In the third issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Work Environment & Health this year, Verbeek et al explore the potentials of evidence-based medicine for occupational health (1). Stating that evidence-based medicine has developed into a generally accepted method of linking the results of research to the practice of medicine, the authors present four clinical problems and examine the evidence relevant to the management of these problems through an appropriate search strategy. They conclude that the methods applied for a scientific review of evidence contribute to other methods used in evidence-based medicine, such as the use of guidelines.

Although we agree that scientific evidence is an absolutely necessary basis for modern medical practice, evidence may have other origins as well, such as narrative evidence (2) and intuition (3). This kind of evidence is useful for any practice of medicine, including occupational medicine. Indeed, the patient`s story is more than a list of present or absent symptoms, which act as the stepping-stone to the scientific databases. Some symptoms are related; others are not. They can vary in "time" and "place" and constitute metaphors for another meaning. The way the story is told, including the expression of nonverbal signs and the like, is also noteworthy. Together with the patient, the doctor must delve into history coherence and meaning, which should be adequate in relation to the iatrogenic question raised. In occupational medicine, the challenge is not only to put forward a clinical diagnosis and an appropriate therapy. The work-relatedness of the disease and the prognosis in terms of work ability is always on the agenda, and relevant clues in this respect are often presented through the patient`s history.

Thus, by combining narrative evidence with scientific evidence, further and more satisfying conclusions can be reached than the (very) modest and perhaps not very useful ones Verbeek and his colleagues seem to end up with in each of their studied cases. We venture to emphasize conclusions or suggestions that meet the patients` questions and needs - obviously not in conflict with any evidence, but rather by triangulating the various sources of evidence.

In their first example, a case of eye symptoms related to computer work, the authors conclude, for example, that "also psychosocial conditions, like job satisfaction, could contribute to these problems" [p 200]. In our opinion, the doctor`s job will not be finished until a more ambitious conclusion is reached. A more personal feedback would be required. The patient is not only interested in knowing Whether her problems are likely to be related to stress. She also has a need for a deeper realization of the possible mechanism behind the troublesome condition and potential solutions - at least some ideas to go home with and to test further at the workstation.

In the second example, the preventive aspects of hepatitis A among sewage workers is limited to a matter of vaccination, for which, however, advice is not given due to insufficient evidence in the reviewed scientific literature. Irrespective of the evidence, the best advice to the healthy worker would be to assure an adequate hygienic level, washing facilities, workclothes, and protection against aerosols. To ensure the adequacy of the advice, the doctor must not only be familiar with the scientific evidence, but also with the conditions in the actual workplace, for example, the assumed risk of transmission and the potentials for different preventive strategies. One factor here is the patient himself, for example, his skills for complying with directives for behavior, his fears, and the like.

The scientific evidence in the third example, emanating from an extensive number of revealed articles on the treatment of work-related burnout, was eventually limited to a single article advocating cognitive behavioral therapy in combination with relaxation therapy to reduce stress. Now stress and burnout are two different things, and we are convinced that the advice given was not really the best help to the teacher to promote his return to work. Continued suboptimal teaching of the children would hardly be influenced by the suggested therapy (if at all available) in absence of intervention directed towards relevant environmental (psychosocial) factors. Anyhow, a balanced view on whether environmental intervention or individual therapy is needed necessitates a careful evaluation of the patient`s story. Even though burnout is more a descriptive label than a representative one for a specific disease entity, each case of burnout is as distinct as individuals differ. Burnout is probably more a kind of existentialistic crisis. Thus the management of the burnt out patient must be based on the patient`s specific story. Any burnt out patient doubtlessly asks himself: "Why did I break down?" "What does that breakdown mean to me?" "How can I live with it?" "How can I go on?"

Compared with the three first examples the critical appraisal in the fourth example (which is a question of whether a pregnant hypertonic nurse should be advised go on sick leave) seems to provide the highest levels of evidence. Apparently, however, the references on which the scientific evidence is founded are mainly based on dichotomous exposures: work or absence from work. While this approach may sufficiently satisfy other physicians, the hallmark in occupational medicine is a more detailed appraisal of the exposure and the exposure-effect relationship. It is more than likely that the blood pressure of a pregnant worker is affected differentially with various work exposures. Some jobs may have a highly significant influence, and other jobs may be irrelevant. The patient`s history may also disclose nonoccupational factors that could influence blood pressure, such as anxiety, overweight, problems or stress in the home environment, and the like. The intervention in this case is not necessarily a question of work or sick leave, but rather advice based upon a thorough examination of the full story.

The authors conclude that the method of evidence-based medicine seems to be feasible also for occupational medicine. As to the question of whether evidence-based medicine is sufficient, there are no comments. Literature reviews remain important sources of evidence. However, as the examples seem to demonstrate, their yield may often be limited. Patients may not be really better informed, and health may not necessarily be improved if any action is based on evidence-based medicine only. The optimal selection and interpretation of scientific evidence deriving from the literature is highly dependent on the background, experience, and communication skills of the occupational physician. Of particular importance is the ability to ask relevant questions, to achieve patient confidence, and to identify objects for preventive activities that may differ from those coming up from a Medline search.

Of course, we are not in favor of loose talk and ad hoc ideas, notions, or concepts. We suggest, however, that the clinician should be well aware of the possibilities of basing assistance to the patient on broader evidence, which, as brilliantly presented in a number of articles in the British Medical Journal (eg, reference 2), may derive from ample sources apart from the strictly scientific one. Indeed, any credible feedback to the patient and, not the least, any reassurance has to build on a more personal and committed approach.


The Iowa Women's Health Study, a prospective cohort study of 41,836 Iowa women aged 55-69 years at baseline in 1986, reported that lung cancer was inversely associated with body mass index (BMI) and waist/hip ratio. Risk by histologic subtype was not examined. Through 1998, 596 cases of lung cancer were identified. After adjustment for established risk factors, women in the upper BMI quintile were at decreased risk of all lung cancer subtypes, especially squamous cell carcinoma; the highest versus the lowest quintile of BMI was associated with a relative risk of 0.22 (p-trend = 0.005). Conversely, the highest quintile of waist circumference was positively associated with small cell and squamous cell lung cancer (relative risks = 3.31 and 3.05, respectively). No association of waist circumference with risk of adenocarcinoma of the lung was found. There were too few cases of squamous cell and small cell carcinoma in never smokers to eliminate the possibility that these results are due to the residual effects of smoking. Alternatively, these results may reflect increased activation of chemicals from cigarette smoke among women with an increased waist circumference. Results suggest that waist circumference may be differentially associated with histologic subtypes of lung cancer.


Marx's account of the rise of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte is one of his most important texts. Written after the defeat of the 1848 revolution in France and Bonaparte's subsequent coup, it is a concrete analysis that raises enduring theoretical questions about the state, class conflict and ideology. Unlike his earlier analyses, Marx develops a nuanced argument concerning the independence of the state from class interests, the different types of classes, and the determining power of ideas and imagery in politics. In the Eighteenth Brumaire he applies his 'materialist conception of history' to an actual historical event with extraordinary subtlety and an impressive, powerful command of language.This volume contains the most recent and widely acclaimed translation of the Eighteenth Brumaire by Terrell Carver, together with a series of specially commissioned essays on the importance of the Brumaire in Marx's canon. Contributors discuss its continuing significance and interest, the historical background and its present-day relevance for political philosophy and history.


Abstract Background Chemoradiation of locally advanced non-metastatic pancreatic cancer can lead to secondary operability by tumor mass reduction. Here, we analyzed radiomodulating effects of oridonin and ponicidin in pancreatic cancer in vitro. Both agents are ent-kaurane diterpenoids, extracted from Isodon rubescens, a plant that is well known in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Cytotoxic effects have recently been shown in different tumor entities for both agents. Materials and methods Pancreatic cancer cell lines AsPC-1, BxPC-3, Panc-1 and MIA PaCa-2 were pretreated with oridonin or ponicidin and irradiated with 2 Gy to 6 Gy. Long-term survival was determined by clonogenic assay. Cell cycle effects and intensity of γH2AX as indicator for DNA double-strand breaks were investigated by flow cytometry. Western blotting was used to study the DNA double-strand break repair proteins Ku70, Ku80 and XRCC4. Results Oridonin and ponicidin lead to a dose-dependent reduction of clonogenic survival and an increase in γH2AX. Combined with irradiation we observed additive effects and a prolonged G2/M-arrest. No relevant changes in the levels of the DNA double-strand break repair proteins were detected. Conclusions Pretreatment with oridonin or ponicidin followed by irradiation lead to an additional reduction in survival of pancreatic cancer cells in vitro, presumably explained by an induced prolonged G2/M-arrest. Both agents seem to induce DNA double-strand breaks but do not interact with the non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) pathway.


Objective: The aim of the paper is to study the prevalence of Toxoplasma infection in the TB patients in comparison with individuals apparently healthy. Methods: A total of one hundred and twenty-eight selected TB patients have collected from the specialized center for Chest and Respiratory Disease in Baghdad who have the TB symptoms. They divided into three groups; newly diagnosed TB (NDTB) (58), old diagnosed patients (ODTB) (36) and multidrug resistance patients (MDRTB) (34) compare with forty-six apparently healthy individuals as a control group. The detection depends on Anti-Toxoplasma IgG in their serums by using Toxoplasma IgG enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kit. Results: The results of the anti-Toxoplasma IgG showed significant differences among the groups and control; mean ± SD 15.756 ± 3.1, 14.28 ± 3.04, 14.14 ± 3.27, 10.35 ± 3.14 respectively, and there were a highly significant differences between subgroups of patients and the control group in the percentage of infection with toxoplasma P=0.000. Conclusion: The present study concludes that the prevalence of anti-toxoplasma IgG among TB patients was highly significant than the healthy control group, and MDRTB subgroup has a high prevalence of Toxoplasma infection than other subgroups due to a weak immunological status, and increase antibacterial tolerance and the deteriorate prognosis of a disease.


Mentoring has become more prominent in teacher education (Power, Clarke, & Hine, 2002), which increases the responsibilities assigned to mentors (Sinclair, 1997). The mentor's role in preservice teacher education includes developing the mentee's overall teaching ability, yet each mentor has individual beliefs on what is and what is not important. Five factors for mentoring have previously been identified, namely, Personal Attributes, System Requirements, Pedagogical Knowledge, Modelling, and Feedback, and items associated with each factor have also been identified and justified with the literature (Hudson, Skamp, & Brooks, 2005; Hudson, 2005). A literature-based survey instrument gathered 446 preservice teachers' perceptions of their mentoring for primary teaching. Data were analysed within the abovementioned five factors proposed for mentoring with 331 final-year preservice teachers from nine Australian universities responding to their mentoring for science teaching and, in a subsequent year, 115 final-year preservice teachers from an urban university responding to their mentoring for mathematics teaching. Results indicated similar Cronbach alpha scores on each of the five factors for primary science and mathematics teaching; however percentages and mean scores on attributes and practices aligned with each factor were considerably higher for mentoring mathematics teaching compared with science teaching. Benchmarking mentoring practices may aid in determining ways for enhancing such practices.


In classical planning as heuristic search, the guiding heuristic function is typically treated as a black box. While many heuristics support refinement operations, they are typically only used for its initialization before search, but further refinement during search could make use of additional information not available in the initial state. We explore online refinement for additive Cartesian abstraction heuristics. These abstractions are computed through counter-example guided abstraction refinement, which can be applied online as well to further improve the abstractions. We introduce three operations, refinement, merging, and reordering, which are combined to a converging online-refinement algorithm. We describe how online refinement can effectively be used in A∗ and evaluate our approach on the IPC benchmarks, where it outperforms offline-generated abstractions in many domains.


Summary

Increases in primary production may occur if plants respond to climate warming with prolonged growing seasons, but not if local adaptation, cued by photoperiod, limits phenological advance. It has been hypothesized that trees with diffuse-porous xylem anatomy and early successional species may respond most to warming. Within species, northern populations may respond most due to the fact that growing seasons are relatively short. Species most sensitive to spring temperature may show little overall response to warming if reduced chilling in fall/winter offsets accelerated winter/spring development.

Because current thermal models consider only highly aggregated variables, for example degree-days or chilling units (temperature sums for a season or year), they may not accurately represent warming effects. We show that assumptions contained in current thermal (degree-day) models are unrealistic for climate change analysis. Critical threshold parameters are not identifiable, and they do not actually have much to do with thresholds for development. Traditional models further overlook the discrete nature of observations, observation error and the continuous response of phenological development to temperature variation. An alternative continuous development model (CDM) that addresses these problems is applied to a large experimental warming study near northern and southern boundaries of 15 species in the eastern deciduous forest of the USA, in North Carolina and Massachusetts.

Results provide a detailed time course of phenological development, including vernalization during winter and warming in spring, and challenge the basic assumptions of thermal models. Where traditional models find little evidence of a chilling effect (most are insignificant or have the wrong sign), the continuous development model finds evidence of chilling effects in most species.

Contrary to the hypothesis that northern populations respond most, we find southern populations are most responsive. Because northern populations already have a compressed period for spring development, they may lack flexibility to further advance development. A stronger response in the southern range could allow residents to resist northward migration of immigrants as climate warms. If potential invaders fail to exploit a prolonged growing season to the same degree as residents, then there is a resident advantage.

Hypothesized effects of warming for xylem anatomy and successional status are not supported by the 15 species in this study.


Over 120 advanced recipes to search, analyze, deploy, manage, and monitor data effectively with ElasticSearch Overview Write native plugins to extend the capabilities of ElasticSearch to boost your business Integrate the power of ElasticSearch in your Java applications using the native API or Python applications, with the ElasticSearch community client Step-by step-instructions to help you easily understand ElasticSearch's capabilities, that act as a good reference for everyday activities In Detail ElasticSearch is one of the most promising NoSQL technologies available and is built to provide a scalable search solution with built-in support for near real-time search and multi-tenancy. This practical guide is a complete reference for using ElasticSearch and covers 360 degrees of the ElasticSearch ecosystem. We will get started by showing you how to choose the correct transport layer, communicate with the server, and create custom internal actions for boosting tailored needs. Starting with the basics of the ElasticSearch architecture and how to efficiently index, search, and execute analytics on it, you will learn how to extend ElasticSearch by scripting and monitoring its behaviour. Step-by-step, this book will help you to improve your ability to manage data in indexing with more tailored mappings, along with searching and executing analytics with facets. The topics explored in the book also cover how to integrate ElasticSearch with Python and Java applications. This comprehensive guide will allow you to master storing, searching, and analyzing data with ElasticSearch. What you will learn from this book Choose the best ElasticSearch cloud topology to deploy and power it up with external plugins Control the index steps with tailored mappings Manage indices and documents and build a complex query against them Execute facets to compute analytics against your data to improve searches and results Use scripting to bypass limits of search, facets, and updates Synchronize and populate data from different data sources, by managing rivers (SQL, NoSQL, web) Monitor the cluster and node performances, and execute common tasks via web interfaces Integrate ElasticSearch in Python and Java applications Extend the capabilities of ElasticSearch by writing your own plugin to add REST calls, rivers, and custom cluster actions Approach Written in an engaging, easy-to-follow style, the recipes will help you to extend the capabilities of ElasticSearch to manage your data effectively. Who this book is written for If you are a developer who implements ElasticSearch in your web applications, manage data, or have decided to start using ElasticSearch, this book is ideal for you. This book assumes that you've got working knowledge of JSON and Java.


What is music and how do we go about researching it? Obviously, these are important questions, and the backbone of further developments within the discipline of musicology. As far as empirical fields and contextualization goes, this text initially claims that studies within ethnomusicology and musicology today portray a blurring of borders. The making of text as such and the analysis of a musical phenomenon, be it more or less focused on contexts primarily understood as external to the sound itself or the actual production of it, cannot escape the sediments of academic traditions and a multitude of challenges translating "music" to Music. What music is will always permeate academic texts on the matter whether it is an explicit theme or not. Without offering a final solution, nor excluding any takes on the matter, this article offers some critical comments funded primarily on a text by Michael Tanner (Understanding Music) that more or less explicitly treats this question.


Strongly Correlated Clocks Optical lattice clocks with alkaline earth atoms provide one of the most stable time-keeping systems. Such clocks, in general, exhibit shifts in their transition frequencies as a consequence of interactions between atoms. Can this sensitivity be used to explore the dynamics of strongly correlated quantum systems? Martin et al. (p. 632) used a 1-dimensional optical lattice clock to study quantum many-body effects. Whereas the clock shift itself could be modeled within the mean field approximation, quantities such as spin noise required a full many-body treatment. This system may be useful for the quantum simulation of exotic magnetism. A one-dimensional lattice of pancake-shaped clouds of 87Sr atoms is used to realize a strongly correlated system of spins. Strongly interacting quantum many-body systems arise in many areas of physics, but their complexity generally precludes exact solutions to their dynamics. We explored a strongly interacting two-level system formed by the clock states in 87Sr as a laboratory for the study of quantum many-body effects. Our collective spin measurements reveal signatures of the development of many-body correlations during the dynamical evolution. We derived a many-body Hamiltonian that describes the experimental observation of atomic spin coherence decay, density-dependent frequency shifts, severely distorted lineshapes, and correlated spin noise. These investigations open the door to further explorations of quantum many-body effects and entanglement through use of highly coherent and precisely controlled optical lattice clocks.


Thymic epithelial cells (TEC) guide selection of a T-cell repertoire that is reactive to pathogens but tolerant to self. While this process is known to involve the promiscuous expression of virtually the entire protein-coding gene repertoire by TEC, the extent to which these cells reproduce peripheral isoform structures is unknown. We performed a transcriptomic investigation of transcript structures and splicing factor expression in medullary TEC and 21 peripheral tissues. Our results indicate that TEC re-use a small number of peripheral splicing factors to recreate a limited subset of the peripheral splice isoform repertoire. We found, for example, that TEC lacked both neuronal micro-exons and the splicing factor, Srrm4, which promotes their inclusion. We demonstrate a functional role for the Rbfox splicing factors in promoting medullary TEC development and the alternative splicing of promiscuously expressed genes. Our findings have implications for understanding autoimmune diseases and the development of antigen-specific immunotherapies.


Data centers are among the fastest growing industries in the United States economy in terms of IT service and usage of data. However, data centers consume an excessive amount of energy that contributes to huge energy costs and CO2 emissions; thus, they face challenges in energy cost savings and making a positive impact on the environment. Therefore, data centers have been striving to: 1) improve energy efficiency in server operations by applying server provisioning techniques, and 2) utilize renewable energy and energy storage for power procurement. Although data centers have obtained financial and environmental benefits from the aforementioned efforts, there still exists significant room for improvement by facilitating demand response based on the co-optimization of server operations and power procurement, which has not been well implemented in the current practice. The main objective of this paper is a new holistic approach that considers server operations and power procurement simultaneously for implementing demand response. Also, this paper develops a decision-making model based on two-stage stochastic programming to successfully address the inherent stochastic nature and demonstrate the impact of the proposed model via numerical experiments. The proposed model is designed to support practitioners' strategic and operational decision-making for demand response in data centers.


Abstract Background: The pure-tone audiogram, though fundamental to audiology, presents limitations, especially in the case of central auditory involvement. Advances in auditory neuroscience underscore the considerably larger role of the central auditory nervous system (CANS) in hearing and related disorders. Given the availability of behavioral audiological tests and electrophysiological procedures that can provide better insights as to the function of the various components of the auditory system, this perspective piece reviews the limitations of the pure-tone audiogram and notes some of the advantages of other tests and procedures used in tandem with the pure-tone threshold measurement. Purpose: To review and synthesize the literature regarding the utility and limitations of the pure-tone audiogram in determining dysfunction of peripheral sensory and neural systems, as well as the CANS, and to identify other tests and procedures that can supplement pure-tone thresholds and provide enhanced diagnostic insight, especially regarding problems of the central auditory system. Research Design: A systematic review and synthesis of the literature. Data Collection and Analysis: The authors independently searched and reviewed literature (journal articles, book chapters) pertaining to the limitations of the pure-tone audiogram. Results: The pure-tone audiogram provides information as to hearing sensitivity across a selected frequency range. Normal or near-normal pure-tone thresholds sometimes are observed despite cochlear damage. There are a surprising number of patients with acoustic neuromas who have essentially normal pure-tone thresholds. In cases of central deafness, depressed pure-tone thresholds may not accurately reflect the status of the peripheral auditory system. Listening difficulties are seen in the presence of normal pure-tone thresholds. Suprathreshold procedures and a variety of other tests can provide information regarding other and often more central functions of the auditory system. Conclusions: The audiogram is a primary tool for determining type, degree, and configuration of hearing loss; however, it provides the clinician with information regarding only hearing sensitivity, and no information about central auditory processing or the auditory processing of real-world signals (i.e., speech, music). The pure-tone audiogram offers limited insight into functional hearing and should be viewed only as a test of hearing sensitivity. Given the limitations of the pure-tone audiogram, a brief overview is provided of available behavioral tests and electrophysiological procedures that are sensitive to the function and integrity of the central auditory system, which provide better diagnostic and rehabilitative information to the clinician and patient.


The critical role of the ferryl intermediate in catalyzing the oxygen chemistry of monooxygenases, oxidases, or peroxidases has been known for decades. In contrast, its involvement in heme-based dioxygenases, such as human indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (hIDO), was not recognized until recently. In this study, H2O2 was used as a surrogate to generate the ferryl intermediate of hIDO. Spectroscopic data demonstrate that the ferryl species is capable of oxidizing azinobis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) but not l-Trp. Kinetic studies reveal that the conversion of the ferric enzyme to the ferryl intermediate facilitates the l-Trp binding rate by >400-fold; conversely, l-Trp binding to the enzyme retards the peroxide reaction rate by ∼9-fold, because of the significant elevation of the entropic barrier. The unfavorable entropic factor for the peroxide reaction highlights the scenario that the structure of hIDO is not optimized for utilizing H2O2 as a co-substrate for oxidizing l-Trp. Titration studies show that the ferryl intermediate possesses two substrate-binding sites with a Kd of 0.3 and 440 μm and that the electronic properties of the ferryl moiety are sensitive to the occupancy of the two substrate-binding sites. The implications of the data are discussed in the context of the structural and functional relationships of the enzyme.


Human activity is one of the most important aerosol sources. Because the underlaying surface feature records most human activities, it is important to recognize the correlation between aerosol distribution and the underlaying surface. In this research, the dark object algorithm and a second-generation operational algorithm of Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aerosol retrieval are used to estimate aerosol optical depth from Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images acquired by the Landsat 7 satellite system in urban regions, and the correlations between aerosol distribution and urban underlaying surface features (including landform, land cover and urbanization level) is analysed. Results show that (1) it is feasible to apply a second-generation algorithm to retrieve aerosol optical depth with ETM+ images. When a validation is performed with the ground observation meteorological range converted into aerosol optical depth with the correlation model acquired by a Moderate-Resolution Atmospheric Transmission (MODTRAN) simulation, the retrieval error is about 0.0094. For higher spatial resolution of an ETM+ image, it is better to study the aerosol distribution features in the urban regions. Additionally, (2) there are obvious variations in spatial distribution of aerosol over the different features of the underlaying surface. For the landform, aerosol optical depth is mountain < hill < plain; for the land cover, aerosol optical depth is dense vegetation < sparse vegetation < water < bare soil < residential area; for the different urbanization-level regions, there is bigger and bigger aerosol optical depth with increasing of the urbanization level. On the whole, as human activities increase, so too does the aerosol optical depth.


Location-based Management System (LBMS) uses actual progress, resource, and productivity data to calculate schedule forecasts. The forecasting method has been developed by using empirical results from real construction projects and these forecasts are intended to be used as early warnings to highlight production problems and interference before they occur. It is expected that control actions are taken in response to adverse forecasts to prevent the forecasted problems from happening on site. The updated forecasting system based on earlier research has been used in several projects and now there is enough data to evaluate how well the forecasts reflect reality. In this research, forecasts from two hospital construction projects were evaluated for accuracy. Tasks were selected for analysis based on their manhour count, availability of accurate resource data and full completion of the operation. Forecasts were reviewed at four dates during performance of each task. The forecast on each date was compared to actual progress on these four dates. Results show that certain deviations such as working out of sequence, not finishing locations or working in several locations at the same time severely impact the forecasting ability of LBMS and make the project schedules unpredictable. Forecasting is accurate in the short term if there are no special circumstances and the work proceeds continuously.


Semi-synthetic biopolymer complex (SSBC) nanoparticles were investigated as a potential oral drug delivery system to enhance the bioavailability of a poorly water-soluble model drug acyclovir (ACV). The SSBCs were prepared from cross-linking of hydroxyl groups on hyaluronic acid (HA) with poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) resulting in ether linkages. Thereafter, conjugation of 2-hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HP-β-CD) onto HA-PAA was accomplished using a 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide (EDC)/N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS)-promoted coupling reaction. Nanoparticle powders were prepared by spray drying of drug-loaded SSBC emulsions in a laboratory nano spray dryer. The prepared SSBC was characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging, and X-ray diffraction (XRD) spectroscopy. The average particle size was found to be 257.92 nm. An entrapment efficiency of 85% was achieved as ACV has enhanced affinity for the hydrophobic inner core of the complex. It was shown that SSBC improved the solubility of ACV by 30% and the ex vivo permeation by 10% compared to the conventional ACV formulation, consequentially enhancing its bioavailability. Overall, this study resulted in the successful preparation of a hybrid chemically conjugated SSBC which has great potential for enhanced oral absorption of ACV with possible tuneable ACV permeability and solubility, producing an "intelligent" nanoenabled drug delivery system.


This article argues that the Party retains a tradition of seeking to revitalize its legitimacy through demonstrations of benevolence and glory. The post-2008 Sichuan earthquake provided just such an opportunity to mobilize the discourse of "Party spirit" and display the willingness of cadres to suffer and sacrifice themselves on behalf of the people. In addition to being grist for the propaganda mill, these norms and expectations were implemented in concrete policy directives and work pressures. Local cadres, who were also earthquake survivors, started to suffer from exhaustion, insomnia, and depression. After high-profile suicides by several local cadres, the Party adopted a therapeutic discourse in order to address the psychological needs of individual cadres, though these gentler policies seem doomed to be short-lived.


In this thesis, the first aim was to synthesise an inhibitor for the alpha-SNAP/NSF-mediated disassembly reaction of the SNARE complex. Based on identified interaction sites between alpha-SNAP and Synaptobrevin-2, suitable sequence positions (D51, E55, Q58, E62, D65) of Synaptobrevin-2 were chosen for modification. One or more sterically demanding side chains were introduced on the surface of the SNARE complex to prevent or at least weaken the alpha-SNAP binding which is essential for the disassembly reaction. For the site-specific modification of the Synaptobrevin-2 SNARE motif by SPPS, the adamantyl-modified amino acid building block Fmoc-Asn(Ad)-OH was synthesised. SNARE assembly and disassembly properties were investigated by time-dependent fluorescence anisotropy. The second aim was to study the influence of the adamantyl-modified Syb-2 analogues on the Complexin binding to the SNARE complex, due to the suggested competitive binding of alpha-SNAP and Complexin to the SNARE complex surface. The binding reaction was investigated by time-dependent fluorescence anisotropy and monitored by an increase of anisotropy upon addition of the SNARE complex to OregonGreen-labelled Complexin. In a third part of this study, the SNARE complex formation itself, the SNARE zippering process was investigated. By introducing photocleavable protecting groups, a soluble caged Synaptobrevin-2 derivative was designed and synthesised which was inactive towards SNARE complex zippering, and could be reactivated upon irradiation. In the last part of this study, Syntaxin transmembrane domains (TMDs) were easily accessible by SPPS and attachment of fluorophores to the N-terminal end of the sequence on the solid-support were successfully performed.


Ontogenetic and morphological variation in 40 populations of the closely related
species, Eucalyptus risdonii Hook.f. (Risdon Peppermint) and E. tenuiramis Miq.
(Silver Peppermint), was assessed in a multivariate study of heteroblastic leaf (adult
and juvenile) and fruit characters. Present taxonomic treatment of the two taxa is based
on ontogenetic differences but this study reveals that the variation in the retention of the
juvenile leaf habit is continuous. The morphological data suggests that at least four
, phenetic groups exist in the E. risdoniiltenuiramis complex and that, when ontogenetic
variation is removed, the morphological variation between some E. risdonii and some
E. tenuiramis populations is continuous and much smaller than the morphological
differences within E. tenuiramis. An extensive progeny trial, undertaken to remove
the confounding effects of environmental and ontogenetic variation, revealed that the
genetically-based variation between geographically contiguous populations of E.
risdonii and E. tenuiramis is relatively small and appears to be continuous. Reliable
classification into either taxon, on the basis of seedling phenotype, is not possible for
this group of populations. The major dichotomy between phenetic clusters derived
from the seedling morphology is not between forms that can be assigned to E. risdonii
and E. tenuiramis, but between geographically isolated forms of E. tenuiramis. This
disjunction in phenetic distance between the Central East Coast populations and the
remaining E. risdoniiltenuiramis populations parallels the geographic disjunction
between the two that has existed since at least the last glaciation. The combination of
clinal variation between contiguous E. risdonii and E. tenuiramis populations and the
divergence of the isolated East Coast phenotype suggests that both ecological
separation and reproductive isolation may be necessary for speciation to occur in the
eucalypts, especially in a climatically unstable environment such as Tasmania.
Phenotypic variation in ontogeny between forms classified as E. risdonii and E.
tenuiramis has been shown to be genetically based. When grown in a common
garden environment to 10 years of age, all progeny from the E. tenuiramis type
mothers had attained the petiolate leaf condition, whereas most progeny from the E.
risdonii type mothers still retained the connate, juvenile leaf type. Progeny from
intermediate mothers displayed a large variation in the height of phase change but could
be regarded as intermediate. This suggests that there is a cline in the retention of the
juvenile leaf form (neoteny) in the E. risdoniiltenuiramis complex. The time to
reproductive maturity and subsequent reproductive loads have also been shown to
differ markedly between the two forms. The E. risdonii progeny became reproductive
much earlier than the E. tenuiramis progeny, and bore a heavier reproductive load.
This precocious attainment of reproductive maturity can be regarded as progenesis.
Both changes in developmental timing (heterochrony),may lead to paedomorphy but in
response to different selective forces. Neoteny is probably a response to drought,
whereas progenesis appears to be a response to frequent disturbance. Studies of the anatomy and photosynthetic response of the juvenile and adult leaf
phases of one of the E. tenuiramis phenotypes indicates that heteroblasty in the
complex is not a response to regeneration under mesic, low-light conditions as it
appears to be in wet sclerophyll species. In spite of a leaf arrangement that favours
maximum light interception, the juvenile leaf phase appears to be adapted for
droughted, high light intensity conditions. These xeromorphic adaptations reach their
greatest expression in the Government Hills E. risdonii phenotype, which supports
the contention that retention of the juvenile leaf morphology conveys significant
selective advantages in these water limited habitats.
The effect of photoperiod and temperature on the transition from the juvenile to the
adult leaf phase was examined in E. tenuiramis. The results from the first trial
suggest that photoperiod does not affect phase change since no differences were
observed between treatments in chronological time, nor number of nodes, taken to
reach phase change. A second trial, conducted under higher temperature and light
intensity conditions, emphasized the reliability of physiological time (as measured by
node number), rather than height or chronological time, as an index of ontogenetic
development in E. tenuiramis.
v
The nature of this rigid physiological control of phase change was examined at the
individual plant level, revealing interesting differences between the positional control
of phase change in lateral branches and epicorrnic shoots. A model is proposed that
describes how many nodes an epicormic shoot will require to attain phase change from
any given position in the plant Two theories are proposed to account for the
behaviour of the epicorrnic shoots, one involves a gradient in juvenility within the
plant, whereas the other suggests that accessory buds 'remember' their position but are
altered by the length of their suppression. Further experiments are described that
attempt to resolve this question. The results indicate that the control of phase change is
inherent in the apex and that it is relatively independent of gross changes to its
hormonal and nutritive environment, although it can be affected by the length of its
suppressIOn.
This study of the variation in the E. risdoniiltenuiramis complex has illustrated that
heterochrony is a powerful means of altering morphology with only minor changes to
the genome. These large differences in the adult phenotype have led to the
classification of the two forms into distinct species, yet this does not appear to be an
accurate reflection of the genetic distance (nor, consequently, the taxonomic distance)
between the forms. In this example, speciation by paedomorphy has not been
completed. However, many species of eucalypt appear to have arisen by this means
and these species are often found in extreme environments. Examination of these taxa
indicates that paedomorphy has operated at all phylogenetic levels: operating at present, within species in a dinal fashion; operating in the recent past, to produce sister species;
and at earlier points in the evolutionary time scale, which has produced groups of
paedoP1orphic species. In addition to paedomorphy, other heterochronic processes
(peramorphy) are obviously operating throughout the genus, and this evolutionary
shifting of the timing of developmental events has a wider significance in eucalypt
evolution. Because of this repeated occurrence and operation at all phylogenetic levels,
the role of heterochrony in the genus Eucalyptus deserves greater recognition and
comprehension.


The main purposes of this paper are to identify critical success factors (CSFs) for electronic commerce (e‐commerce) in Thailand and explain the major influences behind these factors. Detailed case studies of nine e‐commerce companies from different industries in Thailand were conducted. Results showed that social behavior and national culture, more specifically issues pertaining to trust and shopping behavior, were the major influences for the success of e‐commerce in Thailand. The phenomenon could be partly explained by Hofstede's cultural dimensions. Thailand's infrastructure also played an important role in the success of its e‐commerce development. The findings provide a framework to guide the development of e‐commerce ventures in Thailand and other developing countries with similar cultures and infrastructures.


Deep neural networks are powerful tools for biomedical image segmentation. These models are often trained with heavy supervision, relying on pairs of images and corresponding voxel-level labels. However, obtaining segmentations of anatomical regions on a large number of cases can be prohibitively expensive. Thus there is a strong need for deep learning-based segmentation tools that do not require heavy supervision and can continuously adapt. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective of segmentation as a discrete representation learning problem, and present a variational autoencoder segmentation strategy that is flexible and adaptive. Our method, called Segmentation Auto-Encoder (SAE), leverages all available unlabeled scans and merely requires a segmentation prior, which can be a single unpaired segmentation image. In experiments, we apply SAE to brain MRI scans. Our results show that SAE can produce good quality segmentations, particularly when the prior is good. We demonstrate that a Markov Random Field prior can yield significantly better results than a spatially independent prior. Our code is freely available at this https URL.


Adult rainbow trout (mass 600-1500 g; length 40-44 cm) were held in the laboratory for up to 28 days at seasonally appropriate temperatures. The maximal sustainable aerobic exercise level (involving slow-twitch muscle activity alone) was determined by following muscle recruitment patterns using electromyography. The mean (± s.e.m.) speeds recorded for maximal sustainable aerobic exercise were 0.52±0.02, 0.81±0.06 and 0.39±0.02 BL s-1 (body lengths per second) for animals swimming at their acclimatisation temperatures of 4, 11 and 18 °C, respectively. Thus, fish acclimatised to 11 °C reached the highest maximal sustainable (purely aerobic) levels of exercise. They had similar stride lengths to the 4 °C animals, but generated less thrust per stride, as indicated by increased tail-beat frequency. Acclimatisation to 4 °C led to an increased mass of slow muscle and more effective tail beats (greater stride length at lower frequencies), relative to animals at higher temperatures. Fish acclimatised to 18 °C had the lowest stride length and a reduced aerobic swimming capacity. Sustainable levels of aerobic exercise were reflected in unchanged values for mean heart rate and arterial blood pressure between rest and imposed, graded exercise. Radiolabelled microspheres were used to determine cardiac output (V.b) and regional blood flow distribution simultaneously in fish, both at rest and while swimming, for each acclimatisation temperature. Fish acclimatised to 11 °C had the greatest scope for increasing V.b. This resulted in a significant hyperaemia in slow muscle upon exercise (10-fold increase), without an active redistribution of flow from other tissues. Maximum V.b at 18 °C did not differ significantly from that at 11 °C but, because resting V.b was higher, the scope was reduced and was similar to that found at 4 °C. Specific blood flow to the active muscle was also reduced and this, together with decreased blood oxygen content and reduced slow muscle mass, may limit aerobic swimming performance at 18 °C.


Degradation of urban environment and health hazard is directly associated with the unscientific handling of Municipal solid waste of India. Urbanization also contribute intensify Municipal solid waste generation. Source segregation of solid waste not only the fact to converge but also possible in maximum resource recovery from the waste. Waste management is a problem due to the ineffective management of waste and lack of knowledge of waste management. The main aim of the evaluation is to understand why and how communities can be approached survey and communicated and convicted towards a more suitable more sustainable and inclusive waste management system in Gurugram of India. All the Housing society of the Gurugram do not sort at all. The government agency responsible for the final management of solid waste does not have any practice to segregation the waste to achieving material recovery. The total waste generation in Gurugram area is 7418 kg per day from 5752 number of house hold. The waste segregation is the main challenges for the Municipal waste management system. The results revealed that average 81 percent of solid waste is just dumping in the land filled site without material recovery.


Abstract Insurance fraud is a serious and growing problem, and there is widespread recognition that traditional approaches to tackling fraud are inadequate. Studies of insurance fraud have typically focused upon identifying characteristics of fraudulent claims and claimants, and this focus is apparent in the current wave of forensic and data-mining technologies for fraud detection. An alternative approach is to understand and then optimize existing practices in the detection of fraud. We report an ethnographic study that explored the nature of motor insurance fraud-detection practices in two leading insurance companies. The results of the study suggest that an occupational focus on the practices of fraud detection can complement and enhance forensic and data-mining approaches to the detection of potentially fraudulent claims.


This edited volume addresses the root causes of Africa's persistent poverty through an investigation of its longue durA©e history. It interrogates the African past through disease and demography, institutions and governance, African economies and the impact of the export slave trade, colonialism, Africa in the world economy, and culture's influence on accumulation and investment. Several of the chapters take a comparative perspective, placing Africa's developments aside other global patterns. The readership for this book spans from the informed lay reader with an interest in Africa, academics and undergraduate and graduate students, policy makers, and those in the development world.


Erratic rainfalls and rise in temperature have become more frequent under the changing scenario of climate particularly in semiarid tropics. As a consequence of it, a drastic shift of chickpea diseases have been recorded throughout the major chickpea growing regions in India and elsewhere. Dry root rot (DRR) caused by Rhizoctonia bataticola (Taub.) Butler [Pycnidial stage: Macrophomina phaseolina (Tassi) Goid] was found as a potentially emerging constraint to chickpea production than wilt (Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceris). Increasing incidence of DRR indicate strong influence of climate change variables such as temperature and moisture on the development of disease. The present study therefore was conducted to quantify the role of temperature and soil moisture associated with infection, colonization and development of DRR under controlled environment. The DRR incidence was significantly affected by high temperature and soil moisture deficit. Out of five temperature regimes (15?C, 20?C, 25?C, 30?C and 35?C) and four moisture levels (40%, 60%, 80% and 100%), a combination of high temperature (35?C) and soil moisture content (60%) predisposes chickpea to DRR. The study clearly demonstrates that high temperature coupled with soil moisture deficit is the climate change variables predisposing chickpea to R. bataticola infection, colonization and development.


Numerous institutions of higher education throughout the United States are dedicated to providing education that seeks as its goal a more socially just and ecologically sustainable world. Progressive curricula challenging ecological and human exploitation and promoting alternatives is being taught in classes throughout the nation. However, a gap exists between curricula and management in most educational institutions that diminish the teaching goals. Administrative and governance structures to which academic programs are tied for students services and overall college functions lag behind the progressive thinking in classrooms and often lack systems and structures that embody the mission of the institution. Administrative and governance systems can do more to support academic goals directly in terms of effective, mission-based management as well as indirectly by modeling the progressive society envisioned in classrooms in the administrative and governance systems and, thus, extend the learning of the classroom to an integrated totality of the college experience. A sociologist at heart, Mahatma Gandhi advocated, "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

The purpose of this paper is: 1) to analyze the hidden socializing impacts of organizational systems and structures in formal education on students; 2) to place the purpose of modern education into an ecological and social context; and, 3) to promote ecological and community based organizational systems that may serve in to bridge the gap between teaching and governing in higher education.

I have been working for seven years with a group of committed staff and faculty at New College's North Bay Campus (NBC) to "bridge the gap" and create an organization that embodies its mission in every aspect of the organization from curricular content to toilet bowl cleaners. Examples of the work that has been implemented at New College will be given at the end of the paper. I hope that the governance work being done at the NBC will inspire other progressive institutions of higher education (and perhaps other institutions as well) to work toward diminishing the gap between their mission and operating structures in order to strengthen the impact of their educational goals.


Subtyping tests are essential in typed publish/subscribe infrastructures, especially when the underlying programming language supports subtype conformance, as in Java or C#. These tests are particularly challenging when the publish/-subscribe infrastructure is distributed, because processes have diverging views and new types may be added in a decentralized manner. Maybe surprisingly, subtyping tests for such distributed systems have been devoted only little attention so far; they are usually strongly intertwined with serialization and code transfer mechanisms.
 This paper presents an efficient subtype testing method for event objects received through the wire, requiring neither the download of a full description of the types or classes of these objects nor their deserialization. We use a slicing technique that encodes a multiple subtyping hierarchy with as little memory as the best known centralized type encoding, but allows for the dynamic addition of event types without re-computing the encoding.
 We convey the practicality of our approach through performance measures obtained with standard Java libraries in a publish/subscribe system. Our approach performs between 3 and 12 times faster than a code transfer approach without adding overhead to object deserialization, and requires the same testing time as a straightforward string-based type encoding while reducing the encoding length by a factor of 50.


Fatalities associated with entry into on-farm confined-space manure storage facilities occur each year. The fatalities are due to asphyxiation or poisoning by exposure to high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, methane, carbon dioxide, or oxygen deficiency. Forced ventilation has been identified previously as an effective way to reduce concentrations of these noxious gases to levels that are safe for human entry into these facilities. Previously validated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling protocols were used to identify the influence of several key initial conditions and modeling techniques on gas evacuation or oxygen recovery times for fan-ventilated confined-space manure pits. This article includes an extensive literature review to define the maximum expected initial concentrations and emission rates of primary manure gases in manure pits. The effect of the initial condition, the maximum initial concentrations of contaminant gases, on simulated contaminant gas evacuation time is explored. The influence of boundary conditions (i.e., emission rate (ER) and inter-contamination (INC), the process by which a portion of exhausted contaminant gas re-enters a ventilated confined airspace through the fresh air intake) on CFD outcomes is also explored. Simulation results showed that evacuation times increased as INC-strength (the ratio of contaminant concentration at the fan intake to the concentration in the air exhausted from the manure pit) increased from 0 to 0.40; however, no further increase in evacuation times was predicted for INC-strengths above 0.40. Simulations on oxygen recovery (from 0% to 20.0% by volume) in the confined airspace initially filled completely with a contaminant gas (i.e., H2S, NH3, CH4, and CO2) showed little difference (<5%) in recovery time by gas. Additionally, for a confined airspace (domain) filled with a gas mixture of contaminant gases, simulations showed that time to reduce H2S concentration from a documented high level (10,000 ppm) to the OSHA PEL level (10 ppm) was equal to or greater than evacuation times for other gases from their documented highest initial levels to their safe exposure levels. Also, an initial gaseous mixture including H2S and CO2 at their highest documented concentrations was the critical initial atmosphere in manure pits for performing CFD simulations.


An absolute reference frame may be defined as the one which is stationary with respect to the center of mass of the Universe and in which speed of propagation of light is an isotropic constant. Any motion with respect to this frame may be referred as absolute motion. In this paper we examine the Sagnac effect of absolute motion in the context of clock synchronization through GPS satellites in common view mode. The e-synchronization of two clocks A and B amounts to introduction of time offsets such that the time taken by a light pulse to propagate between A and B will be measured to be the same in both directions. Synchronization of two clocks through a GPS satellite in common view mode is effectively equivalent to e-synchronization of these clocks and introduces an absolute synchronization mismatch proportional to the absolute velocity and length of the baseline. Measurement of this synchronization offset between the GPS synchronized clocks at the ends of a long baseline will enable the practical detection of absolute motion of earth. Here we propose a simple experiment for detection of absolute motion through measurement of absolute synchronization offsets between two timing laboratories maintaining UTC time.


This paper presents a new, highly flexible, scalable image coder based on a Matching Pursuit expansion. The dictionary of atoms is built by translation, rotation and anisotropic refinement of gaussian functions, in order to efficiently capture edges in natural images. In the same time, the dictionary is invariant under isotropic scaling, which interestingly leads to very simple spatial resizing operations. It is shown that the proposed scheme compares to state-of-the-art coders when the compressed image is transcoded to a lower (octave-based) spatial resolution. In contrary to common compression formats, our bit-stream can moreover easily and efficiently be decoded at any spatial resolution, even with irrational re-scaling factors. In the same time, the Matching Pursuit algorithm provides an intrinsically progressive stream. This worthy feature allows for easy rate filtering operations, where the least important atoms are simply discarded to fit restrictive bandwidth constraints. Our scheme is finally shown to favorably compare to state-of-the-art progressive coders for moderate to quite important rate reductions.


In the period 2002-2004, the Netherlands Government's Pin-Matra programme funded an international project aiming to support the introduction of an agri-environment (AE) programme in Croatia. The project resulted in proposals for national and pilot agri-environment programmes. This publication summarises the proposal for the Pilot project.

The Agri-Environment Programme is an integral part of the EU Rural Development Regulation (1257/1999). It is the only obligatory measure under this regulation. The programme sets up the framework for the comprehensive protection of the environment and nature from adverse agricultural practices. The programme is based on voluntary agreements between farmers and public authorities. By providing economic incentives and supporting related education and demonstration activities, the programme encourages and enables farmers to employ agricultural practices that are beneficial for nature and the environment. The agri-environment programme has recorded very rapid expansion. Currently some 25% of EU agricultural land is included in the agri-environment programme. The costs of the AE programmes are partly financed from the EU budget and partly from national budgets. The AE schemes have become an important policy instrument for protecting the environment and maintaining biodiversity on EU agricultural land.

Croatia still does not have an agri-environment programme. Therefore, it was proposed to select a Croatian protected natural area and design a pilot agri-environment programme for it. The Žumberak- Samoborsko Gorje Nature Park was selected because in this region agriculture is essential for maintaining the basic Park phenomena: a man-made mosaic landscape and biodiversity depending on traditional land use. Besides, data needed to design an AE programme were available and the Park management team was highly professional and motivated.

The Žumberak-Samoborsko Gorje Nature Park represents a cultural landscape created through human activities, which shaped the landscape and contributed to the enrichment of biodiversity. Human activity, particularly grazing and mowing, created the conditions for the existence of many wildlife species. Over the last decades, and especially in the 1990s, livestock farming has been seriously declining in the Park. As a result, many species-rich grasslands are no longer managed and are overgrowing with shrubs and trees.

The Agri-environment programme for the Žumberak-Samoborsko Gorje Nature Park is designed to respond to the rapid decline of landscape, habitats and species diversity due to the loss of agricultural land, notably grassland. The Programme will encourage farmers to continue practising environmentally friendly measures or introduce those that are not economically attractive, but essential from the environmental and biodiversity point of view.
The proposed schemes and packages consists of four schemes:
1. The Information Transfer Scheme
It should provide training to farmers, administrators and extensionists, as well as inform general public on the Programme importance.
2. Abandoned Land Clearance Scheme
This Scheme should enable farmers to clean and restore agricultural land overgrown by shrubs.
3. Species Rich Grassland Scheme
It encourages farmers to continue with traditional (extensive) grassland management enabling maintenance of species rich grassland. The Scheme has two packages: for mowing and grazing.
4. Biodiversity Scheme
This consists of three packages: the Traditional Fruit Trees Package, Wild Species Protection Package and Ponds Package. These are targeted to improve habitat, species and landscape biodiversity.

Participation in the AE Programme is granted to all farmers having at least 1 ha of agricultural land within the Park borders. Exempted from this rule are the farms participating in the Wild Species Protection Package, whose size can be smaller than 1 hectare. The Park Authority may also be a recipient of the Programme's aid. Since this kind of programme is quite new and has never been tested in the Park, it is very difficult to forecast the number of farmers and the land area that will enrol in the Programme. The following estimate has been made for the first three years of the Programme:
Abandoned Land Clearance Scheme: 800 hectares. This area represents 20% of the currently estimated abandoned grassland area.
Species Rich Grassland Scheme: 2,000 hectares.
This is equal to 20% of the total Park grassland area.
Biodiversity Scheme: 400 hectares and 10 km under linear habitats. The Traditional Fruit Trees Package is expected to cover 100 hectares of meadow orchards, The Wild Species Protection Package is most likely to cover some 300 hectares and The Ponds Package is expected to involve 10 ponds.
The Information Transfer Scheme: is to provide training for some 1000 farmers, a number of local agronomists, environmentalists and Park experts. The Scheme will also provide information on the Programme to the Park's inhabitants and visitors.
The uptake is expected to record an annual increase in the first years of the Programme's implementation. The envisaged cost for the first three years of the AE Programme's implementation is 400.000 EUR per year on average. Once Croatia joins the EU, the AE Programme could be 85% financed by the EU and 15% by the national agricultural budget.

While designing and starting with the implementation of a national AE programme takes time, the pilot AE programme can be tested in a relatively short period. The Žumberak Samoborsko Gorje Nature Park AE Programme would test several AE measures. Experiences and lessons that could be learned from it would be beneficial both for designing the national AE programme and similar region-specific AE programmes.

Reaching the targets set out by this Programme would enhance the rural landscape, protect the environment and improve biodiversity. By encouraging farmers to continue with appropriate agricultural management the Programme will significantly contribute to preventing any further decline of landscape, habitats and species diversity in the Park.


Abstract : Large, complex systems development has always been challenging, even when the "only" things a program manager had to worry about were cost, schedule, and performance within a single program. The emergence of operational concepts such as network-centric operations, greatly expanded use of joint and combined operations, and rampant growth in system complexity has led to the prevalence of interoperable systems of systems as the preferred solution to providing operational capability. This report explores how systems-of-systems realities necessitate changes in the processes used to acquire, develop, field, and sustain operational capability. Interoperable acquisition is defined, and key concepts are explored through an analysis of some of the ways in which traditional (i.e., system-centric) acquisition approaches can result in problems when applied to a system-of-systems context.


The Kantian ideal is to establish a rational foundation of morality, accessible to everybody, independently of each own religiuos beliefs or even in absence of these beliefs. However, the Kantian practical reason does not ultimately fulfill this ideal, because the subject must have rational faith in the existence of God in order to promote its object, the supreme good, that is, the union between morality and its proportional happiness. God is the cause of this harmony in the afterlife. The cause of this reason's «heteronomy» is precisely Kant's foundation of the autonomy of will. At the bottom of this problem lies the question of how moral law influences man's desire in order that his reason could be really practical. Thomas Aquinas has this problem resolved thanks to his metaphysical anthropology. According to Thomas, the origin of human acts resides in the agent, who moves himself for an end not only known, but also desired, being thus the owner of his actions with a kind of «personal autonomy»


Title of Document TAXING OURSELVES: UNDERSTANDING SCHOOL TAX ELECTIONS Martin Kobren, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Directed By: Professor Irwin L. Morris, Department of Government and Politics Americans have increasingly segregated themselves over the last 40 years by wealth and political orientation. I argue that this segregation affects the way communities react to school tax ballot issues, which are ostensibly nonpartisan matters. Using a database containing 232 school tax elections that took place during 2011 in 10 states, I show that in affluent communities that favor Democrats, high levels of educational attainment make it more likely that a community will adopt a tax increase. By contrast, in downscale communities that favor Democrats, economic concerns play an important role in election outcome; large percentages of homeowners decrease the likelihood of passage while large percentages of renters and poor people make tax increases more likely. In downscale Republican leaning communities, a sense of attachment to the community, indicated by large percentages of households with members who are at least 60 years of age, small community sizes and long tenures in the same house, make it more likely that the community will adopt a school tax increase. Finally, in affluent Republican oriented communities, school tax increases are extremely difficult to pass and become more so as community size increases. High levels of educational attainment tend to moderate the impact of Republican anti-tax ideology and high population sizes to make school tax increases more likely. TAXING OURSELVES: UNDERSTANDING THE RESULTS OF SCHOOL TAX ELECTIONS By


Manufacturing in America has become significantly more data-intensive. We investigate the adoption, performance effects and organizational complementarities of data-driven decision making (DDD) in the U.S. Using data collected by the Census Bureau for 2005 and 2010, we observe the extent to which manufacturing firms track and use data to guide decision making, as well as their investments in information technology (IT) and the use of other structured management practices. Examining a representative sample of over 18,000 plans, we find that adoption of DDD is earlier and more prevalent among larger, older plants belonging to multi-unit firms. Smaller single-establishment firms adopt later but have a higher correlation with performance than similar non-adopters. Using a fixed-effects estimator, we find the average value-added for later DDD adopters to be 3% greater than non-adopters, controlling for other inputs to production. This effect is distinct from that associated with IT and other structured management practices and is concentrated among single-unit firms. Performance improves after plants adopt DDD, but not before – consistent with a causal relationship. However, DDD-related performance differentials decrease over time for early and late adopters, consistent with firm learning and development of organizational complementarities. Formal complementarity tests suggest that DDD and high levels of IT capital reinforce each other, as do DDD and skilled workers. For some industries, the benefits of DDD adoption appear to be greater for plants that delegate some decision making to frontline workers.


Background: Bovine Tuberculosis (bTN) elimination programs are based on test-and-slaughter strategies. No diagnostic test used in the control of Bovine Tuberculosis (bTB), a zoonotic disease, is a perfect gold standard having a diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of 100%. Methods: To find relevant data to assess diagnostic accuracy of one variant of the tuberculin test, the Single Intradermal Comparative Cervical Tuberculin Test (SICCT) used in the diagnosis of bTB a systematic literature search was performed. To estimate diagnostic test accuracies of the SICCT, a Bayesian latent class analysis has been undertaken. Results: Only one eligible study was found. Assuming bacterial isolation has a specificity of 100%, specificity of gross lesion detection and histopathology were estimated as 90% and 97% respectively. Estimates of the sensitivity of the Single Intradermal Comparative Cervical Tuberculin Test (SICCT), gross lesion detection, histopathology and bacteriological isolation were 80%, 89%, 93% and 98% respectively. The design of this study precluded estimating the SICCT specificity, although official UK surveillance data indicates specificity greater than 99.67%. Conclusion: Studies to estimate the diagnostic performance of key tests for bTB are lacking, yet essential for an informed debate in regard to bTB public health policy.


A practicing psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, the author offers a psychoanalytical perspective on psychic illness within a contras tive framework of twentieth-century Western psychiatric and psycho analytic outlooks on mental health. Drawing on Jaspers's exemplary discussion of the differences between psychiatric and phenomenologi cal-interpretative approaches to psychopathology, the author applies it to her exegesis of the Lacanian conceptions of the human unconscious, the dynamics of symptom formation, as well as the significance of mental malady for understanding the structure of the human subject. As differ ent forms of psychopathology express themselves in social phenomena, the author advocates a wider application of psychoanalytic ethnography or applied psychoanalysis to help subjects deal with natural disasters, personal crises, and everyday life. Taking into account the adversities that affect individuals and societies and the diversity of contexts, the dynamic process of applied psychoanalysis can make contributions toward achieving vital understanding.


We describe a neural network-based system for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis that is able to generate speech audio in the voice of many different speakers, including those unseen during training. Our system consists of three independently trained components: (1) a speaker encoder network, trained on a speaker verification task using an independent dataset of noisy speech from thousands of speakers without transcripts, to generate a fixed-dimensional embedding vector from seconds of reference speech from a target speaker; (2) a sequence-to-sequence synthesis network based on Tacotron 2, which generates a mel spectrogram from text, conditioned on the speaker embedding; (3) an auto-regressive WaveNet-based vocoder that converts the mel spectrogram into a sequence of time domain waveform samples. We demonstrate that the proposed model is able to transfer the knowledge of speaker variability learned by the discriminatively-trained speaker encoder to the new task, and is able to synthesize natural speech from speakers that were not seen during training. We quantify the importance of training the speaker encoder on a large and diverse speaker set in order to obtain the best generalization performance. Finally, we show that randomly sampled speaker embeddings can be used to synthesize speech in the voice of novel speakers dissimilar from those used in training, indicating that the model has learned a high quality speaker representation.


Until this point in time, space architecture has relied heavily on engineering - resulting in little room for artistic practice. The resulting habitats are ill-equipped to sustain the quality of life required for long-term or interplanetary missions. However, rapid technological growth is beginning to enable the realisation of outer space for commercial enterprise, scientific gain, and personal exploration. Together, a budding space industry and the profession of space architecture are set to lead each other, hand-in-hand, into a new age of space exploration - and to destinations never before reached.  For almost as long as human culture has remembered we have been fascinated by the stars. A potent result of this fascination is science fiction and stories concerning space travel. A strong and tangible assemblage has formed between science fiction, social narrative, and outer space. Science fiction can make concepts of the future understandable. It can make communities focused on the future.  This thesis proposes that the discipline of architecture, with the help of popular science fiction, can re-imagine space architecture. It seeks to create empathy with the future inhabitants of outer space by envisaging the space industry of the future, and through the creation of a passenger ship it develops a hope for a future that unfolds differently to what we are planning for now.   This research seeks to investigate these connections in order to create safer and more fulfilling homes for spacefarers of the future. It does so by arguing against the typology we maintain. Through iterative designs which coincide with research on the use of science fiction and habitability in space, it concludes with a new ship typology.


In asset classes such as equities, the market beta is fairly clear. However, this question is more difficult to answer within FX, where there is no obvious beta. To help answer the question, we discuss generic FX styles that can be used as a proxy for the returns of a typical FX investor. We also look at the properties of a portfolio of these generic styles. This FX styles portfolio has an information ratio of 0.64 since 1976. Unlike its individual components, the FX styles portfolio returns are relatively stable with respect to underlying regimes in S&P500. Later we replicate FX fund returns using a combination of these generic FX styles. We show that a combination of FX trend and carry, can be used as a beta for the FX market. Later, we examine the relationship between bank indices and these generic FX styles. We find that there is a significant correlation in most instances, with some exceptions.


This thesis formulates, analyzes, optimizes and compares total cost models for conventional, taxi and dial-a-ride systems in rural areas. The models are developed for a rural region with a town at its center. By considering characteristics of rural areas and rural passengers, the models minimize total cost by optimizing key decision variables, i.e. headway and the number of taxis in a system. The analysis of these models aims to identify thresholds of demand where different systems are preferable and explore the effects of various operating conditions on cost and optimized decision variables for each transportation system. The results of this thesis show that in general the taxi system has the lowest total cost per trip, but the dial-a-ride and conventional bus systems have the lowest user and operator cost, respectively. This analysis gives policymakers in rural regions guidelines for developing efficient public transportation systems given various circumstances. Dedication To my mom and dad without which this would not be possible….


The temperature evolution and crystallization sequences in matte and speiss from Pb metallurgy at Přibram (Czech Republic) were determined using a combination of microscopic observations (optical microscopy, SEM/EDS), chemical microprobe data (EPMA), X-ray diffraction (XRD) of original samples collected at the dumps, and samples studied by heating experiments (temperature steps 25, 400, 700, 900, 1100, 1200 °C) and quenching experiments (400, 700 and 900 °C). Immiscibility of sulphide and metallic melts was observed. Identification of the major phases (sulphides, metals and intermetallic compounds) helped in estimation of the temperature of the matte and speiss solidification. Microscopic observations indicate that the crystallization sequences begin with high-temperature phases, such as Ni 3 Sn 2 or NiSb (with melting temperatures of 1264 °C and 1147 °C, respectively) and, in sulphide melts, with crystallization of a high-temperature spinel phase (magnetite, Fe 3 O 4 ), Fe-rich wurtzite/sphalerite (ZnS) and pyrrhotite (Fe 1− x S). The solidification sequence ends either with the formation of galena + Cu sulphide eutectic (~500–600 °C) within the sulphide melt (matte), or with low-temperature Pb + Sb myrmekitic assemblage formation (247 °C) in the speiss. Possible geological implications related to the crystallization of sulphide ore bodies or their partial melting induced by regional metamorphic processes are discussed.


We present a first-principles study based on density functional theory of thermodynamic and electronic properties of the most important intrinsic defects in the semiconductor alloy Cd1-xZnxTe with x < 0.13. The alloy is represented by a set of supercells with disorder on the Cd/Zn sublattice. Defect formation energies as well as electronic and optical transition levels are analyzed as a function of composition. We show that defect formation energies increase with Zn content with the exception of the neutral Te vacancy. This behavior is qualitatively similar to but quantitatively rather different from the effect of volumetric strain on defect properties in pure CdTe. Finally, the relative carrier scattering strengths of point defects, alloy disorder, and phonons are obtained. It is demonstrated that for realistic defect concentrations, carrier mobilities are limited by phonon scattering for temperatures above approximately 150 K.


The cubic regularization method (CR) is a popular algorithm for unconstrained non-convex optimization. At each iteration, CR solves a cubically regularized quadratic problem, called the cubic regularization subproblem (CRS). One way to solve the CRS relies on solving the secular equation, whose computational bottleneck lies in the computation of all eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix. In this paper, we propose and analyze a novel CRS solver based on an approximate secular equation, which requires only some of the Hessian eigenvalues and is therefore much more efficient. Two approximate secular equations (ASEs) are developed. For both ASEs, we first study the existence and uniqueness of their roots and then establish an upper bound on the gap between the root and that of the standard secular equation. Such an upper bound can in turn be used to bound the distance from the approximate CRS solution based ASEs to the true CRS solution, thus offering a theoretical guarantee for our CRS solver. A desirable feature of our CRS solver is that it requires only matrix-vector multiplication but not matrix inversion, which makes it particularly suitable for high-dimensional applications of unconstrained non-convex optimization, such as low-rank recovery and deep learning. Numerical experiments with synthetic and real data-sets are conducted to investigate the practical performance of the proposed CRS solver. Experimental results show that the proposed solver outperforms two state-of-the-art methods.


Environmental anthropological studies on natural resource management have widely demonstrated and thematized local resource management practices based on the interactions between local people and supernatural agencies and their role in maintaining natural resources. In Indonesia, even though the legal status of local people's right to the forest and forest resources is still weak, the recent transition toward decentralization presents a growing opportunity for local people to collaborate with outsiders such as governmental agencies and environmental nongovernmental organizations in natural resource management. In such situations, in-depth understanding of the value of local resource management practices is needed to promote self-directed and effective resource management. Here, we focus on local forest resource management and its suitability in the local social- cultural context in central Seram, east Indonesia. Local resource management appears to be embedded in the wider social-cultural context of the local communities. However, few intensive case studies in Indonesia have addressed the relationship between the Indigenous resource management practices closely related to a people's belief in supernatural agents and the social-cultural context. We illustrate how the well-structured use of forest resources is established and maintained through these interactions. We then investigate how local resource management practices relate to the social-cultural and natural resources context of an upland community in central Seram and discuss the possible future applications for achieving conservation.


All over Europe massive numbers of people live in large-scale housing estates built after the Second World War. The estates were carefully planned, but now often manifest a mulitude af problems. They house large numbers of low-income households, the unemployment rates are above average and in some countries they have become concentration areas for ethnic minorities. Many estates are becoming increasingly associated with crime and social exclusion. The circumstances on the estates and policy initiatives associated with these are focus of the RESTATE-project. RESTATE is the acronym for Restructuring Large-scale Housing Estates in European Cities: Good Practices and New Visions for Sustainable Neighbourhoods and Cities. The study draws on estates in ten European countries: France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The present report deals specifically with large housing estates in two cities in Sweden: Jonkoping och Stockholm. The basic questions are about physical structure, demographic-, economic- and socio-cultural developments. The same kind of information for estates in other countries in the RESTATE-project can be found in the parallel reports


The certification by EPA or a State for SBA Loan purposes in no way constitutes a determination by EPA or the State that the facilities certified (a) will be constructed within the time specified by an applicable standard or (b) will be constructed and installed in accordance with the plans and specifications submitted in the application, will be operated and maintained properly, or will be applied to process wastes which are the same as described in the application. The certification in no way constitutes a waiver by EPA or a State of its authority to take appropriate enforcement action against the owner or operator of such facilities for violations of an applicable standard.


The target of Next Generation Network (NGN) is to provide Quality of Service (QoS) assurance for demands emerged from different applications of nomadic users with any mobility pattern. The intention of this paper is to bring together the state-of-the-art knowledge in telecommunication networks design areas to improve the quality of NGN system design, and also to bind these different areas in order to understand and foresee specific issues. Proper system design and advanced optimized resource management schemes must be adopted to allow each user be connected to the preferred access network at any instant of time. Vertical optimization of the protocol stack as well as horizontal integration of different systems are the mandatory points. Moreover, the adoption of the IP protocol for mobile environment and extension of packet-based services to the air interface calls for innovative QoS approaches and advanced performance modelling efforts. These new challenges require the development of new methods of teletraffic theory and the special attention should be paid to traffic and wireless link modelling techniques.


In 1993, the National Diabetes Advisory Board charged the American Diabetes Association to coordinate a task force of representatives of diabetes and other organizations to review, and revise if indicated, the National Standards for Diabetes Patient Education Programs. The Task Force consisted of representatives from the following organizations: The American Association of Diabetes Educators, The American Diabetes Association, The American Dietetic Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Diabetes Research and Training Centers, the Indian Health Service, and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, Inc. The task force decided to revise the standards to reflect recent research and current health care trends. Thus, the standards were revised and are now termed the National Standards for Diabetes Self-Management Education Programs. These revised standards have been endorsed by the organizations involved in their development.


Higher education pricing models have focused heavily on traditional student population analysis, net earnings, financial aid, and enrollment projections or unduplicated headcount. As the population of students shifts to a nontraditional majority, research of the effect of tuition price on nontraditional population segments is needed with a focus on persistence (the likelihood of re-enrollment in the next semester for a given student) rather than overall enrollment levels. It becomes prudent to re-evaluate pricing models and the associated coefficients from tuition pricing changes on persistence to more effectively serve the nontraditional population as nontraditional students rely less on financial aid and progress through their curriculum at an individualized pace consistent with their needs. The nontraditional population is, on average, older, with more professional experience, often with military affiliations (active duty, veteran, reservist, or family member), and education in progress. Using a quantitative longitudinal empirical case study, the researcher utilized student-level data from a private, nonprofit university in the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools regional accreditation territory to determine the effect of a tuition increase on nontraditional student (age 25 ) persistence. The data was analyzed using a linear regression interaction model in STATA. The researcher found statistical significance, with the counterintuitive finding that the effect of a 1 percent tuition increase for all students was an increase in persistence by 2.01 percent with a clear explanation for this finding of the overall tuition effect on persistence. Consistent with theory, this research finds that nontraditional students only increased their persistence by 0.62 percent, persisting less than traditional students. For every 1 percent increase in tuition, nontraditional online students are decreasing their persistence by 0.9 percent, persisting less than face-to-face students. These findings are important, as they provide contributions to Elasticity Theory, Tuition Elasticity Theory, and practice including application for higher education institutions, administrators and advisors in higher education, and customer relationship management software as service companies targeting students utilizing variations of predictive analytics to estimate persistence of different populations, estimate and understand tuition price increase effects on different populations, set recruiting and enrollment goals based upon expected attrition, and design customized communication plans to facilitate more in-depth relationships with those less likely to persist in an effort to overcome this statistic. These findings are also the first portion of exploring elasticities as they apply toward developing a pricing model for nontraditional student populations using the framework established by the TENEP model (Bryan & Whipple, 1995).


Building on a preliminary paper design of a downlink from a swarm of low-mass interstellar probes for returning scientific data from the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, the most critical technology issues are summarized, and their significance is explained in the context of the overall system design. The primary goal is to identify major challenges or showstoppers if such a downlink were to be constructed using currently available off-the-shelf technology, and thereby provide direction and motivation to future research on the constituent design challenges and technologies. While there are not any fundamental physical limits that prevent such communication systems, currently available technologies fall significantly short in several areas and there are other major design challenges with uncertain solutions. The greatest identified challenges are in mass constraints, multiplexing simultaneous communication from multiple probes to the same target exoplanet, attitude control and pointing accuracy, and Doppler shifts due to uncertainty in probe velocity. The greatest technology challenges are electrical power, high power and wavelength-agile optical sources, very selective and wavelength-agile banks of optical bandpass filters, and single-photon detectors with extremely low dark-count rates. For a critical subset of these, we describe the nature of the difficulties we encounter and their origins in the overall system context. A receiver that limits reception to a single probe is also considered and compared to the swarm case.


Experiencing high levels of poverty and corruption, Nigeria is widely perceived as the quintessential resource cursed country. Yet, the oil exporter nonetheless underwent a democratic transition with its March 2015 elections. The explanation for this puzzle partly lies in the recent fall in oil prices and related government revenues, which limited patronage spending before the elections. Applying a political ecology lens to the case, however, also points towards deeper explanations: the costs and benefits of Nigerian oil extraction have been very unevenly distributed allowing the formation of new, and the destruction of old, political alliances. Keywords: Nigeria, elections, democracy, oil revenues, patronage, capital flight


Manuscript type: Research paper.
Research aims: This paper aims to investigate the applicability of  the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) in examining individuals' behavioural intention to invest in the capital market. This study ex- tends on the TPB model by considering the role of past behavioural biases (PBB) as a factor in influencing the individuals' behavioural investment intentions.
Design/ Methodology/ Approach: This paper employs a hypothesis deductive approach. The research model is tested through structural equation modelling (SEM). Data were collected from 396 individuals in Eastern India through a survey and then analysed.
Research findings: The results of this study demonstrate the applicability of the TPB in predicting the individuals' behavioural intention to invest  in  the  capital  market.  This  study  indicates  that attitude toward behaviour, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control are significantly associated with behavioural intentions. The findings signify that the inclusion of past PBB can improve the predictive power of the model.
Theoretical contributions/ Originality: This study expands on the well-established TPB model by incorporating PBB in examining behavioural intentions. It also extends the applicability of the TPB in the area of investment decision making.
Practitioner/ Policy implications: The findings of this study reveal that behavioural biases are inseparable from normal human beings' decision making. The reason is because behavioural biases can distort the individuals' fundamental valuation of stocks. Therefore,  it is imperative that fund managers incorporate this dimension as part of their risk modelling to enhance investment analysis and strategies. The outcome of this study can be used as a guideline for understanding the factors and programmes that need to be instilled to increase online stock trading among current and future investors. Research limitation: This study is limited to non-financial sectors due to measurement limitations.

Keywords: Theory of Planned Behaviour, Past Behavioural Biases, Investment Decision Making.
JEL Classification: G11, G02, C91


Hannah Tonkin's book, which began its life as a doctoral thesis completed at the University of Oxford, is one of the many books that have been written in response to the rapid proliferation of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in armed conflicts around the world. State Control over Private Military and Security Companies in Armed Conflicts distinguishes itself from the other books by firstly, critically analysing the international obligations from the perspective of three key states, namely: the hiring state, the home state and the host state of a PMSC; and secondly, identifying circumstances in which PMSC misconduct may give rise to state responsibility. Tonkin's industry in researching on this topical issue of state control over PMSCs in armed conflict is evident. A University of Adelaide's 97th Rhodes Scholar, Tonkin proved to be in control of the subject matter right from the introductory chapter all through the individual chapters up to the conclusion.


Recently, the concept of ligand-directed signaling—the ability of different ligands of an individual receptor to promote distinct patterns of cellular response—has gained much traction in the field of drug discovery, with the potential to sculpt biological response to favor therapeutically beneficial signaling pathways over those leading to harmful effects. However, there is limited understanding of the mechanistic basis underlying biased signaling. The glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor is a major target for treatment of type-2 diabetes and is subject to ligand-directed signaling. Here, we demonstrate the importance of polar transmembrane residues conserved within family B G protein-coupled receptors, not only for protein folding and expression, but also in controlling activation transition, ligand-biased, and pathway-biased signaling. Distinct clusters of polar residues were important for receptor activation and signal preference, globally changing the profile of receptor response to distinct peptide ligands, including endogenous ligands glucagon-like peptide-1, oxyntomodulin, and the clinically used mimetic exendin-4.


Facing death results in more fear and anxiety than any other human experience. Though much has been done to address the physical pain suffered by those with a terminal illness, Western medicine has been slow to understand and alleviate the psychological and spiritual distress that comes with the knowledge of death. In What Dying People Want, Dr. David Kuhl begins to bridge that gap by addressing end-of-life realities--practical and emotional--through his own experiences as a doctor and through the words and experiences of people who knew that they were dying. Dr. Kuhl presents ways of finding new life in the process of dying, understanding the inner reality of living with a terminal illness, and addressing the fear of pain, as well as pain itself. He also offers concrete guidance on how to enhance doctor/patient relationships and hold family meetings, and provides an introduction to the process of life review. It is possible to find meaning and peace in the face of death. What Dying People Want "helps us learn to view the knowledge of death as a gift, not a curse." (New Times)