Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift? Can time have a beginning? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Riddles, paradoxes, conundrums-for millennia the human mind has found such knotty logical problems both perplexing and irresistible. Now Roy Sorensen offers the first narrative history of paradoxes, a fascinating and eye-opening account that extends from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century. When Augustine asked what God was doing before He made the world, he was told: "Preparing hell for people who ask questions like that." A Brief History of the Paradox takes a close look at "questions like that" and the philosophers who have asked them, beginning with the folk riddles that inspired Anaximander to erect the first metaphysical system and ending with such thinkers as Lewis Carroll, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W.V. Quine. Organized chronologically, the book is divided into twenty-four chapters, each of which pairs a philosopher with a major paradox, allowing for extended consideration and putting a human face on the strategies that have been taken toward these puzzles. Readers get to follow the minds of Zeno, Socrates, Aquinas, Ockham, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, and many other major philosophers deep inside the tangles of paradox, looking for, and sometimes finding, a way out. Filled with illuminating anecdotes and vividly written, A Brief History of the Paradox will appeal to anyone who finds trying to answer unanswerable questions a paradoxically pleasant endeavor.


This paper explores the way constructions and transformation of both gender and genre are transformed and defamiliarized in order to draw attention to their inherently constructed nature. Although both gender and genre typically attempt to present themselves as inherent and natural they are in actuality as crafted and culturally mediated forms of expression. Joseph Losey's  The Servant  (1963) and Sally Potter's  Orlando  (1992) both  align themselves with well-established genres of British national cinema— The Servant  with classical realism and Orlando  with heritage costume drama—while also disrupting these conventions, drawing on other genres to highlight the performative nature of gender and genre. Through an examination of the transformation of British home, I  demonstrate that by destabilizing firmly held British ideals these films signal the artificiality of the strictly defined boxes of gender and genre upon which British identity is founded.


During 2004, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were the third warmest in the past 125 years, land surface temperatures were the fourth warmest, and globally averaged temperatures likewise ranked fourth highest [Levinson, 2005]. This article presents evidence that SSTs contributed significantly to the widespread terrestrial and global tropospheric warmth.

Every ocean witnessed warm sea surface conditions in 2004, with only the middle latitudes of the Southern Ocean experiencing below average values (Figure 1, top). Much of this warmth was concentrated north of 30°S and included a weak El Nino event in the tropical central Pacific. Terrestrial warmth in 2004 was seen at all locations between 45°N and 45°S.The greatest departures from average temperatures occurred over interior Eurasia and western North America, which experienced increases of up to 2°C (Figure 1, middle). Consistent with the considerable warmth of ocean and land surfaces, much of the global troposphere was also warm in 2004. The thermal expansion of the tropospheric column, whose top is roughly at the 200-millibar pressure surface, is demonstrated by the increase in elevation of that surface worldwide (Figure 1, bottom).


Most sequential recommendation models capture the features of consecutive items in a user-item interaction history. Though effective, their representation expressiveness is still hindered by the sparse learning signals. As a result, the sequential recommender is prone to make inconsistent predictions. In this paper, we propose a model, SSI, to improve sequential recommendation consistency with Self-Supervised Imitation. Precisely, we extract the consistency knowledge by utilizing three self-supervised pre-training tasks, where temporal consistency and persona consistency capture user-interaction dynamics in terms of the chronological order and persona sensitivities, respectively. Furthermore, to provide the model with a global perspective, global session consistency is introduced by maximizing the mutual information among global and local interaction sequences. Finally, to comprehensively take advantage of all three independent aspects of consistency-enhanced knowledge, we establish an integrated imitation learning framework. The consistency knowledge is effectively internalized and transferred to the student model by imitating the conventional prediction logit as well as the consistency-enhanced item representations. In addition, the flexible self-supervised imitation framework can also benefit other student recommenders. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that SSI effectively outperforms the state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods.


This book presents a series of illuminating studies which conclusively demonstrates that the prevailing conception of historical linguistics is deeply flawed. Most linguists today believe that there is no good evidence that the Indo-European family of languages is related to any other language family, or even any other language. In like manner, the New World is deemed to contain hundreds of language families, among which there are no apparent links. Furthermore, it is claimed, there are no known connections between the languages of the Old World and those of the Americas. And finally, the strongest belief of all is that there is no trace of genetic affinity-nor could there be-among the world's language families. The author argues that all of these firmly entrenched-and vigorously defended-beliefs are false, that they are myths propagated by a small group of scholars who have failed to understand the true basis of genetic affinity. Twentieth-century Indo-Europeanists (though not their nineteenth-century forebears) have confused the issue of genetic affinity, which derives from classification, with such traditional concerns of historical linguistics as reconstruction and sound correspondences. Once it is recognized that taxonomy, or classification, must precede these traditional concerns, the apparent conflict between the traditional view and that of Joseph Greenberg and his followers is seen to be illusory. And finally, a comparison of all the world's languages in this new perspective leaves little doubt that all extant human languages share a common origin.


It is a puzzle why people often evaluate consequences of choices separately (narrow bracketing) rather than jointly (broad bracketing). We study the hypothesis that a present-biased individual, who faces two tasks, may bracket his goals narrowly for motivational reasons. Goals motivate because they serve as reference points that make substandard performance psychologically painful. A broad goal allows high performance in one task to compensate for low performance in the other. This partially insures against the risk of falling short of ones' goal(s), but creates incentives to shirk in one of the tasks. Narrow goals have a stronger motivational force and thus can be optimal. In particular, if one task outcome becomes known before working on the second task, narrow bracketing is always optimal.


This paper examines the significance of the schematic domain of BOUNDEDNESS in adjectives. It is proposed that boundedness in adjectives is a fundamental characteristic associated with gradability. Cross-categorial correspondences are made to nouns and verbs, where boundedness is a feature of countability and aktionsart respectively. Two basic types of gradable adjectives are distinguished: those which are associated with a boundary and those which are not. It is also shown that it is possible to change the configuration of adjectives in terms of boundedness through contextual modulation. Finally, it is demonstrated that the configuration of adjectives in terms of boundaries may dominate their interpretation at the expense of the content proper, and the adjectives become more like function words than content words.


When attempting to globally divide ideas into orthodox and subversive categories, it is not always clear what precisely is subversive to the dominant ideology and vice versa. Going against recent trends in English Renaissance studies, Deborah Shuger examines orthodox, rather than subversive, methods of thought in the English Renaissance. Instead of finding a monolithic, unified body of thought, she reveals a remarkably non-uniform 'orthodox' ideology containing a wide range of views. Shuger's approach also re-examines and re-legitimizes the investigation of the connections between religion and literature. First published in 1990, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance presaged an expanding and progressively more popular mode of inquiry in English Renaissance scholarship.


The increasing importance of social media to political communication means the study of government-sponsored social media activity deserves further exploration. In particular, text-as-data techniques like topic models and emotional lexicons provide potential for new types of content analysis of large collections of government-backed social media discourse. Applying text-as-data methods to a corpus of Russian-sponsored Twitter data generated before, during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election shows tweets containing a diverse set of policy-related topics as well as levels of angry and fearful emotional language that peaks in close association to the election. Text-as-data techniques show Russian sponsored tweets mentioned candidate Clinton overwhelmingly negatively and referenced candidate Trump in a positive but less consistent manner. The tweets contained large minorities of apolitical topics, and also saw higher levels of conservative hashtags than progressive ones. Topics within the tweet data show a contradictory set of topics on all "sides" of the political spectrum alongside increases in fearful and angry language in temporal association with the U.S. election. The findings of this inquiry provide evidence that the tweets were sent to heighten existing tensions through topically heterogeneous propaganda. They also caution against an overly black and white interpretation of Russian disinformation efforts online.


Virtual reality (VR) enables the study of visually-guided behavior in situations that are otherwise not amenable to laboratory research. An example is a fire evacuation scenario, in which building occupants have to find their way to safety through smoke and flames, identify safe egress routes, and avoid threats. First, however, it must be determined whether evacuation behavior in VR is comparable to that in a real environment. We are thus initially studying participant responses to a fire alarm in matched virtual and real environments. The present experiment investigates how the decision to evacuate is influenced by visual cues about a neighbor's behavior. In the Control group, a lone participant is exposed to a fire alarm while performing a bogus task. In the Passive group, a participant performs the same task with a confederate who ignores the fire alarm. In the Active group, the confederate immediately leaves the room when the fire alarm sounds. The gender of the participant is crossed with the gender of the confederate. 75 participants experience the scenario in a real environment (25 per group), and 75 others in a matched virtual environment presented in a wireless head mounted display (HMD), with avatars of the confederates. In the real environment, two-thirds of participants in the Control group evacuated the room. In the Active group, nearly all did so, whereas in the Passive group all but one did. More female than male participants evacuated in the Control group, but there were no other gender effects. Data collection in the virtual environment is in progress, and will be completed by spring. The findings thus far demonstrate a very strong influence of neighbor behavior on a participant's evacuation decision. The results will provide answers to the much-debated question of whether evacuation behavior is similar in virtual and real environments. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


Distributed photovoltaics (PV) have played a critical role in the deployment of solar energy, currently making up roughly half of the global PV installed capacity. However, there remains significant unused economically beneficial potential. Estimates of the total technical potential for rooftop PV systems in the United States calculate a generation comparable to approximately 40% of the 2016 total national electric-sector sales. To best take advantage of the rooftop PV potential, effective analytic tools that support deployment strategies and aggressive local, state, and national policies to reduce the soft cost of solar energy are vital. A key step is the low-cost automation of data analysis and business case presentation for structure-integrated solar energy. In this paper, the scalability and resolution of various methods to assess the urban rooftop PV potential are compared, concluding with suggestions for future work in bridging methodologies to better assist policy makers.


How animals interact and develop social relationships regarding, individual attributes, sociodemographic and ecological pressures is of great interest. New methodologies, in particular Social Network Analysis, allow us to elucidate these types of questions. However, the different methodologies developed to that end and the speed at which they emerge make their use difficult. Moreover, the lack of communication between the different software developed to provide an answer to the same/different research questions is a source of confusion. The R package Animal Network Toolkit (ANT) was developed with the aim of implementing in one package the many different social network analysis techniques currently used in the study of animal social networks. Hence, ANT is a toolkit for animal research allowing among other things to: 1) measure global, dyadic and nodal networks metrics; 2) perform data randomization: pre-network and network (node and link) permutations; 3) perform statistical permutation tests. The package is partially coded in C++ for an optimal coding speed, and it gives researchers a workflow from raw data to the achievement of statistical analyses, allowing for a multilevel approach: from individual position and role within the network, to the identification of interaction patterns, and the analysis of the overall network properties.


Emplaced health promotion interventions, delivered by community health workers are increasingly being used internationally. However, the application of epidemiological risk knowledge to individuals within such communities is not straightforward and creates tensions for community health workers who are part of the communities that they are serving. Situated qualitative interview data were co-produced with community health workers employed in a superdiverse, deprived, post-industrial region of the United Kingdom, using photo-voice methods, to develop an account of how they made sense of the challenges of their work. The analysis draws on and develops theories of risk work and resilience work, which draw on practice theory. The key findings were that, first, being a critical insider enabled community health workers to make sense of the diverse constraints on health and lifestyles within their community. Second, they understood their own public health role as limited by operating within this context, so they articulated their occupational identity as focused on supporting clients to make small but sustainable changes to their own and their families' lifestyles. Third, the uncertainties of translating population based risk information to individual clients were (at least partially) resolved at an embodied level, with the community health workers identifying as accessible and trusted role models for the value of changed lifestyles. The article is important for policy and practice as it provides a critique of a rapidly evolving new mode of delivery of public health services, and insights on the development of this new public health workforce.


Soon after coming to power in May 1997, the new government of Congo initiated a national reconstruction process, based on the principles of decentralization, and participation, to overcome the centralist, and authoritarian legacies of the past. The Government also prepared, and adopted a decree-law in 1998, with a view to institutionalizing these two principles during a transition period of two years. Despite the resurgence of war in August 1998, the Government's decentralization policy remains, by and large appropriate. After presenting the legacies of Mobutu's rule that propel the current need for decentralization, and participation, the paper discusses what these ideas mean to people at the grassroots level. Harnessing some of the many ideas expressed in consultations, and conferences sponsored by the Government, the paper discusses the substance of the Government's decentralization policy, and the extent to which it was applied. The paper goes on to explain the growing role of traditional, and religious actors within Congolese society, and discusses their relationship to the new Government. Finally, the paper suggests building on the policy already initiated by the Government, to institutionalize participation, and decentralization, and use them to overcome the divisions left by decades of conflict.


In 1996, three adenovirus type 7 (Ad7) strains were isolated from children with fever and upper respiratory diseases in Japan. Restriction endonucleases (REs) analysis and PCR amplification of the E3 7·7 kDa ORF revealed that these strains were genotype Ad7h and closely related to an Argentine Ad7h strain, which has been reported to be highly virulent and so far predominant only in South America. These strains showed weak cross-neutralizing activity and specific haemagglutination-inhibition activity to Ad3 antiserum. The present findings suggest that Ad7h in South America has spread to other parts of the world. Since the seroprevalence to Ad7 in the current Japanese population is very low due to the absence of Ad7 circulation in Japan for decades, Ad7 outbreak as a typical case of re-emerging infectious diseases is a cause for serious concern.


The energy consumption in the world is currently higher than ever before and it keeps
rising. There is a fast rising demand for renewable energy sources such as solar power,
and concentrated solar power systems can be a solution to this. However, in order to have
robust systems that can compete with solar photovoltaic technologies, the life span and
operational load effects on the structure need to be ensured. This can be done by using a
validated finite element model. This thesis describes the experimental modal analysis and
finite element analysis of a Dish-Stirling system developed by Cleanergy. The purpose of
the thesis is to perform experiments on the structure to compare simulated results with
actual tests, in order to validate that model in terms of dynamic response.
Testing on the structure was done in two different set-ups, one used for calibration and
the other for validation. The structure was excited using a snap-back method, hanging a
weight from the structure by a fishing line and burning the line to excite the structure. The
structure was allowed to oscillate freely and eigenmodes were excited as the vibrations caused
by the excitation were damped out. Data from experiments was processed and system
identification of the response was done in the form of state space models. Eigenfrequencies
and eigenmodes of the state space models were compared to eigenfrequencies and eigenmodes
from the finite element model, which were found by performing modal analysis. Calibration
of different parameters was done, changing one parameter at a time, and the calibrated
data compared to the finite element results. The calibrated parameter which gave the
best correlation between experiments and finite element model was used as input to the
validation.
Due to the complexity of the model, only the first modes were used for the comparison, as
the other modes were too complex, and had frequencies too close to each other to distinguish
between them. Comparing the finite element model with the experiments showed that
the experiments did manage to capture the eigenfrequencies of interest, however, when
comparing the eigenvectors, there were differences in the correlation. Some modes were
captured better than others. Calibration of the model led to a marginally better correlation.
The validation confirmed the calibration, to some extent.
In conclusion, the finite element model corresponds well to the experiments, discrepancies
in the results could be due to faults in experiment methodology, such as measurements were
made too scarcely in the structure. It could also be due to a poorly calibrated finite element
model. In order to further validate the finite element model more extensive experiments
would need to be performed, as well as a more complex calibration procedure.


Lichens collected from five different sites (11 localities) from Garhwal Himalayas, Uttaranchal, India, were analysed for individual Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). There was high spatial variability in the total PAH (ΣPAH) concentrations that ranged from 0.683 ppm to 33.72 ppm with an average concentration of 15.04 ± 12.853 (SD). To elucidate sources, six molecular indices (Fluo/Pyr, Phen/Anthr, Naph/Phen, Anthr/(Anthr+Phen), Fluo/(Fluo+Pyr), BaP/BghiP ratios) were used to determine the pyrogenic and petrogenic sources. Garhwal region receives input primarily from vehicular activity and wood combustion; therefore, it can be inferred that the main source of PAH could be pyrolytic.


This short essay comments on the United States Supreme Court's recent decision in Bowles v. Russell, 127 S. Ct. 2360 (2007), and on Professor Scott Dodson's critique of Bowles at 102 Nw. U. L. Rev. Colloquy 42 (2007).The majority in Bowles held that the federal statutory time limit for the filing of appeals is jurisdictional, and must therefore be enforced literally and mercilessly. The dissent argued that the time limit is not jurisdictional, and need not be enforced literally and mercilessly. My essay expresses no strong view on whether this particular time limit is actually jurisdictional. It does, however, argue that the underlying assumption - that if a time limit is jurisdictional, it is necessarily draconian - is simply mistaken. It treats as mandatory not only the jurisdictional rule itself, but also one particular, literal and merciless, interpretation of that rule. This move is not only entirely unnecessary, it is belied by the treatment of jurisdictional questions in other, less arithmetical, contexts.More broadly, I argue in this essay, as I did in more detail in an earlier, exhaustive, article,Jurisdictionality, Time, and the Legal Imagination, 23 Hofstra Law Review 1 (1994), that the doctrine of jurisdictional time limits represents a certain neurotic turn in the law. More particularly, in Bowles, both the majority and the dissent fail to embrace the potential of the legal imagination. The majority seems to believe that the only way to respect the importance of jurisdictionality is to construe jurisdictional rules literally. The dissent, meanwhile, ends up chopping away at the rich tradition of the notion of jurisdiction in American law, making no real effort to investigate the roots of the legal ideas it is trying to explicate. Both these errors reflect more general, deeply consequential, and sad trends in American legal reasoning and legal culture.


Alexei Lalo's Thomas Pynchon and His America is the first book-length study of Pynchon in post-Soviet American Studies. The fact that it is the first one determines much of the character of the research. The volume of Pynchon criticism in Western academia is huge, while in the former Soviet Union Pynchon's work has not been widely available for long (the first Russian translations of his early novels appeared in 2000)' nor has it been studied in depth. Thus, any Russian-language scholar of Pynchon undertaking solid research in the field inevitably falls between these two extremes of accessibility and depth, and risks losing his or her independent position while representing other critics' interpretations. Lalo's study exemplifies this problem, for it serves more as a useful guide to secondary sources on Pynchon than as an intriguing investigation of truly new aspects of his work.


The Haber-Bosch synthesis produces ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gases in a globally important energy-intensive process that uses coal or natural gas as a fuel and as a hydrogen source. Direct electrochemical ammonia synthesis from nitrogen and water using renewable energy sources presents an alternative to the Haber-Bosch process that would be sustainable and environmentally benign. Additionally, the different production structure of direct electrochemical nitrogen reduction technology suggests a supply chain alternative to the ammonia industry, and a method for load-leveling of the electrical grid. This alternative route to ammonia from dinitrogen would not require the same large capital investments as does the Haber-Bosch process, nor would it require access to a fossil fuel supply. We show that under certain scenarios, at feasibly achievable levels of energy efficiency with a future electrocatalyst, direct nitrogen reduction would be economically competitive or advantageous compared with Haber-Bosch-based ammonia production.


Point your SmartPhone at the code above. If you have a QR code reader the video abstract will appear. Or use: https://youtu.be/vIFeXr2jKo4 Purpose: Currently, there is a number of successfully implemented local hemostatic agents for external bleedings in forms of wound dressings and other topical materials. However, little has been done in the field of intravenous hemostatic agents. Here, we propose a new procedure to fabricate biocompatible protein nanocontainers (NCs) for intravenous injection allowing magneto-controllable delivery and short-term release of the hemostatic agent εaminocaproic acid (EACA). Methods: The nanocontainers were synthesized by the desolvation method from bovine serum albumin (BSA) using methanol without any further crosslinking. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) was used both as a stabilization agent and for size control. Characterization of nanocontainers was performed by the transmission and scanning electron microscopy, dynamic light scattering, X-ray diffraction, and FTIR spectroscopy. Cytotoxicity was estimated using MTT assay. The dopant release from nanocontainers was measured spectrophotometrically using rhodamine B as a model molecule. The specific hemostatic activity was assessed by analyzing clot lysis and formation curve (CloFAL). Moreover, the ability for magneto targeting was estimated using the original flow setup made of a syringe pump and silicon contours. Results: Fabricated nanocontainers had an average size of 186±24 nm and were constructed from building blocks–nanoparticles with average size ranged from 10 to 20 nm. PEG shell was also observed around nanocontainers with thickness 5–10 nm. NCs were proved to be completely non-cytotoxic even at concentrations up to 8 mg BSA/mL. Uptake capacity was near 36% while release within the first day was 17%. The analysis of the CloFAL curve showed the ability of NCs to inhibit the clot lysis successfully, and the ability of magneto targeting was confirmed under flow conditions. Conclusion: The ability of synthesized NCs to deliver and release the therapeutic drug, as well as to accumulate at the desired site under the action of the magnetic field was proved experimentally.


Abstract Weeds compete with crops for light, soil water, and nutrients. Nitrogen (N) is the primary limiting soil nutrient. Forecasting the effects of N on growth, development, and interplant competition requires accurate prediction of N uptake and distribution within plants. Field studies were conducted in 1999 and 2000 to determine the effects of variable N addition on monoculture corn and velvetleaf N uptake, the relationship between plant N concentration ([N]) and total biomass, the fraction of N partitioned to leaves, and predicted N uptake and leaf N content. Cumulative N uptake of both species was generally greater in 2000 than in 1999 and tended to increase with increasing N addition. Corn and velvetleaf [N] declined with increasing biomass in both years in a predictable manner. The fraction of N partitioned to corn and velvetleaf leaves varied with thermal time from emergence but was not influenced by year, N addition, or weed density. With the use of the [N]–biomass relationship to forecast N demand, cumulative corn N uptake was accurately predicted for three of four treatments in 1999 but was underpredicted in 2000. Velvetleaf N uptake was accurately predicted in all treatments in both years. Leaf N content (NL, g N m−2 leaf) was predicted by the fraction of N partitioned to leaves, predicted N uptake, and observed leaf area index for each species. Average deviations between predicted and observed corn NL were < 88 and 12% of the observed values in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Velvetleaf NL was less well predicted, with average deviations ranging from 39 to 248% of the observed values. Results of this research indicate that N uptake in corn and velvetleaf was driven primarily by biomass accumulation. Overall, the approaches outlined in this paper provide reasonable predictions of corn and velvetleaf N uptake and distribution in aboveground tissues. Nomenclature: Velvetleaf, Abutilon theophrasti Medic. ABUTH corn, Zea mays L. 'Pioneer 33A14'.


The planted bisection model is a random graph model in which the nodes are divided into two equal-sized communities and then edges are added randomly in a way that depends on the community membership. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the asymptotic recoverability of the planted bisection in this model. When the bisection is asymptotically recoverable, we give an efficient algorithm that successfully recovers it. We also show that the planted bisection is recoverable asymptotically if and only if with high probability every node belongs to the same community as the majority of its neighbors. Our algorithm for finding the planted bisection runs in time almost linear in the number of edges. It has three stages: spectral clustering to compute an initial guess, a "replica" stage to get almost every vertex correct, and then some simple local moves to finish the job. An independent work by Abbe, Bandeira, and Hall establishes similar (slightly weaker) results but only in the sparse case where pn, qn = Θ(log n /n).


Mobile learning (m-learning) has moved beyond the realms of fantasy to become a viable platform for contextual learning that bridges formal and informal learning environments. This paper overviews how mobile Web 2.0 has been instrumental in facilitating pedagogical change and informing an institution's new e-learning strategy that focuses upon social constructivist pedagogies. The project developedan intentional community of practice model for supporting new technology integration, pedagogical development, and institutional change. Beginning with a small selection of early adopter trials, the results of the research are now informinga wider integration of wireless mobile computing.


In this study parental experiences of care of children with high and intermediate imperforate anus were evaluated. A group of 45 parents of children with high and intermediate imperforate anus and two control groups participated. Data collection with individual questionnaires concerning the child's hospital care, information to the parent and the child, and involvement in the care of the child were performed. Parents of children with imperforate anus reported being less satisfied with the care of their child, and they were less content with information about their child's treatment compared with the control groups. The parents had been extremely involved in the follow-up treatment. Constipation and fecal incontinence are common and involve suffering for the children and their parents. Parents have to be motivated and supportive and have a great deal of patience to be able to put up with caring for these children, and it seems as if health care professionals have underestimated their problems.


With this paper we provide a comparative study of local climate mitigation from both China and Japan, in the context of pessimistic international regimes to achieve significant results on climate mitigation. We compare the political systems, institutional arrangements, and local actors in local climate mitigation through a policy cycle analysis. We find that climate initiatives in the two countries have inherited the political characteristics of traditional environmental management within a centralized administrative system; moreover, these initiatives also reflect the emergence of local governance. Owing to similar political cultures but differing roles of local governments, both countries are making progress with respect to the agenda-setting and policy formation stages, but are facing greater obstacles regarding implementation and evaluation. The monocentric local governance in China results in an easy but irrational planning process, while the powerless local agents in Japan cannot hardly promote bolder campaigns for energy industries. Current administrative systems created by decades of local environmental problem solving are no longer adaptive enough to facilitate the bottom-up emergence of local mitigating activities. Local governments and administration systems should be adaptive regarding capacity building and institutional innovation to improve local governance on climate mitigation.


Operator-theoretic analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems has attracted much attention in a variety of engineering and scientific fields, endowed with practical estimation methods using data such as dynamic mode decomposition. In this paper, we address a lifted representation of nonlinear dynamical systems with random noise based on transfer operators, and develop a novel Krylov subspace method for estimating the operators using finite data, with consideration of the unboundedness of operators. For this purpose, we first consider Perron-Frobenius operators with kernel-mean embeddings for such systems. We then extend the Arnoldi method, which is the most classical type of Kryov subspace method, so that it can be applied to the current case. Meanwhile, the Arnoldi method requires the assumption that the operator is bounded, which is not necessarily satisfied for transfer operators on nonlinear systems. We accordingly develop the shift-invert Arnoldi method for Perron-Frobenius operators to avoid this problem. Also, we describe an approach of evaluating predictive accuracy by estimated operators on the basis of the maximum mean discrepancy, which is applicable, for example, to anomaly detection in complex systems. The empirical performance of our methods is investigated using synthetic and real-world healthcare data.


BACKGROUND: Non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs) are commonly used for stroke prophylaxis in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF), but their efficacy and safety in patients with underlying valvular heart disease (VHD) is unknown. METHODS: A search of MEDLINE, CENTRAL, Embase, clinicaltrials.gov was performed with the terms direct oral antiocoagulants, new oral anticoagulants, DOAC, NOAC, rivaroxaban, apixaban, dabigatran, valvular heart disease, aortic stenosis, aortic regurgitation, mitral regurgitation, tricuspid stenosis, tricuspid regurgitation, pulmonary stenosis and pulmonary regurgitation. Only clinical studies with clinical endpoints that compared NOACs with warfarin in patients with AF and identified VHD were included. RESULTS: Four clinical studies were retrieved based on our search criteria. Subgroup analysis of the landmark trials comparing a NOAC to warfarin in AF patients with underlying VHD demonstrated that NOACs had similar or superior efficacy in stroke prevention compared to warfarin. The risk of bleeding with NOACs compared to warfarin in these patients yielded inconsistent results. CONCLUSION: Based on the available evidence, NOACs provide similar or superior stroke reduction compared to warfarin in patients with AF and VHD, especially in aortic valve disease and mitral regurgitation. The rate of major bleeding between NOACs and warfarin in this patient population is unclear.


OBJECTIVE
To validate patient and nurse short forms for discharge readiness assessment and their associations with 30-day readmissions and emergency department (ED) visits.

DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING
A total of 254 adult medical-surgical patients and their discharging nurses from an Eastern US tertiary hospital between May and November, 2011.

STUDY DESIGN
Prospective longitudinal design, multinomial logistic regression analysis.

DATA COLLECTION/EXTRACTION METHODS
Nurses and patients independently completed an eight-item Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale on the day of discharge. Patient characteristics, readmissions, and ED visits were electronically abstracted.

PRINCIPAL FINDINGS
Nurse assessment of low discharge readiness was associated with a six- to nine-fold increase in readmission risk. Patient self-assessment was not associated with readmission; neither was associated with ED visits.

CONCLUSIONS
Nurse discharge readiness assessment should be added to existing strategies for identifying readmission risk.


T‐Learning makes it possible to deliver educational content to home TVs. TV operators, which manage huge populations of devices such as set‐top‐boxes (STBs) in user homes, are considering t‐Learning as an interesting option for expanding the service they offer. However, typical STB hardware configurations are limited in terms of satisfying operator needs and do not easily support all types of applications or content. In this work, we consider graphic < e‐Adventure > educational games, which are not directly executable on typical STBs. To cover this gap and guarantee an enjoyable user experience, we present an architecture based on a combination of streaming and remote desktop protocols that relies on virtualized servers deployed in a cloud computing infrastructure. It features an original image‐encoding signalling mechanism that identifies multimedia content in educational games and permits seamless protocol switching at the client side. This architecture is a complete technological solution to virtualize heavy educational games and execute them smoothly on STB light clients over Internet Protocol Television networks. We present performance results that show that our proposal is an efficient scalable solution to deliver t‐Learning to home environments. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Continental‐scale assessments of 21st century global impacts of climate change on biodiversity have forecasted range contractions for many species. These coarse resolution studies are, however, of limited relevance for projecting risks to biodiversity in mountain systems, where pronounced microclimatic variation could allow species to persist locally, and are ill‐suited for assessment of species‐specific threat in particular regions. Here, we assess the impacts of climate change on 2632 plant species across all major European mountain ranges, using high‐resolution (ca. 100 m) species samples and data expressing four future climate scenarios. Projected habitat loss is greater for species distributed at higher elevations; depending on the climate scenario, we find 36–55% of alpine species, 31–51% of subalpine species and 19–46% of montane species lose more than 80% of their suitable habitat by 2070–2100. While our high‐resolution analyses consistently indicate marked levels of threat to cold‐adapted mountain florae across Europe, they also reveal unequal distribution of this threat across the various mountain ranges. Impacts on florae from regions projected to undergo increased warming accompanied by decreased precipitation, such as the Pyrenees and the Eastern Austrian Alps, will likely be greater than on florae in regions where the increase in temperature is less pronounced and rainfall increases concomitantly, such as in the Norwegian Scandes and the Scottish Highlands. This suggests that change in precipitation, not only warming, plays an important role in determining the potential impacts of climate change on vegetation.


I INTRODUCTION Cross-border financial flows can have dramatic effects on the recipients of the money--for good or for ill. This is particularly true in countries whose economies and capital markets are underdeveloped. A relatively small inflow of foreign capital into such a country can inflate valuations on a local stock exchange or allow the government to distribute pre-election largesse in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, spending on public works projects, and so forth. A sudden outflow of that capital, however, can have disagreeable consequences of an equal and opposite magnitude. Ethical questions about who should receive cross-border financing, in what amounts, for what purposes, and on what conditions have long engaged the attention of international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the regional development banks. There may even still be a few commercial lenders holding to the view that a private creditor should concern itself solely with the profitability of a transaction and the likelihood that the debt will be repaid, to the exclusion of all other ancillary issues, but these probably constitute a dwindling minority. Like it or not, loans that are susceptible to challenge on grounds of illegitimacy or recklessness run a higher risk of non-payment. So, whether viewed under the light of ethics--morality or profit-loss, the issues cannot be avoided. What, if anything, does the law add to this discussion of ethics and international finance? The law and the machinery of justice are certainly ubiquitous elements in the lending process. After all, cross-border credits are invariably evidenced by contracts of one kind or another that contemplate enforcement in a national court. Specifically, are the ethical considerations raised by cross-border loans exclusively matters to be taken into account before the credits are extended, or are they also relevant to the interpretation and enforcement of the legal agreements that eventually evidence the credits? II THE RULES Parties entering into a commercial contract want predictability in its interpretation and enforcement. The outcome produced by the application of the governing law in any particular dispute may be far less important to the parties than the fact that the outcome can be anticipated in advance of signing the contract. Why? Because if the predictable outcome is commercially unacceptable to one or both of the parties, they are free--before they have signed the agreement--to adjust its terms to avoid that result, to switch the chosen governing law if a switch solves the problem, or, as a final resort, to scrap the deal altogether. But what commercial parties find intolerable is the prospect of locking themselves into a contractual arrangement that may subsequently be interpreted or enforced in a manner inconsistent with their presigning intentions. The ability of a legal regime to deliver a predictable outcome is one of the major reasons why contractual counterparties will choose that regime as the governing law of their contract. This is particularly true in the context of financial transactions. Most lending arrangements involve starkly asymmetrical performance by the parties: the lender's obligations are heavily front-loaded (they lend the money), while most of the borrower's obligations are performed thereafter (they must pay the money back over time). In asymmetrical contracts of this type, the party that must perform first--here, the lender--has an especially keen interest in knowing that it can enforce the subsequent performance of its counterparty or obtain an award of fully compensatory damages if that performance is not forthcoming. Common-law legal systems, with the importance they attach to judicial precedents, have a natural advantage in this regard. The accumulated weight of those precedents both presage and constrain how the judiciary will interpret the provisions of commercial agreements. …


The three essays in this volume present an introduction and history of the emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War. The first essay traces the destruction of slavery by discussing the shift from a war for the Union to a war against slavery. The slaves are shown to have shaped the destiny of the nation through their determination to place their liberty on the wartime agenda. The second essay examines the evolution of freedom in occupied areas of the lower and upper South. The struggle of those freed to obtain economic independence in difficult wartime circumstances indicates conflicting conceptions of freedom among former slaves and slaveholders, Northern soldiers and civilians. The third essay demonstrates how the enlistment and military service of nearly 200,000 slaves hastened the transformation of the war into a struggle for universal liberty, and how this experience shaped the lives of these former slaves long after the war had ended.


The current implementation of 5G technology has pushed the academic community to think about what is next. To properly answer this question, we have to figure out which will be the needs in the future. This paper deals with the answers to those questions for the health vertical of 6G. The grown and the aging of population worldwide make the current healthcare systems unsustainable in the future. Wireless health has to be implemented to let all citizens be followed and managed in the health process of their life by pursuing an economically viable way for the community. 6G is envisioned to be a technology which will not only make the wireless healthcare true, but it also will allow the Internet of Bio-Nano-Things, letting the human body be part of the "Net". Very low complex wearable/implantable devices will be part of our everyday life, which can recover information about our health and lifestyle from every object we interact with, from a bottle of water to a smart drug.


This conference addresses "obstacles to development and use of pharmacotherapies in the treatment of addiction." I will focus on the challenges of increasing use of medical agents if they are developed. Expanding the potential market for these drugs will increase the likelihood that they will be developed in the first place. My point of departure is that the best way of responding to this challenge is to put the nation's drug policy on the right track. I say this because a sensible drug policy will encourage, and indeed subsidize, the use of evidenced-based, cost-effective addiction treatments. The basic thrust of my argument is that we need a stable, essentially pragmatic, drug policy that avoids the ideologically driven positions that have for so long dominated policy discourse and, because they are so contentious, have tended to paralyze policy-making. Just to give you a point of reference, I believe that the only time such a policy was actually in place was about 30 years ago during the Nixon and Ford administrations and the early years of the Carter administration. A little detour here may be in order. The statement I just made is admittedly somewhat self-serving. I was Associate Director of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Use from 1971-73 and was a principal architect of the Commission's two reports, the first of which recommended decriminalization of marijuana use in 1972. The final report, issued the following year, recommended a framework for drug policy that remains pertinent today. During the following several years, I served as an adviser to the Directors of what was then called the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP) in the White House (1973-77), was appointed Secretary of the first National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse (1975-1980), contributed to the first several Federal Strategies on Drug Abuse and helped write an important White Paper on Drug Abuse for the Ford Administration (1976). During this short period, I think our nation's drug policy was moving in the right direction. As I'll discuss, however, the pendulum suddenly swung in the other direction and remained stuck there for more than twenty years. I don't have time to spin out my policy positions fully here, but I will give a brief historical account of drug policy and then draw out three implications of my views that bear most heavily on the subject of this conference.


This thesis addresses the question of how patterning may arise through cell-to-cell communication.
It combines quantitative data analysis with computational techniques to understand biological
patterning processes. The fi�rst section describes an investigation into the robustness of an evolved
arti�ficial patterning system. Cellular automata rules were implemented sequentially according to
the instructions in a simple `genome'. In this way, a set of target patterns could be evolved using
a genetic algorithm. The patterning systems were tested for robustness by perturbing cell states
during their development. This exposed how certain types of patterning rule had very di�fferent
levels of robustness to perturbations. Rules that generated patterns with complex divergent patterns
were more likely to amplify the e�ffect of a perturbation. When smaller genomes, comprising less
individual rules, were evolved to match certain target patterns, these were shown to be more likely
to select complex patterning rules. As a result, the developmental systems based on smaller genomes
were less robust than those with larger genome sizes.
Section two provides an analysis of the patterning of microchaetes in the epithelial layer of the
notum of Drosophila flies. It is shown that the pattern spacing is not sufficiently described by a
model of lateral inhibition through Delta-Notch signalling between adjacent cells. A computational
model is used to demonstrate the viability of long range signalling through a dynamic network of
�filopodia, observed in the basal layer of the epithelium. In-vivo experiments con�rm that when fi�lopodia lengths are effected by mutations the pattern spacing reduces in accordance with the model.
In the fi�nal section the behaviour of simple asynchronous cellular automata are analysed. It
is shown how these diff�er to the synchronous cellular automata used in the fi�rst section. A set of
rules are identifi�ed whose emergent behaviour is similar to the lateral inhibition patterning process
established by the Delta-Notch signalling system. Among these rules a particular subset are found
to produce patterns that adjust their spacing, over the course of their development, towards a more
ordered and densely packed state. A re-examination of the Delta-Notch signalling model reveals
that this type of packing optimisation could take place with either dynamic �filopodial signalling,
or as an alternative, transient Delta signalling at each cell. Under certain parameter regimes the
patterns become more densely packed over time, whilst maintaining a minimum zone of inhibition
around each Delta expressing cell. The asynchronous CA are also used to demonstrate how stripes
can be formed by cell-to-cell signalling and optimised, under certain conditions, so that they align
in a single direction. This is presented as a possible novel alternative to the reaction-di�ffusion
mechanism that is commonly used to model the patterning of spots and stripes.


He used to force me to have sex with him. He would beat me and slap me when I refused. I never used a condom with him ... When I got pregnant I went for a medical check-up. When I gave birth, and the child had passed away, they told me I was HIV-positive. I cried. The doctor told me, "Wipe your tears, the whole world is sick." -- Harriet Ahwoli, Uganda, January 2003 ([dagger]) I. INTRODUCTION In my presentation I consider the role and limits of international law in protecting vulnerable groups, specifically women, and critique the manner in which the law has responded by silencing and masculinizing women's realities. After making some remarks on the limits of the international law framework, I proceed to consider the justiciability of socioeconomic rights, particularly the right to health care within the context of HIV/AIDS. As a South African constitutional court litigator, I will specifically be drawing on South African jurisprudence. II. THE ROLE AND LIMITATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW As a starting point, it is important that we note that at times the law's ignorance of its actual impact is one of the most severe threats to basic civil liberties. It is submitted that the human rights framework and mainstream legal theory are essentially impoverished and masculinist, for its failure to address the real experiences of women in terms of their right to dignity, privacy, equality, life, liberty, and reproductive health care. But what are the real experiences of women that are being silenced by the international legal framework? Some examples illustrate my argument here. The issue of condom use as a prevention strategy illustrates the futility of assuming equality of power between men and women for AIDS prevention strategy. Studies have shown that in many cultures suggesting condom use is even more threatening than raising birth control issues, and may expose women to violence. The bottom line is this: educating populations on condom use is of no significance if women, knowing the benefit of condom usage, are unable to negotiate condom use or demand condom use in their relationships. This means that any efforts to address HIV prevention should not be seen as separate from or running in parallel with efforts to prevent intimate partner violence but that the two should be addressed together. Intervention efforts working toward transformation of broader social structures, which hinder women's empowerment, are what is required. It is within this context that the issue of female-controlled methods of practicing safe sex need to be considered. The same applies in terms of voluntary testing and the duty to disclose to third parties at risk of infection. Research shows that women may experience a range of abuses after disclosing a positive status, ranging from emotional abuse to abandonment and even being killed. Who takes responsibility when a woman is murdered, evicted, or abandoned after a partner, husband, or the community is notified? By the same token one cannot condone a situation whereby women do not take responsibility for their actions and for possible further transmission of the disease. One needs to strike a delicate balance, with any state intervention recognizing the autonomy, dignity, and privacy of the women concerned. Accordingly, it is submitted that partner notification should prohibit disclosure to partners of HIV-infected women until such time as the patient has first been assessed for the risk of domestic violence. These aspects should actively be canvassed alongside options around safe houses and shelters for women fearing violence/abandonment. The above illustrates how an approach failing to acknowledge women's voices and their concerns could have unintended consequences. We also need to consider what the state duties are regarding women who are at risk of violence or harm, and the positive duties to act to serve women's socioeconomic needs in the areas of health care, welfare and housing. …


A large portion, if not the majority, of conditions encountered in geotechnical engineering practice involves unsaturated soil. Practical problems include precipitation-induced slope stability failures, expansive or collapsible soils, contaminant transport in the vadose zone, bearing capacity and settlement of shallow foundations, seepage through landfill covers and liners, excavation, and borehole stability. Despite the importance of unsaturated soils in geotechnical engineering practice, implementation of the mechanics of unsaturated soil remains limited. Although considerable research has been developed in recent years, continuing advances are crucial to fully incorporate the mechanics of unsaturated soil into engineering practice. Modeling or measurements of the pore water fabric in unsaturated granular media would bridge the gap in our knowledge and provide answers to critical unresolved issues in our fundamental understanding of unsaturated soil behavior. This study introduces (i) new frameworks for estimating the soil-water characteristic curve (SWCC) and the hydraulic conductivity function (HCF) of granular porous media using relatively simple experimental measurements and theoretical pore-scale geometric considerations, (ii) a new approach for using X-Ray tomography as a nondestructive and noninvasive tool in measuring the SWCC and volume properties, and (iii) new correlation methods for determining the strength parameters of unsaturated granular porous media from conventional fall cone and SWCC measurements.


The Prunus genus belongs to the Rosaceae family and includes stone fruit crops such as peach (P. persica), apricot (P. armeniaca), European plum (P. domestica), Japanese plum (P. salicina), sweet cherry (P. avium) and sour cherry (P. cerasus), as well as almond (P. dulcis), a species cultivated for its seeds. This work aims to develop simple-sequence repeat (SSR) or microsatellite markers in almond and Japanese plum, the only two diploid Prunus species lacking these markers when this thesis began, and to study their variability in a collection of cultivars of each species. In addition, we studied the transferability of the microsatellites obtained from Prunus in other cultivated rosaceous species, including six Prunus species, and three other genus: apple (Malus x domestica), pear (Pyrus comunis) and octoploid strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa).
To develop new microsatellite markers, we used two methods: one from enriched DNA genomic library (for sequences CT/AG), for which we obtained 31 SSRs in almond and 27 in Japanese plum, and another using the available sequences of ESTs (expressed sequence tags) of almond (22 SSRs) and peach (25 SSRs). All these microsatellites were polymorphic in a set of eight cultivars of their respective species.
We used the obtained markers in an extensive collection of almond varieties (30) to study their genetic variability using 47 microsatellites derived from this species (25 genomic and 22 derived from ESTs). A similar study was conducted in 38 varieties of Japanese plum with 27 genomic SSRs obtained in this species. These markers were highly variable in both species, with an average of 7.3 alleles per locus in almond and 7.2 in Japanese plum, allowing us to distinguish individually all the studied genotypes. Our data indicated that the SSRs of the same species are more variable than those developed in other related species. In addition, in almond we found that the microsatellites derived from ESTs, and particularly those located in coding regions, were less variable than those obtained from genomic sequence.
The grouping of the studied varieties in function of their genetic distance (dendrogram) or their population structure was quite similar both in almond and Japanese plum. The almond varieties were grouped by their geographical origin and their flowering time, whereas the Japanese plum varieties, of recent origin and largely developed in the United States, were clustered according to the breeding programs of the different States they were obtained.
A total of 145 Prunus SSRs [25 genomic from almond, peach and Japanese plum, 25 ESTs derived from peach, 22 ESTs derived from almond and 23 derived from apricot (10 genomic and 13 from ESTs)] were chosen to study transferability, all polymorphic and identifying a single locus in the origin species. These microsatellites were studied in eight varieties of the following nine species: almond, peach, European plum, Japanese plum, apricot, sweet cherry, apple, pear and strawberry. Eighty-three percent (83%) of these markers amplified bands of the expected size in the other Prunus species and 63.9% were polymorphic, indicating the high transferability within this genus. This transferability decreased as the genetic distance between the species origin of the SSR and the studied species increased. Thus, only 16.3% of the tested SSRs were transferable to species of other rosaceous genera (apple, pear and strawberry). No significant differences were detected between microsatellites of different origins (genomic and ESTs) regarding their transferability, nor their capacity to detect variability.
From the studied SSRs, 31 amplified and were polymorphic in all tested Prunus species. Twelve, selected to cover the whole genome, were proposed as the universal set for the analysis of variability in Prunus.


OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the presence of imprinted facial lines in identical twin sisters, one of whom had received botulinum toxin type A (Botox) treatment in the forehead and glabellar region regularly for 13 years and one of whom had not. Crow's feet were also compared.

METHODS
One twin received Botox in the forehead and glabellar region (approximately 2 to 3 times each year over the past 13 years) and in the crow's feet (twice in past 2 years). Her twin received Botox only twice (in the forehead and glabellar region, 3 and 7 years ago).

RESULTS
Imprinted forehead and glabellar lines were not evident in the regularly treated twin but were evident in the minimally treated twin. Crow's feet were less noticeable when the regularly treated twin smiled (even at 7 months after treatment) than when the minimally treated twin smiled. Untreated facial areas (eg, nasolabial folds) showed comparable aging in both twins. Neither twin experienced adverse effects.

CONCLUSIONS
Long-term treatment with Botox can prevent the development of imprinted facial lines that are visible at rest. Botox treatment can also reduce crow's feet. Treatment is well tolerated, with no adverse events reported during 13 years of regular treatment in this study.


We investigated the protective effects of resveratrol on hematological and biochemical changes induced by fluoride in rats. A total of 28 rats were divided into 4 groups: control, resveratrol, fluoride, and fluoride/resveratrol (n = 7 each), for a total of 21 days of treatment. Blood samples were taken and hematological and biochemical parameters were measured. Compared to the control group, the fluoride-treated group showed significant differences in several hematological parameters, including decreases in WBC, RBC, and PLT counts and neutrophil ratio. The group that received resveratrol alone showed a decrease in WBC count compared to the control group. Furthermore, in comparison to the control group, the fluoride group showed significantly increased ALT enzyme activity and decreased inorganic phosphorus level. The hematological and biochemical parameters in the fluoride + resveratrol treated group were similar to control group. In the fluoride + resveratrol group, resveratrol restored the changes observed following fluoride treatment, including decreased counts of WBC, RBC, and PLT, decreased neutrophil ratio and inorganic phosphorus levels, and elevated ALT enzyme activity. The present study showed that fluoride caused adverse effects in rats and that resveratrol reduced hematological and biochemical alterations produced by fluoride exposure.


In this paper, we highlight the key reasons behind the poor power efficiency observed in multiple experiments in gain-guided index-antiguided (GG-IAG) fiber amplifiers and lasers. We show that by properly designing the fiber geometrical characteristics, it is possible to considerably improve the power efficiency of GG-IAG fiber amplifiers in end-pumping schemes.


The pathogenesis of Zika virus infection is not well known and the effects on the structure of the placental villi require to be
investigated. Is our proposal to describe the histopathological changes that occur in the placental villi provoked by Zika
virus. The pacient of 38 years old was infected during the third trimester of pregnancy a week before parturition manifesting
symptoms of infection by Zika. Light and scanning electron microscopy were used. Numerous stem villi are suffering
degenerative changes with collapsed vessels. A conglomerate of syncytial knots and degenerated peripheric surface can be
seen. Immature intermediate villi suffers fibrinoid deposition with macrophagues together in Hoffbauer channels. Necrosis
of the syncytium and stromal fibrosis were noted on the placental villi. Koylocytic cell,destroyed villi,damage in the wall of
vessels and mature intermediate villi with scarcity of terminal villi were found. Bad development of the ramifications of the
placental villi and regions of lysis in stromal region were located. Thrombus and edema could not be seen. The placental
villous tree has been found suffering severe degenerative changes and bad development indicating a destructive effect on the
structure of the placenta that could to explain the cytopathic effect provoked by zika virus.Zika virus Placental villi
Degenerative changes.


Abstract The reaction between clinopyroxene and Mg-carbonate is supposed to define the solidus of carbonated lherzolite at pressures exceeding 5 GPa. To investigate the effect of alkalis on this reaction, subsolidus and melting phase relations in the following systems have been examined at 6 GPa: CaMgSi2O6+2MgCO3 (Di+2Mgs); CaMgSi2O6+NaAlSi2O6+2MgCO3 (Di+Jd+2Mgs); CaMgSi2O6+Na2Mg(CO3)2 (Di+Na2Mg); and CaMgSi2O6+K2Mg(CO3)2 (Di+K2Mg). The Di+2Mgs system begins to melt at 1400 °C via the approximate reaction CaMgSi2O6 (clinopyroxene) + 2MgCO3 (magnesite) = CaMg(CO3)2 (liquid) + Mg2Si2O6 (orthopyroxene), which leads to an essentially carbonate liquid (L) with composition Ca0.56Mg0.44CO3 + 3.5 mol% SiO2. The initial melting of the Di+Jd+2Mgs system occurs at 1350 °C via the reaction 2CaMgSi2O6 (clinopyroxene) + 2NaAlSi2O6 (clinopyroxene) + 8MgCO3 (magnesite) = Mg3Al2Si3O12 (garnet) + 5MgSiO3 (clinopyroxene) + 2CaMg(CO3)2 (liquid) + Na2CO3 (liquid) + 3CO2 (liquid and/or fluid), which yields the carbonate liquid with approximate composition of 10Na2CO3 ·90Ca0.5Mg0.5CO3 + 2 mol% SiO2. The systems Di+Na2Mg and Di+K2Mg start to melt at 1100 and 1050 °C, respectively, via the reaction CaMgSi2O6 (clinopyroxene) + 2(Na or K)2Mg(CO3)2 (solid) = Mg2Si2O6 (orthopyroxene) + (Na or K)4CaMg(CO3)4 (liquid). The resulting melts have the alkali-rich carbonate compositions Na2Ca0.4Mg0.6(CO3)2 + 0.4 mol% SiO2 and 43 K2CO3 ·57Ca0.4Mg0.6CO3 + 0.6 mol% SiO2. These melts do not undergo significant changes as temperature rises to 1400 °C, retaining their calcium number and a high Na2O, K2O, and low SiO2. We suggest that the clinopyroxene–Mg-carbonate reaction controlling the solidus of carbonated lherzolite is very sensitive to the carbonate composition and shifts from 1400 to 1050 °C at 6 GPa, which yields K-rich carbonate melt if the subsolidus assemblage contains the K2Mg(CO3)2 compound. Such a decrease in solidus temperature has been previously observed in the K-rich carbonated lherzolite system. Although a presence of eitelite, Na2Mg(CO3)2, has a similar effect, this mineral cannot be considered as a potential host of Na in carbonated lherzolite, because the whole Na added into the system dissolves as jadeite component in clinopyroxene if bulk Al/Na ≥ 1. The presence of jadeite component in clinopyroxene has little impact on the temperature of the solidus reaction decreasing it to 1350 °C at 6 GPa.


A cross-sectional study was conducted from March 2016 to May 2016 at Guto Gida District, Nekemte, Ethiopia to determine the prevalence of bovine schistosomosis. Simple random sampling method was used to select the study animals and sedimentation technique was applied for finding Schistosoma eggs from fresh fecal samples. Out of 384 fecal samples examined, 22 were found positive indicating an overall prevalence of 5.7% schistosomosis in the study area. The prevalence of bovine schistosomosis was higher in Jirenga kebele (9.1%) than Gaarii kebele (4.6%) and Dalo kebele (3.7%). However, no statistically significant difference in the prevalence of bovine schistosomiasis in relation to origin was found. Similarly, there was no statistically significant difference observed between both sexes (P>0.05). The prevalence in body condition category was reported relatively higher in poor body condition (8.4%) and lower in good body condition (3.8%). However, no statistically significant differences appreciated among the three body condition categories (P>0.05). The finding indicated that, schistosomosis should be taken into consideration as one of the major limiting factor to livestock productivity at Guto Gida District. The control measures against schistosomosis must be designed to target either the parasite or the snail intermediate host.

 Key words: Bovine, Guto Gida, prevalence, schistosomiasis


What was the purpose of Queen Esther's first banquet? Did it serve any purpose at all? Why did Esther not tell King Ahasuerus her request the first time she held a banquet, but instead deferred that conversation to the following day when she would re-create the exact same atmosphere with the intent of saying the exact same thing? Popular opinion assumes Esther's reaction the first night was one of fear, panic, and timidity, thus skirting the issue to be dealt with at a later time. But, was Esther really a meek and weak-willed woman? It is contended in this paper that, instead, Esther was a cunning and crafty woman who understood how to turn the king's favour by exploiting his convivial disposition. Esther did not accost the king with her entreaty until she had gauged that the king was at the precise point of intoxication in order to react the way in which Esther devised; this state was not achieved on the first night, that is, he did not drink enough then, but was sagaciously accomplished on the second night hence acquiring her desired result.


A Ni/Co-based bimetallic metal–organic framework (Ni/Co–MOF) [CoNi(μ3-tp)2(μ2-pyz)2] (tp = terephthalic acid and pyz = pyrazine) was synthesized through a hydrothermal method. Structural characterization revealed that metal centers are equally occupied by Co2+ and Ni2+ ions. The supercapacitive behavior of the synthesized Ni/Co–MOF was evaluated using cyclic voltammetry (CV), galvanostatic charge/discharge, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements in 3 M KOH as electrolyte. The Ni/Co–MOF exhibited an outstanding specific capacitance of 1049 F g−1 at a discharge current density of 1 A g−1, good rate capability (642 F g−1 at 10 A g−1), and 97.4% capacitance retention after 5000 cycles. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first bimetallic MOF that is used in supercapacitors and its encouraging properties indicate that Ni/Co–MOF can be a promising candidate as an advanced electrode material for supercapacitors.


Since the end of World War II a key question that successive U.K. governments have faced is what position the country should occupy in global affairs. Such a question stemmed from the legacy of Empire, which both offered global connections and at the same time financial demands in terms of the need to maintain a global footing. These issues came to a head when the United Kingdom applied (unsuccessfully) to join the European Community (the forerunner of the European Union (EU)) in the 1960s when the country was reappraising its position in the world. And while the United Kingdom eventually joined the Community in 1973, there remained an underlying skepticism about membership within the public at large as well as within sections of the Conservative and Labour parties. This suspicion gained more traction from the 1990s onward as the then EU appeared to be moving to a deeper level of integration in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty. This spurred on Euroskeptics in the United Kingdom to campaign for independence. To put a lid on this pressure for reform, David Cameron held a referendum on U.K. membership in 2016. His gamble that this would once and for all seal the United Kingdom within the EU by closing down the issue of withdrawal did not actually materialize, as the electorate voted to leave, which in turn set the country on a path to depart the EU in 2020. Yet, despite these developments, just as was the case in 1945, the United Kingdom is in many ways still searching for a role in the world in 2020.


The brand image is fundamental for the scientific institution. In the high- competitive market the brand may have a significant impact on students decisions but also the decisions made by other stakeholders. The usage of online tools in creating brands and the brand awareness is standard nowdays and is present in many business strategies. The aim of the article is to present the problem on the example of scientific institutions. Based on literature review and empirical study the authors described the usage of most popular online tools in creating the scientific institutions' brands.


This textbook covers the themodynamics needed by chemical engineers both in their engineering and in their chemistry; it is intended for use in all undergraduate and some graduate-level courses. The authors emphasize a rigorous yet concise presentation of the fundamental chemical concepts governing the behavior of single and multicomponent mixtures, including phase and chemical equilibria. In the application of these concepts, consideration is given to the presentation of experimentally measured thermodynamic properties, and to their prediction for real fluids and their mixtures using methods founded on statistical mechanics. Several applications involving the transfer of heat and work that are of special importance to chemical engineers are studied in detail to show the use of thermodynamics in improving performance. The book is written in SI units and contains worked examples, exercises, and problems.J. S. Rowlinson is Dr. Lee's Professor of Physical Chemistry in the University of Oxford. K. E. Bett and G. Saville are Lecturers in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College, University of London.


© 2003 Jeremy Tanner for selection and editorial matter; the contributors and publishers for their chapters (as specified in the Acknowledgements). All rights reserved. Introducing the fundamental theories and debates in the sociology of art, this broad ranging book, the only edited reader of the sociology of art available, uses extracts from the core foundational and most influential contemporary writers in the field. As such it is essential reading both for students of the sociology of art, and of art history. Divided into five sections, it explores the following key themes: * classical sociological theory and the sociology of art * the social production of art * the sociology of the artist * museums and the social construction of high culture * sociology aesthetic form and the specificity of art. With the addition of an introductory essay that contextualizes the readings within the traditions of sociology and art history, and draws fascinating parallels between the origins and development of these two disciplines, this book opens up a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology and art history as well as providing a fascinating introduction to the subject.


This paper investigates an application of mobile sensing: detecting and reporting the surface conditions of roads. We describe a system and associated algorithms to monitor this important civil infrastructure using a collection of sensor-equipped vehicles. This system, which we call the Pothole Patrol (P2), uses the inherent mobility of the participating vehicles, opportunistically gathering data from vibration and GPS sensors, and processing the data to assess road surface conditions. We have deployed P2 on 7 taxis running in the Boston area. Using a simple machine-learning approach, we show that we are able to identify potholes and other severe road surface anomalies from accelerometer data. Via careful selection of training data and signal features, we have been able to build a detector that misidentifies good road segments as having potholes less than 0.2% of the time. We evaluate our system on data from thousands of kilometers of taxi drives, and show that it can successfully detect a number of real potholes in and around the Boston area. After clustering to further reduce spurious detections, manual inspection of reported potholes shows that over 90% contain road anomalies in need of repair.


Corruption has undermined the sense of justice of the society in various parts of the world, and it has to be admitted that corruption involves contested meanings. The problem is that there is no study about the meaning of corruption for Indonesians. Often the understanding of the community about "corruption" is simply assumed because we have law and regulations regarding this practice. This study aimed to show social representations of corruption, by digging answer to the main question, "If you hear the word 'corruption', what comes first to your mind?" This study was conducted throughout the year 2013-2015, involving people of the four provinces, namely West Kalimantan, North Sumatra, North Sulawesi, and Jakarta, with a total of 2,104 samples that were recruited through convenience sampling technique. Results of this study showed that the most fundamental meanings in society are (1) Related to others; (2) Stealing; (3) Self-interest; (4) An action; and (5) Country. This study contributes to the literature of psychology corruption and could be transformed into a psycho-social intervention to create a society that is free from corruption.


Banks play a crucial role in promoting online businesses. Even though e-shoppers have the option of cash-on-delivery, which seems to be secure and trustworthy, still there is an urge for the e-payment schemes, which can only be provided through banks. Banks act as strong and trustworthy intermediaries in the online transactions and they provide a bold opening in the online business. At present, banks have e-payment systems like Internet banking, electronic fund transfers (NEFT/RTGS), plastic money (credit card & debit card) and mobile banking. These systems provide payment to online transactions like online purchases of products, mobile recharges, hotel booking, ticket booking, etc. by considering all types of security meas-ures. For the real working of these e-services, the need of apt infrastructures is an inevitable feature. This paper examines the efficient utilization of mobile banking by the bank customers who have all the infrastructures for availing the same. The results showed that the majority of the sample customers selected for the study owned a mobile but only few of them use a mobile as their mode of access to banks. They also revealed that the people were comparatively well aware of mobile banking, but its usage level was very low. The mostly used e-settlement with mobile banking was for mobile top-up by urban area customers and rural area customers and there was no significant difference between the urban area and rural area customers regarding the utilization of mobile banking.


Abstract The Mesozoic marine revolution focuses on increased predation by durophagous (shell-crushing) predators and the concomitant evolution of prey organisms that occurred in the Mesozoic. Evidence of this predator/prey revolution is found in the appearance and increase of new types of predators that can crush hard shells of prey organisms, and is also found in the morphological changes of prey organisms, such as the appearance of a protective shell morphology of gastropods. We present new data based on the occurrence of shell fragments that indicate a slower increase in durophagous predation than has been considered previously. The results of an experiment on shell abrasion, in which shells were tumbled in barrels with sediments, indicate that incomplete bivalves and gastropods with angular margins from shallow-marine deposits can be considered as good evidence of durophagous predation. Such angular shell fragments are virtually absent from Japanese Mesozoic shell beds, whereas they are occasionally or commonly found in the Paleogene and are usually abundant in Neogene shell beds. The dominant occurrence of fossil shell fragments in the Cenozoic, as well as the data from shell abrasion experiments using tumbling barrels, indicates that wave agitation or currents do not produce shell fragments with angular margins. Such angular shell fragments are interpreted as the result of durophagous predation that has increased during Cenozoic time, and can be a useful tool in estimating durophagous predation in the fossil record. Revised data on the number of durophagous predator taxa (crustaceans and teleostean fishes) also support this conclusion.


Velvet antler, a traditional Chinese medicine, is believed to have body-strengthening, immunomodulatory and anti-aging effects. It has been used in Chinese commercial functional foods and nutraceuticals. This study aimed to investigate the immunomodulatory effects of aqueous extract of velvet antler (AEVA) from Cervus elaphus Linnaeus and its simulated gastrointestinal digests (SGDs) in vitro. Experiments were carried out by measuring the effects of AEVA and SGDs on splenocyte proliferation, neutral red pinocytosis and nitric oxide (NO) production by macrophages. AEVA (10-400 μg/mL) showed inhibitory effects on concanavalin A (ConA)-stimulated splenocyte proliferation while no difference was observed when lipopolisaccharide (LPS) was used as stimulus. An inhibitory effect was also observed in neutral red pinocytosis by AEVA treated macrophages. During simulated gastrointestinal digestion, AEVA kept and strengthened its inhibitory effect on ConA-stimulated splenocyte proliferation. However, digestion of AEVA counteracted the inhibitory effect on pinocytosis. In addition, AEVA alone had no effect on NO production by macrophages while some SGDs (200 μg/mL) increased NO production by LPS-stimulated macrophages. The results indicated that AEVA could keep its inhibitory effect on T-cells by oral administration. In contrast, the effect of AEVA on macrophage function was changed during digestion.


OBJECTIVE
Atherosclerosis is more severe in individuals with diabetes. Whether diabetic subjects have accelerated arterial hardening (i.e., arteriosclerosis) is less clear. Arteriosclerosis increases pulse-wave velocity and can augment central arterial pressure due to early wave reflection. The aim of this study was to determine whether subjects with type 1 diabetes had evidence of increased arterial stiffness by using pulse-wave analysis.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
Radial artery pressure waveforms were obtained noninvasively by applanation tonometry (PWV Medical Blood Pressure Analysis System, Sydney). A central aortic waveform can be derived by using a transfer function used in previous studies during cardiac catheterization. A total of 89 subjects with type 1 diabetes (46 men and 43 women, aged 34.0 +/- 11.0 years, duration of diabetes 13.1 years [interquartile range 5.8-24.3], HbA1c 8.2 +/- 1.7%) and 95 control subjects (44 men and 51 women, aged 36.1 +/- 12.0 years) were studied. The central aortic waveform allowed the determination of 1) the aortic augmentation index (AAI), a parameter that reflects the degree to which central arterial pressure is augmented by wave reflection, and 2) the subendocardial viability ratio (SEVR), which is a measure of myocardial perfusion relative to cardiac workload.

RESULTS
In multivariate analysis, diabetes was an important determinant of AAI (P = 0.001). The higher AAI was mainly evident in the men, for whom diabetes was a highly significant covariate (P = 0.006); this was not the case for diabetic women (P = 0.2). Nondiabetic men had a lower AAI than nondiabetic women (103.7 +/- 18.6 vs. 117.0 +/- 22.3%, respectively, P = 0.002), but this difference was abolished by diabetes (110.7 +/- 18.5 vs. 116.1 +/- 18.7%, respectively, P = 0.2). Subjects with type 1 diabetes had a significantly lower mean SEVR compared with control subjects (139.2 +/- 28.3 vs. 163.6 +/- 27.4%, respectively, P < 0.0001). In multivariate analysis, diabetes was an important determinant of SEVR (P = 0.001). A significant interaction between diabetes and age was evident (P = 0.0001), which suggests that the effect of age is modified by diabetes.

CONCLUSIONS
These findings suggest that central systolic blood pressure is increased in relatively young individuals with type 1 diabetes, although myocardial perfusion related to cardiac workload is decreased. These changes can be explained by more rapid pulse-wave velocity resulting from arterial stiffening.


The sixth joint ecosystem survey was carried out during the period 1 August to 4 October 2008. The survey encompasses various surveys that previously have been carried out jointly for at national basis. Joint investigations include the 0-group survey, the acoustic survey for pelagic fish (previously known as the capelin survey), and the investigations on young Greenland halibut north and east of Spitsbergen. Oceanographic investigations have always formed a part of these surveys, and studies on plankton have been included for many years. In recent years, observations of sea mammals, seabirds, bottom fishes and benthos have been included. Consequently, from 2003, these surveys were called "ecosystem surveys".


Abstract Conceptual or explanatory models are a key element in the process of complex system modelling. They not only provide an intuitive way for modellers to comprehend and scope the complex phenomena under investigation through an abstract representation but also pave the way for the later development of detailed and higher-resolution simulation models. An evolutionary echo state network-based method for supporting the development of such models, which can help to expedite the generation of alternative models for explaining the underlying phenomena and potentially reduce the manual effort required, is proposed. It relies on a customised echo state neural network for learning sparse conceptual model representations from the observed data. In this paper, three evolutionary algorithms, a genetic algorithm, differential evolution and particle swarm optimisation are applied to optimize the network design in order to improve model learning. The proposed methodology is tested on four examples of problems that represent complex system models in the economic, ecological and physical domains. The empirical analysis shows that the proposed technique can learn models which are both sparse and effective for generating the output that matches the observed behaviour.


Pultruded composites are usually manufactured by pulling fibres that have been immersed in resin through a heated die. The material is layered, usually with the main component being a thick layer of unidirectional material (UD). This is often sandwiched between outer layers of a randomly orientated material. In the current work the outer layers comprise a chopped strand mat (CSM) material stitched on a woven roving mat, known as complex mat (CM). For protection purposes, a thin layer of material, known as a 'surface veil', that consists of thermoplastic fibres wetted with polyester resin is deposited on the surface. Investigations into bonded pultruded butt strap joints have been carried out by the authors showing that the joint efficiency was poor. This was attributed to damage initiating in the UD/CSM material interface, as a result of poor interlaminar mechanical properties, exacerbated by the large stress discontinuities at the adhesive/surface veil/CM and CM/UD interfaces. The failure essentially results in a detachment of the surface of the pultruded material. To identify a means of increasing the joint efficiency it is necessary to establish the stress distribution in the joint particularly at the interfacial layers in the pultruded material to define how the load is carried and transferred to each layer. To do this an experimental technique known as thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA) is used. TSA is a non-contact technique that provides a full field map of the stresses on the surface of a component. The application of TSA to composite materials is described in the paper. To obtain quantitative stress data from TSA it is necessary to 'calibrate' the materials; the calibration approach is also described in the paper. The TSA data provides a layer-by-layer map of the stresses from the joint interface on the surface through the complex mat layer into the UD. This approach has provided a new insight into pultruded joint behaviour and enabled improved validation of Finite Element Analysis (FEA).


Spreadsheets are among the most widely used programming tools, having been adopted almost universally for computing and tabulating financial information. They were not designed for use in strategic applications, however, since they lack all but the most rudimentary programming support, and are highly likely to contain errors. In L-sheets, a recently proposed extension to spreadsheets, the standard data flow computational model is augmented with a form of visual logic programming in which term unification is replaced by array unification, providing both improved programmability and a means to specify the high-level structure of sheets. One of the most important properties of spreadsheets is "level 3 liveness", the immediate recomputation of those cells in a sheet affected by an editing change. This is simple to achieve with data flow computation, but is complicated by the addition of logic programming. Here we address the problem of maintaining liveness in L-sheets.


Managing large collections of documents is an important problem for many areas of science, industry, and culture. Probabilistic topic modeling offers a promising solution. Topic modeling is an unsupervised machine learning method that learns the underlying themes in a large collection of otherwise unorganized documents. This discovered structure summarizes and organizes the documents. However, topic models are high-level statistical tools—a user must scrutinize numerical distributions to understand and explore their results. In this paper, we present a method for visualizing topic models. Our method creates a navigator of the documents, allowing users to explore the hidden structure that a topic model discovers. These browsing interfaces reveal meaningful patterns in a collection, helping end-users explore and understand its contents in new ways. We provide open source software of our method.


Pushing yield frontiers of cereals and legumes is becoming increasingly difficult, especially in drylands. This paper argues and provides empirical evidence that food loss and wastage constitute a sizeable proportion of the total wheat supply in Egypt. By following the life cycle of food and using standard measurement protocols, we estimated the levels of food loss and wastage along the wheat value chain in Egypt and their socioeconomic, biophysical, and environmental implications. About 4.4 million tons (20.62% of total wheat supply from domestic production and imports in 2017/2018) is estimated to be lost or wasted in Egypt which is also associated with the wastage of about 4.79 billion m3 of water, and 74.72 million GJ of energy. This implies that if Egypt manages to eliminate, or considerably reduce, wheat-related losses and wastage, it will save enough food to feed 21 million more people from domestic production and hence reduce wheat imports by 37%, save 1.1 billion USD of much-needed foreign exchange, and reduce emissions of at least 260.84 million kg carbon dioxide-equivalent and 8.5 million kg of methane. Therefore, investment in reducing food loss and wastage can be an effective strategy to complement ongoing efforts to enhance food security through productivity enhancement in Egypt.


Astroblastomas are uncommon brain tumors whose classification and histogenesis have been debated. Precise criteria for diagnosis have been described only recently, but have not found wide acceptance. We report the clinical, radiographic, and histopathologic features of 20 astroblastomas, and the chromosomal alterations in seven cases as detected by comparative genomic hybridization (CGH). The tumors occurred both in children and young adults (average age, 14 years), most often as well circumscribed, peripheral, cerebral hemispheric masses. Radiographically, the lesions were contrastenhancing and solid, often with a cystic component. All were characterized histologically by astroblastic pseudorosettes, and most displayed prominent perivascular hyalinization, regional hyaline changes, and pushing borders in regard to adjacent brain. Tumor cells were strongly immunoreactive for S‐100 protein, GFAP, and vimentin. Staining for EMA was focal. Ten of 20 astroblastomas were classified as "well differentiated" and 10 were classified as "malignant," largely on the basis of hypercellular zones with increased mitotic indices, vascular proliferation, and necrosis with pseudopalisading. All 10 well differentiated lesions and 8 of 10 malignant lesions were completely resected. None of the well differentiated astroblastomas recurred within the limited follow‐up period. Three malignant astroblastomas recurred, including two incompletely resected tumors, and one that had been totally resected. One patient died of disease following recurrence. The most frequent chromosomal alterations detected by CGH were gains of chromosome arm 20q (4/7 tumors) and chromosome 19 (3/7). The combination of these gains occurred in three, including two well differentiated and one malignant astroblastoma. Other alterations noted in two tumors each were losses on 9q, 10, and X. These chromosomal alterations are not typical of ependymoma or infiltrating astrocytic neoplasms, and suggest that astroblastomas may have a characteristic cytogenetic profile in addition to their distinctive clinical, radiographic, and histopathologic features.


TTDABC is a relatively new costing management technique, initially developed for manufacturing processes, which is gaining attention in libraries. This is because TDABC is a fast and simple method that only requires two parameters, an estimation of time required to perform an activity and the unit cost per time of supplying capacity. A few case studies have been documented with regard to TDABC in libraries; all of them being oriented to analyse specific library activities such as inter-library loan, acquisition and circulation processes. The primary focus of this paper is to describe TDABC implementation in one of the most important library processes, namely cataloguing. In particular, original and copy cataloguing are analysed through a case study to demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of TDABC to perform cost analysis of cataloguing processes.


This thesis offers a first scientific portrait of the Baka in North-Eastern Gabon, a group of post-foragers living along the River Ivindo, and the way they practice and conceptualise mobility. The inquiry encompasses the long-term historical and the daily or short-term current mobility of this group, elicited through life histories and participant observation. The central premise of this work is that mobility is relational. Relational refers to interaction of movement and fixity, of position and outcome, and to the understanding of mobility as socially produced. The second concept employed is that of motility, the capacity or potential to be mobile. As motility analyses what comes before observable movement, of potential and actualised outcome as mobility or immobility, it takes up the idea of mobility as relational.

The Baka living on the Ivindo migrated from Cameroon and Congo into Gabon over the last approximately 60 years. In contrast to established approaches to forest forager mobility, which focus mainly on resource mobility during an annual cycle, this study considers the long-term and larger geographical perspective and shows that the quality of personal relations between Baka and their neighbours is decisive in mobility considerations. Previously these relations were characterised as a structural opposition between two ethnic groups. This analysis demonstrates the heterogeneity of people and their interactions, in the past and the present, to argue, firstly, that relations are more appropriately conceptualised as multilateral, and, secondly, that an inquiry remains incomplete without considering affections and emotions.

A principal mobility factor for the Baka is the search for a good life, meaning economic improvement and freedom from violence. This search coincides with a diversification of Baka livelihoods to include subsistence practices as well as working in the gold sites of Gabon. Employing motility shows the aspirations and limitations of Baka personal and group mobility in gold work. Motility is also understood as 'mobility capital' and thereby helps document social change, and how gold work is undertaken with reference to Baka egalitarian social organisation to be successful. By including group and individual as well as different temporalities in the analysis, and detailing the impact of social values on mobilities, motility gives depth to the analysis of mobility.


The Seattle debacle has spawned questions about reforming the World Trade Organization (WTO). While the WTO may be experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, the author contends that pushing for its reform is the wrong agenda. Perhaps the superbody is simply beyond reform because it is fundamentally flawed. The WTO was conceived to protect the interests of the United States and is in no way helping the less industrialized countries to develop. The anti-development character of the WTO is manifested in the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMS) and Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), among others. In making decisions that are of global effect the WTO takes the vote of only the United States, Japan, the European Union and Canada. An organization that is meant to institutionalize and legitimize inequality cannot be reformed. Instead of seeking changes that may inevitably strengthen the WTO, developing countries and international civil society must strive to radically reduce the power of the WTO and make it simply another international institution that can play by the rules.