Abstract Objectives: To describe job satisfaction, determine its correlation with stress, work setting, and other socio-demographic variables, and identify any major dimensions of job satisfaction among psychiatric nurses. Participants and Methods: All ward-based and community-based psychiatric nurses (including ward and service managers, nursing officers, registered and enrolled nurses) of the general adult teams of a psychiatric hospital were sent questionnaires including the McCloskey / Mueller Satisfaction Scale and Anxiety Stress Questionnaire. Results: Data from 102 questionnaires (48.1% of all sent out) showed the nurses (acute / admission ward 30.4%, chronic / subacute ward 60.8%, community psychiatric nurses 8.8%) were satisfied with their jobs, being most satisfied with extrinsic rewards and co-workers, and most dissatisfied with the balance of family and work, and professional opportunities. Their job satisfaction was most strongly (and negatively) associated with stress (r =-0.31, p = 0.002). Three dimensions of their job satisfaction were identified: (1) recognition, control, and interaction; (2) extrinsic rewards; and (3) personal growth. Being a ward manager or service manager predicted greater job satisfaction overall and with extrinsic rewards in particular; being a community psychiatric nurse predicted greater job satisfaction with extrinsic rewards. Conclusion: Overall, psychiatric nurses in our sample were satisfied with their jobs; stress, work setting, and rank were significant factors associated with job satisfaction. Key words: Community health nursing; Job satisfaction; Nursing staff; Psychiatric nursing; Stress Introduction In recent years, job satisfaction and stress among mental health care workers has become a focus of research, especially in the context of hospital-based and community-based care, as currently there is a shift of focus from the hospital to community. (1-5) Evidently, community-based mental health staff were generally more stressed than their ward-based counterparts, though there was no significant difference in job satisfaction between the two groups. (3) Among the health care professions, community-based and ward-based mental health nurses appear to be two of the most stressed groups. (6) The relationship between stress and job satisfaction among nurses is interesting. A meta-analysis found that job satisfaction of nurses had the strongest negative association with stress. (7) However, community nursing, including community mental health nursing, appears to be more stressful but also more satisfying than corresponding nursing in hospital settings. (1,8) Job satisfaction of nurses was found to be an important variable associated with turnover of nurses, their productivity and performance. (9-12) The level of nurses' job satisfaction may influence patient care. (13,14) An understanding of the changing nature of nurses' job satisfaction may help to solve recruitment and retention problems. (15) Managing motivation and developing job satisfaction is important in the health care environment. (16) Maslow (17) and Herzberg (18) have suggested motivation as a major component in job satisfaction. According to Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory, removal of hygiene factors causes job dissatisfaction, while motivators are sources of job satisfaction. (18) Some authors have proposed that intrinsic factors serve as sources of job satisfaction, while extrinsic factors contribute to job dissatisfaction. (19) Based on Maslow's and Herzberg's theories, measures of job satisfaction have been developed, (20,21) and studies have been carried out with attempts to identify areas and dimensions of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction among nurses. (12,22,23) Various factors have been associated with job satisfaction of nurses. Age, education, years of experience, clinical grade, communication, recognition, opportunity for advancement, autonomy, commitment, and stress have all been implicated. …


On the move towards a knowledge-based society professional training represents a decisive factor that requires a solid educational background. With the rise of teamwork, professional skills should be backed by personal skills such as objectivity, tolerance, sense of responsibility, communication skills, etc.. The key benefits of an educated society lie in its ability to choose the road to progress and prosperity.
The access to broadband Internet and the employment of modern technologies in schools resulted in significant changes in the education process. Thus, ICT-based training is changing the attitude towards learning of both students and teachers. The student becomes the center of the learning endeavor, his/her role is active because he/she builds his/her own knowledge and the teacher mediates knowledge completing his/her personal experience through eLearning platforms and educational software. This change in the education system aims to increase the efficiency of learning and communication skills and study. Achieving these objectives depends on the readiness of the teachers in the use of the modern means of learning, on the teaching style, on the number of students, on the interest, knowledge and students' skills, on the learning environment and type of software used, etc. The means of modern technology are naturally present in the daily life of students, and one for each family. It is therefore necessary and useful to employ most of these advanced means as early as possible in the learning process, starting from preschool, so the students become very familiar with the use of ICT for educational purposes.


Objectives
Many countries produce guides to healthy food choices for their populations. Healthy food choices are typically based on ensuring micronutrient adequacy while limiting components such as saturated fat, sugar and sodium. It has also been proposed that the degree of food processing can be used as the criterion for classification either for advice to the public or for making regulatory decisions around which food should be allowed to be voluntarily fortified or carry health claims. This study examined the concordance between two such systems.

Methods
The food database used to analyze intakes reported in the 2011-12 Australian National Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey has been classified by others to identify a) which foods are recommended or 'discretionary' in the Guide to Healthy Eating and b) by degree of processing according to the four levels in the NOVA system. The NOVA classifications were collapsed to compare 'ultra-processed' foods to the other categories.

Results
There were 5645 foods in the database after excluding codes used to generate recipes for fortified foods (e.g., vitamins and minerals) and foods added for the 2013 Indigenous wave of the survey. Of the 4014 recommended foods, 23.5% were classed as ultra-processed whereas 31.2% of the discretionary foods were classified as not ultra-processed. In this dataset, nearly one-quarter of the foods would be recommended to the public by one classification but not by the other. Some notable discrepancies were the classification of recommended foods such as margarine and mass produced bread and buns and breakfast cereals as ultra-processed whereas butter, cream, sugar, honey, and homemade cakes, biscuits and jams are not classed as ultra-processed. It should also be noted that the descriptions in classification systems are often imprecisely worded and so some decisions in the two dataset could be debated.

Conclusions
The survey database serves as a useful starting point to screen possible tools even though it contains averages rather than brand-level information. These two specific classifications do not lead to equivalent advice about which foods to choose.

Funding Sources
None.


As in other countries in the southern Africa region, a human development catastrophe is unfolding in Mozambique. Recently released data estimate HIV prevalence rates amongst the adult population in the year 2000 at around 12% with substantial regional variation. Due to the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it has become a top priority development issue. The goal of this paper is to try to come to grips with the economic dimensions of the pandemic. In this initial assessment, the focus is on implications for macroeconomic prospects. Particular attention is paid to human capital accumulation. Taking demographic projections, human capital accumulation projections, and other inputs, a recursive computable general equilibrium approach is employed to quantify impacts on key macroeconomic variables and identify the major channels through which these impacts occur. Policy options for blunting the major negative impact channels are also considered. Due to the long time lags between infection and onset of AIDS, the AIDS case projections to 2010 are, barring rapid advance in medical technologies, essentially programmed into the system since nearly all of the people projected to die in this decade, including the latter parts, are already HIV positive. The analysis indicates that these impending AIDS cases and deaths could have large economic impacts. Projecting to 2010, per capita annual GDP growth rates are between 0.3% and 1.0% lower than in a fictional no AIDS scenario. The major sources of this slowdown in growth are (1) reduced productivity growth, (2) reduced population growth and human capital accumulation, and (3) reduced physical capital accumulation. All three of these effects are significant though the productivity effect is the strongest. Due to a variety of knowledge gaps, a high degree of uncertainty must be associated with these results. However, if AIDS indeed reduces per capita economic growth for extended periods of time as the analysis suggests, then initiatives that effectively combat AIDS will pay handsomely in purely economic terms. Given the nearly decade long time lags between infection and death, policy actions can be divided into two categories: a) reactive policies to face the ramifications of the pandemic in the current decade and b) preventive policies designed to reduce HIV/AIDS prevalence in future decades. Under reactive policies, education policy was explicitly considered. AIDS poses a threat to educational attainment from both the supply and demand sides. AIDS deaths amongst teachers and administrators will worsen already severe supply side constraints. In addition, widespread orphaning is likely to reduce the demand for education. Both of these effects point to reduced school enrollments and human capital accumulation. The analysis indicates that school enrollments and human capital accumulation rates are sensitive to changes in the probabilities of remaining in school and transitioning to higher grade levels. The scenario Education, corresponding to a strong policy effort to maintain school enrollment rates, graduation rates, and quality, resulted in a 0.6% increment to GDP growth by 2010 relative to the Base AIDS scenario. This growth increment is due to the enhanced productivity of a more skilled workforce. Furthermore, this increment is likely to persist well into the future due to much larger school enrollments in 2010 (for example, enrollment in EP2 in the Education scenario in 2010 is about twice the level in Base AIDS). Assuming this 0.6% growth increment persists to 2020, net present value calculations justify incremental education expenditures on the order of 5% of GDP per year from 2002 to 2010 in order to obtain the growth increment. Similarly, if successful preventive policies substantially reduce AIDS deaths in the next decade resulting in a growth benefit of 0.3% per year from 2010 to 2020 (corresponding to the lower end of the estimated average per capita GDP growth impact), net present value calculations also justify large prevention expenditures (2.5% of GDP from 2002 to 2007) even if per capita GDP is the sole criteria for evaluating the preventive policies. Consideration of individual risk of becoming HIV positive and the human costs of AIDS would justify even higher prevention expenditures. The lesson from these numbers is not that resource allocation on this scale should occur since absorptive capacity is an issue. Rather, the point is that initiatives that successfully prevent the spread of HIV and combat the economic disruptions of AIDS deaths are likely to have a high payoff. Given the extent of the payoff, imaginative initiatives, including costly ones, can be considered. In the final section, these and other relatively broad policy options are considered. Policies highlighted for further scrutiny include: elimination of school fees (such as fees for textbooks), payments to families in the form of food or cash for enrolling children in school, accelerating the general economic reform agenda, administrative and regulatory simplification, accelerated efforts to extend labor-saving agricultural technologies, and tightly targeted (to teachers for example) use of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART). Widespread use of HAART does not appear to be feasible. The challenge is in moving beyond general policy ideas (both reactive and preventive) to real policy initiatives. This will require careful thought particularly with respect to issues of implementation.


We present Mesos, a platform for sharing commodity clusters between multiple diverse cluster computing frameworks, such as Hadoop and MPI. Sharing improves cluster utilization and avoids per-framework data replication. Mesos shares resources in a fine-grained manner, allowing frameworks to achieve data locality by taking turns reading data stored on each machine. To support the sophisticated schedulers of today's frameworks, Mesos introduces a distributed two-level scheduling mechanism called resource offers. Mesos decides how many resources to offer each framework, while frameworks decide which resources to accept and which computations to run on them. Our results show that Mesos can achieve near-optimal data locality when sharing the cluster among diverse frameworks, can scale to 50,000 (emulated) nodes, and is resilient to failures.


Abstract Recent description of the oral cone of Anomalocaris canadensis from the Burgess Shale (Cambrian Series 3, Stage 5) highlighted significant differences from published accounts of this iconic species, and prompts a new evaluation of its morphology as a whole. All known specimens of A. canadensis, including previously unpublished material, were examined with the aim of providing a cohesive morphological description of this stem lineage arthropod. In contrast to previous descriptions, the dorsal surface of the head is shown to be covered by a small, oval carapace in close association with paired stalked eyes, and the ventral surface bears only the triradial oral cone, with no evidence of a hypostome or an anterior sclerite. The frontal appendages reveal new details of the arthrodial membranes and a narrower cross-section in dorsal view than previously reconstructed. The posterior body region reveals a complex suite of digestive, respiratory, and locomotory characters that include a differentiated foregut and hindgut, a midgut with paired glands, gill-like setal blades, and evidence of muscle bundles and struts that presumably supported the swimming movement of the body flaps. The tail fan includes a central blade in addition to the previously described three pairs of lateral blades. Some of these structures have not been identified in other anomalocaridids, making Anomalocaris critical for understanding the functional morphology of the group as a whole and corroborating its arthropod affinities.


The mannose-sensitive hemagglutinin (MSHA) is a type 4 pilus present in Vibrio cholerae O1 strains of the El Tor biotype, as well as in strains of serogroup O139. It has been shown to be a colonization antigen in animal models. The aim of this study was to investigate systemic and local antibody responses to MSHA in adult patients with cholera due to V. cholerae O1 and O139. Twenty-four of 28 (86%) patients with O1 cholera and 11 of 17 (65%) patients with O139 cholera showed significant increases in MSHA-specific immunoglobulin A (IgA) and IgM antibody-secreting cells (ASCs) 7 days after the onset of disease. However, the magnitude of the ASC response in O1 cholera patients was significantly higher than that in the O139 cholera patients in both IgA-producing (P = 0.015) and IgM-producing (P = 0.029) cells. Both groups of patients responded with antibody responses to MSHA in plasma, seroconverting with both IgA (63 to 70% of patients) and IgG (43 to 59% of patients) antibodies. Compared to the MSHA-specific antibody levels determined in healthy controls (n = 10), more than 90% of O1 and O139 cholera patients showed responses to MSHA of both the IgA and the IgG isotypes. About 70% of the patients in both groups also had antibody responses to MSHA in their feces. In summary, we demonstrated that MSHA is immunogenic, giving rise to both systemic and local antibodies in patients with cholera due to both O1 and O139 serogroups.


The genus Peptostreptococcus comprises a heterogeneous collection of
species that are gram-positive cocci, non-spore forming and obligately anaerobic.
They represent a significant component of the normal human flora but remain poorly
studied. They are asaccharolytic or weakly saccharolytic and therefore not easily
delineated by conventional biochemical tests. No virulence mechanisms have been
reported to date, yet peptostreptococci are nearly always present in human anaerobic
infections, and growing evidence indicate that they are likely to play a key role in
disease development. In order to study the role of these organisms in disease, it is
necessary to reliably identify isolates and gain insight into their metabolic activities.
Consequently, the aim of this study was two fold: undertake a 'polyphasic' approach
to the taxonomic structure of the genus, and to study aspects of their metabolism with
particular reference to the genes that regulate haem biosynthesis.
It was shown early in this study that glutamate may have a central role in
metabolism and the enzymic properties of glutamate dehydrogenase was used as a
preliminary method to study the intra-generic structure of the genus. Several species
possessed the enzyme and the electrophoretic mobilities correlated with some. The
glutamate dehydrogenase gene was sequenced in 21 strains of peptostreptococci and
phylogenetically closely related Clostridium species (sp.) and carried out in parallel
with 16S rDNA sequencing. Comparison of the phylogenetic trees constructed using
gdh sequences and 16S rDNA sequence of Peptostreptococcus showed similarities.
P. anaerobius, the type species of the genus clustered with some species of
Clostridium in both trees indicating that P. anaerobius is not only distantly related to
other peptostreptococci but is more closely related to clostridia. Consequently,
during the course of this work, it was proposed that the genus Peptostreptococcus be
restricted to only P. anaerobius and other species were designated incertae sedis.
Further extensive analysis on 44 strains of peptostreptococci and several related
Clostridium sp. were undertaken using gas chromatography of their long chain fatty
acid methyl esters (FAME), while MALDI-TOF (cell surface-associated molecules)
and SELDI-TOF (intracellular proteins) mass spectrometry were also explored in an
attempt to find new characters to delineate species. MALDI-TOF-MS was
successfully used to discriminate between rough and smooth morphotypes of
Peptostreptococcus micros strains, but these analyses remain inconclusive at the species level. However, there was sufficient data generated to begin the
reclassification of the remaining taxa. Consequently, the following new genera were
created to accommodate these; Finegoldia magna comb. nov. (Prevot 1933;
Holdeman and Moore 1972) for Peptostreptococcus magnus\ Micromonas micros
comb. nov. (Prevot 1933; Smith 1957) for Peptostreptococcus micros', Schleiferella
asaccharolytica comb. nov. (Distaso 1912; Ezaki, Yamamoto, Ninomiya, Suzuki and
Yabuuchi 1983) for Peptostreptococcus asaccharolyticus; Schleiferella indolica
comb. nov. (Christiansen 1934; Ezaki, Yamamoto, Ninomiya, Suzuki and Yabuuchi
1983) for Peptostreptococcus indolicus; Schleiferella lacrimalis comb. nov. (Li,
Hashimoto, Adnan, Miura, Yamamoto and Ezaki 1992) for Peptostreptococcus
lacrimalis and Schleiferella harei comb. nov. (Murdoch, Collins, Willems, Hardie,
Young and Magee 1997) for Peptostreptococcus harei.
The second phase of this study focussed on investigating the diversity of the
tetrapyrrole biosynthetic pathway among Peptostreptococcus. This pathway leads to
the synthesis of haem, cobalamin (vitamin 612) and other metal ion chelated
tetrapyrrole molecules. Haem is an iron chelated tetrapyrrole derivative that is
essential for several physiological functions and is one of the prerequisites for the
pathogenicity of many bacteria. Intracellular levels of haem are known to regulate
bacterial biological properties and their ability to initiate infection. Molecular
characterisation of important haem regulatory genes including hemA, hemB, hemH,
cysG, cbiP and btuR were investigated. Gene fragments of hemB, cbiF and cbiP were
amplified, cloned and sequenced. The presence of the hemB, cbiF and cbiP which
encodes for aminolevulinic acid dehydratase (ALAD), precorrin-4 C-ll
methyltransferase and cobyric-acid synthase respectively indicated the presence of a
branched pathway leading to cobalamin biosynthesis. In-vitro transcriptional
expression of hemB and cbiF were investigated by reverse-transcriptase (RT)-PCR in
parallel with enzymatic assays for ALAD activity. The results of this study provided
unambiguous evidence for the presence of a functional tetrapyrrole biosynthetic
pathway. This is in contrast to many anaerobic taxa such as Porphyrinmonas
gingivalis where only vestiges of a tetrapyrrole biosynthetic pathway occur so that
the organism has an absolute dependence on in vitro haem. Peptostreptococci are
therefore able to biosynthesise haem from basic precursors and this may confer
significant advantages for this species in deep-seated infections where it thrives, and
where the basic tetrapyrrole precursors are available.


Solar water heating systems usually cost more to purchase and install than conventional water heating systems. However, a solar water heater can usually save money in the long run.Many factors are involved for a detailed analysis of a solar flat plate collector (FPC). The important subsystems are: solar collectors, fluid transport and distribution systems, hot-water storage container, and its control systems. SolarWater Heating (SWH) System has the potential to reduce household energy consumption by more than 50%. SWH make use of freely available solar energy to preheat water before it enters in to a conventional water heaters (electric or gas); there by substantially reducing energy usage and expenditure. In this paper, many efforts have been made to combine a number of the most important factors (Solar EnergyFactor, Solar Fraction and Energy Factor) into a single equation for estimating the energy (thermal) efficiency and also analyzed the cost for various systems as compared with conventional systems. The process used is to rate solar water heating performance by the use of energy factors, the same efficiency rating used for electric and gas heaters.


Recent recast of the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, requesting all new
buildings in the EU to consume `nearly zero' energy after 2020, requires the coherent
application of passive and active design strategies in reducing heating, cooling and lighting
loads and utilization of renewable energy. A necessary step in this process is application of
the optimal combination of passive design measures, foremost among them being passive
solar design measures, which aim to use the solar energy as much as possible in establishing
thermal comfort in buildings, without the use of electrical or mechanical equipment.
Although it is relatively simple to reduce the energy use up to some extent by applying
individual measures, very high levels of energy performance require application of the
optimal combination of several different measures. Building energy simulation plays a
fundamental role in this process, since the energy use depends in a complex way not only on
applied passive solar design strategies, but also on local climate factors.
Purpose of this work is to study relationships between the parameters of passive solar design
and the heating, cooling and lighting energy loads in office buildings, through a parametric
study of a model of an office building located in Belgrade. The case study is a four-story
office building, rectangular in shape, with longer sides facing south and north, with windows
present at southern and northern facades only. The design parameters include six types of
southern glazing types and of northern glazing types, seven values of windows-to-wall ratio
for southern and for northern windows ranging from 25% (in order to satisfy minimal
daylighting regulations) to 100%, presence of external shading at southern windows, as well
as three U-values of external walls. In total, 10,584 building variants have been simulated in
EnergyPlus. Analysis of simulation results leads to findings on the optimal windows-to-wall
ratio and the optimal glazing choice for southern and northern facade, as well as on the
influence of external shading on lowering cooling energy load. Additional simulations of a
photovoltaic plant installation on the building model show that a significant number of
building variants may became positive energy building with an integration of the photovoltaic
plant in the roof of the building.


Issues of a fundamental quantum origin exert a significant effect on the output mode structures in optically parametric processes. An assumption that each frequency conversion event occurs in an infinitesimal volume produces uncertainty in the output wave-vector, but a rigorous, photon-based theory can provide for a finite conversion volume. It identifies the electrodynamic mechanisms operating within the corresponding region of space and time, on an optical wavelength and cycle timescale. Based on quantum electrodynamics, this theory identifies specific material parameters that determine the extent and measure of delocalized frequency conversion, and its equations deliver information on the output mode structures. The results also indicate that a system of optimally sized nanoparticles can display a substantially enhanced efficiency of frequency conversion.


Cyclophosphamide, a cytotoxic alkylating agent, is an extensively used antineoplastic agent. Cardio-toxicity is considered as one of the limiting side effects of its use, which is attributed to oxidative stress. Zingiber officinale is powerful antioxidants against free radicals and oxidative attacks. The aim of this study is to investigate the possible protective effects of Z. officinale against cyclophosphamide induced cardio-toxicity in adult male albino rats. We used 30 adult male albino rats, divided into five groups; Group Ia (-ve control), Group Ib (+ve control), Group II (Z. officinale treated group; 200 mg/kg/day orally), Group III (cyclophosphamide treated group; single dose of 150 mg/kg I.P.), and Group IV (cyclophosphamide and Z. officinale treated group; rats received Z. officinale as before followed by single dose of cyclophosphamide (150 mg/kg)). At the end of experiment, we studied biochemical parameters: oxidative markers (MDA, GSH and Catalase), and Troponin i. The heart tissue was examined by light and electron microscope to evaluate histo-pathological changes and immune-histochemical technique for localization of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) in the cytoplasm of cardiomyocytes. The result showed increase in troponin I and disturbance of oxidative markers in cyclophosphamide treated group compared to control groups. Whereas these results had significantly improved in cyclophosphamide and Z. officinale treated group. Light and electron microscopic examination revealed disruption in the heart tissue histo-architecture in cyclophosphamide group with strong positive cytoplasmic iNOS immunoreaction in numerous cardiomyocytes by histochemical examination unlike that in cyclophosphamide and Z. officinale treated group which returned near normal. In conclusion, cyclophosphamide has a cardiotoxic effect which can be prevented by Z. officinale supplementation. Further studies about cyclophosphamide toxic effect on the heart and about Z. officinale role in protection are recommended.

 Key words: Cyclophosphamide, Zingiber officinale, cardiotoxicty.


We are developing a novel detector concept for Positron Emission Tomography (PET) that will facilitate ultrahigh spatial resolution, high sensitivity and optimal light collection efficiency. Spatial resolution in PCT can be improved by using finer scintillation crystal array elements. Several groups are developing arrays with <2 mm crystal pixels for ultra-high resolution small animal PET systems. The challenge with finer crystals is extracting sufficient light to maintain a high detection signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), especially if the crystals are kept relatively long for good detection efficiency. Assuming the resulting light signals are sufficiently above noise, the finer crystals may be resolved in a flood histogram. However, the reduced detection SNR means lower count sensitivity since more pulses are now below a given threshold, and a loss in energy resolution, which can result in image contrast degradation. We propose scintillation detector concepts that use new avalanche photodiode (APD) arrays in novel readout configurations that promote very high light collection efficiency. These concepts exploit the high compactness of semiconductor photodetector arrays for tightly packed crystal readout schemes that are unavailable to PMTs. The schemes proposed have the potential to significantly improve detection SNR for ultra-high resolution PET. With a I mm wide LSO crystal coupled to a prototype APD array we obtained 13.7% energy resolution at 511 keV in a nonoptimized measurement. Flood irradiation measurements with a 1 mm thick LSO crystal sheet coupled to the array prototype indicate that /spl les/1 mm intrinsic spatial resolution is available to the design with high spatial linearity out to the crystal edge.


Natural resource management (NRM) analyses often avoid understanding environmental governance as arising from and shaped by social practices and power relations in resource conflicts, contested property rights, and political-economic strategies. I examine a northern Canadian Aboriginal community's experience of a structured yet dynamic socio-cultural response to a period of social and political change. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's conception of social practice I suggest that a diffuse, or less-determinist, theory of practice may help explain how power relations are interwoven throughout yet applied differentially in NRM governance. Drawing on ethnographic research on northern watershed management and protection of Aboriginal cultural landscapes, I propose the notion of practical understanding to explain the ways government resource managers and community leaders challenge and negotiate one another's conceptions of environmental governance in a duel process of cooperation-conflict.


Abstract. Sustainable water management requires the quantification of the spatial and temporal changes of water balance variables. Fully distributed hydrological simulations of these variables are especially in regions with weak infrastructure challenging, because the required meteorological input data are often not available in a sufficient spatial and temporal resolution. One possibility to deal with this limitation is to provide the required input data with a meteorological model. This combination results in a one way meteorological-hydrological coupling system. Within the framework of the GLOWA-Volta project it is investigated to what extent meteorological models are able to provide the required meteorological fields with sufficient accuracy for the hydrological modeling. For this study the mesoscale meteorological model MM5 and the fully distributed water balance simulation model WaSiM-ETH were first adapted and validated separately. The research area is the White Volta catchment in the semi-arid to sub-humid climate zone in West Africa. The meteorological simulations tend toward overestimating measured precipitation sums. The coupled meteorological-hydrological runoff simulations show similar model performances as the simulations driven by observations indicating the potential of this system for a contemporary estimation of the terrestrial water balance.


Broken into thirty-one parts, this book will help readers reach the truth of God's word, and how speaking God's promises can bring about His blessings. Each part will open with a faith-building declaration, followed by a story to demonstrate the power of God, and Scripture references to give testimony to His ability.'May the Lord bless you and protect you. May the Lord smile on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord show you His favour and give you His peace.'(Numbers 6:24-26)


At least three moment magnitude (M) 7 earthquakes occurred along California9s north coast in the second half of the nineteenth century. The M 7.3 earthquake on 23 November 1873 occurred near the California-Oregon coast and likely was located on the Cascadia subduction zone or within the North American plate. The M 7.0+ earthquake on 9 May 1878 was located about 75 km offshore near the Mendocino fault. The surface-wave magnitude ( M S ) 7.0 earthquake on 16 April 1899 was located about 150 km offshore within the Gorda plate. There were at least three M 7 north-coast earthquakes in the 35 years before 1906, two M 7 earthquakes in the 20 years after 1906, no M 7 earthquakes from 1923 until 1980, and four M 7 earthquakes since 1980. The relative seismic quiescence after 1906 for M 7 earthquakes along California9s north coast mimics the post-1906 seismic quiescence in the San Francisco Bay area for M 6 earthquakes. The post-1906 relative quiescence did not extend to lower magnitudes in either area. The 18 April 1906 earthquake apparently influenced the rate of occurrence of M 7 north-coast earthquakes as it apparently influenced the rate of M 6 earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay area. The relative seismic quiescence along the California north-coast region after 1906 should be taken into account when evaluating seismic hazards in northwest California.


Due to the explosive growth of wireless communication, the demands for
radio spectrum are rapidly increasing. It is very di±cult to accommodate
new wireless services under the current spectrum allocation scheme. On
the other hand, the allocated spectrum is not e±ciently utilized. Cognitive
Radio is proposed as a technology to solve the imbalance between spectrum
scarcity and spectrum under-utilization. Spectrum utilization can be im-
proved by making it possible for a user who does not have the license for
spectrum (secondary user) to access the spectrum which is not occupied by
the licensed user (primary user). This secondary user has the awareness of
the spectrum and adapts its transmission accordingly on a non-interference
basis. This spectrum access and awareness scheme is referred to as Cogni-
tive Radio. The idea is also known as Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) or
Open Spectrum Access (OSA). Cognitive Radio is seen as the ¯nal point
of software defined radio (SDR) platform evolution. A fully °exible and
e±cient software defined radio platform will be the enabling technology for
Cognitive Radio. Cognitive Radio imposes a number of requirements on
the processing platform such as °exibility, energy e±ciency and guaranteed
throughput/latency. The trend in the implementation of SDR is moving
towards Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) platforms.
The work of this PhD thesis is part of the Ad-hoc Adaptive Freeband
(AAF) project. The aim of the AAF project is to design a Cognitive Radio
based wireless ad-hoc network for emergency situations. Although the AAF
project addresses Cognitive Radio in a holistic fashion from physical layer to
networking issues, the work of this thesis mainly focuses on the design of the
adaptive physical layer (baseband processing). The physical layer consid-
ered in this thesis mainly consists of two parts: transmission and spectrum
sensing. A reconfigurable MPSoC platform is used to support the adap-
tive baseband processing of Cognitive Radio. A coarse-grain recon¯gurable
processor called the Montium, developed at the University of Twente, is
considered in this thesis as a key element of the proposed MPSoC platform.


Smartphones are being used for a wide range of activities including messaging, social networking, calendar and contact management as well as location and context-aware applications. The ubiquity of handheld computing technology has been found to be especially useful in disaster management and relief operations. Our focus is to enable developers to quickly deploy applications that take advantage of key sources that are fundamental for today's networked citizens, including Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, current news releases, and government data. These applications will also have the capability of empowering citizens involved in crisis situations to contribute via crowdsourcing, and to communicate up-to-date information to others. We will leverage several technologies to develop this application framework, namely (i) Linked Data principles for structured data, (ii) existing data sources and ontologies for disaster management, and (iii) App Inventor, which is a mobile application development framework for non-programmers. In this paper, we describe our motivating use cases, our architecture, and our prototype implementation.


In multi-objective search, edges are annotated with cost vectors consisting of multiple cost components. A path dominates another path with the same start and goal vertices iff the component-wise sum of the cost vectors of the edges of the former path is ``less than'' the component-wise sum of the cost vectors of the edges of the latter path. The Pareto-optimal solution set is the set of all undominated paths from a given start vertex to a given goal vertex. Its size can be exponential in the size of the graph being searched, which makes multi-objective search time-consuming. In this paper, we therefore study how to find an approximate Pareto-optimal solution set for a user-provided vector of approximation factors. The size of such a solution set can be significantly smaller than the size of the Pareto-optimal solution set, which enables the design of approximate multi-objective search algorithms that are efficient and produce small solution sets. We present such an algorithm in this paper which we call A*pex and which builds on PP-A*, a state-of-the-art approximate bi-objective search algorithm (where there are only two cost components) but (1) makes PP-A* more efficient for bi-objective search and (2) generalizes it to multi-objective search for any number of cost components. We first analyze the correctness of A*pex and then experimentally demonstrate its efficiency advantage over existing approximate algorithms for bi- and tri-objective search.


We consider a stochastic linear bandit model in which the available actions correspond to arbitrary context vectors whose associated rewards follow a non-stationary linear regression model. In this setting, the unknown regression parameter is allowed to vary in time. To address this problem, we propose D-LinUCB, a novel optimistic algorithm based on discounted linear regression, where exponential weights are used to smoothly forget the past. This involves studying the deviations of the sequential weighted least-squares estimator under generic assumptions. As a by-product, we obtain novel deviation results that can be used beyond non-stationary environments. We provide theoretical guarantees on the behavior of D-LinUCB in both slowly-varying and abruptly-changing environments. We obtain an upper bound on the dynamic regret that is of order d B_T^{1/3}T^{2/3}, where B_T is a measure of non-stationarity (d and T being, respectively, dimension and horizon). This rate is known to be optimal. We also illustrate the empirical performance of D-LinUCB and compare it with recently proposed alternatives in simulated environments.


Probabilistic Risk Assessments (PRA) are used to achieve a safe design and operation of Nuclear Power Plants. The impact of uncertainties which may affect PRA results must thus be taken into account in the decision making process. These uncertainties due to the lack of data have been recently seen as mainly epistemic ones and it has been recommended to characterize them by the belief functions of Dempster-Shafer Theory rather than a presumed single probability distribution. The current construction of these functions is based on the data provided by PRA data handbooks using traditional statistical tools like Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). However, this approach is only appropriate when data coming from the operating feedback observations are sufficiently large as required in the MLE approach. Furthermore, when wishing to incorporate other sources of information, such as expert's opinions, the pooling data of MLE has limits to account for these kinds of information. Therefore, in order to overcome this problem, two alternative perspectives based on the Dempster's rule of combination and the Generalized Bayesian Theorem for constructing and updating the belief functions in a more effective way will be presented in this paper. These two approaches will be studied for the use in the context of PRA. The comparison of these two approaches with the current method is carried out through a practical example. Some conclusions about the application of these approaches will be drawn.


The ageing criteria for Common Snipe Gallinago gallinago are complex, and a significant proportion of birds in autumn which have completed moult cannot be aged. Jeziorsko Reservoir is an important stopover site for Common Snipe during autumn migration through central Poland. Detailed studies of wing coverts show that in a proportion of adult birds a contrast or moult limit between old, faded feathers and new ones grown during the moult can be used as an additional criterion to distinguish adults from first‐year birds that have completed their post‐juvenile moult. In particular, the presence of one or more old humeral coverts allowed a high proportion of birds, otherwise of indeterminate age, to be identified as adults. Since these feathers are normally hidden under the scapulars, careful plumage examination is needed to age birds correctly.


Organic microlasers are miniaturized coherent light sources with great promise for advancing the field of optoelectronics. Recently, host–guest composite organic microlasers, where the host materials provide spatial confinement for the organic gain materials, have captured much research interest because the host–guest composite material systems endow the organic microlasers with improved lasing performances, such as low threshold, high stability, and excellent tunability. In this Review, we explore the latest advancements in the development of host–guest composite organic microlasers, and offer our perspective on future improvements and trends. Special emphasis is put on the construction strategies and the unique laser properties of the organic microlasers based on host–guest confinement systems. The comprehensive understanding of the relationship between laser performances and the synergistic interactions of the host and guest materials would provide a useful guidance for the design and fabrication of novel organic microlasers.


The book examines the political and economic developments in East Asia since the end of the Cold War in an attempt to identify a broad pattern of transition, particularly in terms of the reshaping of the state's relations with forces and institutions in economy, politics and domestic- international interactions. The chapters are organised into three parts: I: The state in the new economy; II: The state in the new politics; III: The state in the new global environment. The contributors find a general pattern of the state's withdrawal from these three areas. But it is not simply that the market takes over, as some envisaged. Instead, the transition is moving towards a set of governance-producing arrangements in which the role of both the market and the state are appreciated. The book concludes that a more sophisticated approach is needed to the problems of development vs. governance, the state vs. the market, and global dynamics vs. national interests, for a better understanding of the dynamic transition and the consequent new political economy in East Asia.


Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) often base on rules that are inferred from collected patients' histories, together with expert judgements and consented medical guidelines. This type of advisor system is known as rulebased reasoning system or expert system which classifies a given test instance into a particular outcome from the learned rules. The test instance carries multiple attributes which are usually the values of diagnostic tests. In this paper, we propose a classifier ensemble-based method for supporting disease diagnosis. The ensemble data mining learning methods are applied for rule generation, and a multi-criteria evaluation approach is used for selecting reliable rules over the results of the ensemble methods. The efficacy of the proposed methodology is illustrated via an example of a thyroid disease classification.


I started preparations for my first constitu- tional conference in an office overlooking Was- cana Lake nearly forty-seven years ago. I was a young lawyer in the Department of the Attor- ney General of Saskatchewan. Prime Minister Diefenbaker had announced that there would be a Conference of Attorneys-General in early October 1960, chaired by Justice Minister Ful- ton, to seek agreement on "Repatriation of the Constitution." As I expressed interest in the conference to the Attorney General, and had recently taught constitutional law for a year at the University of Saskatchewan, I was made the secretary of the Saskatchewan delegation. This involved most of the work of research and writ- ing position papers and speeches. But it also in- volved making hotel and travel reservations for which I claimed no particular skill! Of course, after four such meetings in 1960 and 1961 we reached no agreement on repatriation, but it gave me on the job training in constitutional reform.


The brain converts a prodrug into estrogen, providing a potential treatment for the neurological and psychiatric symptoms of menopause. Although estrogen is considered to heal the brain of many neurological and psychiatric symptoms, targeting the hormone to the brain only—and avoiding activity in other tissues—is no trivial feat. Prokai et al. discovered a "prodrug," called DHED (10β,17β-dihydroxyestra-1,4-dien-3-one), that is selectively converted to one main estrogen, 17β-estradiol, only in the brain. Similar to 17β-estradiol itself, DHED protected menopausal female rodents from neurological symptoms of estrogen deprivation and also provided neuroprotection to rats after stroke, but without the negative systemic (specifically uterotrophic and cancerous) effects of the free hormone. With an efficacious and safe profile in vivo, this prodrug has the opportunity to provide positive estrogenic effects on the brain and relieve symptoms in patients with a broad range of central nervous system diseases. L. Prokai, V. Nguyen, S. Szarka, P. Garg, G. Sabnis, H. A. Bimonte-Nelson, K. J. McLaughlin, J. S. Talboom, C. D. Conrad, P. J. Shughrue, T. D. Gould, A. Brodie, I. Merchenthaler, P. Koulen, K. Prokai-Tatrai, The prodrug DHED selectively delivers 17 β-estradiol to the brain for treating estrogen-responsive disorders. Sci. Transl. Med. 7, 297ra113 (2015). [Abstract]


This paper considers the usefulness of a range of analytical approaches to describing the impact of natural resource management on Indigenous people. Six approaches are reviewed here with examples from the literature. These include: a well-being index approach used recently by Greiner with the Australian Nywaigi people; a replacement value approach to valuing wild resource harvests for the Wallis Lake area of north eastern New South Wales; a bio-economic approach to Indigenous/Non-Indigenous fisheries management of the Ontario Great Lakes used by Dyack; a stated preference approach used in New Zealand; a Choice Experiment in northern Saskatchewan and Alberta; and, a Goal Programming/Multi-Criteria Analysis with the Wik People from the York Peninsula in north eastern Australia. The purpose of this review is to provide a discussion document for a new project. This project is developing as a collaboration in the Murray River Basin in south east Australia with the Ngarrindjeri People. Examples highlight the challenges for measuring values and well being especially when the context implies potential tradeoffs between Indigenous interests for health of country and nonindigenous interests. References in this regard are made to sport fishery expansion in the Great Lakes and irrigation diversions for the Murray


Model order reduction (MOR) techniques have always struggled in compressing information for advection dominated problems. Their linear nature does not allow to accelerate the slow decay of the Kolmogorov $N$--width of these problems. In the last years, new nonlinear algorithms obtained smaller reduced spaces. In these works only the offline phase of these algorithms was shown. In this work, we study MOR algorithms for unsteady parametric advection dominated hyperbolic problems, giving a complete offline and online description and showing the time saving in the online phase. We propose an arbitrary Lagrangian--Eulerian approach that modifies both the offline and online phases of the MOR process. This allows to calibrate the advected features on the same position and to strongly compress the reduced spaces. The basic MOR algorithms used are the classical Greedy, EIM and POD, while the calibration map is learned through polynomial regression and artificial neural networks. In the performed simulations we show how the new algorithm defeats the classical method on many equations with nonlinear fluxes and with different boundary conditions. Finally, we compare the results obtained with different calibration maps.


In 2002, bleaching was reported throughout many Indo-Pacific coral-reef regions, including French Polynesia. Bleaching occurred again in French Polynesia in 2003, providing an opportunity to compare the effects of successive bleaching events on coral susceptibility. During 2002 and 2003, underwater video surveys were completed in stations at four depths (lagoon: 0–2, 2–4m; outer reef slope: 6–8, 12–14m) at two locations on the northern and north-western coast of Moorea (Society Archipelago) to compare the cover of healthy-appearing, the cover of partially bleached and the cover of fully bleached coral. Bleaching patterns were genus specific and differences in susceptibility among major genera were generally consistent between 2002 and 2003, with Acropora showing the greatest susceptibility. Some genera exhibited substantial spatial variability in bleaching susceptibility between years (e.g. Pocillopora, Montipora); however, this variability was significant only for fully bleached and partially bleached Acropora. Multivariate analyses showed that spatial patterns in the proportion of healthy-appearing coral were similar over time within the assemblages, whereas the cover of partially bleached and the cover of fully bleached coral were more variable among depths and locations. This variability has important implications for assessing changes to coral community structure over time and for estimating coral-reef resistance and resilience to future bleaching disturbance.


To investigate channelization of a reactive melt in mantle rocks, we imposed a gradient in fluid pressure across a partially molten rock composed of olivine and clinopyroxene, sandwiched between a source of alkali basalt melt and a sink of porous alumina. We performed experiments at a confining pressure of 300 MPa and pore pressures of 0.1–300 MPa, resulting in fluid pressure gradients of 0–88 MPa/mm at temperatures of 1200–1250 °C. When the gradient in fluid pressure is zero, only a planar reaction layer composed of olivine + melt develops, in agreement with previous experiments. However, if the gradient in fluid pressure is greater than zero, in addition to the planar reaction layer, finger-like melt-rich channels that contain olivine + melt develop and propagate into the rock, significantly past the interface between the melt reservoir and the partially molten rock. Channelization of the melt results in a significant increase in permeability and hence in the flux of melt through the partially molten rock.


This thesis examines the role of employers in vocational education and training
(VET) with particular reference to initiatives targetted at the 16-19 age group. Its
premise is that the so-called 'employer-led' initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s
have, in fact, been government-led and that employers have played a particularly
passive role in their design and delivery. Furthermore, the thesis asserts that
employers lack the understanding, knowledge and commitment required to play the
proactive role which the rhetoric of VET demands of them.
Historical sources are used to demonstrate that the struggle to persuade employers to
play a leading role in VET has been taking place for decades and that even the classic
employer-led model, apprenticeship, cannot be said to have been an unqualified
success. The introduction of the Youth Training Scheme is examined in terms of its
effects on employers' company-wide training practices, effects which have been
largely overlooked by previous analyses.
The thesis then attempts to reveal the realities behind the employer-VET interface
through two closely observed case studies of, firstly, a Training and Enterprise
Council (TEC), and, secondly, a Training Credits pilot programme. A qualitative
methodology was used to bring into focus the perceptions, values and struggles of
people working both inside and on the outside of initiatives which are hailed as
vehicles for reversing the national failure to match the rest of the developed world
in terms of a skilled labour force. In order to create a sense of the highly complex
world of VET as experienced by young people, employers, TEC staff, teachers,
lecturers and careers officers, the thesis draws on research data collected over four
years.
The thesis concludes by recommending that employers, researchers, VET
practitioners and policymakers need to construct a new paradigm to encompass a
meaningful role for employers in VET.


We here present the main final results coming from four different on-the-field fair trade impact studies, confronting them with the most recent literature and deriving some useful conclusions for the fair trade movement. Our impact studies suggest that fair trade does have a positive impact on the life of its beneficiaries. But this happens not much in the most expected way, that is through the price premium, but rather by the effect of other "monetary but not price related" and "non monetary" criteria applied in the fair trade relationship. This result looks coherent with Sen's capabilities theory, depicting fair trade as a kind of commercial relationship able to increase producers' capabilities and, consequently, their inclusion in the market.


The moment they earn their bachelor's degrees, black college graduates owe $7,400 more on average than their white peers ($23,400 versus $16,000, including non-borrowers in the averages). But over the next few years, the black-white debt gap more than triples to a whopping $25,000. Differences in interest accrual and graduate school borrowing lead to black graduates holding nearly $53,000 in student loan debt four years after graduation—almost twice as much as their white counterparts. While previous work has documented racial disparities in student borrowing, delinquencies, and defaults, in this report we provide new evidence that racial gaps in total debt are far larger than even recent reports have recognized, far larger now than in the past, and correlated with troubling trends in the economy and in the for-profit sector. We conclude with a discussion of policy implications. Black-white disparity in student loan debt more than triples after graduation


Road cutslopes and fillslopes account for approximately 50 percent of the total road disturbance area on steep terrain and contribute as much as 60 percent of sediment from forest roads. The significance of erosion control techniques on these vulnerable components of the road prism has become evident in recent years. A study to gain a better understanding of erosion control techniques on road cutslopes and fillslopes is detailed. Sediment and runoff yield from three erosion control treatments and a control were investigated on west-facing 2:1 and 1.5:1 cutslopes and fillslopes, respectively, on a newly constructed road during a 30-month study. The treatments evaluated were a wood excelsior erosion mat, native species grass, and exotic species grass. Factors detected to significantly affect sediment yield from road sideslopes were treatment, time, and treatment-time interaction based on analysis of variance. Significant reductions in sediment yield and runoff were found on all treatments on both the cutslope and fillslope. The erosion mat most effectively controlled erosion losses on both slopes for all study periods.


Platinum Group Elements (dominated by palladium) are present in the Ni-Cu-Co bearing massive sulphide ore of the Uitkomst Complex, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Mineralogical investigations were conducted in two different parts of the ore body and it was found that these elements are contained in fine-grained mineral phases that are largely attributed to five mineral types based on composition and optical properties. Most of these phases fall within the quaternary system Pd-Bi-Te-Sb. Mineral assemblages of this composition are generally regarded as indicative of relatively low temperature (probably less than 490°C) conditions for the formation of the associated massive sulphide ores. Although the mineral phases reported are similar, there are significant differences in the relative abundances of individual mineral phases between the two areas. The distribution of the individual phases recorded for the deeper part of the ore body indicates an increase in Type II (michenerite) grains towards the base of the zone sampled, an antipathetic relationship between Type I (merenskyite) and Type II (michenerite) phases, and a concentration of Type III (testibiopalladite) grains at the top and the base of the zone. The Platinum Group Mineral grains are preferentially associated with pyrrhotite and generally located along grain boundaries. The relative abundances of the Platinum Group Elements in the massive sulphide body are similar to that of other Ni-sulphide deposits such as Sudbury and Noril'sk, but differ significantly from that of the Merensky Reef, UG-2 Reef, and Platreef ore bodies of the Bushveld Complex.


Abstract A theoretical morphologic model defining ligament formation in the Bivalvia is introduced. It is based on the spacing of a lamellar layer, the spacing of a fibrous layer, and the relative growth rate of the expanding ligament with respect to enlargement of the ligamental area. Most of the diverse patterns of bivalve ligaments are successfully modeled by computer simulations. Wide intraspecific variation of the ligamental pattern is observed in an arcid species, Tegillarca granosa. This appears to be a consequence of allometric change of morphogenetic parameters during growth, adjusted to maintain the relationship between ligament strength and shell weight. The distribution of actual ligaments, which does not fill the theoretical morphospace, shows potential evolutionary pathways of bivalve ligaments. Thus, it implies phylogenetic relationships between ligament types from the viewpoint of pattern formation.


Abstract. The work aims at analyzing the bivariate relationship between flood peaks and flood volumes, with a particular focus on the type and seasonality of flood generation processes. Instead of the usual approach that deals with an analysis of the annual maxima of flood events, the current analysis includes all independent flood events in a catchment. Flood events are considered independent when they originate from distinguishably different synoptic/meteorological situations. The target region is located in the northern part of Austria, and consists of 72 small and mid-sized catchments. On the basis of the discharge measurements with a time resolution of 1 h from the period 1976–2007, independent flood events were identified and were assigned to one of the three following flood generation type categories: synoptic floods, flash floods and snowmelt floods. These were subsequently divided into two seasons, thereby separating predominantly rainfall-fed and snowmelt-fed floods. Nine frequently-used copula types were locally fitted to the samples of the flood type and seasonal data. Their goodness-of-fit was examined locally as well as analyzed in a regional scope. It was concluded that (i) treating flood processes separately is beneficial for the statistical analysis; (ii) suitability patterns of acceptable copula types are distinguishably different for the seasons/flood types considered, (iii) the Clayton and Joe copulas shows an unacceptable performance for all the seasons/flood types in the region; (iv) the rejection rate of the other copula types depends on the season/flood type and also on the sample size; (v) given that usually more than one statistically suitable dependence model exists, an uncertainty analysis of the design values in the engineering studies resulting from the choice of model seems unavoidable; (vi) reducing uncertainty in the choice of model could be attempted by a deeper hydrological analysis of the dependence structure between flood peaks and volumes in order to give hydrological support to the decision on model's suitability in specific regions and for typical flood generation mechanisms.


In light of Russia's war in Ukraine, three widely used trade and sector models were applied to assess: i) global food and nutrition security, ii) the effects on the bioeconomy, and iii) the implications for the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Simulation results show that an export stop of agri-food commodities in Ukraine and Russia results in a substantial increase in global agri-food prices under short-term assumptions. However, the longer-term effects are much smaller due to global supply responses. The effects on food security depend on the importance of cereals in countries' diets. Furthermore, due to subsequent Gross Domestic Product declines, there may be further negative long-term implications for food security, especially in Africa. An additional scenario with a 10% increase in the global oil price shows that European Union (EU) biofuel production is heavily affected. The implementation of the initially envisaged CAP requirement of a set-aside of 4% of the farmed area would have little effect on EU cereal production, whereas a 10% reduction in fertiliser availability in the EU would lead to a decline in net production of cereals. A joint reduction in pig herd size and pork consumption could partly mitigate the negative consequences of reduced fertiliser availability, otherwise leakage would occur either through the import of pork into the EU for consumption or the production of EU pork meat for export markets. To mitigate the market effects of the war, EU policymakers should: i) encourage efficient (animal) nutrient use to offset fertiliser shortages and land use choices that increase market availability of food crops, ii) encourage restructuring of animal production in line with consumption developments to prevent leakage effects and ensure that non-food products are used efficiently as feed products, and iii) support vulnerable households to secure short-term food access.


With the introduction of the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991, all statutory undertakers became fully responsible for all aspects of excavation and reinstatement of the highway. They are required to reinstate to national performance standards and to comply with minimum guarantee periods in accordance with the new national Code of Practice Specification for the Reinstatement of Openings in Highways. A TRL study, commissioned by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (formerly Department of Transport) in 1993, was carried out to identify any problems following the introduction of the Specification in relation to compliance with the Specification and standards of workmanship. Sample studies and monitoring programmes were set up in several Highway Authority areas in co-operation with national utility companies comprising Electricity, Gas, Water, Telecommunications and Cable TV. The results showed that the main aspects of reinstatement practice which can cause problems are the number of compaction passes, layer thicknesses, use of suitable compaction equipment and storage of materials on site. improvements are needed in all these areas if good quality reinstatements are to be achieved consistently. No evidence was found to show that any specific utility company had a higher degree of failure than the others. It is recommended that further monitoring of the study sites and bi-annual monitoring of randomly selected sites should be undertaken by an independent body. If the monitoring identifies deficiencies, measures should be taken to improve compliance with the Specification. It is also recommended that training requirements for supervisors and operatives, in the areas of compaction and materials specification, should be reviewed. It is suggested that the specified reinstatement designs for footways should be reviewed based on the existing construction and the level of trafficking. (A)


This article looks at a much-neglected topic in accounts of the modern legal system: the architecture of law courts. It is argued that a closer examination of radical changes to the ways in which the internal space of the courthouse and courtroom were organised in the mid-nineteenth century can tell us much about how lawyers came to dominate the trial. The essay focuses on the design and planning of the Manchester Assize Courts, a building which can accurately be described as one of the first, if not the first, modern courthouse. It considers how the courthouse came to symbolise new ideas about the civic sphere, the increased reliance on the segregation of participants in the trial, and the role of law in Victorian society. Particular attention is placed on the link between new social and cultural movements and the architect, Alfred Waterhouse.


Traditionally, reaction time (RT) was conceived of as an average speed of a number
of responses made by an individual, or mean RT. Increasingly, however, intraindividual
variability in reaction time (RT IIV) – the consistency of responses by a
single person across trials – is used as an additional or even alternative measure. RT
IIV is often found to be elevated in a number of conditions that affect the central
nervous system functioning, such as traumatic brain injury or neurodegenerative
diseases. It can predict change in cognitive performance in ageing, progression from
normal ageing to mild cognitive impairment, and even death. Therefore, RT IIV may
be of great practical importance. However, RT IIV and mean RT are correlated;
therefore it is often problematic to draw conclusions about unique associations
between these and other variables. One objective of the work presented in this thesis
was to investigate determinants and correlates of simple and choice RT IIV and to test
which associations may be accounted for by the individual differences in mean RT.
The first investigation was concerned with age differences in RT IIV. Following a
systematic review of literature, a series of meta-analyses demonstrated that older
individuals (aged 60 years and above) have greater RT IIV than young or middle-aged
adults in simple and choice RT tasks. The effects were reduced but still significant
when RT IIV was adjusted for mean RT. The next study was a cross-sectional
investigation of the associations between age and RT IIV, as well as of sex
differences in RT IIV, across the lifespan in participants ranging in age from 4 to 75.
Non-linear effects of age were found for RT IIV measures, such that variability
decreased with age in children and increased with age in older adults. A novel finding
from this study was that sex differences in RT IIV were present among adults but not
children, suggesting that there might be an age threshold at which sexes diverge in
their RT IIV trajectories. The results also indicated that findings regarding RT IIV
may differ depending on the variability measure used (that is, whether and how mean
RT is controlled). The second study on the same sample investigated variability on a
trial-by-trial basis. Specifically, it tested the hypothesis that sex differences in
variability are due to females being disproportionately slower at the first trial which
inflates their overall RT IIV. This hypothesis was not supported. Another investigation used longitudinal data from the West of Scotland Twenty-07 study.
Three cohorts of individuals aged approximately 15, 35 and 55, were followed up for
20 years and had RT data collected at four occasions. Analyses confirmed non-linear
effects of age on RT IIV found in the earlier cross-sectional investigation. The final
study investigated the effect of high altitude on RT IIV. It found that altitude-related
increase in RT IIV is fully accounted for by general slowing of RT at high altitude.
The overall pattern of results obtained from the investigations suggests that RT IIV
increases with age in adults and that not all of the increase is due to general slowing.
Moreover, the results show that sex differences in RT IIV are not uniform across the
lifespan. Finally, whereas associations of RT IIV with some variables, for example
age, are relatively robust to controlling for mean RT, others are fully attenuated by
such practice.


The development of successful regional or national invasive weed control programs is often hampered by the way the problem is approached. Typically weed control programs are developed and evaluated solely from the perspective of the biological sciences. While this is appropriate from a local or landscape perspective, it will probably not produce the desired results when addressing widespread well-established infestations that impact large regions. The "Ecological Area-wide Management (TEAM) of Leafy Spurge" program was the first U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Agricultural Research Service (ARS) area wide invasive weed program. The 5-year program, funded by the ARS and conducted cooperatively with the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, focused on the control of leafy spurge (Euphorbia esula L.) in North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. Now in its final year (2001), the TEAM Leafy Spurge program has made significant progress in controlling leafy spurge, increasing public awareness of the problem and demonstrating the effectiveness of biologically-based integrated pest management. While this is a significant accomplishment, the lessons learned over the course of the project clearly demonstrate that the success of regional weed control programs depends on more than a persistent, marked reduction in the pest population. Effective regional weed control programs need to focus not only on biological issues, but also on the ecological, scientific, economic, social and legal factors that influence the effectiveness of the program. Therefore, the implementation and subsequent evaluation of a weed control program must include all the principal factors that will ultimately determine success and sustainability. This manuscript outlines the history of leafy spurge on the North American continent, the situation currently facing weed managers, and an evaluation of the TEAM Leafy Spurge program's success for each factor listed above. The final analysis indicates that successful biologically-based leafy spurge control is on the horizon, especially when weed managers understand the number of problem areas that must be addressed to achieve a sustained reduction of a weed population. The amount of time it will take to be realized depends on our commitment to solving the problem and our willingness to work together as a cohesive team.


Urodele amphibians (salamanders) are unique among adult vertebrates in their ability to regenerate structurally complete and fully functional limbs. Regeneration is a stepwise process that requires interactions between keratinocytes, nerves and fibroblasts. The formation of a wound epithelium covering the amputation site is an early and necessary event in the process but the molecular mechanisms that underlie the role of the wound epithelium in regeneration remain unclear. We have developed an ex vivo model that recapitulates many features of in vivo wound healing. The model comprises a circular explant of axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) limb skin with a central circular, full thickness wound. Re‐epithelialization of the wound area is rapid (typically <11 h) and is dependent on metalloproteinase activity. The ex vivo wound epithelium is viable, responds to neuronal signals and is able to participate in ectopic blastema formation and limb regeneration. This ex vivo model provides a reproducible and tractable system in which to study the cellular and molecular events that underlie wound healing and regeneration.


Background: Electrosurgery is widely used in reproductive related surgeries and technological advancements to improve efficacy and reduce potential complications. However, some reports have indicated lack of sufficient knowledge and training about basic principles and technical aspects of electrosurgery among obstetricians and gynecologists. Methods: In this paper we present a summary on basic concepts and principles of electrosurgery and review the recent evidence on the use of electrosurgical devices in gynecologic procedures including endometrial ablation, gynecologic malignancies, loop electrode excision procedure (LEEP), and infertility. Result: Considering the extensive use of these technologies in reproductive related surgeries, procedures including laparoscopy, hysteroscopy, and loop procedures further highlights the importance of more detailed training in this field. Gynecologists must learn the basics in more detail and update their knowledge on the growing body of evidence regarding the advancements of these technologies to reduce potential complications and select the most cost-effective treatment options for each patient. Conclusion: Try to understanding the underlying biophysical principles and more in-depth familiarity with various electrosurgical devices could lead to less complications and optimize evidence-based gynecological practice.


Rowhammer demonstrated that non-physical hardwareweakness-based attacks can be devastating. In a recent paper, Cai et al. [2] propose that similar attacks can be performed on MLC NAND flash-based SSDs, with potentially devastating effects as well. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for a successful, full-system, local privilege attack on SSDs and show a filesystem based attack vector, which we demonstrate. In particular, to motivate the assumptions of the filesystem-level attack, we show the attack primitive that an attacker can obtain by making use of cell-to-cell interference is quite weak, and therefore requires a carefully crafted attack at the OS layer for successful exploitation.


Objective: Cesarean section has negative effects on the physiologic responses to birth, including the development of lung volumes, pulmonary vascular resistance, and biochemical responses. The objective of this study was to examine the association between the timing of delivery between 37 and 42 wks gestation and neonatal resuscitation risk in elective cesarean section. Design: Observational, cohort study. Setting: Maternity Department of Padua University, Italy. Subjects: All pregnant women who delivered by elective cesarean section at term during a 3-yr period were identified from a perinatal database and compared retrospectively with pregnant women who delivered vaginally and matched for week of gestation. Interventions: None. Measurements and Main Results: Comparative neonatal resuscitation risk (odds ratio, OR; confidence interval, CI) was analyzed. During this time, 1,284 (13%) elective cesarean section deliveries occurred at or after 37 wks of gestation. Forty-four (3.4%) newborns delivered by elective cesarean section and 18 (1.4%) newborns vaginally delivered needed positive pressure ventilation resuscitation by laryngeal mask airway or tracheal tube. Positive pressure ventilation resuscitation risk was significantly higher in the infant group delivered by elective cesarean section compared with vaginal delivery (OR, 2.05; CI, 1.25–5.67; p < .01) and involved both laryngeal mask airway and tracheal tube resuscitation maneuvers (OR, 2.77 CI, 1.26–5.8; p < .01 and OR, 2.9; CI, 1.02–7.81; p < .01, respectively). In the period of weeks 37+0 to 38+6, positive pressure ventilation resuscitation risk and single laryngeal mask airway and tracheal tube resuscitation maneuver risk were significantly greatly increased (OR, 4.25; CI, 1.46–16.12; p < .01; OR, 2.25; CI, 1.46–6.12; p < .01; and OR, 11.3; CI, 2.15–16.0; p < .01, respectively). After 38+6 weeks, there was no significant difference in positive pressure ventilation resuscitation risk. Conclusions: Elective cesarean section at term, in an obstetric population without prenatally identified risk factors, remains associated with increased resuscitation risk with related implications for the neonate compared with vaginal delivery. A significant reduction in neonatal resuscitation risk would be obtained by waiting until week 39+0 before performing elective cesarean section.


Asthma is a distressing disease, affecting up to 7% of the French population and causing considerable morbidity and mortality. A medical decision support system such can help physicians to control this chronic disease. Thanks to the health care network (RESALIS) of Alliance Medica (disease management branch from GlaxoSmithKline), asthma consultation data were collected to exploit them. We chose Case-Based Reasoning paradigm to develop our medical decision support system. Intelligent data analysis methods have been used to determine the knowledge models for our system. A Self-Organising Map has been used to analyse medical data to show if homogeneous groups of cases exist. A case is an asthma consultation. Our similarity metric is based on MVDM method. We present our data analysis results and similarity metric from which we designed our Decision Support System for asthmatic patients health care : ADEMA. An evaluation of ADEMA is presented.


Goal, Scope and Background. The EU 5 th framework project OMNIITOX will develop models calculating characterisation factors for assessing the potential toxic impacts of chemicals within the framework of LCA. These models will become accessible through a web-based information system. The key objective of the OMNIITOX project is to increase the coverage of substances by such models. In order to reach this objective, simpler models which need less but available data, will have to be developed while maintaining scientific quality. Methods. Experience within the OMNIITOX project has taught that data availability and quality are crucial issues for calculating characterisation factors. Data availability determines whether calculating characterisation factors is possible at all, whereas data quality determines to what extent the resulting characterisation factors are reliable. Today, there is insufficient knowledge and/or resources to have high data availability as well as high data quality and high model quality at the same time. Results. The OMNIITOX project is developing two inter-related models in order to be able to provide LCA impact assessment characterisation factors for toxic releases for as broad a range of chemicals as possible: 1) A base model representing a state-of-the-art multimedia model and 2) a simple model derived from the base model using statistical tools. Discussion. A preliminary decision tree for using the OMN/ITOX information system (IS) is presented. The decision tree aims to illustrate how the OMNIITOX IS can assist an LCA practitioner in finding or deriving characterisation factors for use in life cycle impact assessment of toxic releases. Conclusions and Outlook. Data availability and quality are crucial issues when calculating characterisation factors for the toxicity impact categories. The OMNIITOX project is developing a tiered model approach for this. It is foreseen that a first version of the base model will be ready in late summer of 2004, whereas a first version of the simple base model is expected a few months later.


In this tutorial, we give an introduction to optical burst switching and compare it with other existing optical switching paradigms. Basic burst assembly algorithms and their effect on assembled burst traffic characteristics are described first. Then a brief review of the early work on burst transmission is provided, followed by a description of a prevailing protocol for OBS networks called just-enough-time (JET). Algorithms used as an OBS core node for burst scheduling as well as contention resolution strategies are presented next. Trade-offs between their performance and implementation complexities are discussed. Recent work on QoS support, IP/WDM multicast, TCP performance in OBS networks, and labeled OBS is also described, and several open issues are mentioned.


Books on linear systems typically cover both discrete and continuous systems together in one book. However, with coverage of this magnitude, not enough information is presented on either of the two subjects. Discrete linear systems warrant a book of their own, and Discrete Systems and Digital Signal Processing with MATLAB provides just that. It offers comprehensive coverage of both discrete linear systems and signal processing in one volume. This detailed book is firmly rooted in basic mathematical principles, and it includes many problems solved first by using analytical tools, then by using MATLAB. Examples that illustrate the theoretical concepts are provided at the end of each chapter.


Over the past decades, automatic face recognition has become a highly active research area, mainly due to the countless application possibilities in both the private as well as the public sector. Numerous algorithms have been proposed in the literature to cope with the problem of face recognition, nevertheless, a group of methods commonly referred to as appearance based have emerged as the dominant solution to the face recognition problem. Many comparative studies concerned with the performance of appearance based methods have already been presented in the literature, not rarely with inconclusive and often with contradictory results. No consent has been reached within the scientific community regarding the relative ranking of the efficiency of appearance based methods for the face recognition task, let alone regarding their susceptibility to appearance changes induced by various environmental factors. To tackle these open issues, this paper assess the performance of the three dominant appearance based methods: principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis and independent component analysis, and compares them on equal footing (i.e., with the same preprocessing procedure, with optimized parameters for the best possible performance, etc.) in face verification experiments on the publicly available XM2VTS database. In addition to the comparative analysis on the XM2VTS database, ten degraded versions of the database are also employed in the experiments to evaluate the susceptibility of the appearance based methods on various image degradations which can occur in "real-life" operating conditions. Our experimental results suggest that linear discriminant analysis ensures the most consistent verification rates across the tested databases. Keywords—Biometrics, face recognition, appearance based methods, image degradations, the XM2VTS database.


During the past three years, a highly-publicized controversy has raged over the question of whether Congress should prohibit acquisitions of industrial loan companies (ILCs) by commercial organizations. The controversy began when Wal-Mart and Home Depot filed applications to acquire ILCs. Those applications triggered strong opposition from a broad coalition that included the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), members of Congress, community banks, labor unions, retail stores, and community activists. From July 2006 to January 2008, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) imposed a moratorium on the processing of applications by commercial firms to acquire ILCs. In May 2007, the House of Representatives passed a bill (H.R. 698) that would prohibit further acquisitions of ILCs by commercial firms.The Senate has not yet acted on legislation similar to H.R. 698 and is not likely to do so during 2008. Wal-Mart and Home Depot have withdrawn their applications, thereby removing the stimulus for much of the public opposition to commercially-owned ILCs. Senator Robert Bennett of Utah, the state with the largest number of ILCs, has strongly opposed any legislation restricting commercial ownership of ILCs. Congress' attention has also been diverted by the subprime lending crisis.Despite the current legislative impasse, there are three important reasons why Congress should prohibit commercial firms from acquiring ILCs. First, commercial ownership of ILCs conflicts with the well-established U.S. policy of separating banking and commerce. Second, widespread commercial ownership of ILCs will create serious risks for the U.S. financial system and cause significant distortions in the broader economy. As indicated by the FRB's recent rescue of Bear Stearns, large commercial owners of ILCs are likely to receive significant federal subsidies by gaining access to the federal safety net for financial institutions. Such subsidies will encourage other commercial firms to acquire ILCs, thereby promoting extensive commercial-banking links that will increase the U.S. economy's vulnerability to systemic financial crises.Third, no federal regulator currently has authority to exercise consolidated supervision over corporate owners of ILCs. The Bear Stearns rescue has shown that the FRB must be given consolidated supervisory powers over the parent company of any financial institution that has access to the FRB's liquidity support facilities. However, it would not be desirable to authorize either the FRB or the FDIC to supervise commercial firms that own ILCs. Consolidated supervision of commercial parent companies of ILCs would significantly increase the amount of governmental intrusion in the commercial sector of our economy, and it would cause financial markets to expect federal support for large commercial owners of ILCs. The subprime crisis confirms the need for Congress to close the ILC loophole in order to forestall even greater threats to the stability of our financial system and the broader economy.


Intermediate filaments (IF) are essential to maintain cellular and nuclear integrity and shape, to manage organelle distribution and motility, to control the trafficking and pH of intracellular vesicles, to prevent stress-induced cell death, and to support the correct distribution of specific proteins. Because of this, IF are likely to be targeted by a variety of pathogens, and may act in favor or against infection progress. As many IF functions remain to be identified, however, little is currently known about these interactions. Herpesviruses can infect a wide variety of cell types, and are thus bound to encounter the different types of IF expressed in each tissue. The analysis of these interrelationships can yield precious insights into how IF proteins work, and into how viruses have evolved to exploit these functions. These interactions, either known or potential, will be the focus of this review.


American and European constitutional systems have two similar doctrines: balancing and proportionality. Both resemble each other in important aspects and are often discussed in tandem. However, balancing has never attained the status of an established doctrine in American constitutional law in the same way that proportionality has in European constitutional law. Moreover, balancing has always been the subject of fierce criticism and is very much a controversial concept in American constitutional law. European proponents of proportionality are perplexed by this American resistance which is sometimes viewed as based on American isolationalism and unilateralism. In this article we suggest an original, and often overlooked, explanation to the difference between balancing and proportionality - the historical origins of the two concepts. We examine the ways in which proportionality developed in Germany and balancing in the United States and show that the origins of both concepts were very different. For instance, proportionality was originally developed in administrative law, and was only tangentially (if at all) related to private law, whereas balancing arose in private law and was only later extended to public law; proportionality was created as part of an attempt to protect individual rights, whereas balancing was created for the exact opposite purpose - to check overzealous protection of rights by the Supreme Court during the Lochner era. We suggest that these differences may go a long way in explaining current disparities in attitudes and current barriers to dialogue and convergence between these two concepts.


Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Ann Swidler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 312 pp. ISBN: 0-226-78690-0. $30.00 (cloth). Women and men are spending more time away from home. Divorce rates are high. "Family values" seem up for grabs. Movie actors go through messy divorces, passionate encounters, and celebrated marriages, all in various sequences. Maybe love and marriage don't go together quite so naturally as a horse and carriage. Swidler, in her Talk of Love, argues that our ideas about romantic love combine with contradictory ideas about marital love to produce a sometimes messy but nonetheless resilient culture of love. At least most of the time, Swidler is not particularly concerned with historical specificity or historical change; she has a far more ambitious and abstract agenda. She wants to develop her well-known and influential ideas on the uses of culture. Love is a site to develop her theory. Talk of Love does use some data. It is based on interviews conducted in 1980 with some eighty White middle-class heterosexuals in California. We meet some of the same people who first appeared in Habits of the Heart, on which Swidler collaborated with Robert Bellah and three other coauthors. In her new book, Swidler focuses on what her respondents have to say about love and marriage, about what they expected and what they found. Using interview questions and vignettes, she asked them whether there is love at first sight, whether love should always be perfect or whether one needs to compromise and "work" on uncertain love, whether they hold to the view of romantic love promulgated in the movies or develop more prosaic conceptions of love rooted in daily and long-lived experience. Most important, Swidler finds that people live quite comfortably with multiple, conflicting views, and use them to justify different actions and solve various institutional dilemmas. Although Swidler does not use their work, her theories help provide a frame for much recent sociological research about cultural contradictions found in families, whether in Hays' (1996) work on motherhood, in Cooper's (2001) work on fatherhood, or Furstenberg's (2001) work on adolescence. So how do Americans manage the gap between the romantic love and the prosaic love of marriage? Swidler concludes that Americans-whether fundamentalist Christians, utilitarians or the therapeutically inclined-produce a coherent and acceptable (to themselves and others) view of that gap by insisting on the operation of an autonomous self. This self freely chooses actions that support a prosaic culture of love, including commitment and obligation. As a form of self-fulfillment, sacrifice becomes personal preference. Because Americans operate within a culture of voluntarism, at a moment when so many marriages are unraveling, they must do such "culture work" to shore up marriage and resolve otherwise contradictory images of love. Swidler's argument is intricate, elegant, and wonderfully complicated. Although built on remarkably open stories people told about love and life, Swidler's analysis is put to the service of grand theoretical project, about what culture is and how it influences action. For her, mythic movie star love and prosaic everyday love are both culture. In different contexts, people move back and forth between them, using them as guides to action. When thinking about whether to marry or stay in a marriage (an all or nothing decision), people draw on a mythic view. When managing a marriage they already have, people draw on the prosaic view. Swidler takes on the big guys. Criticizing Geertz, Swidler argues that culture is not a coherent, unified body of meanings but is rife with ambiguities. Reprising the language of her "Culture in Action" (1986) she also contrasts her view of culture to a Weberian notion of ideas as "switchmen" that determine the tracks of action and to a Parsonian view that culture shapes values which in turn determine ends. …


Medical research is a pre-requisite for maintaining good clinical care and advancing our knowledge base. Before new interventions can be introduced into clinical practice, their effects have to be tested in research settings, often involving patients. Ethics committees, among other things, are concerned with protecting the interests of patients participating in research.1 This is particularly acute for evaluation of treatments and especially sensitive when participants have mental health issues.

In psychiatry emergency situations, the levels of patient violence are high. Violent behaviour occurs in up to 30% of those who attend or are brought to psychiatric services for the first time,2 and these acute violent situations represent a risk for the patients themselves, for other patients and for the staff.3 Guidelines recommend, first line, to calm the situation using words and reassurance, to acquire a diagnostic history and to complete physical and laboratory tests before starting drug treatment. Yet, if these techniques fail, effective and urgent alternative interventions are necessary to ensure the safety of everyone involved. To date, some of these interventions in psychiatric care remain coercive,4 ,5 but many of these approaches have not been subject to fair evaluation within trials despite calls from national bodies6 ,7 as well as grieving relatives.8

Where trials of treatments given under coercion have been undertaken, they have frequently necessitated informed consent from participants. These procedures generate a delay in the enrolment of participants and make results difficult to apply …


Resonator micro-optic gyro (RMOG) is a promising candidate for the next generation inertial rotation sensor based on the Sagnac effect. A current modulation technique used in an external cavity laser diode is proposed to construct the gyroscope system for the first time. The resonance curves before and after eliminating accompanying amplitude modulation are theoretically analyzed, calculated, and simulated; the demodulation curves with different modulation currents are formulated theoretically; and the optimum modulation current corresponding to the maximum sensitivity is obtained. The experiment results from the established RMOG experimental setup demonstrate that a bias stability of 2.7 deg/s (10 s integrated time) over 600 s, and dynamic range of ±500 deg/s are demonstrated in an RMOG with a silica optical waveguide ring resonator having a ring length of 12.8 cm.


When modeling geo-spatial data, it is critical to capture spatial correlations for achieving high accuracy. Spatial Auto-Regression (SAR) is a common tool used to model such data, where the spatial contiguity matrix (W) encodes thespatial correlations. However, the efficacy of SAR is limited by two factors. First, it depends on the choice of contiguity matrix, which is typically not learnt from data, but instead, is assumed to be known apriori. Second, it assumes that the observations can be explained by linear models. In this paper, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) framework to model geo-spatial data (specifically housing prices), to learn the spatial correlations automatically. We show that neighborhood information embedded in satellite imagery can be leveraged to achieve the desired spatial smoothing. An additional upside of our framework is the relaxation of linear assumption on the data. Specific challenges we tackle while implementing our framework include, (i) how much of the neighborhood is relevant while estimating housing prices? (ii) what is the right approach to capture multiple resolutions of satellite imagery? and (iii) what other data-sources can help improve the estimation of spatial correlations? We demonstrate a marked improvement of 57% on top of the SAR baseline through the use of features from deep neural networks for the cities of London, Birmingham and Liverpool.