The real danger is not pornography. The biggest danger is meeting strangers on line--being molested or killed. (1) INTRODUCTION The Internet (2) is a rapidly growing tool that enables children and adults alike to instantly access information, resources, and other people. (3) In addition to its role as an information provider, the Internet is a communication medium for thousands of political debates and social exchanges. (4) Regulations of materials on and communication through the Internet have just begun to be issued. As a consequence, it is relatively easy for children to encounter materials that they would otherwise be carefully restricted from viewing. In fact, by using a Web browser and knowing how to type simple words, a child can easily come upon material many would find inappropriate. (5) Parents find it difficult to restrict access, because children are often more savvy than their parents at finding and accessing Internet materials. (6) Past government regulations, both federal and state, have attempted to protect children from encountering pornographic materials on the Internet, (7) but a child is at risk of encountering more than just pornography. (8) There is also the risk of encountering dangerous people (9) on bulletin boards (10) or in chat rooms. (11) The people children encounter, sometimes pedophiles, can lure them into disclosing personal information about themselves and their families. (12) But unlike pornography, the threat posed by people luring children into dangerous situations is one that has not yet been dealt with by law enforcement or statutory regulation. Growing awareness of online predators has focused parental and governmental attention on the possible dangers the Internet poses for children and the apparent need for protection. In particular, many parents and privacy advocates think privacy regulation is needed to protect children from disclosing information about themselves and their families. (13) But regulating the Internet cuts close to censorship. (14) Attempts to regulate the Internet are failing. (15) Commentators and advocates disagree over who should be protecting children from the dangers of the Internet--the government, the Internet industry, or parents--and whether there even need be protection at all. The decision of which group should regulate is complicated not only by the legality of giving this power to one group, but, more importantly, by which group would be the most effective protector. Many argue the government should not have any power to regulate the Internet; others believe government regulation will encourage new technological advances because people will have to be creative to conform to new laws. (16) The Internet, according to some, can regulate itself better than any legislative action. Others counter that government is not subject to the same economic considerations that tend to jade industry regulations. The Internet is a unique industry in that it consists of different communities of users, each holding different beliefs about what behavior and terminology is acceptable. (17) People interact with the Internet differently than other previously regulated media. Unlike radio or television, with which a child need only flip a switch to be barraged with information, on the Internet a child must make a conscious effort to interact with someone or something. Unlike dial-a-porn phone lines, which are configured to discourage access by children, children are generally encouraged by parents and schools to interact with the Internet. This interaction is much more like the real world, and in that way, harder to regulate. Regulating Internet communication is like trying to regulate whom children can speak with on the street or playground. There have been two major attempts to protect children's interests on the Internet, both of which have failed. The Communication Decency Act ("CDA") of 1996 (18) and the Child Online Protection Act ("COPA") of 1997 (19) dealt with the protection of children from exposure to obscene materials. …


We present an overview of unique properties of metamaterials, especially negative index materials. These have allowed novel applications, concepts and devices to be developed in the past decade. A review of the progress made in this field is presented with a focus on microwave devices and applications in wireless communications. Since a metamaterial can be regarded as a continuous medium with effective dielectric permittivity and effective magnetic permeability, we present the procedure for the extraction of effective electromagnetic parameters for a guided wave structure with split-ring resonators. As examples, our own designs of bandpass and triple-band filters, which are constructed using metamaterial-inspired resonator elements, are presented and discussed.


Domestic tasks and gender: social representations of higher education students Despite the important changes of Portuguese professional gender roles of the recent decades, an equivalent effect on the organization of domestic life hasn't occurred. Gender inequalities in the domestic space are still common in Portuguese society. This article is based on the idea that to understand the effect of generational change in this situation can bring us important information to better understand this. Therefore the purpose of this research is to analyze the social representations of gender in university students in the context of their domestic tasks practices and also to understand in what measure is the young generation willing to reproduce the model in which they were socialized. The results allow us to say that there is a strong trend of continuity among students but the girls are more willing and prepared for the change.


Tall Horse is a play with a life-size animal puppet about a giraffe sent as a royal tribute to post-revolutionary France in the 1820s. Giraffe is a novel about a herd of giraffes taken from Kenya to a Soviet-defined Czechoslovakia in the 1970s in order to breed a new species for 'the glory of communism'. What pulls these disparate texts into very fruitful engagement is not just the species of animals themselves but why an animal accrues symbolic significance within particular moments in history and culture. Such accruals not only reveal the constructions of human thought but, conversely, may dramatically influence such thought. In their extending of the oft-repeated Claude Levi-Strauss maxim that 'animals are good to think with', Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman point out that such thinking need not necessarily be symbolic but could refer to the human assumption of 'a community of thought and feeling' between ourselves and other animals. Both ways of thinking with animals may be transformative for humans and animals alike, as the primary texts about non-fictional giraffes indicate. This paper will briefly consider the hybridity of giraffes before connecting diasporic theorising with the lives of these charismatic animals taken unwillingly from Africa to Europe. Historically, the respective discourses of science and politics intertwine in the study of the giraffe in Enlightenment France, and in the breeding and then slaughter of the giraffe herd in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. Such mediating representations of 'real' giraffes, the paper suggests, open us up, as members of an audience and/or as readers, to embodied responses of 'generosity' and affect in relation to narratives of nonhuman animals. This journal article is available in Animal Studies Journal: http://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol1/iss1/2


Many factors result in trees with non-straight stems. An important prerequisite to investigating the causes of stem deformity is an ability to assess stem displacement. An ideal system would be easy to implement, be objective, and result in an index that incorporates the essential characteristics of the stem deformity into a dimensionless number. We tested a number of indices that could be measured and calculated from a photo taken from the side showing the tree's greatest deformity. Image analysis software was used to measure the characteristics that define the stem displacement and calculate an index of deformity. This system was tested on trees completing their fifth growing season in a long-term study of the effects of container cavity size and copper root pruning on longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) planted on moderately well-drained, gently sloping soils in central Louisiana.


This thorough commentary on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia draws on legislative history, international and comparative law sources, and the Tribunal's Rules of Procedure and Evidence to analyze its workings, effectiveness, and significance in the development of international ciminal law. In addition to its penetrating commentary, the book provides an overview of the conflict of the former Yugoslavia, an article-by-article analysis of the Statute, and annotated texts of the Rules of Procedure, the Rules on Detention, and the Directives for the Assignment of Defence Counsel.


In recent years, supply and demand of streaming applications via the Internet (e.g., video-on-demand, live TV coverage, video conferencing) have increased. The idea behind streaming Internet services is to avoid a time-consuming download, and instead, make the user view streaming content in real-time without delay. However, today's Internet traffic is routed on a best effort basis without any support for guaranteed service provisioning. Missing traffic prioritization mechanisms to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) and, additionally, the fact that traffic passes several Internet Service Providers (ISP) during transmission is very disadvantageous for the performance of streaming Internet services. Therefore, a solution is presented to enhance existing protocols with QoS mechanisms. Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Operational Level Agreements (OLA) between service providers and service customers are proposed to enforce service guarantees on an economic base and they serve ISPs and Content Service Providers (CSP) to efficiently manage network resources. The concatenation of such contractual agreements between ISPs enables end-to-end-based service provisioning with QoS assurance. A contracting protocol is introduced to control the settlement of contracts and user demands. With the help of service brokers, SLAs could even be traded in a marketplace established for efficient use of limited resources.


Facial expression recognition is a challenging task due to two major problems: the presence of inter-subject variations in facial expression recognition dataset and impure expressions posed by human subjects. In this paper we present a novel Human-to-Animation conditional Generative Adversarial Network (HA-GAN) to overcome these two problems by using many (human faces) to one (animated face) mapping. Specifically, for any given input human expression image, our HA-GAN transfers the expression information from the input image to a fixed animated identity. Stylized animated characters from the Facial Expression Research Group-Database (FERGDB) are used for the generation of fixed identity. By learning this many-to-one identity mapping function using our proposed HA-GAN, the effect of inter-subject variations can be reduced in Facial Expression Recognition(FER). We also argue that the expressions in the generated animated images are pure expressions and since FER is performed on these generated images, the performance of facial expression recognition is improved. Our initial experimental results on the state-of-the-art datasets show that facial expression recognition carried out on the generated animated images using our HA-GAN framework outperforms the baseline deep neural network and produces comparable or even better results than the state-of-the-art methods for facial expression recognition.


The history of slavery and its effects within the United States, especially the impact on the black family and individuals who are African American, have been studied and postulated since before slavery formally ended. What is less often discussed is the impact of slavery on white families and the individuals who comprise those families, or generally the American family within society at large. For both the commission of incest or miscegenation, the event(s) were publicly condemned while simultaneously ignored and hidden, and thereby condoned. Despite the imperative for racial purity, white men enjoyed a presumption of free access to slaves, as well as to freed women. Indeed, because acts of miscegenation were so common, as was their denial, they occurred in transparent obscurity. Further, this white, patriarchal, sexual prerogative was unfettered and all but unchallenged, even when such access resulted in an actual biological, incestuous coupling. Thus, the convergence of the taboos, miscegenated incest/incestuous miscegeny, prompted the hidden exhibition of incest, first for relations between family members of "opposite" races, but also for any correlate relations within a "same" race family. Indeed, acknowledgment or exposure of incest between relatives of so-called opposite race challenged both the social construction of race and therefore the basis for social stratifications. In the least, it calls into question any alleged biological distinction and rationales for this stratification. Unfortunately, it may also be that the social construct of difference may have made these kinds of relations psychologically palatable because the relation could not be considered familial. Nonetheless, once there was silent condonation for the liaisons between a white father and his reflection in brown, it must have become more psychologically plausible that such liaisons could also occur, with impunity, with his reflection in white. The common sense progression within this power dynamic includes the unchallenged access of these same fathers to their white children. Incest taboos have the purpose of permitting the development of children in safe environments, free of sexual exploitation. These taboos also make the interdependence of families within society necessary. The strength of the incest taboo may, alone, be enough to prompt the intensity of the silence surrounding the subject matter, even in the face of strong indicators of its prevalence and the associated problems with its occurrence. However, in the United States, the silence surrounding incest ought to be understood in tandem with the silence pertaining to interracial relations from the era of anti-miscegenation. This Essay is a "thought" piece, relying on historical texts concerning society, politics, and the development of psychoanalytic conventions. The analysis offered in this Essay relies often on the absence of text and direct evidence as a means to elucidate the apparent, yet veiled problem of modern-day incest. It discusses the political considerations and legal thought regarding the connections between incest and miscegenation, primarily from the Ante-bellum South, which sustained the social order of the time. It goes on to discuss the prevailing family and its role in maintaining both patriarch and the racial social order. It then identifies the parallels between the mythologies associated with incest and with miscegenation. It further discusses psychology as it affects an individual victim and situation. It completes the discussion by addressing the possibility of community-based psychology and mass hysterics contributing to the denial of existing social transgressions. The Essay concludes by suggesting how the various constructs identified have modern-day relevance.


A nonlinear random walk related to the porous medium equation (nonlinear Fokker–Planck equation) is investigated. This random walk is such that when the number of steps is sufficiently large, the probability of finding the walker in a certain position after taking a determined number of steps approximates to a q-Gaussian distribution ( G q , β ( x ) ∝ [ 1 − ( 1 − q ) β x 2 ] 1 / ( 1 − q ) ), which is a solution of the porous medium equation. This can be seen as a verification of a generalized central limit theorem where the attractor is a q-Gaussian distribution, reducing to the Gaussian one when the linearity is recovered ( q → 1 ). In addition, motivated by this random walk, a nonlinear Markov chain is suggested.


Aim Spatial autocorrelation is a frequent phenomenon in ecological data and can affect estimates of model coefficients and inference from statistical models. Here, we test the performance of three different simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) model types (spatial error = SAR err , lagged = SAR lag and mixed = SAR mix ) and common ordinary least squares (OLS) regression when accounting for spatial autocorrelation in species distribution data using four artificial data sets with known (but different) spatial autocorrelation structures. Methods We evaluate the performance of SAR models by examining spatial patterns in model residuals (with correlograms and residual maps), by comparing model parameter estimates with true values, and by assessing their type I error control with calibration curves. We calculate a total of 3240 SAR models and illustrate how the best models [in terms of minimum residual spatial autocorrelation (minRSA), maximum model fit ( R 2 ), or Akaike information criterion (AIC)] can be identified using model selection procedures. Results Our study shows that the performance of SAR models depends on model specification (i.e. model type, neighbourhood distance, coding styles of spatial weights matrices) and on the kind of spatial autocorrelation present. SAR model parameter estimates might not be more precise than those from OLS regressions in all cases. SAR err models were the most reliable SAR models and performed well in all cases (independent of the kind of spatial autocorrelation induced and whether models were selected by minRSA, R 2 or AIC), whereas OLS, SAR lag and SAR mix models showed weak type I error control and/or unpredictable biases in parameter estimates. Main conclusions SAR err models are recommended for use when dealing with spatially autocorrelated species distribution data. SAR lag and SAR mix might not always give better estimates of model coefficients than OLS, and can thus generate bias. Other spatial modelling techniques should be assessed comprehensively to test their predictive performance and accuracy for biogeographical and macroecological research.


Background and purpose: Iron anemia deficiency and helicobacter pylori infection are common diseases throughout the world. The aim of this study was to evaluate the association between iron deficiency anemia (IDA) and H. pylori CagA+ infection among children under 5 years of age. Materials and methods: An analytical-descriptive study was performed in Hajar and Kashani hospitals in Shahrekord, Iran, 2014. We investigated the seropositive prevalence of H. pylori CagA+ infection in 59 children with IDA and compared the results with that of 69 sex- and age-matched non-anemic children using SPSS V.20. Results: The mean age of participants in case and control groups was 42±3 and 40±2 months, respectively. The controls and cases included 30 boys and 29 girls and 30 boys and 39 girls, respectively. In anemic children 50% were found to be positive for IgG anti-CagA while in non-anemic group 8% were detected. The results showed significant relationship between the two groups (P< 0.01). Conclusion: Helicobacter pylori infection may induce iron deficiency anemia and CagA virulence factor may play a role in the severity of anemia.


Obscurant representation is a key component of ground battlefield simulation, especially in the infrared domain. Obscurant are special counter measures (clouds) classically used to hide armored vehicles and deceive threatens. Obscurants are very difficult to represent especially because of multi diffusion effects of hot particles and smoke, but this representation is very important to quantify the efficiency of the decoy. This article describes a new model being involved in the simulation workshop CHORALE of the French MoD. The simulation workshop CHORALE developed in collaboration with OKTAL SE company is used by government services and industrial companies for weapon system validation and qualification trials in the infrared domain. The main operational reference for CHORALE is the assessment of the infrared guidance system of the Storm Shadow missile French version, called Scalp. This new model, integrated in CHORALE, enables to simulate the emitted radiance and the transmission of any pre computed obscurant cloud in the virtual battlefield. In the modeling step, the cloud is defined by a set of "voxels" (elementary volume elements). Each voxel contains the spectral extinction coefficient and the spectral scattering coefficients. The shape, i.e. the voxels content, is changing with time to convey the dynamic evolution of the obscurant. In the Non Real Time rendering step, primary rays are traced inside the clouds. For each voxel, scattering rays are then traced to their neighboring voxels and the local hot sources. Actually, ray tracing is used to solve the Radiative Transfer Equation. The main advantage is to be able to solve it taking into account the synthetic environment: the local terrain, the target hidden in the cloud, the atmospheric and weather conditions. The main originality is the multithreading ray tracing which enables to tackle huge quantities of rays in complex geometric environment.


Loss of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) has been proposed to destabilize the atherosclerotic plaque and contribute to plaque rupture, superimposed thrombosis, and acute coronary syndromes (ACSs). We examined whether VSMCs are susceptible to T cell–induced apoptosis and found that CD4 T cells are highly effective in establishing cell–cell contact with VSMCs and triggering apoptotic death. Visualization of the T cell–VSMC contact zone on the single-cell level revealed that both patient-derived and control CD4 T cells reorganized their cell membrane to assemble an immunologic synapse with the VSMCs. Within 4 to 10 minutes, the membrane proximal signaling molecule ZAP-70 was recruited and phosphorylated. However, only patient-derived CD4 T cells sustained an intact immunologic synapse beyond 10 minutes and generated intracellular calcium signals. CD4 T cells that maintained a synaptic contact and appeared to be responsible for VSMC apoptosis accounted for approximately 20% of the circulating memory T cell population in ACS patients and were rare in the blood of age-matched controls. CD4 T cells from ACS patients were also hyperresponsive to T cell receptor–mediated stimulation when triggered by a superantigen and non-VSMC target cells. Lowered setting of the T cell activation threshold, attributable to excessive amplification of proximal CD3-mediated signals, may contribute to CD4 T cell-mediated killing of VSMCs and promote plaque instability. (Circ Res. 2006;98:1168-1176.)


During the Olympiad, an Olympic host country is required to organise and deliver an education programme to schools nationwide. Schools' experiences of engagement with such programmes are often reported on by the government rather than being rigorously examined by academics. Moreover, there is little scientific understanding of how individual schools facilitate the programmes and why different schools engage with the same programme in different ways and to varying degrees, and generate different levels of impact. Looking at the London 2012 Olympic education programme called Get Set, this original qualitative research was undertaken to explore local schools' experiences of involvement with the programme in a non-hosting region, Leicestershire. The paper advocates the use of programme-theory-driven evaluations (in particular a realist evaluation approach) to assess programme implementation. The results provide explanations of how and why case study schools engage more effectively or less effectively with the programme. The results identify the missing links in the programme theory, highlighting the significance of contextual factors at individual school levels, and arguing for the adoption of tailored strategies for effective programme implementation.


The Mississippi Charter School Act (CSA) is under constitutional and political attack. On the first front, litigation is underway challenging the funding provisions of the CSA under the Mississippi Constitution. The second front is a broader political attack against charter schools generally, which questions their effectiveness, viability and impact on traditional public schools. These critical issues have diverted attention from a third, and equally important, consideration: whether the CSA is an effective charter enabling statute. This article addresses this overlooked issue and analyzes the CSA to determine if it constructs a landscape that ensures the creation, governance and oversight of effective and equitable charter schools.
The current constitutional and political attacks seek to prevent charter schools from existing at-all in Mississippi. But if charter schools are deemed constitutionally permissible (almost all similar attacks have failed) and if they continue to grow in Mississippi (as is occurring nationwide), the CSA and the policies of the Charter School Authorizer Board of Mississippi (CSAB) stand as the primary mechanisms ensuring charter schools are effective and provide equitable access. This article provides a critique of the CSA and CSAB's policies and suggests changes to ensure that Mississippi provides equitable access to high performing charter schools.


We numerically investigate the optical field enhancement in metallic microstructures on the surface of polar dielectrics due to the excitation of surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs). The optical field enhancement at the edge of the microstructures is attributed to the contribution of two components: the resonant coupling of the conventional optical antenna and the excitation of SPhPs. By simulation, we found the amplitude of the local field enhancement is up to 106 times. The dependence of field enhancement on incident polarizations and angles is also investigated. The achieved strong field enhancement combined with easy fabrication can potentially lead to promising applications in optical bio-sensing such as surface-enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy.


As one of the most authoritative journals in the field of language planning, Language Problems and Language Planning has a long history. In this paper, we describe the development and changes that the journal has experienced in different periods, the characteristics that have remained constant, and the role that it has played in the development of language planning. To this end, we collected information from the first 100 issues of the journal (1977 to 2010) to build a corpus, and then used software to extract different categories of information. Through analysis of these statistics, we found that the journal is in many respects representative of changes in the field of language planning, following trends in the discipline and clearly and accurately reflecting the evolving priorities of language planning over the years.


We present a novel approach for three-dimensional (3D) measurements that includes the projection of coherent light through ground glass. Such a projection generates random speckle patterns on the object or on the camera, depending if the configuration is transmissive or reflective. In both cases the spatially random patterns are seen by the sensor. Different spatially random patterns are generated at different planes. The patterns are highly random and not correlated. This low correlation between different patterns is used for both 3D mapping of objects and range finding.


All Over the Place traces a personal journey through some of the problems involved in working site-specifically with places in a contemporary context. The project explores the complex relationship between stereotypical preconceptions brought to places and any kind of local reality
that might be engaged with through journeying there. As such, the project asks the question of what 'specifically' is engaged with in working site-specifically in a contemporary context that is increasingly ambiguous, discursive and all over the place. Examining some of the confusions
and contradictions I have encountered through travelling my own site-specific installation practice from place to place, the project investigates problems involved in artists working site specifically with 'other' places as opposed to their own. Reflecting on this notion, the project
explores my own journey to The Central Australian Desert to work with a place that is both familiar and foreign to me as an Australian.
Throughout this journey, I trace how various contemporary theorists and artists have explored these problems and how these investigations have shifted my sculptural response to Central Australia. I investigate theorists who are critical of site-specific practices that engage in 'other' places, such as Miwon Kwon and Hal Foster, as well as theorists such as Michel De Certeau
and Jean Fisher and artists such as Jimmie Durham, who suggest transformative possibilities for engaging in ambiguous territories and methodologies. In response to these explorations, I reflect on my journey through Central Australia as a complexly intertwined discursive and physical
place and the paper sculpture installations I have developed in response. Awards: Vice-Chancellor's Commendation for Masters Thesis Excellence in 2015.


In this paper, we introduce Kathaka, a model trained with a novel two-stage training process for neural speech synthesis with contextually appropriate prosody. In Stage I, we learn a prosodic distribution at the sentence level from mel-spectrograms available during training. In Stage II, we propose a novel method to sample from this learnt prosodic distribution using the contextual information available in text. To do this, we use BERT on text, and graph-attention networks on parse trees extracted from text. We show a statistically significant relative improvement of 13.2% in naturalness over a strong baseline when compared to recordings. We also conduct an ablation study on variations of our sampling technique, and show a statistically significant improvement over the baseline in each case.


"Securing the Vista Environment" takes you on a quick tour of the most significant security features in Vista, Microsoft's first revision of Windows in almost six years. You'll get background on threats and vulnerabilities that will make you think differently about security. Security is more than just the technology and configurations--it's about how we use the system that makes it secure or not. Then we'll cover Vista's security features, from user privileges to Windows Defender, User Account Control, and BitLocker, as well as strategies for protecting your information from unwanted disclosure and accidental damage and loss.


The definitive English version of the stories of King Arthur, Le Morte Darthur was completed in 1469-70 by Sir Thomas Malory, `knight-prisoner'. In a resonant prose style, Malory charts the tragic disintegration of the fellowship of the Round Table, destroyed from within by warring factions. Recounting the life of King Arthur, the knightly exploits of Sir Lancelot du Lake, Sir Tristram, Sir Gawain, and the quest for the Holy Grail, Le Morte Darthur depicts the contradictions that underscore the Fellowship's chivalric ideals. A pervading tension cumulates in the revelation of Lancelot and Guenivere's illicit passion, and in Arthur's powerlessness to prevent a related outbreak of violence and revenge. This generously annotated edition is based on the authoritative Winchester manuscript and represents what Malory wrote more closely than the first version printed by William Caxton. Intelligently abridged from the original to make a single substantial volume, the translation is supplemented by a fine Introduction, a Glossary, and extensive Notes ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.


Amyloid-β and its oligomers disrupt insulin signaling by targeting the insulin receptor or downstream kinases. Excessive production of β-amyloid (Aβ) peptides from proteolytic cleavage of amyloid precursor protein is believed to play a central role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In particular, accumulated intracellular Aβ is found in vulnerable neurons, and the soluble oligomers of Aβ peptides [also termed Aβ-derived diffusible ligands (ADDLs)] are highly toxic to neurons. Evidence shows that both extracellular and intracellular ADDLs can compromise insulin signaling. Extracellular ADDLs can bind to synapses and decrease membrane insulin receptors (IRs) through an insulin signaling–dependent mechanism. Intracellular Aβ inhibits IR signaling in neurons by interfering with the association between phosphoinositide-dependent kinase 1 and Akt1 to preclude Akt1 activation. Together, these findings suggest that agents that stimulate insulin signaling may have neuroprotective effects. Indeed, insulin and insulin sensitizers have been shown to improve cognitive and memory functions in animal models of AD, as well as in AD patients.


Electronic media has a powerful impact on everyone's life today, particularly younger generation of students. They are addicted to electronic media especially the 'monster', Internet, mainly through mobile phones. They are totally immersed in the mobile phones being unaware of what is happening around them at that particular moment. Recently, we came across students who played deadly online games like 'The Blue Whale Challenge' and 'Momo' which ended in taking the life of students. This could have been avoided if the students had avoided the use of internet and if their parents were "media literate". This was the background of this proposal. The students should spend more time on studies so that they can score good marks, improve their knowledge and understand about the society. The students should be aware of what is happening in and around the society they live in. This can be done by reading daily newspapers and most importantly electronic media like Television, Radio and internet connected mobile phones in a purposeful way. The social problems like honor killings, gender inequality, sanitation and cleanliness, pollution etc and their happenings are easily and quickly available to them. The students should use this opportunity and update themselves and analyze the good and bad effects of each. This proposal studies the impact of electronic media in relation to social awareness among high school students in Coimbatore District.


SummaryThis paper accounts for French and Italian figurative verbs of emotion. These verbs are ambiguous in so far as they have a "physical » and a "psychological » meaning. French verbs are extracted from LG Table 4. I will consider the idea put forward by Lamiroy that the psychological use a of given verb can be determined by a reduction of syntactical flexibility in comparison to the physical use. Evidence will be given that at least as far as Table 4 verbs are concerned this is not the case. The approaches of Bouchard and Van Voorst who propose general semantic rules concerning the relation of physical and psychological meaning also fail to account for the data. This will be illustrated by a closer look on French and Italian verbs of anger. Although the devices of metaphorical interpretation can be explained, these devices are not general rules that permit the derivation of a psychological use from a physical use in a given context. Lexicalization seems to be idiosynchratic. Hence, LG has to provide separate lexical entries for the two constructions of any existing ambiguous verb.


In situ U-Th-Pb geochronology was born some two decades ago with the introduction and development of high-resolution secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS or SHRIMP [Sensitive High Mass Resolution Ion MicroProbe]; Compston et al. 1984, Williams 1998, Compston 1999, Davis et al.; this volume, Ireland and Williams, this volume). This technique clearly demonstrated the existence of age heterogeneities within the single crystals of zircon and other accessory phases and therefore the need for high-spatial resolution (tens to hundreds of cubic micrometers) geochronological data. In situ dating by ion probe is capable of achieving an analytical precision that is only an order of magnitude worse than the conventional isotope dilution-thermal ionization mass spectrometry (ID-TIMS) dating technique. It has the advantage, however, of more readily identifying concordant portions of grains, does not require chemical treatment of samples prior to the analysis, is essentially nondestructive, and can achieve greater sample throughputs. A major obstacle to the wider use of ion probe dating has always been the high cost of instrumentation and hence relative scarcity of suitably equipped geologic laboratories.

Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS) emerged in 1985 and rapidly became an important analytical tool for trace element determinations in geological samples (Jackson et al. 1992). It was soon realized that the large variations in radiogenic Pb and Pb/ U isotopic ratios found in nature could be resolved by ICPMS techniques and, when coupled to a laser, ICPMS could be used as a dating tool similar to the ion probe. The pioneering work of Feng et al. (1993), Fryer et al. (1993), Hirata and Nesbitt (1995) and Jackson et al. (1996) illustrated the potential usefulness of laser sampling for in situ dating by ICPMS particularly well. However, these studies and others that followed also revealed the major …


. Understanding the location and nature of Quaternary active crustal faults is critical to the reduction of both fault rupture and strong ground motions hazards in built environments. Recent work along the San Ramón Fault (SRF) demonstrates that crustal seismic sources are important hazards within the Santiago Metropolitan region of Chile. In this paper, we present the evidence of a second likely Quaternary active fault (the El Arrayán Fault, EAF) that runs through the northeastern part of Santiago, in the Lo Barnechea area. The EAF is a strike-slip fault zone at least 13 km-long, has a steep dip (mean dip 77º NNE), and a WNW-ESE general trend (~110º) that cuts across folded rocks of the Abanico Formation and Quaternary deposits. Sequences of meter-wide fault rocks in El Arrayán area are coincident with the tectonic geomorphology of the EAF, with fault scarps, deflected streams, saddles, "island hills", sag ponds and linear valleys in the La Dehesa area and coincident with fault strike from the bedrock exposures. Although direct dating is not yet available, fault exposures tied to fault-related tectonic and geomorphic features that crosscut Late-Quaternary morphologies and deposits (including hillslopes, ridges, landslides and alluvial fans), provides strong evidence that the EAF is a Quaternary active and seismogenic crustal fault. Sinistral slickensides and left-lateral deflected streams indicates a left-lateral kinematics (with slight up to the north reverse motion) for the EAF. Due to the location, geometry, kinematics and likely Quaternary activity of the EAF, this structure is interpreted as an arc-oblique transfer zone of the West Andean Thrust (WATS). If the EAF has stick-slip behaviour, it is potentially an important source of fault rupture and strong ground motions and could be responsible for earthquakes up to Mw 6.4 based on earthquake scaling laws and microseismicity observations in and around Santiago. The lack of fault zone avoidance criteria ( i.e., do not build in and around active faults) in Chilean law, requires immediate enhanced fault mapping, legislation and the implementation of active fault rupture avoidance areas to reduce the risk associated with active crustal structures in the built environment.


The large use of nitrogen (N) and the finite nature of global phosphorus (P) resources
have led to increasing concerns about balancing agronomic, environmental and
economic gains from N and P use on dairy farms. Nitrogen and P inputs, in the form of
fertiliser and concentrates, are key drivers of increased herbage yields and milk saleable
output on most dairy farms. However, N and P inputs typically exceed N and P outputs
in milk and livestock exported off the farms. Increased N and P use efficiency (NUE
and PUE) may be considered as a strategy to reduce the expenditures on the main N and
P inputs on dairy farms. Data from a 3 year (2009-2011) survey were used to assess
farm-gate N and P balances and NUE and PUE on 21 intensive grass-based dairy farms
operating under the Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) regulations in Ireland, as well as
the economic implications of NUE and PUE on 19 of these farms and the sensitivity of
net profit to changes in milk and fertiliser N prices. Comparative profitability and
sensitivity to changes in milk and fertiliser N prices of ten N fertilised grass (FN) and
eight grass-white clover-based (WC) dairy systems were also investigated. Mean
balances for the 21 farms were 175 kg N ha-1 and 5.09 kg P ha-1, respectively, or 0.28
kg N kg MS-1 (milk solids), and 0.004 kg P kg MS-1, respectively. Mean NUE was 0.23
and mean PUE was 0.70. Comparison to similar studies carried out before the
introduction of the GAP regulations in 2006 indicates that N and P balances have
significantly decreased (by 40 and 74 %, respectively) and NUE and PUE increased (by
27 % and 48 %, respectively), mostly due to decreased inorganic fertiliser input and a
notable shift towards spring application of organic manures. Mean net profit was €598
ha-1 and was driven mainly by milk receipts and to a lesser extent by expenditure on
mineral fertilisers. Net profit was indirectly related to N and P surplus and N and P use
efficiency. The results of this study generally indicate that Irish dairy farms, as low
input production systems, have the potential to achieve both economic (as indicated by
net profit per ha) and environmental (as indicated by N and P balances per ha, N and P
use efficiency and N-eco-efficiency) sustainability. The results of the sensitivity
analysis indicated that milk price was the main driver for changes in net profit between
2009 and 2011 both in high and low milk price situations investigated across nine price
scenarios. Net profit was similar for FN and WC (€1,274 ha-1) mainly due to €148 ha-1
lower expenditure on mineral N fertiliser on WC. Net profit of WC was found to be
comparably less sensitive than FN in low milk price situations. A wider adoption of WC
on farms offers potential to meet the twin goals of a sustainable income for dairy
farmers in the context of rising fertiliser N price while decreasing N surpluses on
pasture-based dairy farms.


We statistically evaluated the relative orientation between gas column density structures, inferred from Herschel submillimetre observations, and the magnetic field projected on the plane of sky, inferred from polarized thermal emission of Galactic dust observed by the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimetre Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol) at 250, 350, and 500 μm, towards the Vela C molecular complex. First, we find very good agreement between the polarization orientations in the three wavelength-bands, suggesting that, at the considered common angular resolution of 3.0 that corresponds to a physical scale of approximately 0.61 pc, the inferred magnetic field orientation is not significantly affected by temperature or dust grain alignment effects. Second, we find that the relative orientation between gas column density structures and the magnetic field changes progressively with increasing gas column density, from mostly parallel or having no preferred orientation at low column densities to mostly perpendicular at the highest column densities. This observation is in agreement with previous studies by the Planck collaboration towards more nearby molecular clouds. Finally, we find a correspondencebetween (a) the trends in relative orientation between the column density structures and the projected magnetic field; and (b) the shape of the column density probability distribution functions (PDFs). In the sub-regions of Vela C dominated by one clear filamentary structure, or "ridges", where the high-column density tails of the PDFs are flatter, we find a sharp transition from preferentially parallel or having no preferred relative orientation at low column densities to preferentially perpendicular at highest column densities. In the sub-regions of Vela C dominated by several filamentary structures with multiple orientations, or "nests", where the maximum values of the column density are smaller than in the ridge-like sub-regions and the high-column density tails of the PDFs are steeper, such a transition is also present, but it is clearly less sharp than in the ridge-like sub-regions. Both of these results suggest that the magnetic field is dynamically important for the formation of density structures in this region.


The mean oxygen-18 content of continental ice sheets during the last glacial maximum is estimated to δO18=-30 per mille or less, and the consequent change in the isotopic composition of the oceans at that time to 1.2 per mille or more. This means that at least 70 percent of the oxygen-18 variations found in shells of planktonic foraminifera from deep-sea cores between times of glacial maximums and minimums are due to isotopic changes in ocean water, and at most 30 percent to changes in ocean surface temperature. Hence, Emiliani's "paleotemperature" curve rather depicts the amount of ice on the continents in excess of that present today. In this sense it may be renamed a "paleoglaciation" curve.


Here in Washington, we talk a lot about the need for change - changing our priorities or the way we do business. For children, however, change can be frightening, and the middle school years are a time of dramatic change for them. Young adolescents are grappling with confusing and often difficult changes in their emotions, their bodies, their schools, their schedules, and the social and academic expectations placed upon them. Middle school administrators, teachers, and support staff face unique challenges, and to succeed, these professionals need help and support from parents and community leaders as well as the government. Unfortunately, government has not always lived up to its end of the bargain. When President Bush signed No Child Left Behind, burdening the middle grades with new high expectations for accountability and assessment, the Bush Administration and Congress promised to provide the funding schools and teachers would need to make the program successful. That promise was not kept. We do need change in Washington - change in the way we think about our middle schools and in what we can do to help meet the high expectations we have set - and change in the high expectations we want young adolescents to set for themselves. My interest in middle school education began as attorney general of the state of Rhode Island. I was elected to that position after having served as Rhode Island's United States attorney. As U.S. attorney, I prosecuted bank robbers, polluters, corrupt public officials, those accused of fraud, drug dealers, and other traditional adult criminals. But when I was elected state attorney general, something changed - I was prosecuting children. In fact, nearly 2,000 juvenile cases came across my desk each year involving everything from drug offenses and gang-related activity to so-called status offenses, like truancy and running away from home, that are not crimes for adults. As I tried to understand what was behind these cases, what had gone wrong in these young peoples' lives, a common tipping point seemed to be failure in middle school. It was middle school where these kids started to get seriously off track. At the same time, these young adolescents also appeared still open to positive influences. At that age, students are still children, and dedicated teachers can instill in them the importance of education. High school seemed too late; the "bad habits" like truancy had already taken hold. We also found that one of the best predictors of middle school failure was truancy, often catastrophic truancy - 60, 90, or 100 days of unexcused absence from school. Studies show that youth who are chronically truant are more likely to use drugs, become delinquent, and drop out of school - data that bears out what we were seeing in Rhode Island (Henry & Huizinga, 2007). So, in an effort to build the proverbial fence at the top of the hill instead of waiting for the wrecks at the bottom, my office tried to intervene. We started with truancy enforcement. We discovered that local police officers mistakenly thought they could not pick up kids for truancy. Working with the police department and the local faith community, we established a program for officers to take truant young people back to their schools. This approach worked in theory, as the schools and the police department came together to implement the project. But at the grassroots level, teachers objected. Faced with overcrowded classrooms, reluctant to deal with students brought back to school by a police escort, unwilling to take time away from the children who did show up to class trying to learn, teachers sent a clear signal back to police officers (Find a police officer who does not have a teacher somewhere in the family!) that these kids were a disrupture presence in the schools. The fence we were trying to build, it seemed, was still too far down the hill. We realized that dealing with the entire city of Providence was probably too ambitious. …


I can see a nose and two eyes in the bushes!" cries Hattie. But nobody is listening. "I can see a nose, two eyes, two ears, two legs, and a body in the bushes!" cries Hattie. But no one is paying a bit of attention. Not goose. Not pig. Not horse. Not cow. She tries again and again to warn her friends of danger, but nobody listens to Hattie. That is, until they all realize that what Hattie is saying is true!


Objective: This study aimed at qualitatively evaluating the remineralization potential of casein phosphopeptide amorphous calcium phosphate on artificial early enamel lesions in an ex-vivo scenario by observing the treated tooth surface using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Materials and Methods: This randomized study was conducted on 10 subjects undergoing orthodontic treatment with premolar extraction as part of their treatment. Artificial white lesions were created with the application of 37% phosphoric acid for 20 mins. Teeth were then divided into two groups: one experimental and the other control. Customised orthodontic band with a window was luted with intermediate restorative material in the experimental group whereas in the control group, band without a window was luted. The casein phosphopeptide amorphous calcium phosphate (GC TOOTH MOUSSE) paste was then applied on the window region of the experimental group for 3 mins thrice daily after meals for 14 days, whereas no paste was applied in the control group. After 14 days, teeth were extracted and viewed under an SEM. Results: The study groups showed remineralization of the lesions as compared with the control group in most of the samples. Conclusion: Casein phophopeptide could significantly remineralize the artificial enamel lesions in vivo.


Resonance Raman microspectroscopy in combination with hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) is one of the most promising tools for the rapid examination of complex biological and medical samples. HCA is a ready, computerized tool for examining large sets of data for common characteristics, and a multitude of algorithms for this purpose have been developed over the years. However, resonance Raman spectra obtained from complex biological samples may originate from different chromophores as well as from a common chromophore found in different host environments, i.e., bacteria. Therefore, algorithms applied to resonance Raman spectra must handle data of high intrinsic similarity, i.e., spectra originating from a common chromophore, and data with highly dissimilar features, i.e., spectra from different chromophores, in the same unsupervised analysis. We examined the performance of eight widely used algorithms for hierarchical cluster analysis in clustering resonance Raman spectra of bacteria: Single-Linkage (Nearest-Neighbor), Complete-Linkage (Farthest-Neighbor), Average-Linkage, Weighted-Average-Linkage, Centroid, Median, and the Ward algorithm. Algorithm performance was evaluated by comparing the results of clustering a set of high-quality reference spectra with the results obtained when clustering a set of spectra recorded from single cells. References were formed by averaging 100 spectra of individual cells. While all algorithms returned highly similar results when clustering the reference spectra, their performance differed significantly when applied to single spectra. The best-performing algorithm, Weighted-Average-Linkage, correctly grouped single spectra with a reliability of above 95% while the spectral distances between the clusters deviated less than 10% from the results obtained with reference spectra. In contrast, the algorithm performing worst showed no similarity to the reference clustering at all. The widely used Ward algorithm deviated up to 30% from the reference in the spectral distances and returned a different spectral relation between bacteria expressing the same chromophore.


The Eocene limestones around the Italian village of Bolca occur in a series of distinct localities providing a unique snapshot of marine life in the early Cenozoic. Famous for its fishes, the localities of Bolca also yield diverse invertebrate faunas and a rich, but relatively understudied flora. Most fossils from Bolca derive from the Pesciara and Monte Postale sites, which bear similar fossils but are characterized by slightly different taphonomic and environmental profiles. Although not precisely contemporaneous, the age of these principal localities is well constrained to a narrow interval within the Ypresian Stage, c. 50–49 Ma. This places Bolca at a critical time in the evolutionary assembly of modern marine fish diversity and of reef communities more generally.


"The standard historical image of Jean-Luc Godard is that of a resolute iconoclast breaking with the representational norms and codes of classical cinema in the name of liberating film from the deadening weight of its past. His numerous formal innovations—syncopated montage, unconventional framing, unique experiments with dialogue, etc.—along with his abandonment of traditional narrative and character development, his playful pastiche of genres, his debunking of the representational illusions of cinematic realism, his reflexive preoccupation with film itself and the general dissolution of the distinction between high and low art have created a potent new form of cinema that continues to have far-reaching effects. More experimental than Truffaut, more temerarious than Chabrol, but less fastidious than Resnais, less obtuse and prolix than Rivette, Godard is seen as the bumptious enfant terrible of the Cahiers du cinema who set the agenda for a new era of modernist filmmaking..."


Ultrasonic power is very effective in the mechanical analysis of fine-grained sedimentary rocks, such as clays, shales, and siltstones. An ultrasonic instrument which generates power from the tip of a cone-shaped mechanical transformer is much more effective than "tank-type" instruments. The ultrasonic method is very rapid and satisfactory for most fine-grained sedimentary rocks; however hard black shales are very refractory and require considerable time for complete disaggregation. Material coarser than clay-size is very satisfactorily disaggregated for size analysis; due to the micalike structure of some of the clay minerals, considerable alteration of grains probably occurs within the clay-size range, but this has no effect on size analysis for total sand, silt, and clay.


The genotypic variance within, sigma 2w, and between, sigma 2b, random mating populations and rates and times for convergence to equilibrium values from different founder populations are formulated for an additive genetic model with an arbitrary number of alleles k, number of loci m, population size N, and mutation rate u, with unequal mutation rates for alleles. As a base of reference, the additive variance sigma 2a in an infinite equilibrium population is used. sigma 2a increases as k increases and decreases with variation in the mutation rates. Both transitional and equilibrium values of the variance within populations could be expressed as sigma 2w = (1 - theta)sigma 2a, where theta is the coancestry with mutations of individuals within populations. Thus, rates of convergence and evolutionary times are a function of those for theta, which involves both N and u. When the founder population is fixed, very long times are required to obtain a perceptible increase in sigma 2w and equilibrium values of sigma 2w are very small when 4Nu less than or equal to 10(-1). The variance between populations can be expressed as sigma 2b = 2 theta sigma 2a when the founder population is an infinite equilibrium population, and as sigma 2b = 2(theta - alpha)sigma 2a when the founder population is fixed, where alpha is a function only of u. In this latter case, rates of divergence, while affected by both N and u, are dominated by u and asymptotically a function of u only. With u = 10(-5), very long times (10(3) generations) are required for any perceptible divergence, even for N = 1-10. At equilibrium, most of the variance is between small populations and within very large populations. Migration increases the variance within populations and decreases the variance between populations.


The paper presents an approach for the real time tracking of the moving object in a video stream obtained from a moving airborne platform. The real time tracking means that the user can select the target from any frame at any instant. The Corrected Background Weighted Histogram (CBWH) based Mean Shift algorithm is used for designing the tracking algorithm. Which can effectively reduce the background interferences from the target representation and has high tracking accuracy than general tracking algorithms.


We analyse the threats of global environmental change, as they relate to food security. First, we review three discourses: (i) 'sustainable intensification', or the increase of food supplies without compromising food producing inputs, such as soils and water; (ii) the 'nexus' that seeks to understand links across food, energy, environment and water systems; and (iii) 'resilience thinking' that focuses on how to ensure the critical capacities of food, energy and water systems are maintained in the presence of uncertainties and threats. Second, we build on these discourses to present the causal, risks and options assessment for decision-making process to improve decision-making in the presence of risks. The process provides a structured, but flexible, approach that moves from problem diagnosis to better risk-based decision-making and outcomes by responding to causal risks within and across food, energy, environment and water systems.


Silicon photonics leverages microelectronic fabrication facilities to achieve photonic circuits of unprecedented complexity and cost efficiency. This efficiency does not yet translate to optical packaging, however, which has not evolved substantially from legacy devices. To reach the potential of silicon photonics, we argue that disruptive advances in the packaging cost, scalability in the optical port count, and scalability in the manufacturing volume are required. To attain these, we establish a novel photonic packaging direction based on leveraging existing microelectronics packaging facilities. We demonstrate two approaches to fiber-to-chip interfacing and one to hybrid photonic integration involving direct flip-chip assembly of photonic dies. Self-alignment is used throughout to compensate for insufficient placement accuracy of high-throughput pick and place tools. We show a self-aligned peak transmission of -1.3 dB from standard cleaved fibers to chip and of -1.1 dB from chip to chip. The demonstrated approaches are meant to be universal by simultaneously allowing wide spectral bandwidth for coarse wavelength division multiplexing and large optical-port count.


The purpose of this study is to examine how effective the international promotion of a sport event is on changing the destination image prior to the event if the sport event lacks global popularity. The authors conducted a quasi-experimental posttest research design, in which they used promotional information of a Tour de France stage to manipulate the destination image nonvisitors (N = 3,505) from nine different nations have of the hosting city, 5 months prior to the actual event. Results show that treating the international market as a homogeneous entity might be deceptive, as the effect of the event was different from nation to nation, pending on the popularity of the event or sport in the specific nation, and whether the nation itself offered similar events.


The Press Ombudsman, Johan Retief, has found the Sunday Times in breach of s 1.1 of the Code of ethics and conduct for South African print and online media (the Code) which states: 'The media shall take care to report news truthfully, accurately and fairly.' This finding comes after Eastern Cape attorney, Zuko Nonxuba complained about a story in the Sunday Times (Sabelo Skiti and Monica Laganparsad 'The tragic tale of a penniless SA millionaire' Sunday Times 17 January 2016 at 1 (www.timeslive.co.za, accessed 12-4- 2016)).


Objective Kidney dysfunction in obesity may be independent of and may precede the development of hypertension and/or diabetes mellitus. We aimed to examine if abdominal obesity is associated with early markers of CKD in a young healthy population and whether these associations differ by race and/or ethnicity. Methods We analyzed data from the NHANES 1999–2010 for 6918 young adults ages 20–40 years. Abdominal obesity was defined by gender criteria of waist circumference. CKD markers included estimated glomerular filtration rate and albuminuria ≥30 mg/g. Race stratified analyses were done overall and in subgroups with normal blood pressures, normoglycemia and normal insulin sensitivity. Awareness of CKD was assessed in participants with albuminuria. Results Abdominal obesity was present in over one-third of all young adults and was more prevalent among non-Hispanic blacks (45.4%) versus Mexican-Americans (40.6%) or non-Hispanic whites (37.4%) (P-value = 0.004). Mexican-American young adults with abdominal obesity had a higher odds of albuminuria even among those with normal blood pressure, normal glucose, and normal insulin sensitivity [adjusted odds ratio 4.5; 95% confidence interval (1.6–12.2), p = 0.004]. Less than 5% of young adults with albuminuria of all races and ethnicities had been told they had kidney disease. Conclusion Abdominal obesity in young adults, especially in Mexican-Americans, is independently associated with albuminuria even with normal blood pressures, normoglycemia and normal insulin levels. Greater awareness of CKD is needed to protect this young population from long-standing exposure to abdominal obesity and early progressive renal disease.


The apparent conceivability of a zombie — a physically indistinguishable duplicate of a conscious person that nevertheless lacks consciousness — seems to show that the relation between brain processes and conscious experience is contingent. But this is probably an illusion of contingency, due to the limitations of our current concepts and tricks of the first-person imagination. The mental is at present conceptually irreducible to the physical, but the strict supervenience of the former on the latter suggests the presence of a concealed necessary connection, which could become transparent to us only through a third type of concept that we would have to create — as part of a theory that yields the necessary connection between the mental and the physical as a logical consequence. Such conceptual creations have been important elsewhere in the development of science.


In this essay, I compare the representation of the Congo as a topos of dystopic transgression in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), and in a lesser-known novel entitled Tropenwee (Tropical agony) by the Dutch author Henri van Booven, published in 1904. The
idea of the Congo as a locus of degeneration will be read, not so much as a Conradian theme, but rather, as an idea that had gained wide currency throughout Europe during the fin-de-siecle period. Particular attention will be paid to some of the narrative
techniques that shape this idea and the ideological assumptions it conveys. Moreover, I hope to show that degeneration as reflected by the writings under investigation is at once a colonial and anti-colonial theme, and therefore its significance requires moving beyond singular and clear-cut ideological labels. Keywords : degeneration, colonialism, fin-de-siecle literature, Joseph Conrad, Henri van Booven. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Vol. 46 (1) 2009: pp. 95-108


Section 78(3) of the Attorneys Act 53 of 1979 obliges practitioners to pay any interest earned on deposits in trust accounts in terms of s 78(1) and (2) over to the Attorneys Fidelity Fund (AFF). The AFF has, at its discretion, allowed the following in this regard: Practitioners may deduct 100% of the allowable bank charges incurred on the s 78(1) funds and pay over the net interest to the AFF. However, if the bank charges incurred exceed the interest earned on the s 78(1) funds, the practitioner bears the cost.


Coaching and supervising high school sport programs can be a rewarding but stressful career. Many researchers have identified a close relationship between occupational stress and job satisfaction, or how one feels about the job(Burke 1971; Buck, 1972; Howard, 1978). Most studies of job satisfaction in education have tended to focus on teachers. Much less attention has been paid to the effects of a stressful environment on the effectiveness of high school coaches and other athletic administrators, particularly those serving in a dual or multi-role capacity. There is not an abundance of data that has indicated a strong relationship between job satisfaction, performance, stress, and health. Nevertheless, the job satisfaction problems often seen in the business world, are also present in the highly visible, competitive world of athletics. Hoppock (1935) defined job-satisfaction as any combination of psychological, physiological, and environmental circumstances that causes a person to say "I am satisfied with my job." Similarly, Locke (1969) viewed overall job satisfaction as "the pleasurable emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one's job as achieving or facilitating the achievement of one's values" (p.316). He explained that values exist in relation to their perceived effects on the individual. Thus, "the causes of job satisfaction are not in the job nor solely in man but lie in the relationship between them" (p.319). Davis (1981) surveyed 246 public school teacher/coaches to determine their job satisfaction levels. The researcher's survey identified relationships with coworkers and challenging work as being more valuable than resource adequacy or financial rewards. The investigator further reported that the work climate, morale, and communication patterns also affected overall job satisfaction. Parkhouse and Johnson conducted a study of 37 departments and 229 athletic administrators from large schools throughout the nation. The Job Descriptive Index (JDI) was used to evaluate job satisfaction levels. Personal growth and autonomy were the top items indicated or desired for high job satisfaction. The above studies gives support to Herzberg et. al., (1959) theory which indicated that factors relating to job satisfaction were intrinsic (e.g., the work itself, personal growth and development) in nature. Those factors that were concerned with job content and job dissatisfaction were extrinsic in nature. These studies were further supported by the research of Johnson, Oliver, Herman, & Levick (1982). They noted that the work environment, relationship with co-workers, and a person's perceived position within the organization may affect job satisfaction levels the most. Much of the literature has indicated that much of the dissatisfaction of athletic administrators comes from performing dual or multi-roles. Most athletic administrators including coaches are required to perform some teaching duties in their work setting. Rog (1984) emphasized that teaching and coaching are separate jobs with some very large and critical differences. An athletic administrator job duties include planning and conducting interscholastic practice sessions, motivating highly skilled athletes, preparing the athletic program budget, fund-raising, scheduling games, teaching, and many other pertinent duties. Many educators use the term "role conflict" to identify any situations where there are incompatible expectations for the different roles--for example, high expectation for the athletic programs and lower expectation in the academic programs. …


We propose a novel hybrid optical sensing system for standalone, chip-scale sensing applications. The hybrid optical sensing system detects any spectral shift of the microresonator sensor output by estimating the effective refractive index using maximum likelihood estimation. The performance evaluation of the proposed hybrid sensing system in the Gaussian-noise dominant environment shows excellent estimation accuracy. This innovative approach allows fully functional integrated hybrid sensing systems, offering great potential in various chip-scale sensing applications.


What are the relationships between and among small businesses, conflict, and peaceful development in contexts of urban violence? Here, the complex formal and informal divisions of economic, political and social power, authority, and legitimacy – and the many grey areas between legality and illegality, necessity and opportunism – create challenging conditions for business operations and for peacebuilding. A grounded understanding is required if peace- and development-positive interventions are to be successful. Yet both the peacebuilding and development potential of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), and the specific dynamics of business and conflict in urban spaces, are underdeveloped in the literature assessing and promoting business potential to catalyse positive change. We therefore extract from a broad range of literature a typology representing the weight of the extant frameworks for understanding MSMEs in contexts of urban violence. We then use primary research to construct inductively a framework that captures how those living with urban violence themselves perceive businesses, their relationships to violence, and their impacts on in/security and under/development. Drawing out key areas of synthesis and tension, we propose directions for future study and practice related to small businesses in violent cities, emphasising the need to eschew simple understandings of actors, agency, and objectives in favour of a more nuanced and humane inquiry into the pain and potential inherent in the local context.


▶ Covers technologies for ripeness, quality, damage and disease assessment and prediction; Grading and classification techniques; postharvest treatments, value-addition, and traceability ▶ Examines processing technologies for agricultural and horticultural products; explores properties of foods and agricultural products ▶ Reviews sensors, sensing technology and process control ▶ Focuses on research findings that have the potential for helping the agri-food industry to improve ▶ 95% of authors who answered a survey reported that they would definitely publish or probably publish in the journal again


The sounds of a place can reveal what it is made up of: the infrastructures, lines of power and governance, bodies, and ideologies of a place, and how they move in relation to one another, all make audible conditions of social, political, economic and cultural production. By listening to these relations, it is possible to get a sense of the multiple terrains that comprise such places and the atmospheres they engender (Thibaud 2011); sounds can help in understanding how place is made, unmade and remade. Through careful listening it is possible to encounter sounding as a way of "knowing," as an acoustemology or acoustic epistemology, an idea developed by Steve Feld during his work in Papua New Guinea. For Feld, acoustemology is the "potential of acoustic knowing, of sounding as a condition of and for knowing, of sonic presence and awareness as potent shaping forces in how people make sense of experiences" (1996: 97). Put simply, acoustemology asks: what kinds of meanings, knowledges, values, communications, identities are afforded through sonic practices and forms of representation (Rice 2003)? In this paper I will focus on the site of Rajarhat New Town, a newly developing satellite town in West Bengal, constructed upon histories of land grabs and mass dispossession, in order to demonstrate how soundings, and acoustemology, can hold relevance for a relational materialist politics. By this I mean a politics that is explicitly committed to engaging with the differential and unequal access to resources (such as work, housing, mobility, education, healthcare) and social relations that tend to be experienced and reproduced through processes of contemporary capital. Politics, as I am using it, is less orientated toward rigid systems that see capital as a 'thing' in the world, than toward the complex ways that such processes and conditions assemble and decompose; it is an understanding of capital as a way of relating and being affected. Soundings are useful to this orientation precisely for their ability to move along with such complexity, bringing together possibilities for affective and semiotic approaches. It is this specific combination a capacity for attending to those highly contingent and contagious atmospheres of a place, and to infrastructural, discursive, and material systems that make soundings interesting for geo-politics.


Telaranea octoloba, a rare species previously known only from the Philippines, is newly discovered in Johore, Malaysia. Telaranea semperiana, newly found in Hainan Island of China, its northernmost locality, is new to the liverwort flora of China. The Chinese Kurzia hainanensis D.K.Li & Z.K.Bai, previously known only from the type locality, is reduced to synonym of Telaranea semperiana. The sporophytes of T. octoloba are described and illustrated for the first time.


Students and researchers all write under pressure, and those pressures - most lamentably, the desire to impress your audience rather than to communicate with them - often lead to pretentious prose, academic posturing, and, not infrequently, writer's block. Sociologist Howard S. Becker has written the classic book on how to conquer these pressures and simply write. First published nearly twenty years ago, "Writing for Social Scientists" has become a lifesaver for writers in all fields, from beginning students to published authors. Becker's message is clear: in order to learn how to write, take a deep breath and then begin writing. Revise. Repeat. It is not always an easy process, as Becker wryly relates. Decades of teaching, researching, and writing have given him plenty of material, and Becker neatly exposes the foibles of academia and its "publish or perish" atmosphere. Wordiness, the passive voice, inserting a "the way in which" when a simple "how" will do - all these mechanisms are a part of the social structure of academic writing. By shrugging off such impediments - or at the very least, putting them aside for a few hours - we can reform our work habits and start writing lucidly without worrying about grades, peer approval, or "the literature." In this new edition, Becker takes account of major changes in the computer tools available today and also substantially expands his analysis of how academic institutions create problems for writers. As competition in higher education grows increasingly heated, "Writing for Social Scientists" will provide solace to a new generation of frazzled, would-be writers.


CONTEXT
Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) causes substantial morbidity. A silver-coated endotracheal tube has been designed to reduce VAP incidence by preventing bacterial colonization and biofilm formation.

OBJECTIVE
To determine whether a silver-coated endotracheal tube would reduce the incidence of microbiologically confirmed VAP.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS
Prospective, randomized, single-blind, controlled study conducted in 54 centers in North America. A total of 9417 adult patients (> or = 18 years) were screened between 2002 and 2006. A total of 2003 patients expected to require mechanical ventilation for 24 hours or longer were randomized.

INTERVENTION
Patients were assigned to undergo intubation with 1 of 2 high-volume, low-pressure endotracheal tubes, similar except for a silver coating on the experimental tube.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Primary outcome was VAP incidence based on quantitative bronchoalveolar lavage fluid culture with 10(4) colony-forming units/mL or greater in patients intubated for 24 hours or longer. Other outcomes were VAP incidence in all intubated patients, time to VAP onset, length of intubation and duration of intensive care unit and hospital stay, mortality, and adverse events.

RESULTS
Among patients intubated for 24 hours or longer, rates of microbiologically confirmed VAP were 4.8% (37/766 patients; 95% confidence interval [CI], 3.4%-6.6%) in the group receiving the silver-coated tube and 7.5% (56/743; 95% CI, 5.7%-9.7%) (P = .03) in the group receiving the uncoated tube (all intubated patients, 3.8% [37/968; 95% CI, 2.7%-5.2%] and 5.8% [56/964; 95% CI, 4.4%-7.5%] [P = .04]), with a relative risk reduction of 35.9% (95% CI, 3.6%-69.0%; all intubated patients, 34.2% [95% CI, 1.2%-67.9%]). The silver-coated endotracheal tube was associated with delayed occurrence of VAP (P = .005). No statistically significant between-group differences were observed in durations of intubation, intensive care unit stay, and hospital stay; mortality; and frequency and severity of adverse events.

CONCLUSION
Patients receiving a silver-coated endotracheal tube had a statistically significant reduction in the incidence of VAP and delayed time to VAP occurrence compared with those receiving a similar, uncoated tube.

TRIAL REGISTRATION
clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00148642.


The pressing issues around cyberspace revolve around internet governance, cybersecurity and drawing up rules of the road for the new domain of cyberwar. While each of these is at a different stage in its evolution cycle, cyberspace itself is facing a watershed moment as insecurities mount. The fragmentation of cyberspace seems inevitable unless there is accelerated movement on resolving the fundamental issues of internet governance and cybersecurity that have been hanging fire for well over a decade.


Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 2002. 602 pp. $39.50. The engagement of the Jews in medicine is an ancient and intimate one. Despite certain and isolated sentiments in classical Jewish literature -- for example, that "the best of physicians will go to hell," Judaism has followed another talmudic dictum, namely, that "it is forbidden to live in a city without a physician" (BT Sanhedrin 17b). In other words, Judaism, throughout its literary canon and social practice, has sanctioned the profession of doctor, the art of healing, and supports the proposition that the physician is not the adversary of God, but, in fact, His agent, indeed His partner. One can go even further and make the claim that medicine came (and continues) to form a foundation for Jewish law. From the biblical laws of quarantine to contemporary rabbinical responsa dealing with genetic disorders, health and medicine have informed halakha as well as Jewish sentiment and practice. Yet despite the rich tradition that has seen the rabbis give great consideration to Jewish health and well-being and despite the fact that the physician became a role model in Jewish society, especially after the high Middle Ages, Jews never developed a particular field that can be called "Jewish" medicine, something akin to the Chinese, Galenic, Arab, or Ayurvedic medical traditions. This makes the Jewish engagement with medicine a singular one. While there is no particularly Jewish medical system and the mere thought of a Jewish acupuncture or a Jewish yoga is ludicrous, Jews are central to the history of medicine, first in the Islamic orbit and later under Christendom. And it was in the secular world of post-Enlightenment Europe where they excelled as physicians and were disproportionately numbered among the ranks of doctors. Between the World Wars, Jews were 50 percent of the physicians in Berlin, 60 percent in Vienna, 66 percent in Warsaw, 74 percent in Vilna and a staggering 83 percent in Lodz. Dispersed far and wide, Jews since the Middle Ages have proven themselves to be deeply attracted to medicine, an appeal that has only recently begun to diminish somewhat. The Jewish role in medicine is an absorbing story, one that is the subject of Frank Heynick's Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga. This hefty tome seeks to tell the story of Jews and medicine from biblical times to the mid-twentieth century through the framework that depicts him as the Wandering Jew of tenacious legend. "In view of the truly overwhelming contributions of Jews to medicine throughout the centuries, the image of the Wandering Jew as Doctor is as powerful a symbol as the Wandering Jew of legend" (p. 4). For the author, Jewish doctors represent the "Eternal Doctor." As such, Heynick sets out to write a seamless story, following the path of the wandering Jewish physician, focusing on his contributions to humanity at large. And herein lies one of two basic problems with this book. The first is reflected in the book's subtitle. Heynick sets out to write an epic saga, one which concludes in the middle of the twentieth century, for that time "marked the waning of the Heroic Age of medicine" (p. 549). This approach can make for a good read but an historiographically and conceptually problematic one. Despite recognizing bumps along the way, Heynick provides us with a history of medicine that is teleologically linear, Whiggish, and indeed heroic. And the real heroes of Heynick's story are Jewish doctors. Unfortunately, this sees the author recognize the contributions of doctors who happen to be Jewish, such as Jonas Salk or Rosalind Franklin, but for whom Jewishness played no role in their medical discoveries. Such was true for Paul Ehrlich, Nobel Prize winner, discoverer of, among other things, a cure for syphilis, and one of the main founders of chemotherapy. His Jewishness is relevant to the fact that he was denied promotion to the rank of full professor for 6 years after he had won the Nobel Prize in 1909. …


The autistic child's ability to identify others' faces and their
expressions was investigated in comparison with the ability of non-autistic
children. A study of the children's ability to identify
peers' from isolated facial areas revealed that the autistic children
were abnormally good at this task. Reasons for these findings were
investigated in a series of experiments which revealed that the
autistic children were also abnormally good at recognising inverted
faces and inverted text. The conclusion was drawn that the autistic
children's performance was due to their possessing a perceptual
integration deficit which prevents them seeing stimuli like faces and
words as meaningful wholes. This was investigated further by tests
of their ability to discern facial expression and the results of these
studies supported the above conclusion. Tests of the children's ability
to lip read revealed that the autistic children also had problems with
between modality perceptual integration. Studies of their ability
to produce facial expressions showed them to be poor at both
spontaneous and elicited expressions. Further, whilst they were as
good as controls at copying facial expression, they were less able to
make use of visual feedback to improve their attempts. This was seen
as further evidence for a perceptual integration deficit. Finally, a
computerised study of autistic children's eye movements whilst viewing
live facial expressions and other stimuli supported much of the previous
findings, adding the finding that they had abnormally brief visual
fixation times and that they engaged in very few feature-to-feature
gaze shifts. The results were discussed and found to favour a theory
in which the autistic child's problems with social and communicative
competence are linked to his problems with perceptual integration.
The possession versus the use of abilities was discussed, as was
possible sites of neurological damage, and the possibility that
autistic children lack some vital usually 'innate' abilities and
propensities.


This research study involves a comparative analysis of
marketing life insurance in the UK. The main objectives of this
study are: (1) to investigate the attitudes of marketing managers
of the large and the small life and composite insurance companies
towards marketing life insurance; (2) to investigate the
variables which influence life insurance purchasing behaviour;
and (3) to conduct a comparative analysis of the attitudes of
marketing managers, the insured and the non-insured towards the
variables under investigation.
The design of this study is by facets. The facet approach
helped to compile three sets of questionnaires which were
addressed to (a) the insured, (b) the non-insured, and (c)
marketing managers of life and composite insurance companies.
The data collected consists of both attitudinal and
categorical variables. The analytical techniques used to analyse
the attitudinal data include: Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling
(MINISSA Programme), Discriminant Analysis, and Spearman RankOrder
Correlation Coefficients. As for the categorical data the
Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) is employed in the
analysis. Furthermore, Wilcoxon Test and F-Test are used for
testing the research hypotheses.
Briefly, the research findings suggest that (1) marketing
managers of life and composite insurance companies give priority
to strategic marketing, direct response marketing, and marketing
effectiveness variables and then concern themselves with customer
services, competition, economic and sales problems; (2) both the
insured and the non-insured attach more importance to saving
through other financial institutions than life and composite
insurance companies; (3) the insured regard "colleagues/friends",
"TV advertising", and "ads in newspapers and magazines" as the
main sources of information in keeping them informed and
encouraging them to purchase life insurance; (4) both the insured
and the non-insured regard "standard of service", "contact by the
agent", and "quality of staff" as the most important factors in
influencing their purchasing decisions; and (5) both the insured
and the non-insured regard "providing for children's education"
and "return on investment" as the main reasons for saving
through life and composite insurance companies.
A comparative analysis of the attitudes of marketing
managers, the insured, and the non-insured suggests that
marketing managers will need to put more emphasis on "retirement
income", and "mortgage repayment plans" in their marketing
campaigns; more emphasis should also be placed on the "quality of
staff", and "standard of service".
Finally, an analysis of the effects of socioeconomic and
demographic variables on life insurance purchasing behaviour
suggests that selected predictors (i.e., marital status, family
life cycle, family size, age, education, occupation and income)
when tested together explain a significant portion of the
variance of the dependent variable.


Aulus Gellius (ca. 123170 CE) is known almost wholly from his "Noctes Atticae, " 'Attic Nights', so called because it was begun during the nights of an Attic winter. The work collects in twenty books (of Book VIII only the index is extant) interesting notes covering philosophy, history, biography, all sorts of antiquities, points of law, literary criticism, and lexicographic matters, explanations of old words and questions of grammar. The work is valuable because of its many excerpts from other authors whose works are lost; and because of its evidence for people's manners and occupations. Some at least of the dramatic settings may be genuine occasions. The Loeb Classical Library edition of "Attic Nights" is in three volumes.


The nature of quasi-static indentation damage is studied in aluminum honeycomb core sandwich panels with eight ply, quasi-isotropic, graphite/epoxy face sheets. Parameters that are varied include the core thickness, core density, face sheet layup, and indentor diameter. The majority of induced damage is in the vicinity of the barely visible threshold. The permanent dent in the panel is found to be always larger than the contact area of the indentor, and specimens with denser cores exhibit smaller dent diameters for a given dent depth. Regardless of specimen layup, delaminations occur essentially only at the 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th interfaces. Stiffer cores, either in terms of a higher density or, for those cores considered, a smaller thickness, result in lower dent depths, smaller dent diameters, and more face sheet delamination for a given indentation event. The manner in which core orthotropy influences the size and pattern of the delaminations is shown to depend on face sheet layup. Regardless of the core, larger delaminations occur in face sheets that contain 90° angle changes between the adjacent plies in comparison to those that contain only 45° angle changes. Results are compared to those previously reported in the literature, and mechanisms that are related to plate boundary conditions are described that reconcile what would appear to be conflicting results obtained by different studies. Findings are then discussed in the context of choosing the most damage-resistant structural configuration and how this translates to damage tolerance.


Abstract The SPICA mid- and far-infrared telescope will address fundamental issues in our understanding of star formation and ISM physics in galaxies. A particular hallmark of SPICA is the outstanding sensitivity enabled by the cold telescope, optimised detectors, and wide instantaneous bandwidth throughout the mid- and far-infrared. The spectroscopic, imaging, and polarimetric observations that SPICA will be able to collect will help in clarifying the complex physical mechanisms which underlie the baryon cycle of galaxies. In particular, (i) the access to a large suite of atomic and ionic fine-structure lines for large samples of galaxies will shed light on the origin of the observed spread in star-formation rates within and between galaxies, (ii) observations of HD rotational lines (out to ~10 Mpc) and fine structure lines such as [C ii] 158 μm (out to ~100 Mpc) will clarify the main reservoirs of interstellar matter in galaxies, including phases where CO does not emit, (iii) far-infrared spectroscopy of dust and ice features will address uncertainties in the mass and composition of dust in galaxies, and the contributions of supernovae to the interstellar dust budget will be quantified by photometry and monitoring of supernova remnants in nearby galaxies, (iv) observations of far-infrared cooling lines such as [O i] 63 μm from star-forming molecular clouds in our Galaxy will evaluate the importance of shocks to dissipate turbulent energy. The paper concludes with requirements for the telescope and instruments, and recommendations for the observing strategy.


We formulate a solution to the diffuse optical tomography (DOT) inverse problem as the minimization of an energy functional of the solution and the data. For the solution prior we introduce a local diffusion regularization potential with a threshold based on robust statistics (the Hubert function). We compare results on simulated data for the Hubert function and two other standard regularization functionals, Tikhonov and total variation.


Dynamic loading is a core feature used on current systems to (i) enable modularity and reuse, (ii) reduce memory footprint by sharing code pages of libraries and executables among processes, and (iii) simplify update procedures by eliminating the need to recompile executables when a library is updated. The Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) is a generic specification that describes how executable programs are stitched together from object files produced from source code to libraries and executables. Programming languages allow fine-grained control over variables, including access and memory protections, so programmers may write defense mechanisms assuming that the permissions specified at the source and/or compiler level will hold at runtime. Unfortunately, information about memory protection is lost during compilation.  We identify one case that has significant security implications: when instantiating a process, constant external variables that are referenced in executables are forcefully relocated to a writable memory segment without warning.  The loader trades security for compatibility due to the lack of memory protection information on the relocated external variables. We call this new attack vector CoReV for Copy Relocation Violation.  An adversary may use a memory corruption vulnerability to modify such "read-only" constant variables like vtables, function pointers, format strings, and file names to bypass defenses (like FORTIFY_SOURCE or CFI) and to escalate privileges. We have studied all Ubuntu 16.04 LTS packages and found that out of 54,045 packages, 4,570 packages have unexpected copy relocations that change read-only permissions to read-write, presenting new avenues for attack. The attack surface is broad with 29,817 libraries exporting relocatable read-only variables. The set of 6,399 programs with actual copy relocation violations includes ftp servers, apt-get, and gettext. We discuss the cause, effects, and a set of possible mitigation strategies for the CoReV attack vector.


The current study investigated the attitudes and knowledge regarding diet and oral hygiene of parents with kindergarten children. The parents' statements were evaluated in terms of their socioeconomic background and were compared with the annual clinical examination of the children. The objective of the study was to assess the effectiveness of the school dental-health program and adapt it to today's societal needs. Of those who participated in the interview, 61% were Swiss, 16% were from former Yugoslavia or Turkey, and 12% each from the EU or other countries. Of the children examined, 39% already had caries, and 18% of those showed more than two lesions. The parents' knowledge correlated with the severity of the child's caries as well as with the parents' income, country of origin, and education. There was a correlation between the child's dental decay and lower income, as well as lower education and non-Swiss nationality of the parents. Parents with higher income and better education more often participated in the preschool's preventive program. Parents from former Yugoslavia or Turkey participated less frequently than parents from other countries. The study demonstrated that parents who especially needed instruction and prophylaxis are contacted too late or not at all through the dental-health program at kindergarten and that new approaches to prevention should be implemented to more effectively reach the parents.


This paper is a summary of the study on the optimization of cross compliance in direct payments to farmers in Romania by assessing the situation on the enforcement of cross compliance schemes and measures to support farmers during 2007-2013 and find the best implementation model for the next period. This has been used data and information from IACS database, audit reports and statistical reports on cross, managed by APIA. The analysis shows the existence of a large number of standards for good agricultural and environmental condition (GAEC) and the statutory management requirements (SMR) in continuous revision, difficult to understand by land surveyors and farmers have to comply. This led to a large number of nonconformities and sanctions to reduce payments to certain standards/requirements (approx. 23,029 cases of non-compliance, i.e. 25.86% of the farmers control and penalties totaling approx. 1,412,690 € for period analyzed), with a negative impact on the use of EU funds for agriculture. In response to the matters referred propose simplification of cross compliance, reducing the number of standards and mandatory requirements for farmers (from 13 standards GAEC and 18 requirements SMR currently to 7 standards GAEC and 13 requirements SMR in the new implementation) an effective system of management and control, and an action plan on informing farmers on cross compliance.