Introduction: Multinodular nontoxic goiter is defined as a benign enlargement of the thyroid gland in a subject living in an iodine insufficient area. The causes of MNG are not completely understood, but include autoimmune, genetic, and extrinsic factors. Symptoms vary widely among patients, from those with no symptoms and an incidentally discovered goiter to those with tracheal compression and stridor. The treatment goals for patients with a benign MNG include relief of local compressive symptoms or cosmetic deformity, prevention of progressive thyroid enlargement, and treatment of associated thyroid dysfunction. There are three main treatment options for MNG: thyroidectomy, levothyroxine suppression, and radioactive iodine. Methodology: The purpose of this paper was to compare and contrast medical versus surgical treatment of patients with multinodular goiter through a systemic review of the literature, so that primary care practitioners can use evidence-based criteria when treating or recommending treatment. Articles from 1975 to the present were reviewed that included adult patients ranging in age from twenty years old and older who were diagnosed with benign MNG. Variables included thyroidectomy, antithyroid suppressive therapy and radioiodine therapy. Results: Twenty articles matched the criteria and were reviewed using evidence-based methods. After close analysis of the presented data, disagreement remains in the current treatment of asymptomatic MNG and no optimum treatment has been established. Conclusion: There still is considerable controversy about the optimum treatment and efficacy of using different suppressive medications versus surgical treatment for patients with asymptomatic MNG. Treatment decisions for nontoxic multinodular goiter must be individualized and based on the clinical examination and adequate follow up.


New York FarmNet, a state supported, toll-free, phone help-line for farmers began in March 1986 in response to the farm financial crisis. Its purpose included providing information/refelTal, individualized business/financial analysis and a general safety net for farm families, From March 1986 through March 1991 FmmNet received 3853 calls and assigned 534 consultants to work one-to-onc with fm'm families experiencing severe problems. A summm'y of caller characteristics revealed that slightly over half of callers were males, and nearly all were owners or operators rather than farm workers. Each year caller fmm size averaged between 230 and 320 acres, but the range was from one acre to over 4000 acres. Years of fm'ming experience each year averaged 16 to 23 years, but the range was from I yem' or less to a lifetime. Average debt of callers each yem' averaged between $100,000 and $200,000, and several callers reported debt of over $1,000,000. The main reasons for calling FarmNet were financial or financial/legal problems, but many other reasons were given including need for job information and emotional stress, A 1990-91 phone survey sampled people who had called FarmNet in 1986-87. The survey asked about their recollections of help received from FarmNet. They were generally positive on the helpfulness of the phone operators and remembered considering a number of options as a result of a FarmNet consultant visit. About one third of those callers is no longer fm'ming, and one fifth is in a different type of farming than in 1986-87. Based on five years of the program, several conclusions were offered. 1) A segment of the fm'm population is likely to be at risk each yem'; hence, there is a continuing need for addressing such problems; 2) FarmNet served an audience that would not have been reached by previously existing programs; 3) FarmNet's accomplishments went beyond just focusing on problems of callers to build expertise within Cornell Cooperative Extension staff and networking with other agencies and help sources; 4) The program achieved a positive image under the difficult circumstances of sometimes being the messenger of "bad news"; and 5) individualized, demand-driven programs such as FarmNet require difficult policy choices in these times of tight budgets.


Ultrathin Fe films on Pt substrates have been investigated under ultrahigh vacuum conditions by scanning tunneling microscopy, low energy electron diffraction, magneto-optical Kerr effect, x-ray magnetic circular dichroism measurements, and Kerr microscopy. We present a comparison between Fe films on flat Pt(111) and stepped Pt(997), with particular focus on the magnetic anisotropy in the submonolayer thickness range below 0.2 monolayer coverage, and above the spin reorientation transition at 3 monolayer thickness. The comparison of structure and magnetism suggests that the perpendicular easy axis found for films thinner than three monolayers is due to dominating contributions from both film interfaces to the anisotropy energy. The Fe-Pt interface contribution has its origin in the hybridization of the Fe 3d with the Pt 5d band. The in-plane magnetic anisotropy above 3 atomic layers film thickness can be correlated directly with peculiarities of the film structure.


Due to a growing number of regulations and standards, building performance becomes equally important as traditional design drivers. Therefore, it is necessary to quickly explore design alternatives that meet these performance requirements. To support this complex design task, a rule-based design system is proposed that is founded on a shape grammar. This paper describes a graph-based implementation of this shape grammar that allows subshape detection, parametric rules and attributed shapes. The implementation described in this paper forms the basis to further investigate to what extent rule-based design systems can support a generative approach towards performance-based design.


OBJECTIVE This study was conducted to describe the incidence of diabetes following pancreatic disease, assess how these patients are classified by clinicians, and compare clinical characteristics with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Primary care records in England (n = 2,360,631) were searched for incident cases of adult-onset diabetes between 1 January 2005 and 31 March 2016. We examined demographics, diabetes classification, glycemic control, and insulin use in those with and without pancreatic disease (subcategorized into acute pancreatitis or chronic pancreatic disease) before diabetes diagnosis. Regression analysis was used to control for baseline potential risk factors for poor glycemic control (HbA1c ≥7% [53 mmol/mol]) and insulin requirement. RESULTS We identified 31,789 new diagnoses of adult-onset diabetes. Diabetes following pancreatic disease (2.59 [95% CI 2.38–2.81] per 100,000 person-years) was more common than type 1 diabetes (1.64 [1.47–1.82]; P < 0.001). The 559 cases of diabetes following pancreatic disease were mostly classified by clinicians as type 2 diabetes (87.8%) and uncommonly as diabetes of the exocrine pancreas (2.7%). Diabetes following pancreatic disease was diagnosed at a median age of 59 years and BMI of 29.2 kg/m2. Diabetes following pancreatic disease was associated with poor glycemic control (adjusted odds ratio, 1.7 [1.3–2.2]; P < 0.001) compared with type 2 diabetes. Insulin use within 5 years was 4.1% (3.8–4.4) with type 2 diabetes, 20.9% (14.6–28.9) with diabetes following acute pancreatitis, and 45.8% (34.2–57.9) with diabetes following chronic pancreatic disease. CONCLUSIONS Diabetes of the exocrine pancreas is frequently labeled type 2 diabetes but has worse glycemic control and a markedly greater requirement for insulin.


ABSTRACT Attitudes towards sexual health and relationships are learned from a young age, and there is an ongoing need for innovative and comprehensive approaches to sex education that keep pace with rapidly changing contexts of people's lives. We used thematic analysis of data from two qualitative studies in Scotland to explore learning contexts from a multi-generational perspective, as well as the influence of different socio-cultural factors on provision, access to and experience of sex education. The importance, but inadequacy, of school as a source of learning, was a persistent theme over time. Participants' strategies to address perceived gaps in knowledge included experience, conversations, vicarious and online learning. Gender and age differences emerged, with younger participants more likely to go online for information, and prevailing gender norms shaping attitudes and behaviours across both study groups. Participants who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual described feeling particularly unprepared for sex and relationships due to the narrow, heteronormative content received. Although schools continue to be a common source of information, it appears that they fail to equip young people for their post-school sexual life-course. We recommend the mandatory provision of comprehensive, positive, inclusive and skills-based learning to improve people's chances of forming and building healthy, positive relationships across the lifespan.


Anaemia of chronic disease (ACD) is a multifactorial anaemia often coexistent with iron deficiency. Worldwide, anaemia of chronic disease is the second most common anaemia. Diagnosis generally requires the presence of chronic infection, inflammation, or cancer; marginal normocytic and later microcytic anaemia; and abnormal values for iron studies. The major issue is that the bone marrow erythroid mass fails to expand appropriately in response to anaemia. Treatment is to reverse the underlying disease and, if the disease is irreversible, to give erythropoietin.


Background: This article underscores the fact that society is becoming more and more knowledge-based, and that the organisations that can identify, value, create and evolve their knowledge assets are likely to be more successful than those that do not. Knowledge management (KM) is about enhancing the use of organisational knowledge through sound practices of KM and organisational learning. KM practices encompass the capture and/or acquisition of knowledge, its retention and organisation, its dissemination and re-use, and lastly responsiveness to the new knowledge. Objective: The focus of this study was on KM principles and practices that may be in place in the Metropolitan College of New York (MCNY). The argument is that KM and its survival principles and tools may help the College to improve performance. However, there is uncertainty about whether the use of KM principles and tools can partly solve the College's approach to improving the quality of education it provides. Methods: A mixed methods research methodology encompassing a questionnaire, observation, interviews, and use of institutional documents was used in the investigation. Results: The findings of the study indicate that KM concepts were not universally understood at MCNY. Conclusion: There is a need to create a knowledge inventory at MCNY. This may help the College to develop appropriate institution-wide policies and practices for proper and well organised methods of integrating work processes, collaborating and sharing (including the efficient use of social media), and developing an enabling institutional culture.


We exploit the opening of a large bridge to study how access to a larger labor market affects economic efficiency, and how these potential efficiency gains are distributed across workers. The bridge we study connected the third largest city of Sweden to the capital of Denmark, and led to a substantial increase in the labor market opportunities of Swedes. Using unique cross-country matched registry data, we find that the bridge led to a large increase in cross-country commuting among Swedes, driven both by extensive and intensive employment responses. This commuting effect translates into a significant increase in the average wage of Swedes residing close to the bridge, providing strong evidence of an efficiency gain for individuals in Sweden. However, these efficiency gains are unevenly distributed across workers: the effect is largest for high-educated men and smallest for low-educated women. Thus, the efficiency gains come at the cost of rising income inequality and an increase in the gender wage gap, both within- and across-households. These equity effects are driven not only by differences in the propensity to commute, but also by occupational segregation.


Abstract An interpretation of the work of Schleiermacher and Otto recently offered by Andrew Dole, according to which these two thinkers differed over the extent to which religion can be explained naturalistically, and over the sense in which the supernatural can be admitted, is examined and refuted. It is argued that there is no difference between the two thinkers on this issue. It is shown that Schleiermacher's claim that a supernatural event is at the same time a natural event does not invite, but rather forecloses the possibility of, a naturalistic explanation of the event. It is further demonstrated that Otto, like Schleiermacher, denied the existence of supernatural events interpreted as events that infringe the laws of nature.


MY SCIlAI' nOOK OF TIm FJ:i XCii R1~VOLUTION. By Ellzabl'lIl·· \1'. Latimer; Chicago: A. C. MN'I"rK & Co. Price. $2.50. Connected by close family ties with thr period of which she writes. ann haVing had personal opportunities of oht"iuiaK exact data concerning that ell"dl. ~Ir, Latimer Is especially well fitted to pro I"('~ this volume on the French Re\'oillliflll The several chapters are carefnl'" ('om' plied and written, dealing wltb eai·h '"h: ject with nn open. yet concise. st)·11' that will appeal to the reader. As an :ulditic)Jj to hlstorlcnl nterature, this hook will I", cordially welcomed, while as II ~H'ril':-: of blogrnphlcal narratives It will I'OIllIll"",J a prominent position.. It should li"d a place in every Ilhrary of whatovo111'1>. tensions.


The evergrowing amount of data created and collected is met with the increased need to store this data. In compliment to improving data storage capabilities using engineering controls such as decreased pixel size (i.e., Blu-ray) or 3-D pixels (i.e., voxels), chemistry-based approaches are required to move beyond current limitations and meet our future needs. Herein, we present a new methodology to optically store data in a quaternary code of 0, 1, 2, 3 in a commodity polymer containing a low loading of two small molecules, and using heat and UV light to write, and read fluorescence output. The as-prepared film is non-fluorescent (0), and can be written through a wooden or metal mask with thermal treatment (1), light treatment (2), or both (3), giving three different colours of fluorescence under UV irradiation. The flexible polymer film remains colourless and transparent under ambient light after patterning, retains the stored data after exfoliation with sandpaper, and can be removed from the substrate and mechanically deformed without detriment to the pattern. This straightforward and scalable system demonstrates the use of simple and robust chemical reactions to improve data storage capabilities and has the potential to exponentially increase information density.


Trust and trustworthiness facilitate interactions between human beings worldwide, every day. They enable the formation of friendships, making of profits and the adoption of new technologies, making life not only more pleasant, but furthering the societal development. Trust, for lack of a better word, is good. When human beings trust, they rely on the trusted party to be trustworthy, that is, literally worthy of the trust that is being placed in them. If it turns out that the trusted party is unworthy of the trust placed into it, the truster has misplaced its trust, has unwarrantedly relied and is liable to experience possibly unpleasant consequences. Human social evolution has equipped us with tools for determining another's trustworthiness through experience, cues and observations with which we aim to minimise the risk of misplacing our trust.

Social adaptation, however, is a slow process and the cues that are helpful in real, physical environments where we can observe and hear our interlocutors are less helpful in interactions that are conducted over data networks with other humans or computers, or even between two computers. This presents a challenge in a world where the virtual and the physical intermesh increasingly. A challenge that computational trust models seek to address by applying computational evidence-based methods to estimate trustworthiness.

In this thesis, the state-of-the-art in evidence-based trust models is extended and improved upon – in particular with regard to their statistical modelling. The statistics behind (Bayesian) trustworthiness estimation will receive special attention, their extension bringing about improvements in trustworthiness estimation that encompass the fol- lowing aspects: (i.) statistically well-founded estimators for binomial and multinomial models of trust that can accurately estimate the trustworthiness of another party and those that can express the inher- ent uncertainty of the trustworthiness estimate in a statistically meaningful way, (ii.) better integration of recommendations by third parties using advanced methods for determining the reliability of the received recommendations, (iii.) improved responsiveness to changes in the behaviour of trusted parties, and (iv.) increasing the generalisability of trust-relevant information over a set of trusted parties. Novel estimators, methods for combining recommendations and other trust- relevant information, change detectors, as well as a mapping for integrating stereotype-based trustworthiness estimates, are bundled in an improved Bayesian trust model, Multinomial CertainTrust.

Specific scientific contributions are structured into three distinct categories:

1. A Model for Trustworthiness Estimation: The statistics of trustworthiness estimation are investigated to design fully multinomial trustworthiness estimation model. Leveraging the assumptions behind the Bayesian estimation of binomial and multinomial proportions, accurate trustworthiness and certainty estimators are presented, and the integration of subjectivity via informed and non-informed Bayesian priors is discussed.

2. Methods for Trustworthiness Information Processing: Methods for facilitating trust propagation and accounting for concept drift in the behaviour of the trusted parties are introduced. All methods are applicable, by design, to both the binomial case and the multinomial case of trustworthiness estimation.

3. Further extension for trustworthiness estimation: Two methods for addressing the potential lack of direct experiences with new trustee in feedback-based trust models are presented. For one, the dedicated modelling of particular roles and the trust delegation between them is shown to be principally possible as an extension to existing feedback- based trust models. For another, a more general approach for feature-based generalisation using model-free, supervised machine-learners, is introduced.

The general properties of the trustworthiness and certainty estimators are derived formally from the basic assumptions underlying binomial and multinomial estimation problems, harnessing fundamentals of Bayesian statistics. Desired properties for the introduced certainty estimators, first postulated by Wang & Singh, are shown to hold through formal argument. The general soundness and applicability of the proposed certainty estimators is founded on the statistical properties of interval estimation techniques discussed in the related statistics work and formally and rigorously shown there.

The core estimation system and additional methods, in their entirety constituting the Multinomial CertainTrust model, are implemented in R, along with competing methods from the related work, specifically for determining recommender trustworthiness and coping with changing behaviour through ageing. The performance of the novel methods introduced in this thesis was tested against established methods from the related work in simulations.

Methods for hardcoding indicators of trustworthiness were implemented within a multi-agent framework and shown to be functional in an agent-based simulation. Furthermore, supervised machine-learners were tested for their applicability by collecting a real-world data set of reputation data from a hotel booking site and evaluating their capabilities against this data set. The hotel data set exhibits properties, such as a high imbalance in the ratings, that appears typical of data that is generated from reputation systems, as these are also present in other data sets.


The Caspian Sea has been the focus of states and peoples in and out of the area for the last decade. The surrounding states are interested in getting a decent share of the lakes resources. The industrial states are interested in taking the oil, gas and other natural wealth of the Caspian Sea to world markets as soon as possible. The populations of the littoral states, which are all ruled by undemocratic regimes, are concerned with whether their governments will retain their just rights in the Caspian Sea. They realise that the highest priority for their current rulers is to keep their grip on power, not their nations present or future interests. How have the respective governments in Azerbaijan, the Federation of Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and especially, Iran, thought and acted in regard to the situation of the Caspian Sea and their interests? The issue has a special reference to Iran because it is experiencing a terrible situation in regard to the Caspian Sea due to the poor management of its foreign policy and international relations. Iran will end up with the smallest share of the Caspian Sea, whether it likes it or not. This is a serious setback for a country that once shared the Caspian Sea with the former Soviet Union. Irans mismanagement of its Caspian Sea rights is a political and diplomatic lesson in what not to do. This book gives everyone, even those without legal or political backgrounds in this issue, an opportunity to survey the facts and history; and to analyse the legal and political realities of the present political situation of the worlds largest lake.


The dynamics of sand ridges, as observed on the innershelves and midshelves of various coastal seas, are investigated within the framework of an idealized model. These seabed undulations include shoreface-connected sand ridges and tidal sand banks. The new aspects in this study are the explicit incorporation of both steady and tidal currents, a shelf with a sloping bottom, and a statistical approach to describe the sediment transport during storms (linear in the current) and fair weather conditions (cubic in the current). The present model is used to gain understanding of the different ridge characteristics in different geographical regions. This is done by analyzing the initial growth of small bottom perturbations, which evolve on a basic state describing a longshore uniform flow over a reference topography. It is found that basically five different bottom modes can be excited: shoreface-connected sand ridges, Coriolis ridges, friction-induced bars, trapped tidal ridges, and tidal sand banks. Their growth, which is due to different physical mechanisms, strongly depends on the weather climate and the geometrical characteristics of the shelf.


Among the relatively few father-daughter poems in the "canon," Dylan Thomas's "In Country Sleep" is striking for its frank portrayal of a caring though conflicted state of fatherhood. Other poems belonging to this diverse lyric sub-genre, such as Jonson's "On my First Daughter," Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy," Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter," are essentially expressions of the poet-father's deep concern for the well-being of his living or dead daughter that have little to do with the existence of the child in her own right. Thomas's poem, an arguably Browningesque dramatic monologue of "a soul in action," addressed just after story-telling bedtime to the sleeping child, voices the playing out of a universal parental crisis, that of loving but letting go of the son or daughter so nature can take its course. Thomas's poem for his eldest son Llewelyn, "This Side of the Truth," is, on the other hand, one of his most didactic lyrics. In it the poet-father kindly tells the boy that there are two ways of "moving about your death," "good and bad." "In Country Sleep" is a far more arresting and complex treatment involving a loving father's deep, oedipally colored attachment to his daughter and his concern that she retain her natural innocence and faith in life. The popularity of Thomas's poem since his death may be attributed in part to the wide appeal of the straight-forward situation it dramatizes - a father confronting his concerns for his sleeping daughter's welfare.(1) However, when William York Tindall told Thomas that he "thought this poem to be about how it feels to be a father, Thomas cried, but whether from vexation, beer or sentimental agreement I could not tell" (Tindall 273). In actuality, "In Country Sleep," despite the immediate sense of connection readers may feel with it, has been the subject of varied critical interpretations(2) turning on the identity of the mysterious Thief who the father fears will steal his sleeping daughter's faith in "the green good" of country existence. Thomas once told a woman that the unidentified Thief, usually assumed to be Time or Death,(3) was in reality jealousy, and that the poem was addressed to his wife Caitlin (Ferris 226), from whom he was increasingly alienated in the 1940's. Their marital problems in fact figure in several poems, including "I make this in a warring absence," "How shall my animal," and perhaps most notably "Into her Lying Down Head," in which the speaker's enemies enter his wife's "faithless sleep." Still, Thomas gave a quite different explanation at another time to a reporter in New York: "Alcohol is the thief today. But tomorrow he could be fame or success or exaggerated introspection or self-analysis. The thief is anything that robs you of your faith, or your reason for being" (Quoted in Ferris 227). By the same token, all three of the figures involved in the central action of "In Country Sleep" have a Joycean resonance and reflect multiple prototypical identities. Joyce was Thomas's "most admired prose writer" from whom "he learnt wordplay" (Dylan Thomas: Letters to Vernon Watkins 14). The influence of Joyce's mythmaking, pun-filled "funferal," Finnegans Wake, which has been described as "a prodigious, multifaceted monomyth, not only the cauchemar of a Dublin citizen but the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolving humanity" (Campbell and Robinson 3), is subtly evident in Thomas's poem, though his mythologizing operates on a much smaller scale. Thomas's persona is in a sense all fathers (and possibly all husbands too) and has affinities with figures ranging from Shakespeare's benign father-magician, Prospero, to the biblical or Miltonic Adam, the father of humankind, out of whose "yawning wound" God extracted the rib from which he made his helpmeet Eve. The sleeping daughter herself is an amalgamation of fairy tale heroines such as the "Haygold haired" Goldilocks, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood, along with Adam's beautiful but disobedient wife, Eve. …


Firearm violence is a public health crisis of epidemic proportions. Over 30 000 Americans die from gunshot wounds every year, and countless others are injured. Surgeons and trauma care providers are a diverse group, encompassing a wide range of ages, all sexes, all races and ethnicities, and differing political beliefs. At the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma (EAST), we feel that our current efforts to reduce firearm-related injuries and violence are insufficient. EAST believes that saving individual lives without addressing the underpinnings of violence and the obvious vector, firearms, is contributing to the ongoing suffering. Therefore, as an organization of providers who care for the patient with injuries, and specifically victims of firearm injury, we are committed to the health and safety of our patients and their communities. EAST makes the following statement: Firearm-related injury and death are a complex public health problem. ► EAST supports evidence-based strategies to reduce firearm injuries including the following: ► Federal funding of firearm-related research to inform solutions. ► Violence and injury prevention programs that address conflict resolution. ► Programs that teach non-violent conflict resolution, coping strategies, and anger management. ► Improved access and quality of mental health services. ► Recognition of the other factors that affect these issues including structural violence, domestic violence, and mental health. ► Limited access to firearms through mandatory safe storage (keeping guns unloaded in a safe with ammunition stored in a separate locked device), gun locks, trigger locks, and other safe storage practices. ► Expanded universal background checks to include all firearms sales in any venue. ► Mandatory waiting periods and universal background checks for acquisition of firearms. ► Limited civilian access to highly lethal firearms and firearm accessories, such as high velocity rifles, high-capacity magazines, trigger cranks, and bump stocks. ► Limited dissemination of technology to enhance lethality or bypass standard safety and/or screening (eg, three-dimensional printing firearms). We hope you will join EAST to develop non-partisan and evidence-based solutions for our patients. Standing by and becoming increasingly numb to the rising injury and death toll being witnessed across this country is not an option. Please stand with EAST to affect change.


Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State, by Cemal Kafadar. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995. xx + 154 pages. Abbrevs. to p. 156. Notes to p. 191. Select Bibl. to p. 207. Index to p. 221. $18.95 paper. The formative first two centuries of Ottoman history have not enjoyed the interest later periods have received. Despite recent fascination with state building, state formation and state-civil society relations, some sound explanations for the scholarly reluctance toward the earlier period exist. The range of language skills needed to understand late medieval Anatolia is daunting and, even more discouraging, written sources surviving from the 1250-1450 AD period are few. Studies of accessible material sourcescoins, art, architecture-are only just coming out of a long hiatus (thanks to art historians like Rochelle Kessler and E. Sara Wolper, for example). Finally, despite different analyses offered by scholars over the last two decades, interpreters of the "rise of the Ottomans" have remained enthralled by paradigms crafted by two mid-20thcentury analysts, namely, Paul Wittek and Mehmet Koprulu. In this context, Cemal Kafadar's new study of Ottoman roots is a welcome shaking of the foundations, a masterful "state of the scholarship" review. Kafadar is exceptionally suited to the task. He has an encyclopedic command of the primary sources. He is thoroughly conversant with secondary interpretive works. Comparative history, literature, anthropology and religious studies inform his historiographic examination no less than "Ottoman facts." His excellent endnotes and bibliography alone will be invaluable to any future research in this area. Kafadar's fundamental critique of both Koprulu and Wittek is that, in formulating a theory of Ottoman origins, both engage in a kind of elaborate reductionism that ignores the intricate historical processes which-over two very long centuries-turned one of many petty Anatolian amirates into a transcontinental empire. A courageous statesman as well as a brilliant scholar, Koprulu cast the Ottomans as a distinctive tribe from the great Oghuz confederation in Turkey. He stressed the Turkishness of the Ottoman founders who mobilized thousands of fellow Turkish refugees, fleeing to Anatolia to escape the Mongols. In so doing, Koprulu slighted the pre-existing cosmopolitan traditions and resources already present in the peninsula. Partly in response to Koprulu, Wittek, an Austrian linguist and historian, offered his famous "gazi band" thesis. For Wittek, the attractions of the Ottoman amir derived not from lineage-grounded kinship ties or proto-nationalist ethnic solidarity, but warrior charisma and religious zeal. The first sultans, Ertugrul, Uthman, Orhan and Murad, were political entrepreneurs, who assembled followers into "gazi bands" based on military skill, clerical talent, chivalric loyalty, and a rather personalized vision of Islam that did not bar Christians or Jews from service in "Holy War." If Koprulu's "original" Ottoman state was "exclusivist," Wittek's was "inclusivist. …


Southern European countries are generally portrayed as lame ducks when it comes to migrant integration. In this article, I will analyse some of the reasons that have led to this outcome including potential biases in migration studies. I argue that Southern European countries in fact hold their own specific ways of incorporating migrants which may be equally or even more positive than those of older immigration countries. At the same time, I maintain that they appear rather heterogeneous in this regard, questioning the idea of a single Southern European model. I will test these hypotheses by comparing Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece with some Western European older immigration countries and by observing the trends of migrant incorporation during the Great Recession which started in 2008. The economic crisis is here regarded as both a factor of change and a 'stress test' of the actual robustness of migrant incorporation in the target countries. The empirical data are framed in a typology of migrant incorporation modes conceived of as a heuristic tool to conceptualise the processes occurring during deep economic downturns.


Within Ontario, regional governments are being established. This paper regionalizes south-western Ontario by synthesizing the characteristics of homogeneous and nodal regions. The regions so established are considered in light of their possible application to regional government . The techniques used in the paper recognize regionalization in terms of systems analysis, such that there are places, attributes of these places and interactions between the places. Data are collected on separate matrices for the attributes of the places and for the interactions, and are referred to as structural data and behavioral data respectively. Through manipulation of the data matrices, separate measures of similarity between places are found for structure and for behavior. The two measures are combined to form a single matrix which indicates the similarity between places in terms of both structure and behavior. The places that are most similar and also adjacent are grouped to form regions. For comparison purposes regions are also formed from the structural and behavioral matrices which are homogeneous and nodal regions respectively. The synthesized regions would appear to represent adequately the syntheses of the characteristics of homogeneous regions and nodal regions, but their application to regional government is limited. Many of the regional boundaries are not likely usable for regional government purposes but the study does indicate where regional centres lie.


This article provides the first scholarly investigation of of the relationship between Swedish Catholicism and the totalitarian ideologies during the first half of the twentieth century. It shows that the journal viewed Communism very negatively; Nazism mostly negative, but occasionally in a positive way; Italian Fascism mostly positively; the authoritarian regimes in Spain and Portugal were portrayed in a very positive way. One tendency that was revealed by the study was that anti-Communism was in most cases combined with anti-Semitism. The journal never took a stand for, or defended, the Jews in Europe in their plight under National Socialism.


Objectives: Personal beliefs about illnesses have received increasing interest because these cognitions help to explain and predict preventive and therapeutic coping efforts, adjustment
to a disease and health outcomes. We sought to explore and compare non-specialised
illness representations of hypertension among
adults never suffering from hypertension who had and had not lived with hypertensive
patients. Design: Hypertension representations were explored in a community-based, convenient sample of normotensive
Spanish adults of both genders from different educational backgrounds and with different family experience with this illness. Method: An adapted Illness Perception Questionnaire-R was used to assess such perceptions
among healthy people in nine dimensions: Identity, Time-line, Consequences, Personal Control, Treatment Control, Illness Coherence, Evolution, Emotional
Representations and Causes. Results: The participants'
beliefs mixed accurate and folk knowledge, while gender, age and education
level had little impact, family experience (having or not having a relative with
hypertension) strongly determined the content of hypertension representations.
Participants with family experience held significantly stronger beliefs of controllability of the disease, both by patients and treatments, considered the disease
as less stable and reported a lower emotional impact when thinking on suffering
from hypertension. Family experience was the only significant predictor of illness
cognitions. Conclusions: This study allowed us to know the perceptions of hypertension among non-patients and healthy relatives of patients. Our findings are useful in designing interventions aimed at
hypertension prevention, particularly considering family experience with the disease.


Audio tagging aims to detect the types of sound events occurring in an audio recording. To tag the polyphonic audio recordings, we propose to use Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss function on the top of Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) with learnable Gated Linear Units (GLUCTC), based on a new type of audio label data: Sequentially Labelled Data (SLD). In GLU-CTC, CTC objective function maps the frame-level probability of labels to clip-level probability of labels. To compare the mapping ability of GLU-CTC for sound events, we train a CRNN with GLU based on Global Max Pooling (GLU-GMP) and a CRNN with GLU based on Global Average Pooling (GLU-GAP). And we also compare the proposed GLU-CTC system with the baseline system, which is a CRNN trained using CTC loss function without GLU. The experiments show that the GLU-CTC achieves an Area Under Curve (AUC) score of 0.882 in audio tagging, outperforming the GLU-GMP of 0.803, GLU-GAP of 0.766 and baseline system of 0.837. That means based on the same CRNN model with GLU, the performance of CTC mapping is better than the GMP and GAP mapping. Given both based on the CTC mapping, the CRNN with GLU outperforms the CRNN without GLU.


Umgeni Valley Nature Reserve as a natural area preserved from the more disruptive forms of economic activity, provides a multitude ofbenefits classified as either on-site use values or non-use values . This research addressed the problem of estimating the recreation use value of Umgeni Valley Nature Reserve. Two methodologies for valuing non-market benefits, the travel cost and contingent valuation methods are applied to evaluate the economic value ofthe reserve . The study reviews recent literature and highlights particular methodological issues characteristic of these techniques. The data from an on-site survey in the area permitted a description of visitors' socioeconomic characteristics and their trip patterns. Visitor attitudes, both to the recreational activities in Umgeni Valley Nature Reserve and to the proposals for the improvements of recreation provision were identified. Travel cost method results showed significant statistical relationships between number of trips, travel costs and socioeconomic variables. The consumer surplus value was estimated to be R95 800 in 1998. The contingent valuation method produced a true annual willingness-to-pay ofR66 336 for entrance fees expressed by day visitors. The analysis ofdata from overnight visitors in the cottages revealed that 63 % ofvisitors were willing to pay up to R75 per person per night. Finally, the research emphasized the importance and the potential use of economic value in assisting the development of economically sustainable policies for the provision of recreation. Whilst Umgeni Valley Nature Reserve is under no immediate threat, having an indication of the economic value of recreational opportunities within the reserve will aid future planning and decision-making.


Although science education emphasizes what students should learn, it also recognizes that how science is taught is equally important. In planning instruction, effective teachers draw on a growing body of research knowledge about the nature of learning and on craft knowledge about teaching that has stood the test of time. Typically, they consider the special characteristics of the material to be learned, the background of their students, and the conditions under which the teaching and learning are to take place. This article presents—nonsystematically and with no claim of completeness—some principles of learning and teaching that characterize the approach of such teachers. Many of those principles apply to learning and teaching in general, but clearly some are especially important in science, mathematics, and technology education. For convenience, learning and teaching are presented here in separate sections, even though they are closely interrelated.


The stability characteristics of compressible spanwise-periodic open-cavity flows are investigated with direct numerical simulation (DNS) and biglobal stability analysis for rectangular cavities with aspect ratios of $L/D=2$ and 6. This study examines the behaviour of instabilities with respect to stable and unstable steady states in the laminar regime for subsonic as well as transonic conditions where compressibility plays an important role. It is observed that an increase in Mach number destabilizes the flow in the subsonic regime and stabilizes the flow in the transonic regime. Biglobal stability analysis for spanwise-periodic flows over rectangular cavities with large aspect ratio is closely examined in this study due to its importance in aerodynamic applications. Moreover, biglobal stability analysis is conducted to extract two-dimensional (2-D) and 3-D eigenmodes for prescribed spanwise wavelengths $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}/D$ about the 2-D steady state. The properties of 2-D eigenmodes agree well with those observed in the 2-D nonlinear simulations. In the analysis of 3-D eigenmodes, it is found that an increase of Mach number stabilizes dominant 3-D eigenmodes. For a short cavity with $L/D=2$ , the 3-D eigenmodes primarily stem from centrifugal instabilities. For a long cavity with $L/D=6$ , other types of eigenmodes appear whose structures extend from the aft-region to the mid-region of the cavity, in addition to the centrifugal instability mode located in the rear part of the cavity. A selected number of 3-D DNS are performed at $M_{\infty }=0.6$ for cavities with $L/D=2$ and 6. For $L/D=2$ , the properties of 3-D structures present in the 3-D nonlinear flow correspond closely to those obtained from linear stability analysis. However, for $L/D=6$ , the 3-D eigenmodes cannot be clearly observed in the 3-D DNS due to the strong nonlinearity that develops over the length of the cavity. In addition, it is noted that three-dimensionality in the flow helps alleviate violent oscillations for the long cavity. The analysis performed in this paper can provide valuable insights for designing effective flow control strategies to suppress undesirable aerodynamic and pressure fluctuations in compressible open-cavity flows.


Ischemic stroke occurs when blood flow to the brain is interrupted, causing brain damage. There is evidence that reactive oxygen species, ROS, are produced by the enzyme family NADPH oxidase (NOX) following ischemic stroke, which leads to further brain injury. This study investigated the effectiveness of different NOX inhibitors as treatments for ischemic stroke in silico. The ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity) profile of each NOX inhibitor was taken, in which four classifications, namely applicability domain, human intestinal absorption, blood-brain barrier, and human oral bioavailability, were observed. The profile was used to determine the properties of each inhibitor in order to examine the extent to which it will work as a drug candidate. Then, AutoDock Vina was used to model the docking of the inhibitors: VAS2870, GSK2795039, apocynin, and AEBSF to NOX2, an isoform of the NOX family. We hypothesized that VAS2870 would be the most effective inhibitor in silico due to its potency to NOX2, not present in the other inhibitors. The binding affinities of each of the inhibitors to NOX2 were recorded, and the value was used to calculate the Ki value of each inhibitor. VAS2870 and apocynin were the most potent NOX2 inhibitors, and all four inhibitors had favorable ADMET profiles. This study helps corroborate previous in vivo and in vitro studies in an in silico format, and can be used towards developing drugs to treat ischemic stroke.


Dolomite was treated at 800 °C (D800), characterized, and used in the adsorptive removal of catechol (1,2-dihydroxybenzene) from aqueous solutions. The performances of the D800 sample, named dolomitic solid, were compared with those of the raw material. A bibliographic review shows that the data on the adsorption of phenolic compounds by dolomites are non-existent. Kinetic data, equilibrium isotherms, thermodynamic parameters, and pH influence were reported. Special attention was paid to the spectroscopic study, before and after adsorption. The purpose was to understand the mechanism of catechol uptake on dolomitic materials. Kinetics follows the pseudo-second order model. The Redlich-Peterson isotherm provides the best correlation of our isotherms. Affinity follows the sequence: D800 ≫ raw dolomite. The process is spontaneous at low temperatures and exothermic. After catechol adsorption, the shape of the band in the 3,600-3,000 cm-1 range and its red shift towards 3,429 cm-1 reflect a deep involvement of OH groups both of D800 and catechol, which confirm hydrogen bonding via their respective OH. On this basis, a schematic illustration was proposed. The understanding of the phenolic compound-dolomitic solid interactions constitutes a fundamental approach to developing the application of these materials in wastewater treatment.


This report, like its predecessors, relates primarily to the 2nd vol. of The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction published in the British Isles (2000) and the online The English Novel 1830–1836. The procedure followed derives generally from the activities of the research team who helped produce The British Novel 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation, and Reception, first made publicly available in 2004, though only materials found in Updates 1–4 are incorporated in that database. The present report comes twenty-three years since the release in March 2000 of the printed Bibliography, and some nineteen years after the original launch of British Fiction 1800–1829 database. Its primary aim is to consolidate all the preceding seven Updates into one final composite statement, while at the same time, in assembling these materials, reference has been made to a number of additional sources, incorporating further new information.


By introducing a new kind of Green function, we formulate an improved diffraction integral, which can be used to numerically evaluate the diffracted field of a microlens of plane-convex shape. Analytical expressions for the diffracted field of microlens are derived for the case where the curvature radius of the convex surface is larger than the dimension of the microlens aperture. The validity of the results and the diffracted field of the microlens are illustrated with numerical examples. The focal shifts of the diffracted field are found to depend mainly on the Fresnel number N of the microlens.


The management of design rationale (DR) in engineering design is an important task since DR is often regarded as crucial information in design decision support and design analysis. The existing DR systems largely rely on human efforts in capturing DRs along design activities according to some predefined DR models. However, these systems require heavy human involvement and they do not have the capacity to extract DRs from design archival documents, which contain rich DR information but are usually unstructured or semistructured texts, e.g., design documents, service reports, and test reports. In view of such challenges, it has motivated us to propose a new DR model to intelligently discover DRs from design archival documents. In this paper, we propose an issue, solution and artifact layer (ISAL) model for DR representation and approaches for rationale information discovery from design archival documents. We also introduce a DR repository construction platform based on the ISAL model by integrating rationale information from both design archival documents and design processes. Using patent documents as our research data, we conduct a conceptual comparison and experimental study of DR discovery especially for artifact information extraction. Results demonstrate the merits of our proposal. Lastly, we discuss potential applications by taking advantage of our ISAL model.


Background Cancer is the major cause of illness and mortality in Taiwan. It is noteworthy that the psychosocial and spiritual needs of patients with terminal cancer patients often are neglected by families and healthcare providers in Taiwan. Aim The purpose of this study was to apply the Comfort Theory to explore the experience on comfort care of a patient with terminal HCC near the end of life in hospice ward. Methods Data were collected and evaluated based on Kolcaba's theory of comfort. It directs nurses to assess physical, psycho-spiritual, sociocultural and environmental comfort needs of the patient; design holistic interventions to meet those needs; and measure the effectiveness of interventions to enhance the patient's comfort. Results Four contexts of a terminal hepatocellular carcinoma patient experience are as follows: (a) Physical: abdominal distention resulted from ascites deterioration. (b) Psycho-spiritual: Fear of death anxiety resulted from the uncertainty of life-threatening. (c) Sociocultural: Altered family process resulted from family worry and conceals the patient's condition. (d) Environmental: Un-homelike setting related to the limitation of hospital hardware. Discuss The caring experience of this study provide important information to health professionals while caring terminal cancer patients based on their comfort needs. Health professionals could design an individualised care plan, establish a trusting relationship, control symptoms, provide complementary medicine, reconnect family relationship and create a homelike atmosphere to meet patients' needs. Conclusion The study will help health professionals to perceive psychosocial and spiritual needs and properly provide support for terminal cancer patients.


Recent results have suggested that online Model Predictive Control (MPC) can be computed quickly enough to control fast sampled systems. High-speed applications impose a hard real-time constraint on the solution of the MPC problem, which generally prevents the computation of the optimal controller. In current approaches guarantees on feasibility and stability are sacrificed in order to achieve a real-time setting. In this paper we develop a real-time MPC scheme based on robust MPC design that recovers these guarantees while allowing for extremely fast computation. We show that a simple warm-start optimization procedure providing an enhanced feasible solution guarantees feasibility and stability for arbitrary time constraints. The proposed method can be practically implemented and efficiently solved for dynamic systems of significant problem size. Implementation details for a real-time robust MPC method are provided that achieves computation times equal to those reported for methods without guarantees. A 12-dimensional problem with 3 control inputs and a prediction horizon of 10 time steps is solved in 2msec with a performance deterioration less than 1% and thereby allows for sampling rates of 500Hz.


The frequency response function at the free end of a cantilever beam attached to an irregularly shaped flat plate has been measured experimentally. Variations in the drive point accelerance due to changes in the boundary conditions of the plate are presented. The ensemble of frequency response functions shows some deterministic features (due to the modes of the beam) and some statistical features (due to the varying boundary conditions of the plate). A numerical model using a beam impedance element and a simply supported rectangular plate with the same area and thickness as the test plate gives results that are similar to the ensemble of test results.


In August 2010, simultaneous enhancements of aerosol optical depth and total columns of carbon monoxide (CO), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), and ethane (C2H6) were observed at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL, 80.05°N, −86.42°W, 0.61 km above sea level, Eureka, Nunavut, Canada). Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) hot spots, Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) aerosol index maps, and Hybrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) back-trajectories were used to attribute these enhancements to an intense boreal fire event occurring in Russia. A ground-based Fourier Transform InfraRed (FTIR) spectrometer at PEARL provided vertically integrated measurements of trace gases transported in smoke plumes. We derived HCN and C2H6 equivalent emission ratios with respect to CO of 0.0054 ± 0.0022 and 0.0108 ± 0.0036, respectively, and converted them into equivalent emission factors of 0.66 ± 0.27 g kg−1 and 1.47 ± 0.50 g kg−1 (in grams of gas per kilogram of dry biomass burnt, with one-sigma uncertainties). These emission factors add new observations to the relatively sparse datasets available and can be used to improve the simulation of biomass burning fire emissions in chemical transport models. These emission factors for the boreal forest are in agreement with the mean values recently reported in a compilation study.


Essays by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Clara Bargellini, Dilys E. Blum, Elizabeth Hill Boone, Marcus Burke, Mitchell A. Codding, Thomas B. F. Cummins, Cristina Esteras Martin, M. Concepcion Garcia Saiz, Ilona Katzew, Adrian Locke, Gridley McKim-Smith, Alfonso Ortiz Crespo, Jorge F. Rivas P., Nuno Senos, Edward J. Sullivan, and Marjorie Trusted. By the end of the 16th century, Europe, Africa, and Asia were connected to North and South America via a vast network of complex trade routes. This led, in turn, to dynamic cultural exchanges between these continents and a proliferation of diverse art forms in Latin America. This monumental book transcends geographic boundaries and explores the history of the confluence of styles, materials, and techniques among Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas through the end of the colonial era----a period marked by the independence movements, the formation of national states, and the rise of academic art. Written by distinguished international scholars, essays cover a full range of topics, including city planning, iconography in painting and sculpture, East-West connections, the power of images, and the role of the artist. Beautifully illustrated with over 450 works--many published for the first time--this book presents a spectacular selection of decorative arts, textiles, silver, sculpture, painting, and furniture. Scholarly entries on some three hundred works highlight the various cultural influences and differences throughout this vast region. This groundbreaking book also includes an illustrated chronology, informative maps, and an exhaustive bibliography and is sure to set a new standard in the field of Latin American studies.


Why did Greek society foster social conditions, especially early marriage with its attendant early childbearing, that were known to be dangerous for both mother and child? What were the actual causes of death among women described as dying of childbirth in the Hippocratic Epidemics? Why did families choose to portray labor scenes on tombstones when the Greek commemorative tradition otherwise avoided reference to suffering and illness? In Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece, Nancy Demand offers the first comprehensive exploration of the social and cultural construction of childbirth in ancient Greece. Reading the ancient evidence in light of feminist theory, the Foucauldian notion of discursively constituted objects, medical anthropology, and anthropological studies of the modern Greek village, Demand discusses topics that include midwifery, abortion, attitudes of doctors toward women patients, and the treatment of women generally. For evidence, she relies primarily on the case histories in the Epidemics concerning women with complications in pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth. She also draws relevant details from cure records and dedications from healing sanctuaries, labor scenes depicted on tombstones, Aristophanic comedy, andPlatonic philosophy.


Free flow of culture is not always fair flow of culture. A recent spate of copyright suits by Hollywood against Bollywood accuses the latter of ruthlessly copying movie themes and scenes from America. But claims of cultural appropriation go far back, and travel in multiple directions. The revered American director, Steven Spielberg, has been accused of copying the idea for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial from legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's 1962 script, The Alien. Disney's The Lion King bears striking similarities to Osamu Tezuka's Japanese anime series, Kimba the White Lion. Neither Ray nor Tezuka's studio sued the American filmmakers and this Article is by no means an attempt to revive any particular legal case. Rather, this Article considers copyright's role in promoting free cultural exchange, albeit on fair terms in a global marketplace of ideas marked by sharp differentials in power, wealth, and knowledge.


The mid-elevation hillsides of the Cochabamba region of Bolivia between 2,500 and 4,000 m asi are characterized by a multitude of microclimates for crop production. Poor productivity of food crops in the Cochabamba region has been associated principally with declining soil fertility. The time for natural fallow has declined steadily as more land for crop production is re quired. The use of legume cover crops, therefore, to improve the restoration of soil fertility during the brief natural fallow period offers considerable possibilities for improvement. Potential legume cover crops were identified that can germinate, flower, and set seed within the possible growing season constrained by temperature, photoperiod, and rainfall patterns. A photothermal model was calibrated for each of twelve cover crops. Simulations were run using the climate records for three hillside sites near Cochabamba. Six of the more temperate cover crops investigated could mature and provide seed from any sowing date at 2,600 m, and from most sowings at 3,220 m, but few were adapted to 3,490 m. Potential cover crops, not currently grown locally, and adapted for this cropping system, were identified and recommended for further field trials.


A low-power variable-gain amplifier (VGA) based on transconductance (gm)-ratioed amplification is analyzed and designed with improved linearity. The VGA has the merits of continuous gain tuning, low power consumption and small chip area. However, the linearity performance of the gm-ratioed amplifier is usually poor. We analyze distortion in gm-ratioed amplifiers and propose to improve the output linearity by applying load degeneration technique. It is found that theoretically the output linearity can be improved by 8.5 dB at the same power consumption. We also analyze gain, bandwidth and noise performance of the gm-ratioed amplifiers. Two VGAs based on gm-ratioed amplification are designed and fabricated in a 0.18-μm CMOS process-one with load degeneration only and the other with both input and load degeneration. The VGA with load degeneration only achieves gain of -20 to 41 dB, bandwidth of 121 to 211 MHz, and input and output P1dB up to - 17 dBm and 0.65 dBm, respectively. The VGA with both input and load degeneration achieves gain of -37 to 28 dB, bandwidth of 76 to 809 MHz, and input and output P1dB up to - 2.63 dBm and 2.29 dBm, respectively. The two VGAs consume a similar amount of power, which is about 3 to 5 mW from a 1.8-V supply. For the same bias condition, the proposed load degeneration improves the output linearity by more than 15 dB.


The rate of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in South Africa is rapidly increasing. Elevated low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol is a major risk factor for CVD. Lowering LDL cholesterol levels to the appropriate treatment targets is strongly associated with a decrease in mortality and improved outcomes. This article provides a practical guide to the stratification of patients according to the cholesterol treatment targets, based on classification into various risk categories.


Abstract in every research paper has always been functioning as an attention-grabber which can encourage readers to keep reading the research or to dissuade it. Although abstracts are believed to play an important role in distributing the research findings, few studies have been done to evaluate the rhetorical organization of thesis abstracts, especially in the field of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). Thus, the purpose of the present study was to analyze the rhetorical moves of the MA thesis abstracts written from 1988 to 2015 in the field of TEFL in Allameh Tabataba'i University (ATU), an Iranian university. To this end, 300 MA thesis abstracts were analyzed based on Hyland's (2000) rhetorical move framework. To track the rhetorical move trends of the thesis abstracts and for the ease of analysis, they were analyzed in three time intervals. The results revealed that while in the first interval (1988-1997) the most frequent rhetorical moves were the "Purpose", "Method", and "Product", in the other two intervals (1998-2007 and 2008-2015) the "Purpose" was the most used rhetorical move. In addition, the least frequent rhetorical moves were the "Introduction" and "Conclusion" for the three intervals. The findings, on top of these, indicated that the rhetorical move patterns of thesis abstracts moved from Purpose-Method-Product (P-M-Pr) to Introduction-Purpose-Method-Product-Conclusion (I-P-M-Pr-C). That said, it can be concluded that in the examined thesis abstracts, the highest average of information was provided on the "Purpose" of the study, while the other moves, especially the conclusion move, was not deemed important; moreover, an increasing rate of information provision was detected on the "Method" and "Product" moves. This research bears some implications for L2 learners to better know their community of practice and writing instructors to prepare genre-based writing materials.


In 2009, one of the most powerful executives in the world, Goldman Sach's CEO Lloyd Blankfein, asserted that his firm was "doing God's work." This comment was made in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, a crisis that Goldman Sachs and other U.S. and European investment banks played important roles in creating. The comment's audacity did not escape notice, raising eyebrows even in the mainstream news media given its historical situatedness at the tail end of the crisis. Although Blankfein's comment was coded negatively in the cultural consciousness, it was also represented as iconic of the culture of Wall Street's "Masters of the Universe," as referred to in the popular vernacular. Blankfein's comment is deployed to illustrate the conceptual models and methodologies of those fields of study known as critical and cultural organizational communication research. These closely coupled but distinct fields of study will be delimited with special attention to their objects of investigation and methodological deployments using this example.
 Cultural and critical organizational communication represent closely coupled fields of study defined primarily by their phenomena or objects of study—organizational communications. Scholarship maps and analyzes communications to understand how organizations are constituted through communications that decide organizational policies, programs, practices, and values. Typically, organizational communications include all formal and informal signifying systems produced by members of the particular organization under investigation. Cultural approaches to organizational communication emphasize how these communications produce meaning and experience, while critical approaches address the systemic and historically sedimented power relations that are inscribed and reproduced through organizational communication signifying systems.
 Organizational communication scholarship from a cultural approach would ordinarily seek to represent the organizational culture primarily using ethnographic methods aimed at disclosing an organization's employee articulations, rituals, performances, and other circulations of symbol systems in the course of workaday life. However, the challenges to accessing Goldman Sach's hallow grounds might defeat even the most intrepid ethnographer. Lacking direct access to the day-to-day practices and experiences of investment bankers, challenges of access to work-a-day spaces have encouraged researchers to adopt rhetorical and/or discourse analytical methods to understand the culture as represented in available cultural texts, such as internal communications, press announcements, available corporate policies, shareholder reports, and so on. Ethnographies of communication and rhetorical/discourse analysis together represent the primary nonfunctionalist methodologies commonly used to study how organizational meanings are produced, disseminated, and transformed.
 Across disciplines, organizational cultural analysis, particularly when pursued ethnographically, is typically rooted in an interpretive tradition known as verstehen, which understands meaning as agentively produced through a temporally emergent fusion of subjective horizons. Culture is therefore regarded as emergent and is believed to be actively constructed by its interlocutors, who are afforded great agency within the tradition of verstehen. The emergent aspects of culture are fertile and seed subcultures that produce novel cultural performances as members delineate symbolic boundaries. Power is regarded by this tradition as largely visible to the everyday interpretive gaze, although admittedly fixed in institutions by rules, roles, and norms. The relatively visible character of institutional power hierarchies is believed to beget open conflict when disagreement exists over the legitimacy of power relations. Power is believed to circulate visibly and is thus subject to re-negotiation. This emergent and negotiated social ontology encourages researchers to adopt a pluralist view of power and a more relativistic approach to evaluating the social implications of specific organizational cultures. However, the Blankfein example raises complex moral questions about organizational cultures. Does everyone at Goldman Sachs really think they are doing God's work? If they do, what does that actually mean, and is it a good thing for society given the firm's demonstrable appetite for risk? More deeply, what are the conditions of possibility for the CEO of one of the world's most powerful organizations saying that his firm is pursuing God's work?
 Critical organizational communication adopts the methods of verstehen, in addition to methods from other critical traditions, but interjects ethical interrogation of systemic inequities in access to power and resources that are found across many social institutions and are deeply embedded historically. For example, a critical scholar might interrogate whether Goldman Sach's cultural exceptionalism is found across the financial sector's elite organizations and then seek to explore the roots of this exceptionalism in historical event and power trajectories. The critical scholar might address the systemic effects of a risk-seeking culture that is rooted in the collective belief it is doing God's work. Critical organizational communication research seeks to understand how organizational communications naturalize or reify particular organizational interests, elevating them above the interests of other stakeholders who are consequently denied equitable opportunities for agency.
 Cultural and critical organizational communication studies have prioritized various discourse-based methodologies over the last 20 or so years. The challenges with ethnographic access may have helped drive this shift, which has been decried by those who see discourse analysis as too disconnected from the daily performances and meaning-makings of organizational members. However, the primary challenge facing these fields of study is the one long recognized as the "container metaphor" (Smith & Turner, 1995). The study of organizational communication too often represents its field of study as a self-contained syntagm—a closed signifying system—that too narrowly delimits boundaries of investigation to communications produced in and by particular organizational members with less examination of the material and symbolic embeddedness of those organizational communications within a wider social milieu of networked systems and historically embedded social structures. In essence, organizational communication has struggled to embed its observations of discrete communications/practices within more encompassing and/or networked social systems and structures.


Toibutamide (1 g/kg body wt) was administered to male rats for 3 days to determine the effects of this pretreatment on subsequent insulin biosynthesis and compartmental storage characteristics of freshly isolated islets. Islets were isolated 16 h after the last toibutamide administration, at a time when fed plasma glucose concentrations were normal. Islet glucagon was unchanged but insulin content was significantly reduced (38 ± 1.2 ng IRI/islet from seven untreated rats versus 7.9 ± 1.2 ng IRI/islet from eight treated rats). After toibutamide pretreatment, the rate of incorporation of 3Hleucine into islet proinsulin was unchanged, but the t1/2 of labeled proinsulin-to-insulin conversion was significantly (P < 0.001) decreased from 36 to 20 min. After treatment, actual rates of glucose-stimulated insulin secretion were 50% lower, however, because due to the proportionately greater depletion of islet insulin content, the fractional rate of secretion was increased twofold. After treatment, there was evidence of compartmental, heterogeneous insulin storage, and glucose still marked newly synthesized insulin for preferential release; however, the differential release of new and old insulin converged rapidly with time. Mathematical integration of the data suggested dilution of the newly synthesized insulin compartment with unlabeled insulin during the chase period, but additionally indicated more rapid mixing of newly synthesized with previously stored, unlabeled insulin. Thus, tolbutamide-treated rats partially compensated for acute insulin depletion by (1) increasing the rate of proinsulin-to-insulin conversion, but not increasing the rate of proinsulin biosynthesis; (2) doubling the glucose-stimulated fractional secretory rate of the depleted cellular insulin storage compartment; and (3) retaining compartmental storage characteristics but mixing newly synthesized insulin more rapidly with the compartment of previously stored, unlabeled insulin.


The history of migration during the modern period has been studied without taking into account the respective roles played by men and women in individual and collective displacements. The study of forms of mobility in space, such as leisure travel, exploration, and colonial conquest, has rendered women invisible despite the fact that they were also active figures in long-distance displacements.Female victims of forced displacement have also remained in the dark for a long time. The history of circulations in Europe from the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century shows how the movements of men and women in space have contributed to the evolution of the gendered division of social roles, as well as the shifting and blurring of gender identities.


In our culture, "apocalypse" typically refers to a cataclysmic, catastrophic ending, real or imagined. Often this meaning, in which fear eclipses hope, is traced back to the biblical tradition. But what if the book from which we derive the term, i.e. the "Apocalypse"—or "Revelation"—of John, refers less to the end of the world than to a transition between the two Ages? What if that transition is characterized as double-edged: as both 'the death throes of the old world order' and 'the birthpangs of the new creation'? Attentive to the nature of apocalyptic discourse, this course will seek to develop a key area of systematic theology by exploring the topics of death, judgment, heaven, and hell—the 'four last things' of traditional eschatology—as they are portrayed in the book of Revelation. In allowing intertexual and intratextual webs of meaning to emerge, we will pay special attention to the way in which Old Testament echoes, together with the book's own symbolic coherence and narrative logic, can open up new avenues for exegesis, and for theological reflection. The topic of Final Judgment will be a special focus. How is this to be conceived in the light of the apocalyptic transition? If the first reference to Babylon in the biblical canon, the Babel narrative of Gen 11, refers to a judgment that does not bring history to an end but opens it up once again to the dissemination motif of Gen 1:28, is it possible to detect a parallel 'judgment unto salvation' theme in the final book of the New Testament? Our discussions will explore the interface between biblical studies, the "theological interpretation of Scripture," and contemporary eschatology. Familiarity with New Testament Greek is an advantage but is not a prerequisite.


The reactor of High Density Poly Ethylene –HDPE – conversion into liquid fuel was studied and modeled. The calculation software: CFD FLUENT was applied for this study. The software is a powerful tool in simulating chemical reactions. The simulation of HDPE catalytic cracking reactor was implemented by using this software and inserting both kinetic and thermodynamic conditions of the reaction in Isothermal state. To validate the simulation, the software output graphs including product compositions were put under comparisons with GC gas chromatography graphs. On the other hand, the non-catalytic reaction was modeled and the results were compared to catalytic cracking outputs. On the basis of the received data by simulation, the product content in catalytic cracking had higher values than thermal cracking reaction.


Recent years have shown a tremendous increase in consumer demands for healthy, natural, high-quality convenience foods, especially within the fish and seafood sector. Traditional processing technologies such as drying or extensive heating can cause deterioration of nutrients and sensory quality uncompilable with these demands. This has led to development of many novel processing technologies, which include several mild technologies. The present review highlights the potential of mild thermal, and nonthermal physical, and chemical technologies, either used alone or in combination, to obtain safe seafood products with good shelf life and preference among consumers. Moreover, applications and limitations are discussed to provide a clear view of the potential for future development and applications. Some of the reviewed technologies, or combinations thereof, have shown great potential for non-seafood products, yet data are missing for fish and seafood in general. The present paper visualizes these knowledge gaps and the potential for new technology developments in the seafood sector. Among identified gaps, the combination of mild heating (e.g., sous vide or microwave) with more novel technologies such as pulsed electric field, pulsed light, soluble gas stabilization, cold plasma, or Ohmic heat must be highlighted. However, before industrial applications are available, more research is needed.


In this paper we propose a setting method to adjust the ratio of the CPU, RAM and BUS clock speeds of a PDA to balance the processing time and reduce the jitter of the arrival voice packets. To maintain the balance and fluency among compression, encoder-decoder, memory access and processing for voice packets, we shall lessen the clock delay to thus reduce jitter and reach the QoS of VoIP through the wireless PDA telephone. We use a queueing model to represent the service pattern of the CPU, RAM and BUS of the PDA system. The ratio of the service rates becomes one of the critical factors in reducing the jitter of the VoIP based on a systematic adjusting method. We also use a queueing equivalent model to represent the processing performance, carry out physical measurement and compare model and measurement. From a comparison of all combinations of the clock ratio, we see an improvement and matching of the processing performance of a PDA which can reduce delay and jitter and which also improves the QoS of the network telephone.


Abstract Omega-3 (n-3) fatty acids are essential to maintain satisfactory human health and need to be consumed in the diet. Western diets are often deficient in n-3 fatty acids because of an insufficient intake of cold water oily fish. The main n-3 fatty acids in fatty fish are eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). To date, no formally accepted dietary reference intakes for EPA and DHA exist, while international intake recommendations differ widely. Supplementation is an easy and convenient way of increasing dietary n-3 fatty acid intake, but very little information is available to health professionals when advising consumers on choosing a supplement to suit their lifestyle. Reliable nutrition information on product labels is vital since misleading information may lead to erroneous dosages with concomitant adverse effects. Since no formal regulatory structure for dietary supplements currently exists in South Africa, consumers depend on self-regulation within the industry for assurance of product quality, consistency, potency and purity of n-3 fatty acid supplements. Therefore, the aim of this article is to equip health professionals with proper knowledge with special reference to the bioavailability of fish oil supplements, reliability of labelling information, dietary intake recommendations, potential adverse effects and some general advice when purchasing n-3 fatty acid supplements.


We present technical advances and methods to measure effective broadband physical albedo in snowy mountain headwaters using a prototype dual-sensor pyranometer mounted on an Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (an AAV). Our test flights over snowy meadows and forested areas performed well during both clear sky and snowy/windy conditions at an elevation of ~2650 m above mean sea level (MSL). Our AAV-pyranometer platform provided high spatial (m) and temporal resolution (sec) measurements of effective broadband (310–2700 nm) surface albedo. The AAV-based measurements reveal spatially explicit changes in landscape albedo that are not present in concurrent satellite measurements from Landsat and MODIS due to a higher spatial resolution. This AAV capability is needed for validation of satellite snow albedo products, especially over variable montane landscapes at spatial scales of critical importance to hydrological applications. Effectively measuring albedo is important, as annually the seasonal accumulation and melt of mountain snowpack represent a dramatic transformation of Earth's albedo, which directly affects headwaters' water and energy cycles.


Requirements regarding efficient energy use in buildings are becoming more and more strict. New ideas and technologies are constantly sought to face the challenge of reducing global CO2 emissions. The building sector accounts for a large part of energy use. The potential for more efficient energy use in this sector is significant and will also contribute towards reduced CO2 emissions. This master thesis is a continuation of a project work report written in collaboration with Ida Karin Auraen during the fall semester of 2012. A prototype of a leisure home was developed where sanitary installations were kept frost proof throughout the year without the use of primary energy. This was achieved by placing sanitary installations within well-insulated internal zones, and by using an active solar heating system and heat exchange with the ground. The goal of this thesis is to improve the model developed in the project work report. The main focus is to improve the design of the solar heating system to better approximate a realistic situation. Auraen's master thesis focused on the interaction between the leisure building and surrounding ground, and the ground model developed in her report is further used in this thesis. The leisure building consists of two floors and is constructed of poorly insulated log walls. Each floor has a thermally insulated internal zone where sanitary installations are deemed installed. The goal is to maintain frost proof conditions throughout the year within the internal zones to avoid damages to sanitary installations. The idea is to promote seasonal heat storage by storing heat collected during sunny periods in thermal mass located below the building. The desired effect is that the heat transfer is reversed during cold, dark winter months, so that stored heat is released upwards and into the leisure building, preventing formation of frost in the internal zones. The dynamic simulation tool ESP-r (Environmental System Performance Research) is used to analyze the leisure building. The interactions between the building and the ground are modeled using a submerged basement zone defined with a BASESIMP configuration. BASESIMP performs quasi 3-dimensional heat transfer calculations between a building and the ground. BASESIMP does not account for heat storage. The heat storage potential in the ground is analyzed through the internal ground floor construction. The floor is modeled as a thermally massive concrete slab with high density and high specific heat capacity. Heat storage calculations are performed based on heat stored in this concrete slab. The solar heating system is built up using the plants and systems network in ESP-r. The system contains three components; flat plate solar collector, circulation pump and hydronic floor. The hydronic floor component is a water-based floor heating circuit and is embedded within the concrete slab. Heat from the solar collector is transferred to the hydronic floor heating the slab below the internal zones. Towards the end of the winter, the remaining energy stored in the slab, and the incoming solar radiation injected to the slab, are too limited to make a significant heat contribution to the internal zones. Therefore, heat collected from January 1st to April 30th is injected directly to zone air of the internal first floor. The leisure home is planned located in southern mountain regions in Norway. ESP-r does not have available climate data for this area, and therefore climate data from Ostersund, Sweden has been used as an approximation. The building has also been tested with climate data from Fornebu, Norway which is a typical coastal region in the south of Norway. Different parameters have been altered to optimize the model with regards to raising the minimum temperatures in the internal zones. Results show that the internal zones maintain much more stable conditions throughout the year than the outer zones. This shows that isolating sanitary installations within well-insulated internal zones can be a major advantage in the design process to reduce the amount of energy needed to keep the facilities frost free. A south-oriented solar collector with an area of 2 m2, and an slope of 70 ° achieves sufficient energy for frost proof conditions for both locations. The minimum temperatures in the internal ground- and first floor are 5.29 °C and 3.10 °C with Ostersund climate data. The delivered energy from the hydronic floor component to the concrete slab, turns out to be 482 kWh with Ostersund climate data, and 547 kWh with Fornebu climate data, with a collector efficiency of 68 %. Results show that heat collected in the spring and summer significantly affect the minimum temperatures occurring around mid-February in the following year. For further studies and optimization of the model, the interactions between the heat storage and surrounding ground should be studied more thoroughly. The effect which snow may have on the ground conditions should also be studied. Evacuated tube solar collectors are probably more suited for Scandinavian climate than flat plate collectors as used in this thesis. The plant database in ESP-r has no option to model evacuated tube collectors. The effect of such could be studied with another simulation tool.


Usability evaluation is essential to user-centred design; yet, evaluators who analyse the same usability test sessions have been found to identify substantially different sets of usability problems. We revisit this evaluator effect by having 19 experienced usability professionals analyse video-recorded test sessions with five users. Nine participants analysed moderated sessions; 10 participants analysed unmoderated sessions. For the moderated sessions, participants reported an average of 33% of the problems reported by all nine of these participants and 50% of the subset of problems reported as critical or serious by at least one participant. For the unmoderated sessions, the percentages were 32% and 40%. Thus, the evaluator effect was similar for moderated and unmoderated sessions, and it was substantial for the full set of problems and still present for the most severe problems. In addition, participants disagreed in their severity ratings. As much as 24% (moderated) and 30% (unmoderated) of the problems reported by multiple participants were rated as critical by one participant and minor by another. The majority of the participants perceived an evaluator effect when merging their individual findings into group evaluations. We discuss reasons for the evaluator effect and recommend ways of managing it.


In many sectors customers are increasingly seeking service contracts rather than buying products. High tech capital equipment firms attracted by the potential revenue benefits are choosing to move from supplying product only to supplying product and services. This concept is known as 'Servitization'. Through empirical evidence the academic literature has shown that businesses face challenges in undertaking the transformation from product to service provision and that organisational, cultural, commercial and operational challenges have the potential to erode the desired and expected benefits sought from such a transition. The research presented in this thesis investigates and identifies the features and challenges of servitization in the context of a complex engineering service provided by the UK Aerospace Defence industry. The research also explores the reported costs and front of mind costs for the provision of a complex engineering service. Particular attention is given to the problem of less than expected profitability during and post transformation to service. This research adopts a qualitative approach through the use of a single case study with multiple case examples of the complex engineering service. Findings identify a number of challenges associated with the transformation from product to service provision that include strategy, organisation and enterprise management, contracting, risk, culture and operations. Considering these findings holistically it is suggested that a paradigm shift needs to occur, changing both managers perspective and the business models employed if the firm is to provide a sustainable service offering. New ways of structuring and managing the enterprise to deliver the service value proposition will be required. This will include the development of performance management of all operations across the enterprise required as a minimum to ensure optimum performance of service delivery at lowest cost.


The low completion rate issue in MOOCs has become one of the main highlights by researchers. It is reported that only 10 to 15 percent of the students were able to complete the MOOCs. This low completion rate is due to the students are less engaged with the MOOCs content causing them to become demotivated to complete the whole MOOCs. Engaging students in MOOCs environment, especially for non-technical subjects, suited very well. However, for technical MOOCs, it involves significant challenges because technical MOOCs must be able to offer the students with practice-oriented learning outcome in-order for the MOOCs to be effective and engaging. Due to the above issue, this paper discussed an improvised MOOCs model for teaching technical subjects with the intervention in the use of wearable technology. A discussion on the e-content and e-activity of the technical MOOC learning design was presented. This study implemented the proposed technical MOOC model through the MOOC development. The students' perception of the technical MOOC was then evaluated, and all the results were explained in the discussion part. Results of the correlation test revealed that all of the technical MOOC variables correlated substantially and held a positive relationship with students' perception variable with r =.3 to 1.0, p < .0005. In addition, this result also suggests that the learning materials produced by wearable technology do contribute towards the positive effect of students' perception when learning technical MOOC.


A point-source digital inline holographic microscope (DIHM) was designed for the imaging of particles from 50 µm to several millimeters in size. The DIHM operates autonomously without connection to external recording devices or power sources and delivers 4.2 megapixel images at a rate of approximately 7 images s –1 , each image representing a snapshot of 1.8 mL seawater. Reliance on largely off-the-shelf components, and simplifi-cation in its construction makes this camera system adaptable to various particle size ranges and environments, and easy-to-operate for nonexpert users. The DIHM produced sharp images of protists with skeletal structures (e.g., acantharians, tintinnids, dinoflagellates), mesoplankton (e.g., copepods, appendicularians, medusae), Trichodesmium colonies and marine snow particles while descending in the water column at 1 m s –1 , a typical velocity for deployments of tethered instruments and samplers from oceanographic vessels. To validate the usefulness of the new instrument in an oceanographic context, data are presented of the surface distribution of Trichodesmium spp., and of the vertical frequency distribution of fecal pellets and other particles in the deep sea. The point-source DIHM has the potential to become a standard instrument on the CTD rosette (i.e., on the basic oceanographic instrument and sampling frame) in the future providing a permanent archival record of the water column that


Iris recognition is a method of biometric identification. Biometric identification provides automatic recognition of an individual based on the unique feature of physiological characteristics or behavioral characteristic. Iris recognition is a method of recognizing a person by analyzing the iris pattern. This survey paper covers the different iris recognition techniques


This study analyses the extent of gold open access (OA) publishing options in 377 anthropology journals by applying a six-level coding scheme (0 = non-transparent = fully OA, i.e., free to read and publish without embargo). This analysis is meant to simplify the process of identifying OA journal publishing options in the discipline of anthropology, in addition to sharing findings on some of the prominent issues in OA publishing as they relate to anthropology journals, including non-transparency among publishers and the prevalence and price of article processing charges (APCs). We conclude that publishers should be more transparent about their OA publishing options and policies by providing conspicuous and straightforward information to potential authors. Further, we find that in the anthropology scholarly communication ecosystem, APCs for hybrid journals are more expensive than those for fully gold OA journals, thus contradicting the assumption that gold OA is more costly to researchers.


Chordal graphs are a widely studied graph class, with applications in several areas of computer science, including structural learning of Bayesian networks. Many problems that are hard on general graphs become solvable on chordal graphs. The random generation of instances of chordal graphs for testing these algorithms is often required. Nevertheless, there are only few known algorithms that generate random chordal graphs, and, as far as we know, none of them generate chordal graphs uniformly at random (where each chordal graph appears with equal probability). In this paper we propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample connected chordal graphs uniformly at random. Additionally, we propose a Markov chain that generates connected chordal graphs with a bounded treewidth uniformly at random. Bounding the treewidth parameter (which bounds the largest clique) has direct implications on the running time of various algorithms on chordal graphs. For each of the proposed Markov chains we prove that they are ergodic and therefore converge to the uniform distribution. Finally, as initial evidence that the Markov chains have the potential to mix rapidly, we prove that the chain on graphs with bounded treewidth mixes rapidly for trees (chordal graphs with treewidth bound of one).


Women are under-represented on corporate boards and other leadership structures in Africa. This problem is a reflection of the historical disadvantages and gender inequalities women face. The status quo is, however, ironic given the relatively large female population in Africa and women's influence on more than three-quarters of consumer decisions on the continent. This policy briefing sheds light on women on corporate boards in Africa. While recognising contextual differences among countries, policy directions are suggested that could result in gains for several stakeholders. Women on Corporate Boards in Africa: Beyond Tokenism


Site index is the most widely used method for site quality assessment in hardwood forests of the eastern United States. Its application in most oak (Quercus sp. L.) dominated stands is often problematic, however, because available sample trees usually do not meet important underlying assumptions of the method. A prototype method for predicting site index from tree species composition has shown promising results in the southern Appalachian Mountains. The objective of this study was to determine if upland oak site index was associated with two common understory shrubs: mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia (L) and spice bush (Lindera benzoin (L) Blume). Regression analysis indicated that including these shrubs in the model increased r2 from 0.63 to 0.67. Predicted upland oak site index decreased by 5.4 ft if mountain laurel was present on a sample plot and increased by 7.4 ft if spice bush was present. Results from this exploratory study conducted in a small watershed should be validated elsewhere, but the findings do suggest that estimates of upland oak site index using the species composition method can be improved by observing the presence of mountain laurel and spice bush.


Purpose: The paper proposes a systematic review and bibliometric analysis of the corporate finance literature on tax and multinational investment, since the complexity of legislations and taxation is a challenge to researchers who seek to understand their influence on corporate financing decisions. It presents the most relevant papers about the influence of taxes on corporate capital structure, classifies and codifies the various characteristics of these articles, describes the strengths and weaknesses of the studies and provides an agenda and a research framework to address the key gaps in the current knowledge on the theme. Approach/Methodology/Design: The study classifies 41 selected articles cited in the WoS database. The papers are reviewed and their main contributions are identified. Findings: The results indicate that tax is a determinant for multinational companies. However, the complexity of the legislations implies problems in estimating and the results of these studies. Among the knowledge gaps identified, the estimation problems of the models stand out, due to the difficulty in calculating the tax proxies. The papers present opposite results for the same information bases and research problems, depending on how the tax independent variable is modulated. Practical Implications: The study will contribute positively to the understanding of foreign direct investments, world organizations, multinational companies and investors. Originality/Value: To the best of the authors´ knowledge, this is the first systematic review identifying what is missing in the literature on taxation and capital structure of multinationals, while offering recommendations for future studies.