A common goal in the analysis of neural data is to compress large population recordings into sets of interpretable, low-dimensional latent trajectories. This problem can be approached using Gaussian process (GP)-based methods which provide uncertainty quantification and principled model selection. However, standard GP priors do not distinguish between underlying dynamical processes and other forms of temporal autocorrelation. Here, we propose a new family of "dynamical" priors over trajectories, in the form of GP covariance functions that express a property shared by most dynamical systems: temporal non-reversibility. Non-reversibility is a universal signature of autonomous dynamical systems whose state trajectories follow consistent flow fields, such that any observed trajectory could not occur in reverse. Our new multi-output GP kernels can be used as drop-in replacements for standard kernels in multivariate regression, but also in latent variable models such as Gaussian process factor analysis (GPFA). We therefore introduce GPFADS (Gaussian Process Factor Analysis with Dynamical Structure), which models single-trial neural population activity using low-dimensional, non-reversible latent processes. Unlike previously proposed non-reversible multi-output kernels, ours admits a Kronecker factorization enabling fast and memory-efficient learning and inference. We apply GPFADS to synthetic data and show that it correctly recovers ground truth phase portraits. GPFADS also provides a probabilistic generalization of jPCA, a method originally developed for identifying latent rotational dynamics in neural data. When applied to monkey M1 neural recordings, GPFADS discovers latent trajectories with strong dynamical structure in the form of rotations.


Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) emerged as a suitable solution to optimization of Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It improves network efficiency, utilization of resources and resilience in packet switched networks. With MPLS, packet forwarding decisions are made based on label inspection rather than packet header information. While MPLS is native to packet switched networks, Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) extends MPLS functionality to networks that support non-packet switched domains such as time, lambda and fiber. GMPLS also offers better resource management through the use of a new protocol; Link Management Protocol (LMP). In this work, a performance evaluation of GMPLS and MPLS control plane signaling protocols was performed. Further, a control plane interworking model for MPLS and GMPLS networks was proposed. Simulations were carried out to examine the performance of signaling protocols in an MPLS network configured with, and without Quality-of-Service (QoS). Conclusions on the performance characteristics of each signaling protocol were made based on the collected results.


Two key themes in the Middle East region are, of course, democratization and women's rights. In our first article, Emily Regan Wills addresses the "democratic paradox" that occurred in Kuwait beginning in 1999, when the emir granted women the right to vote, only to have the elected parliament repeal it six months later. She traces the history of the issue through the subsequent electoral cycles to the 2012 elections. Next, Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania examines recent efforts by those favoring Israel's annexation of all or most of the West Bank to downplay the demographic challenge that Palestinian population growth presents to Israel's Jewish identity. After a careful review of statistics used in these efforts, he argues that a systematic manipulation of population statistics has occurred. In the wake of the controversies sparked by the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential elections, and with presidential elections approaching again this summer, Hamid Mavani of Claremont Graduate University addresses attempts to reconcile Ruhollah Khomeini's concept of wilayat al-faqih with efforts to reflect the will of the population. In the midst of the current confrontation between the US and Iran over Iran's nuclear program, it may be useful to revisit an earlier stage in the complex evolution of the relations between the two countries. Stephen McGlinchey of the University of the West of England in Bristol examines US arms credit sales to Iran during the Johnson Administration, a prelude to the strengthening ties between the US and Iran during the subsequent Nixon years. In our last issue, I introduced new, occasional policy essays which address topics of current interest and are not subjected to the lengthy scholarly review process. There are two such shorter articles in this issue: Geoffrey Aronson on US policy options in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Charles Freilich, a former Deputy National Security Advisor in Israel, on improving Israel's security decision-making process. This issue's Book Review Article, by Robert Springborg of the US Naval Postgraduate School, "GCC Countries as Rentier States Revisited," reviews four recent books on the Gulf economies. There is also the usual range of individual book reviews and our quarterly Chronology, which has appeared continuously since our first issue in 1947. And, between issues, pay a visit our website at http://www.mei.edu, soon to be much expanded, and also keep in mind that I blog daily at the MEI Editor's Blog, at http://mideasti.blogspot.com.


Can a country grow faster by saving more? We address this question both theoretically and empirically. In our model, growth results from innovations that allow local sectors to catch up with the frontier technology. In relatively poor countries, catching up with the frontier requires the involvement of a foreign investor, who is familiar with the frontier technology, together with effort on the part of a local bank, who can directly monitor local projects to which the technology must be adapted. In such a country, local saving matters for innovation, and therefore growth, because it allows the domestic bank to cofinance projects and thus to attract foreign investment. But in countries close to the frontier, local firms are familiar with the frontier technology, and therefore do not need to attract foreign investment to undertake an innovation project, so local saving does not matter for growth. In our empirical exploration we show that lagged savings is significantly associated with productivity growth for poor but not for rich countries. This effect operates entirely through TFP rather than through capital accumulation. Further, we show that savings is significantly associated with higher levels of FDI inflows and equipment imports and that the effect that these have on growth is significantly larger for poor countries than rich.


The past few years have shown a tendency from desktop software development towards mobile application development due to the increasing amount of smartphone users and available devices. Compared to traditional desktop applications, requirements are different in the mobile world. Due to the massive amount of mobile applications it is important to bring a new idea to the market very quickly and concurrently target a large number of users all over the world. The aspect of localization is crucial if the product should be usable in different countries. The term localization in this context refers to the process of adapting a software to different regions by changing the language, image resources, reading direction or other regional requirements. The proposed solution covers the aspect of string translation, with a focus on devices where the screen area is limited. Translating a software poses a challenge since the text can have several meanings on the one hand and has to match the available screen space on the other hand.
 Knowing the context and area where a string appears in the user interface can improve the quality and accuracy of the translation. Besides that it reduces efforts for layout implementation and testing. This paper refers to that feature as navigation context-aware. A Context-Aware Translation Tool (CATT) including this feature is presented. As an input for the tool a user interface description language (UIDL) is used which contributes platform independence to the tool. To increase the applicability of the tool to a number of description languages, a meta-model was created which specifies crucial compatibility requirements. An evaluation of existing languages regarding their compatibility to the proposed model and a discussion of limitations is included.


Context. Here we investigate the dynamical evolution of the reconnection process at an initially linear 3D null point that is stressed by a localised shear motion across the spine axis. The difference to previous investigations is that the fan plane is not rotationally symmetric and this allows for different behaviours depending on the alignment of the fan plane relative to the imposed driver direction. Aims. The aim is to show how the current accumulation and the associated reconnection process at the non-axisymmetric null depends on the relative orientation between the driver imposed stress across the spine axis of the null and the main eigenvector direction in the fan plane. Methods. The time evolution of the 3D null point is investigated solving the 3D non-ideal MHD equations numerically in a Cartesian box. The magnetic field is frozen to the boundaries and the boundary velocity is only non-zero where the imposed driving for stressing the system is applied. Results. The current accumulation is found to be along the direction of the fan eigenvector associated with the smallest eigenvalue until the direction of the driver is almost parallel to this eigenvector. When the driving velocity is parallel to the weak eigenvector and has an impulsive temporal profile the null only has a weak collapse forming only a weak current layer. However, when the null point is stressed continuously boundary effects dominates the current accumulation. Conclusions. There is a clear relation between the orientation of the current concentration and the direction of the fan eigenvector corresponding to the small eigenvalue. This shows that the structure of the magnetic field is the most important in determining where current is going to accumulate when a single 3D null point is perturbed by a simple shear motion across the spine axis. As the angle between the driving direction and the strong eigenvector direction increases, the current that accumulates at the null becomes progressively weaker.


I started a summer internship at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland on May 31, only about 48 hours after I made the trek from the southeastern region of Virginia to Northeast Ohio (affectionately referred to as "NEO"). Exactly one month ago, I graduated from the University of Virginia (UVA) with a BA in Spanish (with a concentration in linguistics and philology) and a BA in global studies (with a concentration in public health) and completed my first year of graduate school. After I completed a course titled Public Health — Law, Ethics, and Policy that challenged my thoughts about and understanding of healthcare policy, I decided to apply to the accelerated master of public policy (MPP) program offered through the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at UVA. Through this program, I was afforded the opportunity to complete my first year of grad school while concurrently completing my fourth year of undergrad. Based on my academic interests and my community service experiences, the Community Development Department's efforts "to build partnerships and provide training and technical assistance to bankers and community development practitioners" captivated me. This internship provides me with opportunities to work in a culture that values community input and economic development and to apply academic learning to real-world experiences. On June 1, my second day on the job, I attended the 2016 Northeast Ohio Regional Workforce Development Forum at Corporate College East in Warrensville Heights. This event brought employees and employers together to discuss potential ways to address labor and workforce issues in Northeast Ohio. Now, you may be curious as to why the Community Development Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland cosponsored this event. There are a couple of reasons. First, and what I quickly learned during my first week at the Fed, is that the community development team frequently brings together academic professionals, area nonprofits, and local organizations to discuss current challenges and potential solutions. Our team convenes such events in an effort to facilitate communication, collaboration, and cooperation that ultimately can lead to improved outcomes for individuals and families in low- and moderate-income communities. Second, and more specific to this particular event, the Fed's Community Development Department has focused over the past couple of years on developing a greater understanding both of challenges within the complex workforce development system and of how these challenges impact individuals in low- and moderate-income communities. Thus, it was a natural fit for the community development team to partner with workforce development boards from Ashtabula, Cleveland—Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage, and Summit Counties in cosponsoring the Northeast Ohio Regional Workforce Development Forum. Over 230 workforce development practitioners, city leaders, funders, researchers, employees, and employers attended and participated in stimulating conversations about regional workforce challenges and potential ways to address these challenges. This event included guest speakers such as Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University and an institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research; Fred Dedrick, executive director of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions; and others. Professor Holzer's speech focused on the need for greater communication and collaboration between the education system and the workforce. He mentioned some challenges that many future employees face such as the current developmental-education system and the system for determining financial need, as well as potential policy solutions to alleviate these challenges such as reforms in financial aid allocation and developmental education. Additionally, the forum included multiple breakout sessions in which participants formed small groups in which to share their perspectives and to discuss initiatives that successfully have addressed current challenges in the workforce, as well as the role that employers and education systems play in preparing and training workers to meet the needs of local businesses. Based on closing remarks from attendees, it appears that one of the most important steps moving forward is to promote cooperation and strengthen the relationships among economic development entities, community colleges, institutions of secondary education, and intermediaries. For the stakeholders involved in the Workforce Development Forum, I believe this was an important opportunity to provide feedback to contribute to the development of a regional workforce strategy. For me, this event served as an opportunity to develop a better understanding of a topic that I have not often discussed in an academic setting, as well as to gain a greater appreciation for the Community Development Department's mission and role within the community.


Summary 1. The past decade has witnessed a continual increase in the use of crops genetically modified to produce insecticidal toxins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). This presents the challenge of designing agricultural systems to manage pests and the evolution of resistance to Bt. 2. We tested whether entomopathogenic nematodes might act synergistically with Bt crops by killing pests in non-Bt refuges and by increasing the fitness costs of resistance to Bt. We also tested whether insect mortality and fitness costs were affected by the cotton phytochemical gossypol. 3. The entomopathogenic nematode Steinernema riobrave increased the fitness cost of Bt resistance, indicating that its presence in refuges may slow pest adaptation to Bt crops. No effect on fitness costs was detected for the nematode Heterorhabditis bacteriophora . Gossypol did not alter nematode-imposed fitness costs. 4. Simulation modelling supported the hypothesis that nematodes in refuges may slow resistance evolution. 5. The effects of gossypol on insect mortality from nematodes and nematode reproduction differed between nematode species. Gossypol increased insect mortality caused by H. bacteriophora but did not affect mortality caused by S. riobrave . Gossypol enhanced reproduction of H. bacteriophora and decreased reproduction of S. riobrave . 6. Synthesis and applications. Our results point to the value of developing integrated pest management strategies for Bt crops that include non-Bt refuges in which entomopathogenic nematodes are used as a pest-management agent. Because entomopathogenic nematodes can magnify fitness costs of Bt resistance, their presence in refuges may delay resistance by pests to Bt crops. Moreover, entomopathogenic nematodes can serve as biological control agents thereby decreasing dependence on conventional insecticides to manage pest populations in refuges.


John Lighton Synge was arguably the greatest Irish mathematician and theoretical physicist since Sir William Rowan Hamilton(1806–65). He was a prolific researcher of great originality and versatility, and a writer of striking lucidity and 'clarity of expression'. He made outstanding contributions to a vast range of subjects, and particularly to Einstein's theory of relativity. His approach to relativity, and theoretical physics in general, is characterized by his extraordinary geometrical insight. In addition tobringing clarity and new insights to relativity, his geometrical approach profoundly influenced the development of the subject since the 1960s. His crusade in his long academic career was 'to make space–time a real workshop for physicists, and not a museum visited occasionally with a feeling of awe' (31)*.


Fluid-borne vibrations in piping systems remain a serious problem in applications such as marine vessels where mechanical fatigue and radiated noise are critical factors. In the case of pumps or hydraulic engines, the main source of vibrational energy is in the fluid axisymmetric plane wave associated with the system pressure pulsations. Due to fluid/structure coupling, this wave propagates in both the pipe wall and fluid. For high levels of pressure pulsations, the resulting radial and axial wall motion can then cause mechanical fatigue and unwanted radiated noise. Passive pulsations dampers have been used traditionally to reduce the fluid pressure pulses. The use of such passive devices is limited however in critical applications due to the resulting static pressure loss which decreases the system performance. This paper describes the design and testing of a non-intrusive fluid wave actuator for the active control of pressure pulses. The actuator consists of a circumferential ring of PZT stacks acting on the pipe outside wall to generate an axisymmetric plane wave in the fluid. Experimental results estimate the control performance of the actuator applied to the discharge line of an oil driven hydraulic engine.


This paper presents a novel active learning (AL) technique in the context of ε-insensitive support vector regression (SVR) to estimate biophysical parameters from remotely sensed images. The proposed AL method aims at selecting the most informative and representative unlabeled samples which have maximum uncertainty, diversity and density assessed according to the SVR estimation rule. This is achieved on the basis of two consecutive steps that rely on the kernel kmeans clustering. In the first step the most uncertain unlabeled samples are selected by removing the most certain ones from a pool of unlabeled samples. In SVR problems, the most uncertain samples are located outside or on the boundary of the ε-tube of SVR, as their target values have the lowest confidence to be correctly estimated. In order to select these samples, the kernel k-means clustering is applied to all unlabeled samples together with the training samples that are not SVs, i.e., those that are inside the ε-tube, (non-SVs). Then, clusters with non-SVs inside are rejected, whereas the unlabeled samples contained in the remained clusters are selected as the most uncertain samples. In the second step the samples located in the high density regions in the kernel space and as much diverse as possible to each other are chosen among the uncertain samples. The density and diversity of the unlabeled samples are evaluated on the basis of their clusters' information. To this end, initially the density of each cluster is measured by the ratio of the number of samples in the cluster to the distance of its two furthest samples. Then, the highest density clusters are chosen and the medoid samples closest to the centers of the selected clusters are chosen as the most informative ones. The diversity of samples is accomplished by selecting only one sample from each selected cluster. Experiments applied to the estimation of single-tree parameters, i.e., tree stem volume and tree stem diameter, show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.


A promising approach to the management of dementia is 'social prescribing'. Social prescribing is a form of 'co-production' that involves linking patients with non-clinical activities, typically delivered by voluntary and community groups, in an effort to improve their sense of well-being. The success of social prescribing depends upon the ability of boundary-spanning individuals within service delivery organizations to develop referral pathways and collaborative relationships through 'networks'. This article examines the operation of a pilot social prescribing programme in the North East of England, targeted at older people with early onset dementia and depression, at risk of social isolation. It is argued that the scheme was not sustained, in part, because the institutional logics that governed the actions of key boundary-spanning individuals militated against the collaboration necessary to support co-production.


Recent developments in spin noise and relaxation and their interrelationship in terms of a modified spin density (MSD) have focussed on the case of extreme narrowing where the timescale of the field fluctuations that give rise to the spin process are negligibly small. It is customary in this case to model the random magnetic field as a(n) (isotropic) white noise process and thereby formulate a stochastic differential / Langevin type equation for the spin ensemble. It is notable in this case that the usual perturbation treatment becomes exact since the perturbation expansion truncates at second order, a characteristic familiar feature of the Wiener process, which has finite quadratic variation but whose higher order infinitesimal moments vanish. In terms of the field spectrum the Larmor frequency plays no essential role here, since such a flat spectrum is invariant to frequency shifts. Of much greater experimental relevance is the non-extreme narrowed case where the field fluctuations have a finite auto-correlation time and a corresponding power spectrum with finite bandwidth. In such cases the Larmor frequency plays a special role in terms of its situation within this narrowed spectrum. Provided the strength of the fluctuations is small it is possible to formulate the spin dynamics (perturbatively) while retaining the full spectral character of the random field more recently a nonperturbative treatment has also been possible. This is achieved through the description of the field in terms of an (3-dimensional) Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, consistent (via Doob's theorem) with the requirements that the process be Gaussian, Markov and stationary. The result is significant in that it predicts a non-Lorentzian spectrum it is interesting therefore both theoretically and experimentally. In turn we derive a spin noise / relaxation process that inherits spectral features from both the amplitude and frequency characteristics of the driving random magnetic field. The intimate connections that exist between spin noise and relaxation in the extreme narrowed case persist in this more general context, whereby standard relaxation emerges as the ensemble average of spin noise, the latter being essential to describe non-ensemble averaged (real time) properties of spin systems.


The availability of multiple frequency channels on modern radios has provided a way to improve networking performance. Nevertheless, current multi-channel protocols lack the architectural consistency and flexibility to support a diverse set of applications. In this paper we argue that it is necessary to integrate channel switching to the emerging wireless sensor network architecture and propose a way to decompose the problem into two reusable components: the channel allocation component that is integrated with network layer protocols and a shared channel synchronization component at the MAC layer. Furthermore, we outline how existing multi-channel protocols can be re-factored to comply with the proposed architecture and present ViR, an initial implementation of the channel synchronization component. Finally, using realistic applications synthesized from existing protocols, we show how ViR reduces conflicts among protocols and reduces packet losses.


Abstract Novel acute kidney injury (AKI) biomarkers offer promise of earlier diagnosis and risk stratification, but have yet to find widespread clinical application. We measured urinary α and π glutathione S-transferases (α-GST and π-GST), urinary l-type fatty acid-binding protein (l-FABP), urinary neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL), urinary hepcidin and serum cystatin c (CysC) before surgery, post-operatively and at 24 h after surgery in 93 high risk patient undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) and assessed the ability of these biomarkers alone and in combination to predict RIFLE-R defined AKI in the first 5 post-operative days. Twenty-five patients developed AKI. π-GST (ROCAUC = 0.75), lower urine Hepcidin:Creatine ratio at 24 h (0.77), greater urine NGAL:Cr ratio post-op (0.73) and greater serum CysC at 24 h (0.72) best predicted AKI. Linear combinations with significant improvement in AUC were: Hepcidin:Cr 24 h + post-operative π-GST (AUC = 0.86, p = 0.01), Hepcidin:Cr 24 h + NGAL:Cr post-op (0.84, p = 0.03) and CysC 24 h + post-operative π-GST (0.83, p = 0.03), notably these significant biomarkers combinations all involved a tubular injury and a glomerular filtration biomarker. Despite statistical significance in receiver–operator characteristic (ROC) analysis, when assessed by ability to define patients to two groups at high and low risk of AKI, combinations failed to significantly improve classification of risk compared to the best single biomarkers. In an alternative approach using Classification and Regression Tree (CART) analysis a model involving NGAL:Cr measurement post-op followed by Hepcidin:Cr at 24 h was developed which identified high, intermediate and low risk groups for AKI. Regression tree analysis has the potential produce models with greater clinical utility than single combined scores.


In July 2010, Acme Studios and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London began a two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership. KTP is a part government-funded programme which helps businesses to improve their competitiveness and productivity through the better use of knowledge, technology and skills that reside within the UK Knowledge Base. KTP is funded by the Technology Strategy Board along with the other government funding organisations.

This is the first time Fine Art practice has been the subject of a KTP; the project has generated significant interest and it is hoped will pave the way for other arts-based KTPs.

The project reviews the changing form and function of the artists' studio in relation to contemporary art practice through an extensive programme of research, studio visits and interviews. The culmination of the KTP will be new briefs for design specifications and management protocols for future artists' studios, which will help ensure that Acme continues to provide and manage studios which meet the changing needs of artists. Critically it is also an opportunity more generally for Acme to engage in a creative dialogue which explores and challenges how it operates now and in the future. The project's findings will be made public through lectures, conferences, symposia, case studies and a publication in 2012.

Securing a KTP to develop new designs for artists' studios, based on robust research into current and emergent fine art practice, is a very important next step for Acme and of value to the affordable studios sector as a whole. The project will enable Acme to ensure that its support of artists in economic need with high-quality, permanent, affordable space is in tune with their changing requirements. The research from the KTP is already impacting upon decisions being made by Acme concerning their future business models and acquisition of studio space.

The project is being undertaken by Arantxa Echarte, the Artists' Studios Research and Development Associate, who is based with Acme full-time. Arantxa is employed by the university and jointly supported by Graham Ellard for Double agents, the research project based at Central Saint Martins which he leads with Professor Anne Tallentire, and Acme Chief Executive Jonathan Harvey. The total budget for the project is £130,000, jointly funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and TSB with Acme contributing 30 per cent of the total.

During the initial phase of the project, Arantxa was involved in a series of research activities including reviewing Acme's charitable purposes, mission and operations, visiting a representative range of studio providers and carrying out a literature review covering a wide range of discourses. This project involves a series of research methodologies such as data gathering and analysis, experiments and conceptual research.

Visiting Studio Providers

A key early objective is to gain a wide and detailed understanding of the studio provision sector both in London and nationally, aiming to highlight the relevance of this research to the sector as a whole. Arantxa visited Acme's 11 buildings in London and also met other providers in the capital including ACAVA, Mother Studios, Gasworks, APT, Creekside Artists, Occupation Studios and Auto-Italia. Elsewhere in the UK, Arantxa visited Wasps Artists' Studios in Glasgow, Platform Arts in Middlesbrough, Bar Lane Studios in York, The Art House in Wakefield and East Street Arts in Leeds. Visits to other providers will be arranged in the future.

Photography Project

Photographer Moz Bulbeck was commissioned to record a series of identical studios at a recent development of 30 newly-converted units at Acme's existing Childers Street building, in Deptford, SE8. The initial photos are of the empty studios before occupation and further images will be taken from identical viewpoints at four-monthly intervals over the next two years. The final body of pictures will provide a unique insight into the activities developed within the studios and the transformation of the spaces by each practitioner.

Sessions With Students at Central Saint Martins

Also as part of the project Arantxa and Graham Ellard organised a series of seminars with students at Central Saint Martins. These sessions aimed to explore students' current views on the idea of 'the studio', and what might be seen as its priorities, based on their experience in the School and their expectations of becoming practising professional artists.

Interviews

Thirty artists have been selected to be interviewed formally in order to gain further understanding of the use of the studio in relation to different practices and practitioners. The 'oral history' interviews will be recorded and kept as part of Acme's archive.

The final outcomes of the project will be a revised design brief for a 'model' Acme studio, and a review of management processes in relation to the findings of the research. The findings will be collated for internal use, and in an edited form, accompanied by contextual essays, published and publicly disseminated. A symposium will also be staged to present and discuss the project findings as they develop.


With random inputs, certain decision problems undergo a "phase transition." We prove similar behavior in an optimization context. Given a conjunctive normal form (CNF) formula F on n variables and with m k-variable clauses, denote by max F the maximum number of clauses satisfiable by a single assignment of the variables. (Thus the decision problem k-SAT is to determine if max F is equal to m.) With the formula F chosen at random, the expectation of max F is trivially bounded by (3/4)m l E max F l m. We prove that for random formulas with m = ⌊cn⌋ clauses: for constants c < 1, E max F is ⌊cn⌋ - Θ(1/n); for large c, it approaches ** equation here ** and in the "window" c = 1 + Θ(n-1/3), it is cn - Θ(1). Our full results are more detailed, but this already shows that the optimization problem MAX 2-SAT undergoes a phase transition just as the 2-SAT decision problem does, and at the same critical value c = 1. Most of our results are established without reference to the analogous propositions for decision 2-SAT, and can be used to reproduce them. We consider "online" versions of MAX 2-SAT, and show that for one version the obvious greedy algorithm is optimal; all other natural questions remain open. We can extend only our simplest MAX 2-SAT results to MAX k-SAT, but we conjecture a "MAX k-SAT limiting function conjecture" analogous to the folklore "satisfiability threshold conjecture," but open even for k = 2. Neither conjecture immediately implies the other, but it is natural to further conjecture a connection between them. We also prove analogous results for random MAX CUT. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2004


Water resources are one of the limiting factors of regional development around the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean. Scarcity and conflict, but also considerable uncertainty, inter-annual variability, and simple lack of reliable data characterize the problems of water resource management in many countries and river basins. Within the EU sponsored international RTD project OPTIMA a water resources optimization system is being developed that addresses a broad range of objectives and criteria. A web based client-server implementation supports distributed use and easy access, providing considerable server side computing power for distributed web browser clients. This architecture supports a participatory approach involving local stake holders for multi-criteria optimisation and decision support. The multi-criteria optimization approach covers global and sectoral demand and supply balances, reliability of supply, cost and benefits, as well as compliance with water quality standards. Arbitrary penalty functions can be used for the valuation of missing targets, both shortfalls of supply as well as excess (flooding or pollution), or exceeding water quality standards. The approach and methodology are demonstrated using the case studies of the OPTIMA project that demonstrate the entire range of prototypical water management problems in the region, and their potential solutions.


For the practical device application of the two-dimensional semiconducting MoS2, it is a critical issue to manipulate the electronic and magnetic properties locally at its contact to the metal electrode. For the tuning of those properties, we have proposed the vacancy-defective 1L-MoS2 or the hydrogenated 1L-MoS2 at the metal [Co(0001) or Ni(111)] contacts and performed first-principles electronic structure calculations. By controlling the atomic vacancy defects and the hydrogen coverages, we investigate the Schottky barrier heights and charge and spin transfers at the interface. Our findings provide a physical insight into the practical device design using the two-dimensional MoS2.


Emergency medical services (EMS) have been of interest for operations research since the middle of the 1960's. Since then there have been published numerous articles on the location of ambulances stations, allocation of ambulances, dispatching of vehicles, re-deployment of ambulances and evaluation methods. This thesis presents a new problem for the location of ambulance stations and allocation of ambulances in heterogeneous regions, referred to as the Maximum Expected Performance Location Problem for Heterogeneous Regions (MEPLP-HR). The problem applies multiple performance measures as well as station specific probabilities for the availability of ambulances at a station. Compared with earlier problems, the MEPLP-HR is more realistic for heterogeneous regions as the service rate of ambulances in the problem depends on the area a station covers. A mixed integer linear model is proposed to solve the problem. The probability for available ambulances is found by utilizing queuing theory together with the service rate and arrival rate of calls for each station. In contrast to recent models, the probability for available ambulances is calculated within the model. Hence, it is not necessary to use iterative solution approaches. The formulation is strengthened using valid inequalities and a reformulation of a restriction. With the strengthening constraints, both the solutions and the best bounds are improved. The computational studies are performed on the heterogeneous region of Sor-Trondelag in Norway. For this region, the model is able to find a realistic solution that has a higher expected performance than the current solution on each of the given performance measures. The model is also tested with different weights for the performance measures, with the conclusion that the weights significantly affect the locations and allocation of stations and ambulances. By using the model as a decision support tool, three real managerial cases are analyzed together with potential solutions. The first case concerns the importance of taking multiple time periods into account when planning. The results from the computational study indicate that it is sufficient to plan for the busiest period. The second case analyzes the consequences and potential mitigating actions for closing down a local emergency room (ER). By closing the local ER, the travel time to ER will increase significantly for the zones close to the local ER. However, adding an extra ambulance and ambulance station can to some degree mitigate this effect. The third case concerns the benefit of transferring all non-urgent transport calls to designated non-urgent transport vehicles. The analysis in this case shows that there is a potential to reduce the number of ambulances by one fifth if designated non-urgent vehicles are introduced. This thesis consists of a report and two articles. The report is the main part of the thesis and contains all of our results and analyses. The articles are found as separate works after the report. The first one, "Strategic ambulance location for heterogeneous regions", presents the problem, the proposed model and technical characteristics. The second article, "Strategic Emergency Medical Service Planning - Three Case Studies", presents how the model can be applied as a decision support tool. The articles are based on the report, hence the report and articles are to some degrees overlapping.


Extending previous studies of nonthermal electron transport in solar flares, which include the effects of collisional energy diffusion and thermalization of fast electrons, we present an analytic method to infer more accurate estimates of the accelerated electron spectrum in solar flares from observations of the hard X-ray spectrum. Unlike for the standard cold-target model, the spatial characteristics of the flaring region, especially the necessity to consider a finite volume of hot plasma in the source, need to be taken into account in order to correctly obtain the injected electron spectrum from the source-integrated electron flux spectrum (a quantity straightforwardly obtained from hard X-ray observations). We show that the effect of electron thermalization can be significant enough to nullify the need to introduce an ad hoc low-energy cutoff to the injected electron spectrum in order to keep the injected power in non-thermal electrons at a reasonable value. Rather, the suppression of the inferred low-energy end of the injected spectrum compared to that deduced from a cold-target analysis allows the inference from hard X-ray observations of a more realistic energy in injected non-thermal electrons in solar flares.


By September 2003, six months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the anarchy had begun. Rory Stewart, a young Biritish diplomat, was appointed as the Coalition Provisional Authority's deputy governor of a province of 850,000 people in the southern marshland region. There, he and his colleagues confronted gangsters, Iranian-linked politicians, tribal vendettas and a full Islamist insurgency. Rory Stewart's inside account of the attempt to re-build a nation, the errors made, the misunderstandings and insumountable difficulties encountered, reveals an Iraq hidden from most foreign journalists and soldiers. Stewart is an award-winning writer, gifted with extraordinary insight into the comedy, occasional heroism and moral risks of foreign occupation. 'Beautifully written, highly evocative ...a joy to read.' - John Simpson. 'A marvellous book ...a devastating narrative.' - Simon Jenkins. 'Absolutely absorbing.' - Ken Loach. 'Strikes gut and brain at once.' - James Meek. 'Wonderfully observed, wise, evocative.' - "Observer".


A new domestic intelligence network has made vast amounts of data available to federal and state agencies and law enforcement officials. The network is anchored by "fusion centers," novel sites of intergovernmental collaboration that generate and share intelligence and information. Several fusion centers have generated controversy for engaging in extraordinary measures that place citizens on watch lists, invade citizens' privacy, and chill free expression. In addition to eroding civil liberties, fusion center overreach has resulted in wasted resources without concomitant gains in security. While many scholars have assumed that this network represents a trade-off between security and civil liberties, our study of fusion centers suggests they are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. Too often, fusion centers' structure has been based on clever legal strategies for avoiding extant strictures on information-sharing, rather than objective analysis of terror threats. The "Information Sharing Environment" created by fusion centers has short-circuited traditional modes of agency accountability. Our twentieth-century model of agency accountability cannot meaningfully address twenty-first century agency coordination. A new concept of accountability - network accountability - is needed to address the shortcomings of fusion centers. Network accountability has technical, legal, and institutional dimensions. Technical standards can render data exchange between agencies in the network better subject to review. Legal redress mechanisms can speed the correction of inaccurate or inappropriate information. We also propose a robust strategy for institutionalizing these aspects of network accountability, based on recent regulatory reform.


Renal fibrosis is the principal pathological process underlying the progression of chronic kidney disease that leads to end-stage renal disease. Melittin is a major component of bee venom, and it has anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-inflammatory properties in various cell types. Thus, this study examined the therapeutic effects of melittin on the progression of renal fibrosis using the unilateral ureteral obstruction (UUO) model. In addition, the effects of melittin on inflammation and fibrosis in renal fibroblast cells were explored using transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1). Histological observation revealed that UUO induced a considerable increase in the number of infiltrated inflammatory cells. However, melittin treatment markedly reduced these reactions compared with untreated UUO mice. The expression levels of inflammatory cytokines and pro-fibrotic genes were significantly reduced in melittin-treated mice compared with UUO mice. Melittin also effectively inhibited fibrosis-related gene expression in renal fibroblasts NRK-49F cells. These findings suggest that melittin attenuates renal fibrosis and reduces inflammatory responses by the suppression of multiple growth factor-mediated pro-fibrotic genes. In conclusion, melittin may be a useful therapeutic agent for the prevention of fibrosis that characterizes the progression of chronic kidney disease.


In recent years, sensor networks characteristics have led to incremental utilization in different types of applications. Several techniques have been proposed to evaluate the performance of WSNs; the two most popular being mathematical analysis and simulations. An important drawback of these techniques is that they provide evaluation results that usually are not similar to those of real deployments. One reason for this is the fact that both techniques introduce physical layer modeling assumptions, which do not usually corresponded to real-life environments. In this paper, we used measurements from an industrial environment to develop a new radio propagation model for use in simulators and mathematical tools. The proposed radio model was implemented in the COOJA simulator and validated against real-life results obtained from a testbed inside a running oil refinery, which were found not to conform to any legacy radio propagation model. The proposed model has been shown to successfully match the refinery testbed behavior.


The human experience of sound is an essential element to our understanding of the built environment. However, sound has played a minimal aspect in the construction of meaning in contemporary architecture, and is given little attention in architectural education as a source for design inspiration. This thesis investigates sound as an architectural, cultural and environmental phenomenon through the design of a small listening pavilion. This thesis has two goals: 1) To provide an exploration into the potentials of sound as a source for design inspiration and architectural meaning. 2) To provide a space that heightens one's awareness of sound, both in the environment, and within the space itself. Title of Document: Sound, Awareness and Place: Architecture from an Aural Perspective John W. Bryant, Master of Architecture, 2008 Directed By: Ronit Eisenbach, RA Visiting Associate Professor School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation SOUND, AWARENESS, AND PLACE: ARCHITECTURE FROM AN AURAL PERSPECTIVE


Abstract Scientific knowledge has to meet some necessary conditions. Among these, it has to be properly communicated. Usually, scientists (mis)understand this requirement and believe that publishing their results in peer-reviewed journals is enough. Society demands the availability of information in other formats. This is particularly relevant when dealing with natural hazards, which affect the life and fate of human beings. Natural hazards and extreme events are becoming more frequent and energetic, and future scenarios sustain that this tendency will remain or even increase. Furthermore, in trying to explain scientific results to untrained members of society, scientists usually focus more on forecasts than on the prediction errors. Talking about our forecast limitations outside of academia seems shameful, rather than being a logical limitation of sciences and regardless of the fact that discussing limitations is not something of which to be ashamed. Using numerical modelling combined with field observations to predict extreme marine events we hope to show here that it is possible to be less cryptic. Also, the general public needs to know enough to properly deal with variability and uncertainties. Scientists have the ethical responsibility of communicating the uncertainties of our results to society because these limitations are neither obvious nor irrelevant.


Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) systems are standard automated items in production and warehousing today. However, studies have rarely examined a more advanced form of AGVs called Semi-Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs), which have a higher sophistication of task completion and routing flexibility. This research presents SAVs in an industrial development case study. Using simulation, the route-keeping ability of SAVs with two types of guidance techniques is being studied. The results show that dual-navigation SAVs can provide the needed flexibility for routing. Using wire guidance and dead reckoning, both very well-established techniques, the SAVs' performance is, within certain limits, quite comparable to the AGVs with more advanced and expensive navigation techniques.


To guarantee delay performances for time-sensitive services in an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access passive optical network (OFDMA-PON), we propose a two-dimensional (i.e., subcarriers and time) upstream bandwidth allocation method based on interleaved polling with adaptive cycle time (IPACT). We first analyze its delay performance in terms of cycle time, i.e., the length of a polling cycle. Then, by setting the maximum polling cycle so as to guarantee timely transmissions for time-sensitive services, we identify the requirements, i.e., the maximum bandwidth allocation, the maximum number of allowed optical network units, and the optimum number of subcarriers, for upstream bandwidth allocation with delay guarantees. The proposed scheme is evaluated both numerically and via simulation.


An entrancing, otherworldly collection of short stories from one of Europe's most accomplished 20th century writers, new to Penguin Modern Classics. A counter-prophet attempts the impossible to prove his power; a girl sees the hideous fate of her sisters and father in a mirror bought from a gypsy; the death of a prostitute causes an unanticipated uprising; and the lives of every ordinary person since 1789 are recreated in the almighty Encyclopedia of the Dead. These stories about love and death, truth and lies, myth and reality range across many epochs and settings. Brilliantly combining fact and fiction, epic and miniature, horror and comedy, this was Danilo Kis final work, published in Serbo-Croatian in 1983. Kis is one of the great European writers of the post-war period - Guardian Compulsively readable - Daily Telegraph Fantasy chases reality and reality chases fantasy. Pirandello and Borges are not far away. But these names are intended as approximate references. Kis is a new, original writer - Times Literary Supplement Intense and exotic, his mysteries hint at unspeakable secrets that remain forever beyond the story-teller's grasp - Boyd Tonkin Danilo Kis was born in the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1935. After an unsettled childhood during the Second World War, in which several of his family members were killed, Kis studied literature at the University of Belgrade where he lived for most of his adult life. He wrote novels, short stories and poetry and went on to receive the prestigious NIN Award for his novel Pescanik. He died in Paris in 1989. Mark Thompson is a British historian. His published work includes Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kis.


Can distance-related information asymmetries in credit markets be overcome with contract design and credit scoring models? To answer this question, we explore differences in foreign and domestic banks' credit contract terms and pricing models. Using a sample of firms that borrow from both domestic and foreign banks in the same month, we show that foreign banks are more likely to demand collateral and grant shorter maturity loans than domestic banks. Foreign banks also base their pricing on internal credit ratings and collateral pledges, while domestic banks price according to the length, depth and breadth of their relationship with a firm. These findings confirm that foreign banks can overcome informational disadvantages using contract design and credit scoring models. However, we also show that there are limitations, with foreign banks facing higher default rates and lower returns on lending if not using collateral and short maturity as disciplining tools.


Phenolic compounds were characterized after traditional extraction method (TEM) and ultrasound-assisted extractions (UAEs) for 10 min (US10) and 15 min (US15). Four fractions (free, bound, conjugated esters, and conjugated glycosides) were obtained and characterized using RP-HPLC-PDA. The US10 extracted 22.1% (454.3 mg/kg) phenolic compounds while US15 extracted 66.6% (1,369.7 mg/kg) phenolic compounds compared to traditional extraction method (TEM) after 1 hr of extraction. US10 and TEM extracted a similar amount of aglycones (112.3 ± 4.0 and 109.0 ± 12.9 mg/kg, respectively) while US15 showed a significant decrease in aglycone extraction (58.9 ± 4.1 mg/kg) (P < 0.05). In seabuckthorn kombucha, US decreased initial microbial load by 2.6 log CFU/mL, increased ORAC value by 3% and increased water solubility index (WSI) by 40% (from 6.64 to 9.29 g/g) without syneresis. Results from this study suggest that application of US can enhance phenolic functionality during fermentation and is capable of decreasing syneresis, increasing oil yield, decreasing microbial load, and increasing ORAC with minimal loss of nutritional quality.


The emergence of online paid micro-crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), allows on-demand and at scale distribution of tasks to human workers around the world. In such settings, online workers come and complete small tasks posted by an employer, working for as long or as little as they wish, a process that eliminates the overhead of the hiring (and dismissal). This flexibility introduces a different set of inefficiencies: verifying the quality of every submitted piece of work is an expensive operation, which often requires the same level of effort as performing the task itself. A number of research challenges arise in such settings. How can we ensure that the submitted work is accurate? What allocation strategies can be employed to make the best use of the available labor force? How to appropriately assess the performance of individual workers? In this paper, we consider labeling tasks and develop a comprehensive scheme for managing the quality of crowd labeling: First, we present several algorithms for inferring the true classes of objects and the quality of participating workers, assuming the labels are collected all at once before the inference. Next, we allow employers to adaptively decide which object to assign to the next arriving worker and propose several heuristic-based dynamic label allocation strategies to achieve the desired data quality with significantly fewer labels. Experimental results on both simulated and real data confirm the superior performance of the proposed allocation strategies over other existing policies. Finally, we introduce two novel metrics that can be used to objectively rank the performance of crowdsourced workers, after fixing correctable worker errors and taking into account the costs of different classification errors. In particular, the worker value metric directly measures the monetary value contributed by each label of the worker towards meeting the quality requirements and may provide a basis for the design of fair and efficient compensation schemes.


How do people, organizations, and even movements bounce back from losses and setbacks? For organized labor, the disappointments are routinely legal: an overturned precedent, a loss of coverage, or even the accelerated degradation of the National Labor Relations Act (Act) regime itself. In aggregate, these and other law-based defeats pose a serious, even existential, threat to unions. And yet, the labor movement does not just forge ahead, it renews, shape-shifts, and, in many circles, energizes. This article suggests that the legal setbacks, and the persistence, are sometimes connected. Put otherwise, the way labor law is bad is sometimes linked to the movement's resiliency. In making this case, the article argues that the law's deficiencies often force movement actors and institutions to operate within "in-between" spaces: precedential instability means rules often exist between what a current decision says it is and predictions about when a future decision will say it is not; organizing protections can hang in a balance between NLRB-created identity poles; and if labor law might range from no rights to great rights, current rights rest, and frequently backslide, between those two extremes. These and other legal in-betweens are ultimately corrosive to collective bargaining and must be fixed. But in the meantime, there is increasing academic, business, and even pop-empirical evidence that in-between or, as described in cultural anthropology, "liminal" states are ripe for creative thought, new relational commitments, and beneficial change. How these and other liminal effects might be located within the labor movement are explored through three very recent case studies involving reversed joint-employer precedent, graduate student misclassification, and the Trump NLRB's aggressive attempts to further limit the role of collective bargaining in American life.


The present research investigated the separate and interactive effects
of high doses of a minor tranquilliser (temazepam) (20 mg) and alcohol
(BAC = 0.10%) on human information processing using a dual-task
paradigm.
For this purpose dual task methodology was combined with P300
amplitude and latency as an index of resource allocation. A dual task
paradigm in which subjects were instructed to attend to two tasks
concurrently (which had the effect of increasing overall cognitive load) was
used to indicate if the affects of alcohol and/or temazepam impaired the
contextual updating of neuronal models in the brain and/or reduced
specific 'pools of available resources'.
Twelve subjects completed four drug treatments in a repeated
measures design. The four drug treatments organised in a two by two
design, included a placebo condition (alcohol no/temazepam no), an
alcohol only condition (alcohol yes/temazepam no), a temazepam only
condition (alcohol no/temazepam yes), and a combined condition (alcohol
yes/temazepam yes). Event-related potentials were recorded from midline
sites Fz, Cz and Pz within a dual task paradigm.
The results indicated that at higher doses, widespread neural
depression by alcohol overlapped the specific depressant effects of
temazepam. The effect of ingesting high doses of alcohol and temazepam
was synergistic, that is the combined effects of alcohol and temazepam were
greater than their summated individual effects. In terms of information
processing, from the perspective of contextual updating the process of
updating the pre-existing neuronal model may be restricted, or from the
view of resource allocation the actual pool of available resources may have
been reduced.

The RT data suggested that alcohol and temazepam may have had an
additive effect on psychomotor processing. Both alcohol and temazepam
significantly increased RT when ingested separately, but there was no
interaction between the two drugs. Therefore alcohol and temazepam
appeared to affect different aspects of RT processing.


REGIONAL GEOPHYSICS AND BASIN
ARCHITECTURE
This report describes further advances in the regional
basin architecture study.

Some revisions and refinements of previously reported material within the Batten Trough are included. The extension of the interpretation southward into the Wallhallow region and eastward onto the Wearyan Shelf is also described. This new work generally confirms the implications of the original study and suggests that the Batten Trough has had a long and complex history. The first two stages of its evolution include large-scale volcanism and irregular extension and uplift. The structural environment of the Wearyan Shelf is shown to be distinct.

Most refinements of the Batten Trough study relate to additional peripheral studies, either reported here or under way, and involve small variations in presented diagrams or additional diagrams. The latter include one omitted from the original report and a detailed version of the distribution of basement granitoids. The few seismic sections available have also been reviewed in light of the implications of the gravity-magnetics interpretation and found consistent with it.

Some readers of the first report were concerned that the inferences concerning substantial, differentiated and concealed volcanic piles might be suspect. Since this pre-Tawallah Group aspect of the interpretation may ultimately prove crucial to an understanding of the basin, its evolution and its mineralisation, it is necessary to demonstrate that feasible alternatives do not exist. An example of such analysis is included here. This shows that the potential field data do not leave much conceptual uncertainty although many details remain to be worked out. Thick, deep volcanic sections do exist in the McArthur Basin.

Others have noted that some interpretation fits were less than ideal and that as an consequence the entire interpretation might be suspect. Lack of fit perfection may result from the nature of the regional data sets and their subsampling for evaluation purposes, the scale of the analysis, and the amount of time actually spent on each analysis. Irrespective of any deficiencies in these factors, an outline of the very rigorous interpretation criteria actually used is included. This outline, and the discussion of volcanic piles, shows that any imperfections are not of consequence at the scale of this study and any
refinements are either not justified or not meaningful.

The implications of these findings have yet to be
appraised and the significance of the Batten Trough, its margins and structures such as the Emu Fault await completion of interpretation across the Bauhinia Shelf. This study will be described in the next report.

However, it is evident that a coherent history for the basin and its deep volcanic sequences is evolving. The stratigraphic implications are contrasted with the observed relationships in the nearby Isa Inlier. A future study will test the possible correlations across the Murphy Inlier, South Nicholson Basin and Lawn Hill Platform.

GOLD METALLOGENY AND THE Cu-Au ASSOCIATION OF THE AUSTRALIAN PROTEROZOIC - Results of research from a
previous Proterozoic Cu-Au project

Australian Proterozoic copper-gold deposits, emplaced
mainly at 1.6 to 2.0 Ga, are divided into the following categories: (1) breccia-hosted iron oxide-dominated
Cu-U-Au-REE deposits spatially associated with fractionated felsic intrusions (273t Au); (2) Au ± cu-bearing iron formations (l28t Au); (3) unconformity-style U ± Cu/PGM/Au deposits (53t Au); (4) iron-oxide-dominated pipes hosted within shears and folds (147t Au); (5) Broken Hill and volcanic-hosted massive sulphides (150t Au); (6) iron-sulphide-dominated veins and replacement zones
spatially related to felsic intrusions (148.7t Au), and
(7) iron-sulphide-dominated veins and replacement zones spatially related to elements of regional deformation (147t Au). Categories (1) to (4) are mainly confined to Proterozoic rocks, constituting an assocation in which Au and Cu are commonly present together, with variable amounts of U, Bi, Co, W, Se, Te and REE. Most examples in categories 1 to 4 fall into either of two groups: Cu-Au-magnetite±hematite types formed at relatively high temperature (300 to 450 degrees C), and Cu-U ± Au -hematite types formed at 150 to 300 degrees C. We postulate that these ores formed from a common high salinity (15-35 wt. % NaCl equiv.), low total sulphur (= 10-3 to 10-2), high f02 fluid-type, in which metal transport was dominated by chloride-eomplexing. The most effective method of metal deposition was fluid mixing,
achieving a synchronous decrease in f02 and temperature. This unusual oxidised fluid association was favoured in high heat-flow extensional settings containing oxidised and/or oxidised-evaporitic sedimentary sequences. The intrusion of oxidised fractionated granites, which are commonly temporally associated with metal emplacement, acted in some places to heat and focus basinal fluids, and in others was the ultimate source of metals.


Concrete structures must be designed not only to be safe against failure but also to perform satisfactorily in use. This book is written for practising engineers and students, and focuses on design methods for checking deflections and cracking which can affect the serviceability of reinforced and prestressed concrete structures. The authors present accurate and easy-to-apply methods of analysing immediate and long-term stresses and deformations. These methods allow designers to account for variations of concrete properties from project to project and from country to country, making the book universally applicable. Comprehensively updated, this third edition of Concrete Structures also includes four new chapters covering such topics as: non-linear analysis of plane frames, design for serviceability of prestressed concrete, serviceability of members reinforced with fibre polymer bars, and the analysis of time-dependent internal forces with linear computer programs that are routinely used by structural designers. A website accompanies the book, featuring three design calculation programs related to stresses in cracked sections, creep coefficients and time-dependent analysis. The book contains numerous examples, some of which are worked out in the SI units and others in the Imperial units. The input data and the main results are given in both SI and Imperial units. The book is not tied to any specific code, although the latest American and European codes of practice are covered in the appendices.


Jumellea is an orchid genus centered on Madagascar but also occurs on some of the neighboring oceanic islands (the Mascarenes and Comoros) and in southern and eastern Africa. Prior to our study the genus contained ca. 55 morphologically distinct species, of which six are found in the Comoros (three endemic, three shared with Madagascar), nine in the Mascarenes (four endemic, four shared with Madagascar), two in southern and eastern Africa (both endemic), and 41 species endemic to Madagascar. We perform Bayesian and parsimony phylogenetic analyses of Jumellea based on combined chloroplast (matK, trnL-F, rps16, ycf1) and nuclear (nrITS) data from 60 specimens representing 47 species, four subspecies, and two varieties of Jumellea: (1) to assess the phylogenetic value of growth form, leaf, bract and lip shape, and spur length, presently used for recognizing informal groups within the genus; and (2) to test the monophyly of some variable species (e.g., J. gracilipes, J. lignosa). We find no support for the informal groups of Jumellea, as all the characters tested are evolutionarily labile. Jumellea lignosa (comprising J. lignosa subsp. lignosa, subsp. tenuibracteata, subsp. actuissima, and subsp. latilabia) is not monophyletic unless subsp. tenuibracteata is excluded. Jumellea gracilipes s.l. (including J. ambongensis, J. imerinensis, and J. unguicularis) is polyphyletic. As a result, we resurrect these three latter species, and recognize J. lignosa subsp. tenuibracteata at species level. Furthermore, we propose new circumscriptions for the following species: the Comorian J. arachnantha (including the Malagasy J. sagittata); the Reunionese J. exilis (including the Malagasy J. flavescens); the Reunionese J. recta (including the Malagasy Jumellea sp. I); the Reunionese J. recurva (including the Malagasy J. pandurata); and the Reunionese J. stenophylla (including the Malagasy J. gracilipes 2 and 3). Finally, Jumellea arborescens and J. maxillarioides are recorded from Madagascar and the Comoros. Finally, the number of species of Jumellea has now increased from 55 to 57: seven species in the Comoros (four shared with Madagascar), nine species in the Mascarenes (four shared with Madagascar), two species in Africa, and 39 species, three subspecies, and two varieties restricted to Madagascar.


The in-situ analysis of pharmaceutical solid dosage forms films is of great interest to pharmaceutical research, especially with the drive towards continuous processing compared to batch processing requiring either in-line or on-line analysis of pharmaceuticals. The size and shape of many solid dosage forms impedes their in-situ analysis, particularly when using thermal analysis techniques such as differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Thermal probe methods, which combine atomic force microscopy (AFM) with thermal analysis, permits imaging and characterisation of solid dosage forms in-situ. The goal of this thesis is to perform the in-situ analysis of film coated minitablets through the use of thermal probe methods.
Minitablets, which are small diameter tablets, were coated with Opadry I, Opadry II or Surelease, and blends of Surelease and Opadry I and Surelease and Opadry II. In addition the same systems were prepared as cast free films to ascertain differences resulting from the two methods of producing the films. Distinct morphologies were observed between the film coated minitablets and cast free films, particularly for the polymer blends. Thermal analysis by modulated temperature DSC (MTDSC) and localised thermomechanical analysis (L-TMA) of film coated minitablets coated with polymer blends indicating miscibility. However the novel technique of heated tip tapping mode was employed, which was able to resolve separate domains of the polymer blends, which appeared as nanophases. Heated tip tapping mode was further employed to determine changes in the surface morphology of film coated minitablets which had undergone curing. It was successfully used to observe the further coalescence of Surelease and the alteration in the phase distribution of the polymer blends after film coated minitablets had been cured. Polymer films with incorporated pigments were also analysed by thermal probe methods with differences in pigment distribution being observed between film coated minitablets and cast free films. Tapping mode AFM was able to determine the location of pigment particles and the novel use of L-TMA performed in tapping mode allowed thermal analysis without changing AFM mode. Overall the use of AFM combined with thermal probes achieved the aim of performing in-situ analysis of polymer film coats; however further research to correlate in-vivo behaviour of film coats would be of value.


This paper examines the relationship between corpus linguistics and theoretical linguistics from a variety of standpoints. We consider the nature of the fit between particular theoretical approaches and the three areas in which corpus linguistics has made a significant contribution to our understanding of language: the provision of frequency information, the highlighting of the importance of collocations, and the description of variation and text types. The complex relationship between data, theory, and representation is described with the aim of situating corpus-based research with respect to different linguistic theories, looking broadly at British and American traditions and paying particular attention to usage-based models of language. We then briefly discuss some current issues surrounding theoretical developments within corpus linguistics, including the divide between cognitive and social perspectives; the representation of corpus-based generalisations; and the relationship between patterns in corpus data and patterns in the mind.


Scientists have the difficult task of clearly conveying the ecological consequences of forest and wetland loss to the public. To address this challenge, we scaled the atmospheric carbon emissions arising from mangrove deforestation down to the level of an individual consumer. This type of quantification represents the "land-use carbon footprint", or the amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) generated when natural ecosystems are converted to produce commodities. On the basis of measurements of ecosystem carbon stocks from 30 relatively undisturbed mangrove forests and 21 adjacent shrimp ponds or cattle pastures, we determined that mangrove conversion results in GHG emissions ranging between 1067 and 3003 megagrams of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per hectare. There is a land-use carbon footprint of 1440 kg CO2e for every kilogram of beef and 1603 kg CO2e for every kilogram of shrimp produced on lands formerly occupied by mangroves. A typical steak and shrimp cocktail dinner would burden the atmosphere with 816 kg CO2e. This is approximately the same quantity of GHGs produced by driving a fuel-efficient automobile from Los Angeles to New York City. Failure to include deforestation in life-cycle assessments greatly underestimates the GHG emissions from food production.


The C2 ungrouped Tagish Lake meteorite preserves a range of lithologies, reflecting variable degrees of parent‐body aqueous alteration. Here, we report on soluble organic compounds, including aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons, monocarboxylic acids, and amino acids, found within specimens representative of the range of aqueous alteration. We find that differences in soluble organic compounds among the lithologies may be explained by oxidative, fluid‐assisted alteration, primarily involving the derivation of soluble organic compounds from macromolecular material. In contrast, amino acids probably evolved from precursor molecules, albeit in parallel with other soluble organic compounds. Our results demonstrate the role of parent‐body alteration in the modification of organic matter and generation of prebiotic compounds in the early solar system, and have implications for interpretation of the complement of soluble organic compounds in carbonaceous chondrites.


Proximity to short yield zero lower bounds has challenged the inflation targeting central banks of the advanced regions. Central to this development are three-decade declining trends in long yields and underlying real, equilibrium interest rates that have flattened yield curves, restricting "normalisation" and adding deflationary pressure by boosting demand for portfolio money. Inflationary forces, such as fiscal deficits, industrial protection and resurgent regional growth, have proved comparatively weak. In this paper global modelling is used to show that key deflationary forces in these regions include automation, the race to the bottom in capital taxation and immigration. Each is shown to redistribute income so as to expand the welfare gap between the low-skilled and capital owners by 2.5 to 3.5 per cent per year. The high saving rates of capital owners depress real equilibrium rates and their expanding portfolios demand monetary expansion. These forces ensure that the challenges of macro stabilisation and distributional policy making are both intertwined and urgent.


The purpose of this study is to evaluate the risk adjusted performance measures, such as Sharpe, Treynor, Sortino, Jensen's Alpha and Fama measure. A novelty of this work is using the sectorial wise analysis of the all the available data of mutual fund industry of Pakistan. This study used four categories of Voluntary Pension Fund, ten categories of Open ended mutual fund such as index tracker, income, equity, asset allocation, balanced, capital protected, commodity, money market, fund of fund and fixed aggressive fund, and one category of close ended mutual fund. Study revealed that voluntary pension and closed ended fund out-performed and seem to be more diversified and have ability to generate excess return for compensation of bearing high return. Open ended mutual fund under performed and seems to be poor in diversification and selectivity. This conclusion indicates that mutual fund industry of Pakistan face very extensive problem and the ability of fund managers is question mark.


The mission of  the Eurasian Journal of Business and Management (EJBM)  is to give opportunity to papers which tests theory and contributes to practice. All empirical methods - including, but are not limited to, qualitative, quantitative, field, laboratory, and combination methods - are welcome. Studies focused on developing countries are especially encouraged. Empirical, theoretical, and methodological articles from all major fields of business and management such as audit & accounting, industrial organization, competition policy, entrepreneurship, strategic management, marketing, human resources, MIS, risk management, corporate governance and the like are accepted in the journal. To be included in the journal, a manuscript must make strong empirical and/or theoretical contributions to the field. Consequently, preference is given to submissions that test, extend, or build strong theoretical frameworks while empirically examining issues with high importance for theory and practice. EJBM aims to give priority to manuscripts that examine countries in the Eurasia region. However, all papers from related fields on any region or country are highly encouraged. Single country studies, multi-country or regional studies could also be submitted.


There are several methods for ranking the scholarly performance of law faculties, including reputation surveys (U.S. News, Leiter); publication counts (Lindgren and Seltzer, Leiter); and citation counts (Eisenberg and Wells, Leiter). Each offers a useful but partial picture of faculty performance. We explore here whether the new "beta" SSRN-based measures (number of downloads and number of posted papers) can offer a different, also useful, albeit also partial, picture. Our modest claim is that SSRN-based measures can address some of the deficiencies in these other measures and thus play a valuable role in the rankings tapestry. For example, SSRN offers real-time data covering most American law schools and many foreign law schools, while citation and publication counts appear sporadically and cover a limited number of U.S. schools. The SSRN measures favor work with audiences across disciplines and across countries, while other measures are more law-centric and U.S.-centric. SSRN is relatively new and thus favors younger scholars and improving schools, while other measures favor more established scholars and schools. At the same time, the SSRN measures have important field and other biases, as well as gaming risks. We assess the correlations among the different measures, both on an aggregate and on a per-faculty-member basis. We find that all measures are strongly correlated; that total and per faculty measures are highly correlated; and that SSRN measures based on number of papers are highly correlated with measures based on number of downloads. Among major schools, all measures also correlate with school size. For commentary on this article and the role of SSRN in law faculty rankings, see: • Lawrence A. Cunningham, Commentary, Scholarly Profit Margins and the Legal Scholarship Network: Reflections on the Web, 81 IND. L.J. 271 (2006). • Theodore Eisenberg, Commentary, Assessing the SSRN-Based Law School Rankings, 81 IND. L.J. 285 (2006).


The presence of phenolic compounds can make a great contribution to the perception of astringency in red wines based on their interactions with proteins. Human salivary protein and bovine serum albumin were used in this study to investigate the relationship between astringency and polyphenol composition.  The interactions between polyphenols and proteins were analysed by means of electrophoresis and fluorescence spectra, and they were further confirmed by sensory analysis. The results indicate that a positive correlation existed among the percentage of polymeric proanthocyanidins and the total phenols.  Additionally, astringent wine was generally identified as having a high percentage of polymeric fragments.  In comparison with other fractions, polymeric fractions exhibited the highest affinity for protein, and thus the highest astringency.


Power plays a key role in definitions of political ecology. Likewise, empirical studies within this field tend to provide detailed presentations of various uses of power, involving corporate and conservation interventions influencing access to land and natural resources. The results include struggle and conflict. Yet, there is a lack of theoretical elaboration showing how power may be understood in political ecology. In this article, we start to fill this gap by reviewing the different theoretical perspectives on power that have dominated this field. There are combinations of influences, two of them being actor-oriented and neo-Marxist approaches used from the 1980s. Typically, case studies are presented of environmental interventions by a broad range of actors at various scales from the local to the global. The focus has been on processes involving actors behind these interventions, as well as the outcomes for different social groups. Over the last two decades, in political ecology we have increasingly seen a move in power perspectives towards poststructuralist thinking about "discursive power", inspired by Foucault. Today, the three approaches (actor-oriented, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian) and their combinations form a synergy of power perspectives that provide a set of rich and nuanced insights into how power is manifested in environmental conflicts and governance. We argue that combining power perspectives is one of political ecology's strengths, which should be nurtured through a continuous examination of a broad spectrum of social science theories on power.


Irrigation management transfer (IMT) is an important strategy among donors and governments that aims to strengthen farmer control over water and irrigation infrastructure. In this study, we use data from a survey of 68 irrigator associations (IAs) and 1020 farm households in the Philippines to examine the impact of IMT on irrigation association performance and on rice yields. We find that the presence of IMT is associated with an increase in maintenance activities undertaken by irrigation associations. While associations with and without IMT contracts undertake canal maintenance, the frequency of maintenance in IMT IAs is higher. IMT presence is also associated with an increase in farm yields by about 6%; rice production in IMT areas is higher even after we control for various differences amongst rice farmers in IMT and non-IMT areas. Finally, IMT may even give poorer farmers a small boost in terms of rice yields. We speculate that this boost may be a result of improved water delivery and better resolution of conflicts related to illegal use.


Socio-economic change and human mobility are constantly interactive processes, so to ask whether migration or development comes first is nonsensical. Yet in both popular and political discourse it has become the conventional wisdom to argue that promoting economic development in the Global South has the potential to reduce migration to the North. This carries the clear implication that such migration is a 'bad thing,' and that poor people should stay put. In other words, the idea is that encouraging international migration now may help create conditions conducive to eliminating – or at least reducing – it in the future. This belief in the positive consequences of migration for development represents a reversal of dominant views prior to the 1990s, according to which migration represented a loss of labor and human capital likely to hold back development of origin countries. This article explores the processes and reasoning behind changing views on migration and development in the European Union and Asia, arguing that social-scientific and political discourses are often closely linked, and that this can have negative consequences both for the advancement of knowledge and for policy development. The article proposes an alternative view of human mobility as a normal part of social transformation processes. Migrating in search of better opportunities and greater human security is a way in which people can exercise agency to improve their livelihoods. Embedding migration studies in an analysis of contemporary social transformation processes can help overcome the frequent separation between migration research and mainstream social theory, and may contribute to improved international cooperation in the migration field.


Academic discourse on global justice is at an all-time high. Within ethics and international law, scholars are undertaking new inquiries into age-old questions of building a just world order. Ethics – within political and moral philosophy – poses fundamental questions about responsibilities at the global level and produces a tightly reasoned set of frameworks regarding world order. International law, with its focus on legal norms and institutional arrangements, provides a path, as well as illuminates the obstacles, to implementing theories of the right or of the good. Yet despite the complementarity of these two projects, neither is drawing what it should from the other. The result is ethical scholarship that often avoids, or even misinterprets, the law; and law that marginalizes ethics even as it recognizes the importance of justice. The cost of this avoidance is a set of missed opportunities for both fields. This article seeks to help transform the limited dialogue between philosophers and international lawyers into a meaningful collaboration. Through a critical stocktaking of the contributions of the two disciplines, examining where they do and do not engage with the other, it offers an appraisal of the causes and costs of separation and an argument for an interdisciplinary approach.


Abstract:This collection in The Medieval Globe aims to reassess the so-called global turn in medieval art history. Study of the migration of motifs, materials, personnel, and finished objects has a long pedigree within medieval art history, while the broadening attention to material culture has likewise been an integral factor in reshaping the current conception of a more interconnected medieval world. Yet despite these developments, numerous important problems remain to be addressed. In addition to debates concerning the concept of "the global," these include the challenges to traditional art historical narratives, specializations, and scholarly training posed by the much more complex picture of Eurasian and African cross-cultural connections which has begun to emerge. Moreover, while these challenges affect Byzantine, Islamic, western European, and East Asian art histories alike, there has as yet been little sustained conversation among those working in these fields. Drawing together articles by specialists actively engaged in the reassessment of medieval art and material culture in a global context, this thematic issue features examples of cutting-edge scholarship and offers a starting point for future dialogues and cross-cultural research projects. This introduction describes the stakes and circumstances of Reassessing the Global Turn in Medieval Art History and offers a brief summary of its contents.


Abstract Many late Pleistocene fossil localities contain the remains of multiple mammoths. Some of these sites have been interpreted as representing the mass death of an entire herd, or family group, of mammoths. These assemblages have been cited as evidence of intense human predation and used to reconstruct mammoth population dynamics. However, these interpretations remain controversial because the taphonomic settings of many sites are still debated. To reconstruct the taphonomic setting of each site and the movement patterns of mammoths among sites, I used analyses of carbon, oxygen, and strontium isotope ratios in mammoth tooth enamel. The carbon isotopes of fossils vary with diet and local vegetation, oxygen isotopes vary with local climate, and strontium isotopes vary with local soil chemistry. If Pleistocene mammoths traveled together in small family groups, then mammoths from sites that represent family groups should have lower isotopic variability than mammoths from sites containing unrelated individuals. I tested this conjecture by comparing the isotopic variability among mammoths from two sites—one that represents the mass death of a single herd (Waco, Texas) and one representing a time-averaged accumulation (Friesenhahn Cave, Texas)—and then used these analyses to examine mammoths from three Clovis sites: Blackwater Draw, New Mexico; Dent, Colorado; and Miami, Texas. Low levels of carbon isotope variability were found to be the most diagnostic signal of herd/family group association. Although the variability of oxygen and strontium isotope ratios proved less useful for identifying family group assemblages, these signals did provide information about the movement patterns of individuals among different sites. High levels of variability in each of the isotope systems at Clovis sites suggest that all of the sites examined represent time-averaged accumulations of unrelated individuals, rather than the mass deaths of family groups. In addition, analyses of the mean isotope values of Clovis mammoths show that although most mammoths from Blackwater and Miami had similar values, the values of Dent mammoths were significantly different. This demonstrates that the Dent mammoths belonged to a separate population and suggests that Clovis mammoths did not routinely undertake long distance (≥600 km) migrations.


In eigenstructure methods for direction of arrival estimation of signal wavefronts, the additive noise is assumed to be spatially white, i.e., of equal power and uncorrelated from sensor to sensor. When the noise is nonwhite but has a known covariance, we can still handle the problem through prewhitening. However, there are no techniques presently available to deal with completely unknown noise fields. In this paper, we propose a solution to this unknown noise covariance problem for the case when the noise field is invariant under two measurements of the array covariance; situations where this assumption is valid are not uncommon in sonar applications. In fact, the idea has been used in certain so-called "despoking" algorithms for conventional beamformers. Results of computer simulations carried out to compare the performance of the new algorithm to earlier methods are also presented.


The widespread occurrence and availability of coal makes it the world's prime source of energy for different end use applications. Coal is commonly used for electricity production through coal combustion. However, many researchers have indicated that coal combustion is a prime contributor to emission of greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. During combustion gaseous elements such as sulfur, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen react with oxygen to produce their respective oxides. These oxides contribute to global warming, air and water pollution as well as acid deposition. Emission of these oxides and their effect on the environment has resulted in increased interest in clean coal technologies. Clean coal technologies, such as coal gasification technology, use multiple technologies to control the emissions so as to minimize environmental effects from coal utilization. In this paper, the characteristics of Morupule coal from the south and east main sections are determined to establish its suitability for gasification. The characterization was conducted using thermal analysis (Thermogravimetric Analyzer) and an X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF). Numerical simulation was also carried out using Ansys software for species transport. The samples proved the coal to be from a high ash and sulfur content and medium volatiles bituminous parent rock, whilst species transport revealed a sufficient syngas yield per kilogram of coal for downstream processes.


We introduce an algorithm for automatic selection of semantically‐resonant colors to represent data (e.g., using blue for data about "oceans", or pink for "love"). Given a set of categorical values and a target color palette, our algorithm matches each data value with a unique color. Values are mapped to colors by collecting representative images, analyzing image color distributions to determine value‐color affinity scores, and choosing an optimal assignment. Our affinity score balances the probability of a color with how well it discriminates among data values. A controlled study shows that expert‐chosen semantically‐resonant colors improve speed on chart reading tasks compared to a standard palette, and that our algorithm selects colors that lead to similar gains. A second study verifies that our algorithm effectively selects colors across a variety of data categories.


OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the effect of diabetes during pregnancy on cesarean delivery and to determine whether the association between diabetes during pregnancy and cesarean delivery is mediated by birth weight.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
South Carolina 1993 birth certificates were matched through a unique identifier with infant and maternal hospital discharge records for the same year, yielding a total study population of 42,071 singleton births. Adjusted odds ratios (ORs) and 95% CIs were determined for the association between diabetes in pregnancy and cesarean delivery through multiple logistic regression, controlling for maternal age, race, education, number of prenatal care visits, length of gestation, birth weight, and a number of medical indications.

RESULTS
Of the study population, 0.7% were pregnancies complicated by preexisting diabetes, 2.9% were pregnancies complicated by gestational diabetes, and 23.4% were cesarean deliveries. After controlling for confounders, including birth weight, cesarean delivery was strongly associated with both preexisting diabetes (OR [95% CI] 6.20 [4.47-8.61]) and gestational diabetes (1.71 [1.41-2.07]). The estimates remained essentially unchanged without birth weight in the model, and were substantially higher in analyses restricted to deliveries without common medical indications for cesarean delivery.

CONCLUSIONS
Both preexisting and gestational diabetes increase the risk for cesarean delivery, independent of the effect of birth weight. The association is markedly greater among women without other medical indications for cesarean delivery. The increased risk of cesarean delivery for women with diabetes is mediated through other factors, which may include practice patterns and physician referrals to high-risk care.


Over the last decade there has been an increase in premature deaths due to cancer. The identification of new chemotherapeutic agents has led to the discovery of toxic peptides with cancer cell specificity. Extensive research is therefore required to determine how these anticancer peptides (ACPs) function and how their structural characteristics relate to both specificity and efficacy.
An ACP database comprising of 158 peptides was sub-divided into 3 datasets as follows: ACP 1 (inactive) containing 21 peptides, ACPAO (anticancer only) containing 14 peptides and ACPT (toxins) containing 123 peptides. Multivariate analysis of the physiochemical properties and toxicity indicated that no significant difference (Kruskal-Wallis = 8.82; p = 0.18) was observed in the median toxicity of the ACP datasets against the cancerous and non-cancerous cell lines.
In contrast to the oligopeptides from Mtaldon and Argos control dataset, C residues were observed to be completely absent from all 3 ACP subsets with an abundance of the positively charged K residues (relative frequency >0.3) in the ACPAO and ACPTpeptides. This suggested that positive charge and the absence of C residues may facilitate peptide binding to anionic
cancer cell membranes. Furthermore, lower levels of K residues were observed in the ACP 1 datasets, indicating that positive net charge may also be important for efficacy. A combination of several other physiochemical properties was analysed using box-plot analysis, linear regression and frequency distribution analysis. It was found that whilst sequence length, net charge, mean hydrophobicity ( ) and amphiphilicity ( ) of the peptides did not show a linear correlation with the toxicity, they may help increase efficacy in the case of some tumour cell lines. Three-dimensional clustering using net charge, and was carried out using the unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA). The cluster analysis results showed that there was no optimal combination of these properties for high level efficacy and no
specific residue arrangement was found to affect ACP specificity for cancer cells. Therefore, inter-quartile ranges were identified for key parameters but it was observed that no single optimal values could be obtained, emphasizing the complexity of these biological systems and the interdependence of these parameters. Further work in this study therefore, involved the investigation of secondary structural elements such as hydrophobicity gradients generated by residue arrangements. It was observed that although surface activity and amphiphilicity were important parameters, hydrophobic gradients were not essential for anticancer activity or selectivity.