In the multi-agent environment, it is important to identify position and orientation of multiple robots for accomplishing a given task in cooperative manner. This paper proposes a method for estimating position and orientation of multiple robots using multiple omnidirectional images based on geometrical constraints. Our method reconstruct not only the relative configuration between robots but also an absolute one using the knowledge of landmarks in the environment. Even if there are some obstacles in the environment, our method can estimate absolute configuration between robots based on the results of self-localization of each robot.


Virtual offices (VOs) emerged in enterprises as a result of information and communication technology (ICT) developments that drastically changed the traditional office scenario. The VO is a worksite at which employees can still do traditional office work, but which is situated outside the traditional office. Virtual implies the use of ICT, and VOs are typically equipped with a combination of technologies that enables information workers to recreate the support services of the traditional office. This new scenario has initially been referred to as the VO or telecommuting. Academics in the USA have concluded that both these terms are misleading and nondescriptionptive. Instead, the terms 'telework' or 'teleworkers' are now used; 'tele' meaning 'distance', combined with 'work', implying work that is executed from a distance or away from the traditional workplace. A teleworker is defined as a corporate employee who works at home or at any other workstation during normal business hours for one or more days every month. Telework generates significant benefits for the corporate environment and improves work and personal lifestyle experiences, as well as environmental and social circumstances. It has also contributed to a significant paradigm shift in the corporate management arena.


The 2013 season was forecast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center (and many other seasonal forecast centers) to be much more active in terms of tropical cyclone activity than it turned out to be. The season was characterized by tropical cyclone activity that was well below normal and produced significantly fewer named storms than expected. This study investigates the reasons behind the poor forecast by analyzing the differences in the 2013 season compared to climatology from the previous 18 years (1995-2012), a very active Atlantic hurricane period associated with a multidecadal oscillation in the thermohaline circulation (Klotzbach & Gray, 2008).

Specifically, this study focuses in large part on the analysis of accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), which is used by NOAA to determine how "active" an individual tropical cyclone is throughout its life cycle, and how "active" a season is as a whole. ACE is calculated by using the formula ACE = 10-4Sv2 where v is the estimated sustained maximum wind speed measured in knots. This is calculated every six hours, typically at 0000, 0600,1200, and 1800 UTC. For this study, the 2013 tropical cyclone tracks were mapped using ArcGIS software and the ACE for all 2013 was calculated using data collected from NOAA. The Atlantic basin is then subdivided into three regions where tropical cyclones typically form throughout the season: East Atlantic (15°W-45°W), Mid-Atlantic (45°W-75°W) and Gulf of Mexico/Immediate Eastern U.S. Seaboard (75°W - 105°W). For each region, the total ACE for the 2013 season as well as the number of hurricane days is calculated. Then, the ACE values are calculated for each individual month (June-December). These values are compared with "typical" averages and analyzed. Additionally, the physical tracks of 2013 Atlantic tropical cyclones are analyzed and compared to those of a "typical" season using ArcGIS. This information quantifies the extent to which tropical cyclones in 2013 formed in anomalous locations or took anomalous paths compared to the 1995-2012 average.

It can be concluded from this study that the total ACE for 2013 was well below the average ACE value of a "typical" season. When analyzed by month, ACE for the Atlantic basin generally followed the expected climatology trend with a peak in September, but values were much smaller than climatology. It was found that 2013 ACE for the East Atlantic was about average and as expected, however ACE values from the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico/Immediate Eastern U.S. Seaboard were well below average. Climatology suggests that most tropical cyclone activity should be in the Mid-Atlantic region, but this was not the case for 2013 when most activity was located in the East Atlantic. Additionally, it was found that the number of hurricane days in 2013 was well below average, with the Mid-Atlantic region being particularly anomalous with no hurricane days in 2013.

This study will be a useful resource for meteorologists and climatologists to continue analyzing the 2013 season, and will serve as a basis for determining possible causes of the anomalous geographic distribution of tropical cyclone activity in 2013. The information herein will also be beneficial in observing long-term trends and improving seasonal outlooks in the future.


With the rapid growth of computer and communication technology, a global interconnected information infrastructure is quickly constructing through the Internet. As the information is able to travel beyond geographical and spatial borders via the Internet, and more and more people around the world have gained access to global networks, the language boundaries have to be crossed in order to make the global communication possible. Statistics shows that 74% of Internet users are non-English speakers (MiniWats Marketing Group, 2015). However, English is still the leading language in global communication environment. English language dominates 54.4% of the websites (W3Techs.com, 2015). As the Internet has become one of the major communication mechanisms for information storage, retrieval, and dissemination, users need the ability to locate and retrieve information wherever, whenever and in whatever the language it has been stored. However, most of the search engines currently available can only provide monolingual information retrieval, which means that the retrieval can only be conducted in the same language as the query language. Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) has become increasingly important to facilitate the effectiveness of information exchange among different languages. As a result, the study and development of tools and technology of cross-language information retrieval have gained greater attention over the past decade. While a lot of research has focused on the effectiveness of system functionality, few studies have examined information needs and social aspects related to cross-language information retrieval. This article aims to speculate the human and social aspects of cross-language information retrieval. It explores CLIR users' unique social and cultural contexts, their psychological and cognitive structures, and their distinctive relevance judgment. It examines in depth the barriers embedded in cultural, linguistic, and cognitive dimensions, which might hinder further advancement in crosslanguage information retrieval.


In the Bering Strait region, where Siberia and Alaska are in close proximity, the world's greatest diversity of Eskimo languages is found, with five separate languages: Inupiaq, Central Siberian Yupik, Naukan Yupik, Central Alaskan Yupik, and Sirenikski (now extinct). The results of language contact among them are evident and must be due to extensive bilingualism, although the introduction of English and Russian has vastly decreased bilingualism involving the indigenous languages. Emphasizing Inupiaq, this paper presents a number of these language-contact phenomena, from lexical borrowing to profound alterations in phonology such as the prosodic-type systems found in Seward Peninsula Inupiaq, and discusses the history of the contact.


Tasks such as street mapping and security surveillance seek a route that traverses a given space to perform a function. These task functions may involve mapping the space for accurate modeling, sensing the space for unusual activity, or searching the space for objects. When these tasks are performed autonomously by robots, the constraints of the environment must be considered in order to generate more feasible paths. Additionally, performing these tasks in the real world presents the challenge of operating in dynamic, changing environments.
This thesis addresses the problem of effective graph coverage with environmental constraints and incomplete prior map information. Prior information about the environment is assumed to be given in the form of a graph. We seek a solution that effectively covers the graph while accounting for space restrictions and online changes. For real-time applications, we seek a complete but efficient solution that has fast replanning capabilities.
For this work, we model the set of coverage problems as arc routing problems. Although these routing problems are generally NP-hard, our approach aims for optimal solutions through the use of low-complexity algorithms in a branch-and-bound framework when time permits and approximations when time restrictions apply. Additionally, we account for environmental constraints by embedding those constraints into the graph. In this thesis, we present algorithms that address the multi-dimensional routing problem and its subproblems and evaluate them on both computer-generated and physical road network data.


The purpose of this study is to examine the origins and development of the gentleman in the South. It begins with an examination of Castiglione1s The Courtier. Castiglione provided a discussion of the ideal man of Renaissance Italy. His ideal man, the courtier, possessed cultivation, character, and class. Together, these attributes made up the complete, or universal man. The Renaissance idea of the complete man profoundly influenced all later thought concerning the nature of the gentleman. The English embraced Castiglione's idea of a complete man, but they immediately adapted it to suit their own needs. The English placed much greater emphasis upon the gentleman's duty to his nation and to his fellow man. In addition, the English stressed Christian morality, expecting the gentleman to be both charitable and humble, and they also stressed the importance of the bourgeois virtues of frugality and industry. The influence of the English ideal on the colonial South is clearly identifiable. Colonists read the English advice literature which recommended the development of gentlemanly attributes, and they recommended that others follow the English ideal. Although southerners embraced the basic elements of the ideal of the English gentleman, they also adapted it to suit colonial conditions. Colonists believed that the gentleman had to possess a natural simplicity which reflected their rural life. They celebrated simplicity as one of the required virtues. Ante-bellum southerners were indebted to Castiglione, the English, and their own colonial forebears for their gentlemanly ideal. According to their letters, diaries, commencement addresses, and novels, southerners believed that the gentleman ought to be a complete man, possessing the requisite elements of class, character, and cultivation. He should possess a noble obligation to serve his nation and his fellow man; he should possess the Christian virtues of humility and charity; he should possess the bourgeois virtues of industry and frugality; and he should possess a rural simplicity. The ideal of the gentleman in the South evolved out of the European tradition, but it also began to develop distinctive characteristics during the ante-bellum period. ^Morality and honor, which had always played a role in the gentlemanly ideal, became the two most distinctive characteristics of the gentleman of the South. Those two attributes were eventually to become the most striking features of the


The author shares summaries of the supervision literature along with personal reflections and recommendations to discuss supervision's past, present, and future. Topics from the past include the heyday of clinical superevision, the University of Georgia's Department of Curriculum and Supervision, important concepts introduced by supervision scholars, and groups associated with supervision. Consideration of the present encompasses current scholarship, other recent influences on supervision, and the resurgence of the Council of Professors of Instructional Supervision (COPIS). The part of the article on supervision's future consists of hopes and recommendations for the future, with discussions of the Journal of Educational Supervision as well as recommendations for political action, teacher leadership, and fully functioning professional development schools. The author also recommends an expanded COPIS as well as partnership among scholarly groups focused on educational supervision, school districts and schools, and supervision scholars from around the world.


Foramina transversaria are located on the transverse process of cervical vertebrae. These foramina are known to exhibit variations with regard to size, shape and may even absent, incomplete or duplicated. The aim of this study is to investigate the shape, size and variations of foramina transeversaria of the human atlas vertebrae and to point out the importance of these variations. 153 atlas vertebrae of south Indian origin were studied for the presence of various shapes and size. 5 shapes are noted. Type 4 was predominant on right side, type 2 and 5 are predominant on the left side. Double foramina found in 10, incomplete foramina in 6 and accessory incomplete foramina are seen in 10. Variations between the area of right and left side of transverse foramina not much significant, but data provided in this study can be helpful in interpretation of radiographic pictures or in computerized axial tomography and angiograms. The recognition of these variations provides accurate and safety for the posterior surgical approaches of the cervical spine.


There is a fine art to presenting complex ideas with simplicity and insight, in a manner that both guides and inspires. In "Taking the Path of Zen" Robert Aitken presents the practice, lifestyle, rationale, and ideology of Zen Buddhism with remarkable clarity. The foundation of Zen is the practice of zazen, or mediation, and Aitken Roshi insists that everything flows from the center. He discusses correct breathing, posture, routine, teacher-student relations, and koan study, as well as common problems and milestones encountered in the process. Throughout the book the author returns to zazen, offering further advice and more advanced techniques. The orientation extends to various religious attitudes and includes detailed discussions of the Three Treasures and the Ten Precepts of Zen Buddhism. "Taking the Path of Zen will "serve as orientation and guide for anyone who is drawn to the ways of Zen, from the simply curious to the serious Zen student.


Indicators are a representation of reality. They are just numbers on a piece of paper or on a computer screen, but they stand for something far greater – the success of your project. Indicators are usually defined in the context of project planning and show something about or give an indication of progress towards realising the project goal, without being complete or comprehensive. Of course, there could be other representations of this reality, such as stories (Dart and Davies, 2003) or drawings (Feuerstein, 1986) or photographs (Tijm et al, 2011). However, indicators are a widely accepted way of representing what is being achieved in a programme or project.


Sequential patterns of d-gaps exist pervasively in inverted lists of Web document collection indices due to the cluster property. In this paper the information of d-gap sequential patterns is used as a new dimension for improving inverted index compression. We first detect d-gap sequential patterns using a novel data structure, UpDown Tree. Based on the detected patterns, we further substitute each pattern with its pattern Id in the inverted lists that contain it. The resulted inverted lists are then coded with an existing coding scheme. Experiments show that this approach can effectively improve the compression ratio of existing codes.


Could Napoleon have won the battle of Waterloo? And what would have happened if he had? Or suppose Nelson had not destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir, would Napoleon have conquered India and become Emperor of the East? What if Hitler had not halted his panzer forces before Dunkirk and had entrapped the entire British Expeditionary Force? How would Churchill have then denied the Wehrmacht? If by chance Hitler had been assassinated in 1944 and the German General Staff taken control, would there have been a totally different kind of surrender? In examining these and other contingencies, Major General Strawson brings his experience of command in war and his skill as a military historian to present us with an enthralling catalogue of chance and speculation, while emphasising how profoundly the character of commanders influenced events and how events affected their character.


This editorial theorizes the emotional entanglements that constitute spaces of fieldwork. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's notion of sticky and circulating emotions, we develop the concept of emotional entanglements as a way to engage with the methodological implications of the emotional turn in geographic research. Beyond providing empirical evidence for research on emotional geographies, we argue that an attention to emotions in fieldwork has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity and positionality. In addition, a critical engagement with emotions can offer novel epistemological techniques for studying the politics of knowledge production and the landscapes of power in which we, as researchers, are embedded. As the papers of this themed section demonstrate, analysis of emotional entanglements in research pose critical questions with regard to power relations, research ethics and the well-being of research participants and researchers alike. They also make visible how the power relations of sexism, racism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism permeate and constitute the emotional spaces of the field. We use the notion of emotional entanglements as a way to situate the five articles of the themed section and to highlight the contribution of each paper to debates about the emotional field.


Objective: There are limitations of Food and Drug Administration pregnancy risk classification system and pregnancy information, surplus resources are essential to evaluate the safety and to assess the risk-benefit ratio of medication use in pregnancy. The aim of the study is to characterize medication use in hospitalized pregnant women during antenatal period and correlate maternal characteristics in this population. Methods: It is a retrospective cross-sectional survey. Data of hospitalized pregnant women was collected. The FDA pregnancy risk classification was categorized for the prescribed drugs. Descriptive analysis was performed for demographic and maternal characteristics. Pearson Chi-square Fisher's exact tests are used to observe the association between the independent variables and outcome variables. Adjusted odds ratios (ORs) and 95% CIs were also estimated. Each outcome variables whose levels were with a P ( Results: Among 505 pregnant women, 75.24% were hospitalized during third trimester, and 3.17% were having comorbid conditions. 60.59% of the pregnant women received more than or equal to five drugs. 39.86% are exposed to FDA C, D or X categories of drugs during pregnancy. Category B drugs are frequently prescribed. Women whose parity is ≥ 2, length of hospital stay and with at least five medications prescribed are the factors associated to prescription of FDA C, D or X drugs during pregnancy. Conclusion: There was considerable use of medicines among the pregnant women as per the essential drug list complying fully with World Health Organization recommendations by using their international non-proprietary names. Key words: Pregnancy, Classification, Drug utilization, Public health hospital, Retrospective study.


This document is a companion to the Sequence Alignment/Map Format Specification that defines the SAM and BAM formats, and to the CRAM Format Specification that defines the CRAM format. Alignment records in each of these formats may contain a number of optional fields, each labelled with a tag identifying that field's data. This document describes each of the predefined standard tags, and discusses conventions around creating new tags.


Falls are very dangerous events among elderly people. Several automatic fall detectors have been developed to reduce the time of the medical intervention, but they cannot avoid the injures due to the fall. In this paper a study about the feasibility of a wearable system for the detection of the fall risk is presented. The aim is to detect the fall before to the impact on the floor, allowing the intervention of an impact reduction system. An electromyography-based system has been chosen because it can recognize the risk of fall faster than other more commonly used inertial sensors based system. The logical framework implements the feature extraction procedure, demonstrating a higher discriminative power of Co-contraction Indices and Integrated EMG for which at least of 70% of specificity and sensitivity are achieved in the classification process.


Previous work has demonstrated that two separate components of the systemizing trait of autism differentially predict susceptibility to the mechanisms that drive the Rod-and-Frame illusion, with an Analytical Tendencies factor associated with reduced reliance on global cues, and an Insistence on Sameness factor associated with increased susceptibility to local orientation contrast effects (Reed & Dassonville, VSS 2012). However, it is unclear whether these associations reflect atypical contextual modulation only at higher levels of processing, or whether low-level visual processes (i.e., in primary visual cortex) may also be affected. To examine this, we compared scores on the Systemizing Quotient-Revised (Wheelwright et al., 2006) in the general population to individual differences in the contextual modulation of perceived orientation induced by lateral and collinear flankers, presented at the estimated size of V1 receptive fields. When an observer judges the orientation of a central line in the presence of lateral flankers, the perceived orientation of the line is biased in the direction opposite the tilt of the flankers (a repulsive effect), while the same judgments made in the presence of collinear flankers bias the perceived orientation of the line in the same direction as the flankers (an attractive effect). We found that higher scores on the Analytical Tendencies factor of the SQ-R were associated with reduced contextual effects of collinear flankers, but were unrelated to contextual interactions induced by lateral flankers. Conversely, higher scores on the Insistence on Sameness factor were associated with increased contextual effects of lateral flankers, but were unrelated to contextual effects induced by collinear flankers. These findings suggest that distinct systemizing tendencies differentially predict low-level contextual interactions that are thought to occur in primary visual cortex, and provide insight to the relationship between the functional structure of V1 and the behavioral tendencies associated with autism. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


OBJECTIVE
To compare health-related quality of life in patients having no neck dissection and those having a selective dissection, with particular reference to shoulder dysfunction.

DESIGN
Prospective study.

SETTING
Regional Maxillofacial Unit, University Hospital Aintree, Liverpool, England.

PATIENTS
Two hundred seventy-eight consecutive patients undergoing primary surgery for previously untreated oral and oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma between January 1, 1995, and December 31, 1999.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE
The University of Washington Quality of Life questionnaire, administered on the day before surgery and at 6 months, at 12 months, and more than 18 months after surgery.

RESULTS
No neck dissection was performed in 58 patients (21%), a unilateral dissection in 181 (65%), and a bilateral dissection in 39 (14%). Patients with no neck dissection and those with unilateral level III or IV dissections had similar mean scores for shoulder dysfunction, whereas patients with unilateral level V and bilateral level III and IV dissections recorded much worse scores on average.

CONCLUSIONS
There is little subjective morbidity associated with shoulder dysfunction after a unilateral level III or IV neck dissection compared with patients undergoing primary surgery without a neck dissection. More extensive surgery in the neck, whether bilaterally removing levels I to III or IV or extending posteriorly to include level V, is associated with statistically significantly worse shoulder dysfunction.


In seven of the eight species of the Drosophila melanogaster group, the predominant cuticular hydrocarbon of males is 7-tricosene, but in the island endemic species D. sechellia it is 6-tricosene. The phylogeny of the group implies that the novel hydrocarbon profile of D. sechellia is a derived character. Genetic analysis of hybrids between D. sechellia and its close relative D. simulans show that each of the five major chromosome arms carries at least one gene affecting the ratio of the two tricosene isomers, with the right arm of the third chromosome having the largest effect. The species difference in this character is therefore polygenic with the effects of the different chromosome arms generally additive, although there is some epistasis among third-chromosome genes. Observations of courtship by males who have been coated with foreign hydrocarbons suggest that a male's hydrocarbon profile may slightly affect the degree of sexual isolation in one of the reciprocal hybridizations between these species, but that this role is small compared to that played by hydrocarbon differences between females.


In its most recent Halliburton II decision, the Supreme Court rejected an effort to overrule its prior decision in Basic Inc. v. Levinson. The Court reasoned that adherence to Basic was warranted by principles of stare decisis that operate with "special force" in the context of statutory interpretation. This Article offers an alternative justification for adhering to Basic — the collaboration between the Court and Congress that has led to the development of the private class action for federal securities fraud. The Article characterizes this collaboration as a lawmaking partnership and argues that such a partnership offers distinctive lawmaking advantages.Halliburton II offered a compelling illustration of the lawmaking partnership, as Congress and the Court together used the Basic decision as a building block to enable and then refine private securities fraud class actions. Notably, Congress took affirmative steps through legislation — the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act and the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act — to balance the competing policy objectives of allowing effective enforcement while limiting the potential for abusive litigation. The process illustrates the three critical components of a lawmaking partnership: an open-textured statute, sequential adjustments to the statutory scheme by both the Court and Congress, and a set of common objectives to guide the lawmaking enterprise. This Article argues that the existence of a lawmaking partnership offers the Court the freedom to engage in explicit policy analysis of a type that is inconsistent with a traditional textualist approach. Put differently, the partnership operates as a type of rule of construction allowing the Court to engage in its own analysis of the interpretation that will best further congressional objectives. The lawmaking partnership also offers distinctive lawmaking advantages, including efficiency, political insulation, and comparative institutional competence. An exploration of these advantages can be used to identify the potential value of the lawmaking partnership beyond federal securities fraud.


Human language is a combination of elemental languages/domains/styles that change across and sometimes within discourses. Language models, which play a crucial role in speech recognizers and machine translation systems, are particularly sensitive to such changes, unless some form of adaptation takes place. One approach to speech language model adaptation is self-training, in which a language model's parameters are tuned based on automatically transcribed audio. However, transcription errors can misguide self-training, particularly in challenging settings such as conversational speech. In this work, we propose a model that considers the confusions (errors) of the ASR channel. By modeling the likely confusions in the ASR output instead of using just the 1-best, we improve self-training efficacy by obtaining a more reliable reference transcription estimate. We demonstrate improved topic-based language modeling adaptation results over both 1-best and lattice self-training using our ASR channel confusion estimates on telephone conversations.


Recent trends in human computer interaction have focused on representations based on physical reality [4, 5, 6, 8]. The idea is to provide richer, more intuitive handles for control and manipulation compared to traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs) using a mouse. This trend underscores the need to examine the concept of manipulation and to further understand what we want to manipulate versus what we can easily manipulate. Implicit in this is the notion that the bias of the UI is often incompatible with user needs.The main goal of UI design is to reduce complexity while augmenting the ability of users to get their work done. A fundamental belief underlying our research is that complexity lies not only in what is purchased from the software and hardware manufacturers, but also in what the user creates with it. It is not just a question of making buttons and menus easier to learn and more efficient to use. It is also a question of "Given that I've created this surface in this way, how can it now be modified to achieve my current design objective?" (The observation is that how the user created the surface in the first place will affect the answer to the question.) Our thesis is that appropriate design of the system can minimize both kinds of complexity: that inherent in accessing the functionality provided by the vendor, and that created by the user. The literature focuses on the former. In what follows, we investigate some of the issues in achieving the latter. In so doing, we structure our discussion around questions of compatibility.


Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) has been widely studied in the AI community. For example, Conflict-Based Search (CBS) is a state-of-the-art MAPF algorithm based on a twolevel tree-search. However, previous MAPF algorithms assume that an agent occupies only a single location at any given time, e.g., a single cell in a grid. This limits their applicability in many real-world domains that have geometric agents in lieu of point agents. Geometric agents are referred to as "large" agents because they can occupy multiple points at the same time. In this paper, we formalize and study LAMAPF, i.e., MAPF for large agents. We first show how CBS can be adapted to solve LA-MAPF. We then present a generalized version of CBS, called Multi-Constraint CBS (MCCBS), that adds multiple constraints (instead of one constraint) for an agent when it generates a high-level search node. We introduce three different approaches to choose such constraints as well as an approach to compute admissible heuristics for the high-level search. Experimental results show that all MC-CBS variants outperform CBS by up to three orders of magnitude in terms of runtime. The best variant also outperforms EPEA* (a state-of-the-art A*-based MAPF solver) in all cases and MDD-SAT (a state-of-the-art reduction-based MAPF solver) in some cases.


The current reckoning with systemic bias and discrimination calls for centering historical and social context in narrative theory, as in other domains of academic and public life. This article undertakes that centering in rhetorical narrative theory. Informed by genre theory, it argues for theorizing narrative occasion by focusing on two dimensions: 1) the social positions it entails and 2) the conceptual frameworks it engages. Readings of two German-language texts, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774/1787) and Babak Ghassim and Usama Elyas's "Behind Us, My Country" (2015), establish continua for mapping these social positions and conceptual frameworks and for evaluating their thematic salience in the narrative. Crucially, these methods are applied not only to text-internal figures like narrators and characters but also to the real-world parties to narrative: authors and actual readers. In addition to providing a framework for describing narrative occasion, this socially attuned analysis highlights problems with rhetorical narrative theory's treatment of audience, particularly its idealization of the authorial audience. The article thus points the way toward dismantling the universal thinking embedded in other narratological categories and suggests that rhetorical and cognitive narrative theories could be combined to understand how cognitive frameworks shape narrative occasion.


"Sharp, unsentimental and ruefully funny. A fascinating portrait not only of Lively but of the times through which she has lived". (Daily Telegraph). "Clever and poignant ...there is much to enjoy. This is Lively at her best". (Sunday Express). In this powerful and compelling 'view from old age', Penelope Lively, at eighty, reports back on what she finds. There are meditations on what it is like to be old as well as on how memory shapes us. There are intriguing examinations of key personal as well as historical moments she has lived through and her thoughts on her own bookishness - both as reader and writer. Lastly, she turns to six treasured possessions to speak eloquently about who she is and where she's been - fragments of memories from a life well lived. "A superb study of memory and of her own voyage into the ninth decade of her life. Lively is a compelling, vitally interested witness to time past". (Helen Dunmore, Observer, Books of the Year). "Enthralling. Will delight all those who love Lively's novels". (Daily Mail).


The unexpected intersection of rhyolitic magma and retrieval of quenched glass particles at the Iceland Deep Drilling Project-1 geothermal well in 2009 at Krafla, Iceland, provide unprecedented opportunities to characterize the genesis, storage, and behavior of subsurface silicic magma. In this study, we analyzed the complete time series of glass particles retrieved after magma was intersected, in terms of distribution, chemistry, and vesicle textures.
 Detailed analysis of the particles revealed them to represent bimodal rhyolitic magma compositions and textures. Early-retrieved clear vesicular glass has higher SiO2, crystal, and vesicle contents than later-retrieved dense brown glass. The vesicle size and distribution of the brown glass also reveal several vesicle populations. The glass particles vary in δD from −120‰ to −80‰ and have dissolved water contents spanning 1.3−2 wt%, although the majority of glass particles exhibit a narrower range. Vesicular textures indicate that volatile overpressure release predominantly occurred prior to late-stage magma ascent, and we infer that vesiculation occurred in response to drilling-induced decompression. The textures and chemistry of the rhyolitic glasses are consistent with variable partial melting of host felsite. The drilling recovery sequence indicates that the clear magma (lower degree partial melt) overlays the brown magma (higher degree partial melt). The isotopes and water species support high temperature hydration of these partial melts by a mixed meteoric and magmatic composition fluid. The textural evidence for partial melting and lack of crystallization imply that magma production is ongoing, and the growing magma body thus has a high potential for geothermal energy extraction.
 In summary, transfer of heat and fluids into felsite triggered variable degrees of felsite partial melting and produced a hydrated rhyolite magma with chemical and textural heterogeneities that were then enhanced by drilling perturbations. Such partial melting could occur extensively in the crust above magma chambers, where complex intrusive systems can form and supply the heat and fluids required to re-melt the host rock. Our findings emphasize the need for higher resolution geophysical monitoring of restless calderas both for hazard assessment and geothermal prospecting. We also provide insight into how shallow silicic magma reacts to drilling, which could be key to future exploration of the use of magma bodies in geothermal energy.


A novel method is presented for electrically tuning the frequency of a compact radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag antenna. A tuning circuit, comprising a radio frequency (RF) switch and discrete passive components, was completely integrated into the antenna element, which is thus free of DC wires. The low-profile printed antennas were fabricated together with the layouts of the DC control circuits and other RF/baseband circuit footprints. A surface-mounted varactor was applied as a frequency-tuning element at the proper places of the meandered slots in the compact antenna. Prototype designs showed that the in-band frequency (return loss < 10 dB) was tunable from 2.4 GHz to 2.8 GHz when the bias voltage varied from 4 V to 7 V. The impact of the tuning circuit on the antenna's return loss and radiation pattern were experimentally studied through comparison with the performance of a reference antenna not incorporating the tuning circuit. The proposed frequency tuning concept can be extended to more complex compact structures as well as other types of antennas to give enhanced electrical performance.


Endogenous pseudophosphatases involved in the transition from oocyte to zygote inhibit kinase activity by "substrate trapping." The transition from egg to embryo is complex and involves two stages. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, an unusual dual specificity kinase MBK-2, a member of the DYRK family, plays a crucial role in the egg-to-embryo transition by regulating the activity of proteins involved in meiosis. DYRK are self-activating kinases that become autophosphorylated on a tyrosine residue during translation and then serve as serine/threonine kinases. MBK-2 is sequestered in the cytosol before meiotic division by the interaction of the pseudophosphatase EGG-3 with a region of MBK-2 outside the catalytic domain, and release of MBK-2 requires the activity of cyclin-dependent kinase 1 (CDK-1) and the ubiquitin ligase APC/C. Cheng et al. now show that the activity of MBK-2 during meiosis is stimulated by phosphorylation by CDK-1 and is inhibited by two closely related pseudophosphatases, EGG-4 and EGG-5 (EGG-4/5), which act as substrate-trapping molecules, binding, but not dephosphorylating, MBK-2 at the autophosphorylated tyrosine residue and preventing MBK-2 from phosphorylating its substrates. In vitro kinase assays showed that MBK-2 (a catalytically inactive mutant) was phosphorylated by CDK-1 on Ser68. In adult worms, phosphorylated MBK-2 was detected only in mature hermaphrodites, which have both oocytes and embryos, but not in young adults, which contain only oocytes but no embryos. Furthermore, a S68E phosphorylation mimicking mutant MBK-2, but not a S68A mutant, rescued mbk-2 mutants. When CDK-1 was knocked down, phosphorylation of an MBK-2 substrate MEI-1 was reduced in worms expressing wild-type MBK-2 but not in worms expressing the S68E mutant. Unexpectedly, phosphorylation by CDK-1 did not appear to directly stimulate the kinase activity of MBK-2, because when expressed and immunoprecipitated from mammalian cells and then exposed to hCDK-1, MBK-2 and the S68A mutant exhibited similar activities toward recombinant MEI-1, and when produced as recombinant proteins in bacteria, wild-type MBK-2, S68A, and S68E all showed similar catalytic activity. Thus, CDK-1 phosphorylation likely promotes the interaction of MBK-2 with other regulatory molecules to stimulate MBK-2 activity during meiosis. The authors investigated MBK-2 activity in oocytes of worms deficient for EGG-4/5 and found that phosphorylated MEI-1 was present in the most mature oocytes; when EGG-4/5 were knocked down in the presence of S68E MBK-2, however, phosphorylated MEI-1 was also present in less mature oocytes. Because EGG-4/5, like MBK-2, are released into the cytosol in worms deficient for EGG-3, the author postulated that EGG-4/5 did not inhibit MBK-2 through a sequestration mechanism. The ability of EGG-3 and EGG-4/5 required their pseudophosphatase active sites, but EGG-3 bound to MBK-2 at the N terminus and did not require the ATP-binding site of MBK-2. In contrast, EGG-4/5 bound MBK-2 at the active site and required at least one of the tyrosines at the MBK-2 active site and the MBK-2 ATP-binding site. These interactions were confirmed in worms by colocalization and coimmunoprecipitation analysis. EGG-4 inhibited MBK-2 activity in an in vitro kinase assay without altering the tyrosine phosphorylation state of MBK-2. Kinetic analysis suggested that EGG-4 altered the Km and the Vmax of the activity of MBK-2 for MEI-1. Thus, the self-activating kinase MBK-2 uses CDK-1 phosphorylation to stimulate activity in specific contexts and pseudophosphatases to inhibit activity through two mechanisms, sequestration and direct inhibition of the kinase (see commentary by Tonks). N. K. Tonks, Pseudophosphatases: Grab and hold on. Cell 139, 464–465 (2009). [Online Journal] K. C.-C. Cheng, R. Klancer, A. Singson, G. Seydoux, Regulation of MBK-2/DYRK by CDK-1 and the pseudophosphatases EGG-4 and EGG-5 during the oocyte-to-embryo transition. Cell 139, 560–572 (2009). [Online Journal]


Conspiracy theories cover topics from politicians to world events. Frequently, proponents of conspiracies hold these beliefs strongly despite available evidence that may challenge or disprove them. Therefore, conspiratorial reasoning has often been described as illegitimate or flawed. Here, we explore the possibility of growing a rational (Bayesian) conspiracy theorist through an Agent-Based Model. The agent has reasonable constraints on access to the total information as well its access to the global population. The model shows that network structures are central to maintain objectively mistaken beliefs. Increasing the size of the available network, yielded increased confidence in mistaken beliefs and subsequent network pruning, allowing for belief purism. Rather than ameliorating and correcting mistaken beliefs (where agents move toward the correct mean), large networks appear to maintain and strengthen them. As such, large networks may increase the potential for belief polarization, extreme beliefs, and conspiratorial thinking – even amongst Bayesian agents.


The recent federal mandates influenced by 2001's No Child Left Behind Act have had an impact on staffing schools throughout the nation. One of the requirements of the act is that a "highly qualified teacher" must teach each child. The United States Department of Education predicts that by the 2011-12 school year, between 3.2 and 3.9 million teachers will be needed to fill vacancies in public schools (U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, 2007). Although universities in the United States are producing a large number of education graduates, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future states that nearly one-fourth of new teachers leave the profession within their first three years of teaching. In urban areas, the attrition rate is even greater with about half of the new teachers in urban schools leaving the profession within five years (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future 2002, as cited in Curran & Goldrick, 2002). Furthermore, teachers working in schools in which the minority enrollment is greater than 50% tend to leave at rates more than twice those of teachers in schools with fewer minorities (NCES, 1998 as cited in Haycock, 2000). Alternative Certification programs have been developed to recruit people to teaching who possess bachelor's degrees or higher in another field. Although the nature of these programs varies by school district, they share the goal of placing qualified teachers in often hard to staff classrooms. These new teachers often earn their teaching certificates by taking certification classes each year while they teach full time. Typically, these teachers who possess the least amount of teaching experience are most often placed with little support in the most challenged classrooms (Carey, 2004), many of which are difficult for an experienced teacher to handle. Assuming the role as classroom teacher without preparation is difficult at best. First, because these alternative entry teachers have not previously taken child development, planning, methods, or classroom management classes, they often lack important foundational professional knowledge. Second, although research indicates that teachers teach best the subjects they know best, only one-third of teachers in high-poverty schools are certified to teach their subject (Carey, 2004). As they encounter these challenges, alternatively certified teachers typically "learn on the job" and need tremendous support as they learn to create, instruct, and evaluate curricula that maximizes student learning (Haberman, 1991). For those entering the teaching profession, learning to plan lessons appropriate both for students' needs and grade level requirements is imperative. According to Ornstein (1997), novice teachers need to practice writing plans, and then implement those plans within their field placements. The opportunity to link theory and practice provides the experience needed to bring what is learned in teacher education classes into the elementary classroom. Without this experience, new teachers struggle to bridge theory and practice. John (1991) agrees that practical experiences are the primary influence on how novice teachers learn to plan. Because the importance of practical experience is a common theme in the existing literature, alternative certification elementary teachers, many of whom do not receive a range of methods classes, need support as they learn to plan and implement instruction. By having opportunities to both design and implement instruction, these novice teachers learn to recognize their students' needs which helps them to plan more relevant, appropriate, and effective lessons. Differentiated Instruction (DI) is an approach that recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of diverse learners and requires the teacher to base instructional accommodations on student strengths and weaknesses (Tomlinson, 2001). Specifically, teachers use DI strategies to adjust the content, process, or product of instruction depending on student needs (Tomlinson, 2001). …


Poly(vinylidene difluoride) (PVDF) has piezoelectric properties suitable for numerous applications such as flexible electronics, sensing and biomedical materials. In this study, individual fibers with diameters ranging from 17-55 μm were processed using melt electrowriting (MEW). Electroactive PVDF fibers can be fabricated via MEW, while the polymer could remain molten for up to ten hours without noticeable changes in the resulting fiber diameter. MEW processing parameters for PVDF were investigated, including applied voltage, pressure and temperature. A rapid fiber characterization methodology for MEW that automatically determines the fiber diameters from camera images taken of microscope slides was developed and validated. The outputs from this approach followed previous MEW processing trends already identified with different polymers, although overestimation of the < 25 micron fiber diameters was observed. The transformation of the PVDF crystalline phase to the electroactive beta-phase – without poling – was confirmed using piezo-force microscopy and revealed that the PVDF fibers possess piezoelectric responses showing d33~19 pm/V.


Learning a new software application can be a challenge, requiring the user to enter a new environment where their existing knowledge and skills do not apply, or worse, work against them. To ease this transition, we propose the idea of cross-application bridges that start with the interface of a familiar application, and gradually change their interaction model, tools, conventions, and appearance to resemble that of an application to be learned. To investigate this idea, we developed Blocks-to-CAD, a cross-application bridge from Minecraft-style games to 3D solid modeling. A user study of our system demonstrated that our modifications to the game did not hurt enjoyment or increase cognitive load, and that players could successfully apply knowledge and skills learned in the game to tasks in a popular 3D solid modeling application. The process of developing Blocks-to-CAD also revealed eight design strategies that can be applied to design cross-application bridges for other applications and domains.


Property markets move in cycles, and tracking them is critical for an investor. The proposed framework, called Betanalytics, uses statistical tools to anticipate changes in property trends. It generates lead signals giving time buffers to re-configure a portfolio for a downturn or an upswing. Coverage: Back testing results, currently focusing on UK and European Office sector, show a success rate of 80% plus consistently across 21 cities. Nine variables across each city complete the framework. These include: Sales Prices, Rental Rates, Yields, Spreads between Government Bonds and Property yields, GDP, Production, Unemployment, Inflation, Interest Rates. What does it do? For London office market alone, from Q2-1984 to Q3-2011 an investor would have captured 87-96% of the rallies and avoided 69-95% of the downtime. Sales price chart alone generates a hit rate of 86%. Combining signals with other variables improves this. Note: London is probably the trickiest market to analyse because it attracts foreign capital. Limitations: The computer program is only an enabler, not the product. Interpretation is key. The framework does not forecast in a conventional sense (using regression); it primarily helps understand the risk-reward ratio within market cycles. It does not guarantee success, but it signals high probability set-ups based on a back-tested model. Key findings: i Rentals lag Sales: Sales are speculative and Rentals are need-based. i Rentals are less volatile than Sales: Sales are transaction-based, hence momentary. Rentals are contractual, hence sticky. i Macro factors: GDP, Inflation, Interest Rates and Production hold limited correlation with property cycles. They are useful for general overview. i Unemployment: Employment actually tends to be counter-cyclical to Property. High unemployment: distressed sellers, attractive yields time to buy. Low unemployment: high inflation, compressed yields ii time to sell (or hedge). Bonds and Property Yields: the correlation exists, but not consistent across 21 cities.


Despite predictions of the "death of the past" and the "end of history," the past refuses to go away. In fact, the start of the twenty-first century has seen an upsurge of interest in popular representations of history on the large and small screen, and of impassioned political conflicts over rival understandings of the past. Historical responsibility and apology have become contentious topics of domestic politics and of international diplomatic relations, and memory a profitable commodity for sale to mass markets. Against this background, how do historians deal with the problems of the search for "historical truth" ? The Past Within Us approaches these issues by examining the problems of representing history in the popular media. Drawing on examples from East Asian and American as well as European history, it poses the question: What happens when accounts of history are transferred from one medium to another? How far does the medium shape the message? How can historians deploy contemporary media in ways which evoke and develop the historical imagination? From the romances of Walter Scott to Steven Spielberg blockbusters, from online Irish nationalism to Japanese revisionist comic books, The Past Within Us explores some of the more dramatic modern popular representations and reflects on the key challenges and possibilities for the communication of history in a multimedia age.


Aerial architecture of seed plants is determined by the development of repeating modules named phytomers. An important factor therein is the formation and fate of axillary meristems (AMs), influencing agronomically important traits, like inflorescence architecture and shoot branching. The present study in tomato represents a reverse genetics approach unveiling the function of genes homologous to the MYB and bHLH proteins, Blind and LAX, two key regulators of axillary meristem initiation.
Public databases and PCR technology enabled the identification of three closely related paralogs of Blind, Blind-like1 (Bli1), Bli2 and Bli3. TILLING of Bli2 led to the identification of the classical tomato mutant potato leaf (c), a mutant described already more than a hundred years ago. potato leaf mutants display leaves with reduced leaflet formation and lack leaf lobing and serration. Nine potato leaf alleles were identified, all carrying a mutation in the Bli2 gene. RNA in-situ hybridisation revealed a distinct expression pattern in leaf primordia prior to leaflet formation, at positions axillary of outgrowing leaflets and marking the sinuses of leaf lobes. Ectopic expression of Blind (Bl) partially complemented the defects of c, indicating a conserved function of the two proteins. Silencing of Bli3 revealed that this gene probably acts in the same process as C, because RNAi plants displayed reduced leaf complexity. The protein similarity of Bl and C, the partial complementation of c by Bl and the phenotype of Bli3 RNAi plants represent further elements in the rising evidence that leaf dissection and AM initiation employ homologous mechanisms.
Furthermore, silencing of Bli1 and Bli3 unveiled that these genes redundantly regulate AM initiation in vegetative and reproductive development. The defect in AM initiation along the shoot axis was complementary to the defect of blind mutants. RNA in-situ hybridisation showed major expression domains of Blind in the shoot apical meristem, at positions of presumptive leaf primordium formation and adaxially of leaf primordia. Additionally, Blind mRNA accumulated adaxially of new reproductive and vegetative meristems. Besides AM initiation, Bl, Bli1 and Bli3 act in the prevention of concaulescent fusions of vegetative and reproductive side-shoots. Moreover, a series of observations disclosed that Bl, Bli1 and Bli3 control the maintenance and reproductive identity of apical and axillary meristems.
In a second project, silencing of the bHLH transcription factor SlLax in tomato, led to the identification of the classical mutant, uniflora. SlLax/Uniflora encodes an ortholog of the AM initiation regulators, LAX (rice), ba1 (maize) and ROB (Arabidopsis). Uniflora (Uf) was known to control inflorescence architecture and flowering time in a condition dependent manner. Detailed analysis of organogenesis in different uniflora mutant lines, unveiled that Uf controls the initiation of reproductive axillary meristems and regulates reproductive meristem identity. RNA in-situ hybridisation indicated that Uf mRNA accumulates adaxially of newly initiated reproductive AMs, similar to the expression pattern of Blind in inflorescences. Heterodimers of bHLH and MYB proteins regulate several developmental processes. Previous studies showed that the Uf and Blind orthologous proteins ROB and RAX of Arabidopsis interact physically. The phenotypic similarities of Uf and Bl, Bli1 and Bli3 loss of function plants, and the overlapping expression patterns of Uf and Bl strongly suggest that also in tomato these MYB and bHLH proteins may act as heterodimers controlling AM initiation and meristem identity in reproductive development. Together, the observations in tomato, rice, maize and Arabidopsis propose that heterodimers of Blind and LAX orthologous MYB and bHLH proteins constitute a fundamental mechanism, controlling axillary meristem formation in flowering plants.
In summary, the present study unveiled the identity of two classical mutants and demonstrated that genes of the Blind family and Uniflora regulate four important features of aerial plant architecture in tomato: leaf compoundness, organ separation, axillary meristem initiation and the development of apical meristems.


We present a process for rendering a realistic facial performance with control of viewpoint and illumination. The performance is based on one or more high-quality geometry and reflectance scans of an actor in static poses, driven by one or more video streams of a performance. We compute optical flow correspondences between neighboring video frames, and a sparse set of correspondences between static scans and video frames. The latter are made possible by leveraging the relightability of the static 3D scans to match the viewpoint(s) and appearance of the actor in videos taken in arbitrary environments. As optical flow tends to compute proper correspondence for some areas but not others, we also compute a smoothed, per-pixel confidence map for every computed flow, based on normalized cross-correlation. These flows and their confidences yield a set of weighted triangulation constraints among the static poses and the frames of a performance. Given a single artist-prepared face mesh for one static pose, we optimally combine the weighted triangulation constraints, along with a shape regularization term, into a consistent 3D geometry solution over the entire performance that is drift free by construction. In contrast to previous work, even partial correspondences contribute to drift minimization, for example, where a successful match is found in the eye region but not the mouth. Our shape regularization employs a differential shape term based on a spatially varying blend of the differential shapes of the static poses and neighboring dynamic poses, weighted by the associated flow confidences. These weights also permit dynamic reflectance maps to be produced for the performance by blending the static scan maps. Finally, as the geometry and maps are represented on a consistent artist-friendly mesh, we render the resulting high-quality animated face geometry and animated reflectance maps using standard rendering tools.


Recently, internet social media has been championed as an important tool for political activism and democracy. Many models exist for various types of group action, with many inspired by Granovetter's threshold model of collective action, but these models don't distinguish between the effects of specific types of actions. I begin with a network model of collective action for Twitter and interpret it for cascades of retweets during recent political activism for various roles. Although identities are easiest to understand strictly by the labels we use to denote them, I will show how identities iterate over practice and labels in this community. By connecting characteristics of network models and previous analysis of retweets, I will show how a person's history influences his or her actions and how those actions dictate chosen identities.


Applied project submitted to the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Ashesi University, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, April 2019


Feminists have researched the link between gender and HIV/AIDS and shown that women are not always morally responsible for being HIV-positive. This article contributes to the debate by presenting a systematic discussion of women's experience of HIV/AIDS and spirituality. It offers a model of full humanity that interprets the links between HIV/AIDS, poverty, and gender and uses feminist spirituality as a resource for transformed healing. The model was developed by weaving together the interpreted experiences of black, HIV-positive women participants with the teachings of feminist Christian spirituality. This research study shows that in responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it is necessary to adopt an integrative, multifaceted and holistic approach that embodies the gender perspective so that the fully human spirituality of people and women in particular, is enhanced.


Creative Arts is a core and compulsory subject in Nigerian upper basic classes, but the students' performance over the years indicated high failure. Instructional strategies play a pivotal role in improving students' performance. Computer-based instructions such as animated drawings could be a possible solution. This research adopted the design and development type. The between groups repeated measure design compared pretest and post-test scores of participants to identify differences after treatment. To validate the instruments, test re-test method was used; Pearson product moment correlation co-efficient yielded a reliability value of .94. Also, 674 upper basic school students consisting of 387 public and 287 private schools students, 338 males, and 336 females were involved in the study. Seven research questions and seven corresponding hypotheses were raised and tested respectively. ANOVA and t-test were used for hypotheses testing. Findings of the study showed that computer-based animated drawings instruction enhanced performance. It was recommended among others that the classroom teacher should embrace the strategy for Creative Arts classes; authors and curriculum planners should create more opportunities for computer-based animated drawing in explaining procedures for instruction to enhance learning and improve performance


In her recently published book, Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom, Cynthia Lee weaves together an array of case narratives to argue that the concept of reasonableness in self-defense and provocation cases allows majority culture defendants to benefit from jurors' deeply ingrained biases. She makes her case by drawing from three categories of cases: men who claim they were provoked to kill by female infidelity; gay panic cases, in which heterosexual defendants claim self-defense or provocation from unwanted homosexual advances; and racialized fear cases, in which white defendants claim self-defense to justify the killing of victims of color. Lee argues that the role of reasonableness in the law of criminal defenses permits the majority culture defendants in these cases to benefit from unspoken juror biases that render male jealousy, heterosexual protectiveness, and white fears of people of color understandable. Lee's reassessment of the reasonableness requirement launches primarily from her concern about this inequity. Having identified her primary concern, Lee devotes the bulk of her book to the development of three reforms. First, she argues that jurors should be required to apply a normative concept of reasonableness in addition to an empirical one, focusing not only on what most individuals might have believed or done in the defendant's situation, but also on what an individual ought to have believed or done. Second, she maintains that jurors should evaluate the reasonableness of not only the defendant's beliefs, but also his actions. Finally, and most interestingly, Lee encourages a trial practice of switching, in which jurors would be asked to switch the races, genders, and sexual orientations of the parties involved in the case in order to expose any hidden biases. In this review, I attempt to situate Lee's recommendations within the broader debates in current criminal law scholarship between rule-based and standard-based defenses and between objective and subjective standards for judging claims of reasonableness. Situating her analysis within the broader literature on criminal defenses, I recharacterize her recommendation that jurors evaluate the reasonableness of both the defendant's beliefs and his conduct as a call for criminal defenses defined by flexible standards, rather than by imperfect rules intended to reflect those standards. Only when defenses have resorted to imperfect rules has it created the potential for defendants who believed reasonably, but behaved unreasonably, to avoid criminal liability. I then turn to Lee's suggestion of using switching and attempt to discern its implications for the broader dichotomy between subjective and objective standards of reasonableness. The standard story here juxtaposes an objective standard of reasonableness with a so-called subjective one in which jurors evaluate the defendant's reasonableness by comparing him to a hypothetical reasonable person sharing all of the individual defendant's relevant character traits. Although the battered woman has been depicted as the poster child of subjectivity, Lee adds a new dimension to this traditional dichotomy by suggesting that it is not battered women but, rather, white, heterosexual men who are most able to manipulate the concept of reasonableness by invoking dominant cultural norms. Although Lee sees switching as a way to neutralize stereotypes in the cases that concern her, I see it more broadly as a method of implementing an objective, contextualized standard of reasonableness in which jurors would compare the defendant to a hypothetical neutral reasonable person - without gender, race, or sexual orientation - in the defendant's situation. By tackling their intuitive responses to switching exercises, jurors conjuring a neutral reasonable person in the defendant's shoes might best be able to isolate the relevant, objective circumstances that should properly contextualize the defendant's situation, a task that has troubled courts and scholars since the emergence of the battered woman self-defense cases.


The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been funded to create a collection registry and item-level metadata repository for digital collections and content created under the auspices of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant (NLG) program. The first stages of developing the collection registry are described: defining a collection; surveying current collection description schemas and registries; and determining which schema to use and whether to modify it. Next steps will include populating the registry, testing the efficacy of the schema and designing internal and public interface.


Glycerin is an organic compound with an alcoholic function and can be esterified into fatty acids to form triglycerides. Due to the increasing availability of glycerin, studies that determine the best level of its inclusion in diets for ruminants are needed. This study evaluated the effects of glycerin supplementation on the proximate composition and fatty acid profile of the longissimus lumborum of heifers fed on Brachiaria brizantha pasture. Thirty-six heifers were distributed in a totally randomized design with four treatments (G0.0 = without glycerin, G4.6 = 4.6% glycerin, G9.3 = 9.3% glycerin and G14.3 = 14.3% glycerin). The addition of glycerin decreased the tetradecanoic and octadecanoic fatty acids but increased the pentadecanoic, heptadecanoic, heptadecenoic, eicosanoic, eicosatetraenoic and docosatetraenoic fatty acids. The saturated (SFA), monounsaturated (MUFA) and omega-3 (n-3) fatty acid concentrations were similar across the diets. However, the polyunsaturated (PUFA) concentrations and the PUFA:MUFA and n-6:n-3 ratios increased with the inclusion of glycerin in the diet. Glycerin levels up to 14.3% (corresponding to a substitution of 50.5% of corn for this byproduct as an energy source) did not alter the proximate composition of the meat but improved the fatty acid profile of the longissimus lumborum muscle and, consequently, increased the meat quality, potentially providing benefits for human health.


The duty of candor has developed significantly over the past century of Delaware corporate jurisprudence. As the duty currently stands, corporate directors and officers owe a duty to disclose material information to the shareholders. In light of recent corporate scandals - most notably those involving options backdating - a significant gap has appeared which could be aptly filled by an expansion of the duty of candor so that corporate officers owe a duty to disclose material information to the directors. If the duty of candor were expanded to encompass corporate officers' communications with directors, then directors would be better suited to fulfill their fiduciary duties. Using Desimone v. Barrows as a case study, this article summarizes the current state of the duty of candor in Delaware case law and suggests an expansion of that duty. After review of the options backdating cases, this article concludes that an internal duty of candor would have provided a way for shareholders to bring derivative suits on behalf of the corporation against the officers who knowingly engaged in the deceptive behavior. Imposing liability for a breach of an officer's duty of candor to the corporation would provide a remedy for the corporation - and its shareholders - for the alleged wrongdoing.


In the present paper, a computational algorithm is proposed for the motion ofa beam which is constrained by unilateral contact at prescribed contact sites. Special attention is focused on the numerical difficulties arising due to the iteration between the beam equation of motion and the contact algorithm, and a method to overcome these difficulties is suggested. The algorithm also includes wear, and the dynamical properties of the system are allowed to change gradually as the contact sites wear down.


Purpose: Purpose of the article is to describe the information needs of individual users of financial statements. Individual users have different needs of information, but in one need they are agreed. Some information, requiring users of accounting information the financial statements does not. Shortcomings of financial statements result from incomplete harmonization of Czech financial statements to International Financial Reporting Standards.
 Scientific aim: The main aim of this article is evaluating how output accounting information company contained in company financial statements come up to the expectations person, who are ask for the information. This may point to the shortcomings of the financial statements.
 Methods: The article is based on studies published in theme of information needs users of financial statements. Studies will be confronted with information potential of financial statements focused of the equity. In this article is mainly used logical and empirical methods. From logical methods was selected base pair-methods: Induction-illiation, analysis-synthesis and abstraction- concretization. From empiric methods was selected method comparison.
 Findings: The user of accounting information are agreed in one need. They need infrormation about going concern company. Financial statements does not contain this information. The reproduction of the equity can ensure going concern. The equity can be viewed in two ways. Looking in the equity like to production capacity the company, is one way. This method brings the idea that company can continue, when the equity is reproduced. But this method needs valuating all balance and profit and loss sheet items in regular price. Assess value in historical price causes overvalued trading income (undervalued of costs) and undervalued the equity.
 Conslusions: Reproduction of the equity must be ensured to going concern company. It can be ensured by assess valuation in regular prices instead historical. Stiffen up the condition for pay profit, it is the second solution.


Trees provide a wide variety of ecosystem services to society and form the character of the environment and landscape. The analyses of tree populations and their resistance to changing conditions related to climate change typically focus on urban tree communities or forest trees. Similar studies on non-forest trees in the open landscape are largely missing; even the evidence on tree species abundance and distribution is sporadic. The article aims to expand the current evidence by a large-scale study on roadside trees in the Czech Republic. Using an extensive dataset that covers 91.2% of the total tree population along roads in nine NUTS3 regions, we assess the state and observed practices in selecting tree genera for roadside planting and discuss the implications for sustainable tree planning and management. Our survey documented 133,169 tree individuals belonging to 116 species and 40 genera. The results show that 75% of the total roadside plantings along second-class motorways and first-class roads are represented by seven main genera of deciduous trees (Acer, Fraxinus, Tilia, Malus, Betula, Populus, and Quercus), the distribution of which is similar across most Czech regions. New plantings have shifted only a little from the original species distribution. Traditional roadside species are becoming a more popular choice among new plantings, and the effort not to let the invasive trees outgrow into the mature stage is apparent. Most of the original and newly planted species are relatively suitable for emerging risks related to climate change. To achieve more sustainable patterns in roadside tree species composition in the future, especially the susceptibility of some commonly planted roadside tree species to emerging pests and diseases (e.g., Fraxinus excelsior) and to unfavorable site conditions typical for roadside tree stands (Tilia cordata) is of relevance to tree managers. The relative abundance of tree genera was proven to be similar in most studied regions, which makes the recommendations equally relevant for roadside tree managers across the country.


The release of genetically modified plants is governed by regulations that aim to provide an assessment of potential impact on the environment. One of the most important components of this risk assessment is an evaluation of the probability of gene flow. In this review, we provide an overview of the current literature on gene flow from transgenic plants, providing a framework of issues for those considering the release of a transgenic plant into the environment. For some plants gene flow from transgenic crops is well documented, and this information is discussed in detail in this review. Mechanisms of gene flow vary from plant species to plant species and range from the possibility of asexual propagation, short- or long-distance pollen dispersal mediated by insects or wind and seed dispersal. Volunteer populations of transgenic plants may occur where seed is inadvertently spread during harvest or commercial distribution. If there are wild populations related to the transgenic crop then hybridization and eventually introgression in the wild may occur, as it has for herbicide resistant transgenic oilseed rape (Brassica napus). Tools to measure the amount of gene flow, experimental data measuring the distance of pollen dispersal, and experiments measuring hybridization and seed survivability are discussed in this review. The various methods that have been proposed to prevent gene flow from genetically modified plants are also described. The current "transgenic traits" in the major crops confer resistance to herbicides and certain insects. Such traits could confer a selective advantage (an increase in fitness) in wild plant populations in some circumstances, were gene flow to occur. However, there is ample evidence that gene flow from crops to related wild species occurred before the development of transgenic crops and this should be taken into account in the risk assessment process.


With growing demand for cardiovascular implants, improving the performance of artificial blood-contacting devices is a task that deserves close attention. Current prostheses made of fluorocarbon polymers such as expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) suffer from early thrombosis and require periodic replacement. A great number of attempts have already been made to improve blood compatibility of artificial surfaces, but only few of them found commercial implementation. One of the surfaces under intensive research for cardiovascular use is amorphous carbon-based coatings produced by means of the plasma-assisted deposition. However, this class of coatings can be produced using various techniques leading to a number of coatings with different properties. Carbon coatings produced in different plasmas may be of hard diamond-like type or soft graphite-like type, doping with different elements also changes the surface structure and properties. Taking this into account, the search for blood-compatible coating requires the understanding of surface composition and structure and its influence on blood-compatibility. This work attempts to advance our knowledge of this field. Here, commercial PTFE thin film was used as a working material, which composition corresponds to the composition of modern ePTFE vascular grafts and which compatibility with blood we tried to improve by deposition of nitrogenated amorphous carbon (a-CN) coatings in the plasma. Biocompatibility was assessed by a number of tests including the interaction with whole blood and various cells such as platelets, endothelial cells, neutrophils, and fibroblasts. Most of tests showed the blood compatibility of coated surface is better than that of untreated PTFE. Physico-chemical and morphological properties of coated surfaces were studied in parallel using x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS), electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), atomic force microscopy (AFM). Some correlation between the structure of coatings and blood compatibility was inferred. It was found that at first nitrogen incorporation into amorphous carbon film stimulates blood compatibility. However, when nitrogen fraction increases over 23-25 %, no further improvement but reduction of blood compatibility was observed. Conclusion is made that for best biomedical performance, nitrogen percentage in a-CN coatings must be adjusted to the optimum value.


Climate change is a phenomenon that has the potential of affecting all natural and human systems and may be a threat to human development. This is particularly the case in developing countries. This paper is a theoretical article that uses secondary sources of data including weather events that occurred recently to appraise climate change and agriculture in Nigeria. The results have shown that human activities are largely responsible for climate change experienced in different parts of the globe today. These activities have led to increased concentration of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and they are associated with the industrialised countries and some emerging nations. Agriculture in Nigeria is entirely dependent on climate and changes in climate are bound to affect it. This paper found out that climate change has already had a negative impact on agriculture in Nigeria especially in the last few years. It is therefore recommended that conscious efforts should be made towards mitigating the impacts of climate change on agriculture in Nigeria.

 Keywords: Climate change, Agriculture, Nigeria.


This volume combines three reference works, "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations", "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs" and "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins". The dictionary of quotations has been revised and updated, maintaining extensive coverage of literary and historical quotations. It contains over 9000 quotations from nearly 2000 authors; new appendices have been added on Sayings of the Nineties, Slogans and Popular Misquotations, bringing the dictionary fully up to date. A useful keyword index helps the reader to trace quotations and their authors. The dictionary of proverbs covers sayings from "the more the merrier" to "there's no such thing as a free lunch", with over 1000 of the best-known English proverbs from around the world. For this second edition, many new quotations have been added to illustrate the proverbs, and over 100 proverbs are included for the first time. A new thematic index helps you find proverbs on subjects ranging from bee-keeping to stress. The dictionary of word origins is Based on "The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology" in a concise edition comprising over 17,000 entries. It contains a wealth of information about our language and its history, including the origins for "assassin" (from the Arabic for hashish-eater), "nice" (which meant foolish or stupid in the 13th century, and coy or shy in the 15th) and "shrapnel" (named after its inventor, General Henry Shrapnel).


This book brings together recent and ongoing empirical studies to examine two relational kinds of politics, namely, the politics of nature, i.e. how nature conservation projects are sites on which power relations play out, and the politics of the scientific study of nature. These are discussed in their historical and present contexts, and at specific sites on which particular human-environment relations are forged or contested. This spatio-temporal juxtaposition is lacking in current research on political ecology while the politics of science appears marginal to critical scholarship on social nature. Specifically, the book examines power relations in nature-related activities, demonstrates conditions under which nature and science are politicised, and also accounts for political interests and struggles over nature in its various forms. The ecological, socio-political and economic dimensions of nature cannot be ignored when dealing with present-day environmental issues. Nature conservation regulations are concerned with the management of flora and fauna as much as with humans. Various chapters in the book pay attention to the ways in which nature, science and politics are interrelated and also co-constitutive of each other. They highlight that power relations are naturalised through science and science-related institutions and projects such as museums, botanical gardens, wetlands, parks and nature reserves.


In 1774, as the new world simmered with tensions that would lead to the violent birth of a new nation, two Rhode Island brothers were heading toward their own war over the issue that haunts America to this day: slavery.Set against a colonial backdrop teeming with radicals and reactionaries, visionaries, spies, and salty sea captains, "Sons of Providence" is the biography of John and Moses Brown, two classic American archetypes bound by blood yet divided by the specter of more than half a million Africans enslaved throughout the colonies. John is a profit-driven robber baron running slave galleys from his wharf on the Providence waterfront; his younger brother Moses is an idealist, a conscientious Quaker hungry for social reform who -- with blood on his own hands -- strikes out against the hypocrisy of slavery in a land of liberty. Their story spans a century, from John's birth in 1736, through the Revolution, to Moses' death in 1836. The brothers were partners in business and politics and in founding the university that bears their name. They joined in the struggle against England, attending secret sessions of the Sons of Liberty and, in John's case, leading a midnight pirate raid against a British revenue cutter. But for the Browns as for the nation, the institution of slavery was the one question that admitted no middle ground. Moses became an early abolitionist while John defended the slave trade and broke the laws written to stop it. The brothers' dispute takes the reader from the sweltering decks of the slave ships to the taverns and town halls of the colonies and shows just how close America came to ending slavery eighty years before the conflagration of civil war. Thisdual biography is drawn from voluminous family papers and other primary sources and is a dramatic story of an epic struggle for primacy between two very different brothers. It also provides a fresh and panoramic view of the founding era. Samuel Adams and Nathanael Greene take turns here, as do Stephen Hopkins, Rhode Island's great revolutionary leader and theorist, and his brother Esek, first commodore of the United States Navy. We meet the Philadelphia abolitionists Anthony Benezet and James Pemberton, and Providence printer John Carter, one of the pioneers of the American press. For all the chronicles of America's primary patriarch, none documents, as this book does, George Washington's sole public performance in opposition to the slave trade.Charles Rappleye brings the skills of an investigative journalist to mine this time and place for vivid detail and introduce the reader to fascinating new characters from the members of our founding generation. Raised in a culture of freedom and self-expression, Moses and John devoted their lives to the pursuit of their own visions of individual liberty. In so doing, each emerges as an American archetype -- Moses as the social reformer, driven by conscience and dedicated to an enlightened sense of justice; John as the unfettered capitalist, defiant of any effort to constrain his will. The story of their collaboration and their conflict has a startlingly contemporary feel. And like any good yarn, the story of the Browns tells us something about ourselves.


The R environment provides a natural platform for developing new statistical methods due to the mathematical expressiveness of the language, the large number of existing libraries, and the active developer community. One drawback to R, however, is the learning curve; programming is a deterrent to non-technical users, who typically prefer graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to command line environments. Thus, while statisticians develop new methods in R, practitioners are often behind in terms of the statistical techniques they use as they rely on GUI applications. Meta-analysis is an instructive example; cutting-edge meta-analysis methods are often ignored by the overwhelming majority of practitioners, in part because they have no easy way of applying them. This paper proposes a strategy to close the gap between the statistical state-of-the-science and what is applied in practice. We present open-source meta-analysis software that uses R as the underlying statistical engine, and Python for the GUI. We present a framework that allows methodologists to implement new methods in R that are then automatically integrated into the GUI for use by end-users, so long as the programmer conforms to our interface. Such an approach allows an intuitive interface for non-technical users while leveraging the latest advanced statistical methods implemented by methodologists.


AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
To develop a Chinese version of the Disaster Preparedness Evaluation Tool and validate its psychometric properties.

BACKGROUND
An adequate disaster preparation programme for nurses has not been developed in Taiwan. To develop an exhaustive and effective educational programme on disaster preparation for nurses, a multidimensional instrument is required for assessing the disaster preparation level of nurses.

DESIGN
A cross-sectional study was conducted.

METHODS
In total, 1550 of 2226 public health nurses in 15 counties completed the self-administrated questionnaire. We randomly selected 805 samples to examine the factor structure and factor model by using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The convergent validity was measured using the average variance extracted and composite reliability.

RESULTS
Five factors, namely postdisaster management, skills, knowledge of self-preparation in a disaster, knowledge to respond in the community, and knowledge to respond in the workplace, were extracted, and explained 65·13% of the total variance. An acceptable model fit was identified using confirmatory factor analysis. The Cronbach's α coefficient of the Chinese version of the Disaster Preparedness Evaluation Tool was 0·97. Significant values of the average variance extracted greater than 0·5 indicated convergent validity.

CONCLUSION
The Chinese version of the Disaster Preparedness Evaluation Tool is a reliable and valid instrument for measuring disaster preparation.

RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE
The Chinese version of the Disaster Preparedness Evaluation Tool provides reliable and valid measures that can be used to evaluate the disaster preparedness of nurses. The items in the instrument can be used to identify the dimension of disaster management in all stages, and can form the essential foundation of an education and training programme for public health nurses to reduce the harm of disasters and promote community resilience.


Abstract We provide a structural analysis and propose a geomechanical model for an extensional fault system observed in seismic data from the deep water Santos Basin, offshore Brazil. The system includes low-angle normal faults (LANFs) associated with underlying listric faults and salt rollers. The LANFs cut through shallow sedimentary successions up to the seafloor, reaching displacements of 1 km during the last 5 myr, at least one order of magnitude larger than the displacement of the coeval Andersonian high-angle normal faults. We suggest that the LANFs were produced by clockwise rotation of the stress field caused by the presence of salt intruded along the footwall of the main listric normal faults of the extensional system. Numerical models indicate that the proposed geomechanical model can be attained with strain weakening and widespread plastic yielding along the main normal faults. We suggest that the studied LANFs are related to salt flow in the same way that the LANFs described in regional extensional provinces are related to flow of either the lower crust or the mantle. The rheological analogy is remarkable and therefore we suggest that this work will contribute to the solution of the LANFs paradox.


The increased mortality among persons co-infected with HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C (HCV) is a concern that provider training on HCV-HIV co-infection may address. Medical and behavioral health providers were given training on co-infection. This study addresses two research questions: What changes, if any, did providers seek to effect in their practice after training? Of those providers desiring change in their practice, which, if any, did they implement? Surveys indicated that 82% planned to change their practice. Of those, 51% were reached 3 months later, and of those, 86% reported having enacted a change. Qualitative analysis found that planned changes fell into two domains: HCV Education and HCV Medical Actions. The most frequently intended and enacted changes involved patient education. Barriers to enact changes included lack of colleague support for HCV treatment and inadequate access to hepatitis A/B vaccine. Training on HIV-HCV co-infection should: engage multiple providers from the same site; address HCV treatment side effects; and support systems changes targeting vaccine and testing availability.


Higher-order properties arise naturally in some areas of climate impact research. For example, "vulnerability measures", crucial in assessing the vulnerability to climate change of various regions and entities, must fulfill certain conditions which are best expressed by quantification over all increasing functions of an appropriate type. This kind of property is notoriously difficult to test. However, for the measures used in practice, it is quite easy to encode the property as a dependent type and prove it correct. Moreover, in scientific programming, one is often interested in correctness "up to implication": the program would work as expected, say, if one would use real numbers instead of floating-point values. Such counterfactuals are impossible to test, but again, they can be easily encoded as types and proven. We show examples of such situations (encoded in Agda), encountered in actual vulnerability assessments.


Introduction: The initial point in the diagnostic workup of solid tumors remains manual, with the assessment of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained tissue sections by microscopy. This is a labor-intensive step that requires attention to detail. In addition, diagnoses are influenced by an individual pathologist's knowledge and experience and may not always be reproducible between pathologists. Methods: We introduce a deep learning-based method in colorectal cancer detection and segmentation from digitized H&E-stained histology slides. Results: In this study, we demonstrate that this neural network approach produces median accuracy of 99.9% for normal slides and 94.8% for cancer slides compared to pathologist-based diagnosis on H&E-stained slides digitized from clinical samples. Conclusion: Given that our approach has very high accuracy on normal slides, use of neural network algorithms may provide a screening approach to save pathologist time in identifying tumor regions. We suggest that this new method may be a powerful assistant for colorectal cancer diagnostics.


The Internet of Things offers many opportunities to grow the economy and improve quality of life. Just as the public sector was instrumental in enabling the development and deployment of the Internet, it must play a similar role to ensure the success of the Internet of Things. Therefore, national governments should create comprehensive national strategies for the Internet of Things to ensure that the technology develops cohesively and rapidly, that consumers and businesses do not face barriers to adoption, and that both the private and public sector take full advantage of the coming wave of smart devices.


Interactions between the hippocampus, parahippocampal regions and the prefrontal cortex are thought to underlie the formation, consolidation, and retrieval of short term memories and play an important role in the learning processes. To date, only conceptual models have been offered to explain the potential interactions among these regions, but their connectivity and synaptic regulation remain unknown. To better understand sequential learning and decision making during spatial navigation, a largescale biological model was needed to further guide experimental studies. The results of a putative entorhinal grid cell and hippocampal place cell circuit-level model was reported, incorporating Hebbian learning, ion channels, and asynchronous background activity in the context of recent in vivo findings showing specific intracellular-extracellular precession disparities and place field destabilization by entorhinal lesioning. A more complex model was then proposed by adding another hippocampal formation structure, the subiculum, in a complete recurrent loop with the prefrontal cortex. The model replicated some of the dynamics of the mammalian hippocampal-frontal loop microcircuitry, including phase synchrony of prefrontal cells to hippocampal theta oscillations. It also demonstrated short-term augmentation of navigational sequences, decision making, and learning reinforcement. To demonstrate the computational model's functionality, a graphic environment with a navigating virtual mouse was created and could be used for further real-time simulations. Finally, to refute or support the proposed mechanisms of hippocampal-entorhinal dynamics, future experimental studies were proposed to test the types of extrinsic connectivity between the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus and the intrinsic connectivity within the subiculum.


In this paper we compare results from an in-store field experiment and a mail survey choice experiment (CE) to investigate CE's capacity in predicting grocery store market share. For the comparison, we used three seafood products: freshwater prawns, marine shrimp, and lobster. CE estimates were obtained via four econometric models: the conditional logit, the random parameter logit, the heteroskedastic extreme value, and the multinomial probit. We found that the level of control in the grocery store experiment and the choice of econometric model influenced the capacity of CE to predict grocery store market shares.


Anomalous coronary arteries are known to occur in the general population at a rate of 1-2% however the significance has been the subject of uncertainty throughout the literature. In particular, there is limited data on the clinical significance of an anomalous left circumflex artery originating from the right sinus of valsalva with only a handful of case reports to be found. The aim of this case report is to add to the body of literature indicating that anomalous left circumflex artery originating from the right sinus of valsalva are not all 'benign' but in fact can be 'malignant' and can result in a patient developing an acute coronary syndrome. Furthermore, this case also adds to the increasing role of computed tomography coronary angiography in the delineation and characterization of coronary anatomy, in particular acute angulation of take off and the slit-like ostium which under exertion may reduce coronary perfusion. We describe a 38 year old male patient who had a non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction after experiencing exertional angina, without evidence of coronary artery disease or inflammatory carditis, and in whom an anomalous left circumflex coronary artery was subsequently.