment as compared to normal subjects.


Purpose Combined oral anticoagulant (OAC) and antiplatelet (AP) therapy is generally discouraged in atrial fibrillation (AF) outside of acute coronary syndromes or stenting because of increased bleeding. We evaluated its frequency and possible reasons in a contemporary European AF population. Methods The PREvention oF thromboembolic events–European Registry in Atrial Fibrillation (PREFER in AF) prospectively enrolled AF patients in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the UK from January 2012 to January 2013. We evaluated patterns of combined VKA-AP therapy in this population. Results Out of 7243 patients enrolled, 5170 (71.4%) were treated with OAC alone, 808 (11.2%) with AP alone and 791 (10.9%) with a combination of OAC and one (dual) or two AP (triple combination therapy). Compared with patients only prescribed OAC, patients on combination treatment had similar Body Mass Index, but more frequently diabetes (p<0.05), dyslipidaemia (p<0.01), coronary heart disease (54.2 vs 18.6%; p<0.01) or peripheral arterial disease (10.2 vs 3.7%; p<0.01). Accordingly, they had a higher mean CHA2DS2VASc (3.7 vs 3.4), and HAS-BLED (2.7 vs 1.9) scores (for both, p<0.01). Of the 660 patients on dual AP+OAC combination therapy, 629 (95.3%) did not have an accepted indication. Out of the 105 patients receiving triple combination therapy, 67 (63.8%) did not have an accepted indication. Conclusions The combined use of OAC and AP therapy is not uncommon in AF, largely inappropriate, explained by the coexistence of coronary or peripheral arterial disease, and not influenced by considerations on the risk of bleeding.


In this paper, a novel design for a wideband integrated photovoltaic (PV) solar cell patch antenna for 5 GHz Wi-Fi communication is presented and discussed. The design consists of a slot loaded patch antenna with an array of complimentary split ring resonators (cSRR) etched in the ground plane. This is then integrated with a solar cell element placed above the patch, where the ground plane of the solar cell acts as a stacked antenna element from an RF perspective. The design is simulated on CST Microwave Studio and fabricated. The results indicate that an impedance bandwidth of 1 GHz is achieved to cover the 5 GHz Wi-Fi band with a gain of between 7.73 dBi and 8.18 dBi across this band. It is also demonstrated that size reduction of up to 25% can be achieved. Moreover, it is noted that using a metamaterial loaded ground plane acts as an impedance transformer, therefore the antenna can be fed directly with a 50 Ω microstrip feed line, hence further reducing the overall size.


If we accept that the practice of filmmaking is based on the pleasure and desire to appropriate and control an image, it seems hardly surprising that film directors can fall in love with film stars, and vice versa. In the collective imagination, the actress is malleable material in the hands of her male partner-creator. This rigid definition of gender roles within the creative process has been surprisingly challenged and explored in an Italian melodrama of 1912, The Stage (La Ribalta). In it, a noblewoman who has been prompted by an actor (her lover) to step on the stage for fun reveals an uncanny talent for acting. Unable to deal with the humiliation of coming second to this talent, her mentor becomes envious and causes a tragedy. The leading role was played by Maria Gasparini, one of the most appreciated intellectual actresses of Italian early cinema. More interestingly, the film was directed by Gasparini's own husband, Mario Caserini, who treated the subject as a delicate, sincere homage to his partner, focusing on her character as the true creative genius within the fictional couple.


In this thesis I examined the effects of task switching on people's ability to ignore irrelevant distractors. Load theory proposes that distractor interference critically depends on the availability of executive control to minimise the effects of irrelevant stimuli (e.g. Lavie, 2000). Much work on task switching suggests that task switching demands executive control in order to prepare for and implement a switch between tasks (e.g. Monsell, 2003; Rubinstein, Meyer, & Evans, 2001). I therefore hypothesised that the executive demand of a task switch will result in reduced ability to reject irrelevant distractors in selective attention tasks. The research reported provided support for this hypothesis by showing that task switching results in greater distractor interference as measured with the "flanker task" (e.g. Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974) and with the attentional capture task (e.g. Theeuwes, 1990), even when there was no overlap between the stimuli and responses for the two tasks, and when task-repeated and switch trials were presented within the same block (in AAABBB designs). This research also showed that dissociable executive demands were involved in switching tasks (AAABBB), compared with mixing tasks (ABAB versus AAA), and these executive demands were found to control rejection of distractors in the flanker task and attentional capture task, respectively. In addition, task switching reduced internal distraction by task-unrelated thoughts. The contrast between the effects of task switching on internal versus external sources of distraction further supported the involvement of executive control in task switching. Finally, individual differences in operational span capacity predicted the magnitude of task switching costs and flanker interference effects, suggesting the involvement of executive control in both abilities. Overall, this research highlights a new consequence of task switching on selective attention and distractibility, supporting predictions derived from prevalent views on the role of executive control in task switching and selective attention.


On a solid surface a droplet of liquid will stick due to the capillary adhesion and this causes low droplet mobility. To reduce contact line pinning, surface chemistry can be coupled to micro- and/or nano-structures to create superhydrophobic surfaces on which a droplet balls-up into an almost spherical shape thus minimising contact area. Recent progress in soft matter has now led to alternative lubricant impregnated surfaces capable of almost zero contact line pinning and high droplet mobility without causing droplets to ball-up and minimize contact area. Here we report a new approach to Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) actuated droplet transportation enabled using such a surface. These surfaces maintain the contact area required for efficient energy and momentum transfer of the wave energy into the droplet, whilst achieving high droplet mobility and large footprint, therefore reducing the threshold power required to induce droplet motion. In our approach we used a slippery layer of lubricating oil infused into a self-assembled porous hydrophobic layer, which is significantly thinner than the SAW wavelength and so avoided damping of the wave. A significant reduction (up to 85%) in the threshold power for droplet transportation was found compared to that using a conventional surface treatment method. Moreover, unlike droplets on superhydrophobic surfaces, where interaction with the SAW induced a transition from a Cassie–Baxter state to a Wenzel state, the droplets on our liquid impregnated surfaces remained in a mobile state after interaction with the SAW.


Increasing the polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) composition of milk is acknowledged to be of benefit to consumer health. Despite the high PUFA content of forages, milk fat contains only about 3% of PUFA and only about 0.5% of n-3 fatty acids. This is mainly due to intensive lipid metabolism in the rumen (lipolysis and biohydrogenation) and during conservation (lipolysis and oxidation) such as drying (hay) and ensiling (silage). In red clover, polyphenol oxidase (PPO) has been suggested to protect lipids against degradation, both in the silage as well as in the rumen, leading to a higher output of PUFA in ruminant products (meat and milk). PPO mediates the oxidation of phenols and diphenols to quinones, which will readily react with nucleophilic binding sites. Such binding sites can be found on proteins, resulting in the formation of protein-bound phenols. This review summarizes the different methods that have been used to assess PPO activity in red clover, and an overview on the current understanding of PPO activity and activation in red clover. Knowledge on these aspects is of major importance to fully harness PPO's lipid-protecting role. Furthermore, we review the studies that evidence PPO-mediated lipid protection and discuss its possible importance in lab-scale silages and further in an in vitro rumen system. It is demonstrated that high (induction of) PPO activity can lead to lower lipolysis in the silage and lower biohydrogenation in the rumen. There are three hypotheses on its working mechanism: (i) protein-bound phenols could directly bind to enzymes (e.g. lipases) as such inhibiting them; (ii) binding of quinones in and between proteins embedded in a lipid membrane (e.g. in the chloroplast) could lead to encapsulation of the lipids; (iii) direct binding of quinones to nucleophilic sites in polar lipids also could lead to protection. There is no exclusive evidence on which mechanism is most important, although there are strong indications that only lipid encapsulation in protein-phenol complexes would lead to an effective protection of lipids against ruminal biohydrogenation. From several studies it has also become apparent that the degree of PPO activation could influence the mode and degree of protection. In conclusion, this review demonstrates that protein-bound phenols and encapsulation in protein-phenol complexes, induced by PPO-mediated diphenol oxidation, could be of interest when aiming to protect lipids against pre-ruminal and ruminal degradation.


MicroRNAs are a class of small RNAs that are increasingly being recognized as important regulators of gene expression. Although hundreds of microRNAs are present in the mammalian genome, genetic studies addressing their physiological roles are at an early stage. We have shown that mice deficient for bic/microRNA-155 are immunodeficient and display increased lung airway remodeling. We demonstrate a requirement of bic/microRNA-155 for the function of B and T lymphocytes and dendritic cells. Transcriptome analysis of bic/microRNA-155–deficient CD4+ T cells identified a wide spectrum of microRNA-155–regulated genes, including cytokines, chemokines, and transcription factors. Our work suggests that bic/microRNA-155 plays a key role in the homeostasis and function of the immune system.


This chapter provides an overview of pseudo-out-of-sample tests of unconditional predictive ability. We begin by providing an overview of the literature, including both empirical applications and theoretical contributions. We then delineate two distinct methodologies for conducting inference: one based on the analytics in West (1996) and the other based on those in Giacomini and White (2006). These two approaches are then carefully described in the context of pairwise tests of equal forecast accuracy between two models. We consider both non-nested and nested comparisons. Monte Carlo evidence provides some guidance as to when the two forms of analytics are most appropriate, in a nested model context.