We analyze panel data of U.S. states to determine whether nonprofit contribution and program service revenues are correlated with state tax burden. State tax burden is modeled as a function of (a) state tax policy, (b) nontax policy factors that affect state income, and (c) other exogenous factors that are independent of state tax policy and do not directly induce income; regression results reveal correlations with variables in all three categories. Intergovernmental revenue (IGR) paid to local governments, debt burden, tax exporting, a tax revenue limitation, and nonprofit revenue are most consistently correlated with state tax burden. Financial support for nonprofits in the form of contributions helps to reduce state tax burden and does so at a meaningful level. This finding implies nonprofits provide goods and services that are supplementary to government provision. However, the supplementary nature of nonprofit service provision is not universal. Further analysis of contribution and program service revenues for nonprofits in particular service categories finds either no correlation with state tax burden, a reduction in state tax burden, or an increase in tax burden imposed on state residents over time. By controlling for factors influencing demand for service provision and state tax policy changes, the regression results also provide evidence that government acts as a free rider.


Accurately assessing student needs is a key concern for learning developers in order for provision to have a strong evidence base. Studies investigating student study needs in higher education tend to provide a snapshot in time and are limited to a certain number of students (Liu et al., 2011; Sloan et al., 2013). Others have surveyed users of learning development centres, but not their needs (Buchanan, 2015). In order to develop evolving needs-based writing provision across Swansea University, the Academic Success Programme (ASP) has implemented a web-based system for recording identified areas for improvement in 1:1 tutorial sessions. The ongoing needs analysis is based on student essays in progress and identifies textual and functional categories for improvement. Grouping records according to student metadata allows us to profile student needs according to discipline area and year of study. The emerging patterns enable us to create bespoke workshops for particular student cohorts. To illustrate this process, an example needs analysis and curriculum design for Swansea University's College of Human and Health Sciences is described.


Posterior-stabilized and posterior cruciate retaining total knee arthroplasty prostheses have had high success rates, but it is unclear whether one design has superior outcomes. The purpose of the present study was to directly compare the outcomes of these two designs. Forty-five patients who received a posterior-stabilized prosthesis were compared to 46 consecutive patients who received a cruciate-retaining implant. At a mean follow-up time of 60 months (range, 49 to 69 months), the mean Knee Society knee scores improved from 42 points (range, 20 to 73 points) to 93 points (range, 39 to 100 points) for the cruciate-retaining group and from 38 points (range, 20 to 70 points) to 94 points (range, 60 to 100 points) for the posterior-stabilized group. The mean Knee Society functional scores improved from 36 points (range, 10 to 60 points) to 71 points (range, 15 to 100 points) for the cruciate-retaining group and from 32 points (range, 10 to 70 points) to 73 points (range, 32 to 100 points) for the posterior-stabilized group. The ranges of motion were 125 degrees (range, 100 to 140 degrees ) and 118 degrees (range, 87 to 135 degrees ) in the cruciate-retaining and posterior-stabilized groups, respectively, at final follow-up. Radiographic analysis revealed no radiolucencies that were progressive or were greater than 1 millimeter in length. There were no re-operations in either group. This study did not conclusively demonstrate the superiority of one knee design over the other, suggesting that the choice of implant should be based on surgeon preference and existing pathology of the posterior cruciate ligament.


Continuous Time Markov Chains, Hawkes processes and many other interesting processes can be described as solution of stochastic differential equations driven by Poisson measures. Previous works, using the Stein's method, give the convergence rate of a sequence of renormalized Poisson measures towards the Brownian motion in several distances, constructed on the model of the Kantorovitch-Rubinstein (or Wasserstein-1) distance. We show that many operations (like time change, convolution) on continuous functions are Lipschitz continuous to extend these quantified convergences to diffuse limits of Markov processes and long-time behavior of Hawkes processes.


What is it about affirmative action that makes this public policy one of the most contentious political issues in the United States today? The answer to this question cannot be found by studying the recent past or current events. To understand the current debate over affirmative action, we must grapple with all of America's racial history, from colonial times, through slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights era, to the present day. Philip Rubio argues that misunderstanding the history of affirmative action is the principal reason that most white people have difficulty in seeing their historical and current privilege. He combines African American, labor, and social history with thirty years of personal experience as a blue-collar worker, labor and community activist, jazz musician, and writer to examine the roots of this debate. He maintains that we are not asking the right question. The real issue, he argues, is not whether African Americans should receive compensatory treatment to correct past and present discrimination, but, rather, why whites should continue to receive preferences based on skin color. He argues that America was conceived and continues to reshape itself not on a system of meritorious achievement or equal opportunity but on a system of white preferences and quotas that are defended both actively and passively by white people. Tracing the development of the old legal initiative known as ""affirmative action"" (based on the principle of equity in English common law), he shows how affirmative action today has become transformed in American folklore and popular culture into something akin to the ""Black Power"" slogan of the late 1960s. Rather than a new and radical program, he shows that affirmative action is only the most recent challenge to the system of white privilege brought about by a long tradition of black protest. Affirmative action is not simply legislated public policy or voluntary corporate policy. Instead, as Rubio points out, it is a social history that represents a tug-of-war within working-class America over whether there should exist a property value in whiteness. In presenting this history, Rubio is firm in the belief that, after the facts have spoken, readers not only will marvel that these programs are not even tougher but also will understand why. Philip F. Rubio is a Mellon Fellow studying history at Duke University.


The questions of childbearing and parenting in the life of persons with intellectual disabilities are very marginal both in research and professional practice. Although international guidelines emphasize the total social participation and self-determination of persons with disabilities, protectiveness is more common at a local level in connection with sexuality and childbearing. Parenting capacity involves the complex interplay between children and their parents, home and community environments, and family and community services. Hence, our intention is to concentrate on these relationships and to conduct interactive pair interviews with people with intellectual disabilities and relevant people in their lives. In our research we are curious about the opportunities and obstacles in the lives of persons with intellectual disabilities to becoming parents in a variety of living conditions, as well as the characteristics of the parenting roles of women and men with intellectual disabilities.


This study aims to improve the modeling of partial SCRAM in the BISON plant model for the Forsmark 2 nuclear reactor after power uprate. Validation of the BISON model against tests performed from March to May in 2013 have shown that this is one of the areas in which there is room for improvement. After partial SCRAM is performed, the model underestimates the reactor power, recirculation flow and steam flow when compared to the measurement data.In BISON the partial SCRAM is modeled using a relative control rod effect vector (ASC vector). The aim is to replace the old values in this vector to improve the model. The new model was shown to give an improved result for the reactor power, recirculation flow and steam flow. The study gives recommendations on how to apply the new model and what values of the relative control rod effect vector that can be used in the future.


The controversial 'Buy American requirements in Section 1605 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 threaten to stir protectionism leading to an outright trade war. This could be catastrophic in the current economic crisis, particularly since the Obama administration does not appear to beleive that additional domestic preferences are needed for U.S. procurement. The pending challenge for federal regulators, therefore, will be to craft a rule that contains the Recovery Act's international impact, while implementing Congress' intent. The authors suggest that the optimal approach seems to be the most simple: to fold new procurement under the Recovery Act into the existing FAR regulatory structure, which accommodates the U.S.' many trade agreements. This would ensure that federal agencies' procurements adhere to those trade agreements (and also increases the likelihood that an already over-taxed acquisition workforce can consistently apply the new rules.) This simple, quick and elegant approach would be the least likely to generate new, potentially disastrous waves of protectionism in the critical, but treacherous, waters of global commerce.


This paper reports on the analysis of the use of a number of invariant tags in spoken London English, which formed part of the completed project Analysis of spoken London English using corpus tools (funded by the British Academy). The tags examined were: innit, okay, right, yeah, you get me and you know, as well as three semi-fixed expressions containing you know, which functioned as tags: do you know what I mean, if you know what I mean and do you know what I'm saying. The study used the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC), a 1.4 million word corpus comprising the transcribed and marked-up interview data from the Lancaster/Queen Mary ESRC-funded project, Linguistic innovators: the English of adolescents in London (Kerswill et al. 2008), as well as the Corpus of London Teenage English (COLT) (Stenstrom et al. 2002). The research methodology combined approaches and techniques from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Five variables were examined, four of which had two values: age (young: 16-19 / old: over 70), sex (male/female), ethnicity (Anglo/non-Anglo) and place of residence (Hackney/Havering). The fifth variable was a self-assessed measure of the multi-ethnicity of the friendship networks that speakers belonged to, with scores ranging from 1 (all friends same ethnicity as self) to 5 (60%-80% of friends different ethnicity as self). The analysis took into account the relative frequency of use of each tag, as well as the proportion of speakers in each sociolinguistic group that used each tag. The comparison of LIC and COLT revealed an increase in yeah and, in particular, innit, and a dramatic increase in you get me, but a decrease in the relative frequencies of right and okay. The analysis of LIC showed that all the innovative tags, such as innit and you get me, were clearly a feature of young people's speech. In addition, the most innovative tag, you get me, was by far most frequent in Hackney (inner London), and the highest frequency was observed among the non-Anglo speakers. The ethnic minority speakers, and male speakers in general, are the most innovative tag users, particularly of innit and you get me, but the ethnic minority speakers also had high frequencies of yeah, okay and right, and they were therefore the highest users of tags overall. Overall, there is a difference in tag usage between inner and outer London: the more innovative tags are more frequent in inner London and the more traditional ones in outer London. The innovative tags you get me and innit were most frequent, and were used by a larger proportion of speakers, among male, non-Anglo, Hackney residents. The results indicate that young people, ethnic minorities, an urban environment, and dialect contact are of great importance in language change, a fact that can feed into an exploratory model of language variation and change.


The authors contend that service-learning courses at urban universities can and should play a vital role in the greening of higher education and the promotion of sustainable urban environments. They describe one model outreach program that provides continuing education for middle school teachers and several undergraduatelevel courses from disciplines across the humanities and sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University. The authors outline strategies for implementing these green service-learning courses and discuss the value of offering a green curriculum that includes both science and humanities courses.


Many of the dramatic works of John Ford seem to be preoccupied with the topic of desire and portray a rich and vibrant picture of the potent and often dangerous emotional experience of love, from Penthea's grief and subsequent starvation at the separation from her loved ones in The Broken Heart (1629) to Palador's palpable love melancholy in the tragicomedy The Lover's Melancholy (1629) . Arguably, these themes are most explicit and central in the sensationally titled, and most famous of his plays 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633), which is notorious for its exploration of forbidden passion in the form of an incestuous relationship between Giovanni and his sister Annabella. The following article will consider the uncontrollable nature of passion and ask whether or not Ford presents the passions as governable, or even preventable. Are Ford's protagonists able to exercise control over their excessive passion?


Motivation Reproducing the results from a scientific paper can be challenging due to the absence of data and the computational tools required for their analysis. In addition, details relating to the procedures used to obtain the published results can be difficult to discern due to the use of natural language when reporting how experiments have been performed. The Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA), Nanopublications (NP), and Research Objects (RO) models are conceptual data modelling frameworks that can structure such information from scientific papers. Computational workflow platforms can also be used to reproduce analyses of data in a principled manner. We assessed the extent by which ISA, NP, and RO models, together with the Galaxy workflow system, can capture the experimental processes and reproduce the findings of a previously published paper reporting on the development of SOAPdenovo2, a de novo genome assembler. Results Executable workflows were developed using Galaxy, which reproduced results that were consistent with the published findings. A structured representation of the information in the SOAPdenovo2 paper was produced by combining the use of ISA, NP, and RO models. By structuring the information in the published paper using these data and scientific workflow modelling frameworks, it was possible to explicitly declare elements of experimental design, variables, and findings. The models served as guides in the curation of scientific information and this led to the identification of inconsistencies in the original published paper, thereby allowing its authors to publish corrections in the form of an errata. Availability SOAPdenovo2 scripts, data, and results are available through the GigaScience Database: http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/100044; the workflows are available from GigaGalaxy: http://galaxy.cbiit.cuhk.edu.hk; and the representations using the ISA, NP, and RO models are available through the SOAPdenovo2 case study website http://isa-tools.github.io/soapdenovo2/. Contact: email@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com.


This paper analyzes mathematically the effect of quantizer threshold imperfection commonly encountered in the circuit implementation of analog-to-digital (A/D) converters such as pulse code modulation (PCM) and sigma-delta (SigmaDelta) modulation. SigmaDelta modulation, which is based on coarse quantization of oversampled (redundant) samples of a signal, enjoys a type of self-correction property for quantizer threshold errors (bias) that is not shared by PCM. Although "classical" SigmaDelta modulation is inferior to PCM in the rate-distortion sense, this robustness feature is believed to be one of the reasons why SigmaDelta modulation is preferred over PCM in A/D converters with imperfect quantizers. Motivated by these facts, other encoders are constructed in this paper that use redundancy to obtain a similar self-correction property, but that achieve higher order accuracy relative to bit rate compared to classical SigmaDelta. More precisely, two different types of encoders are introduced that exhibit exponential accuracy in the bit rate (in contrast to the polynomial-type accuracy of classical SigmaDelta) while possessing the self-correction property


This article is a summary of a cross-Arts, action research project in primary teacher education. The Higher Education ARTS and Schools (HEARTS) project aimed at attitude and pedagogical change amongst teacher education students. The researchers chose to explore the effects and effectiveness of the Arts in making meaning and relevance for both children and university students. The project used challenging, outdoor experiences shared equally by students and pupils in an attempt to generate creative thinking. The article describes the project and highlights key research findings from a meta-analysis of student research assignments and logged student reflections. It suggests that there are major challenges for teacher education, in particular to support new teachers in discovering their own areas of creativity, enhancing those of the children they teach and in becoming more confident in making their own curricular contributions. The research also revealed neglected capacity in tutor/tutor, tutor/student and student/pupil collaboration. For the Arts in schools, the project strongly suggested that the meaning-making qualities of the Arts were currently under-used and should be maximized. For schools the researched and researching students recognized the great potential of shifting the locus of control towards children and also the power of the Arts as motivators for learning across all curriculum subjects.


In the concluding pages of his Epistolae duae de motu impresso a motore translato (1642), Pierre Gassendi provides a brief summary of the explanation of the tides found in Galileo's Dialogue over the Two Chief World Systems (1632). A comparison between the two texts reveals, how- ever, that Gassendi surreptitiously modiaes Galileo's theory in some crucial points in the vain hope of rendering it more compatible with the observed phe- nomena. But why did Gassendi not acknowledge his departures from the Galilean model? The present article argues that cautiousness was just one of the reasons that stopped the French priest from turning Galileo's theory into his own theory. He was probably also aware of the fact that Kepler's model of planetary motion, which he endorsed in the Epistolae, could not be reconciled with Galileo's explanation of the tides. In the postumously published Syntagma philosophicum (1658), Gassendi tried to mend this major in- consistency by arguing that Galileo's theory of the tides not only remained valid, but became even more coherent, if one attributed to the Earth an ellip- tic orbit. But given that in the Syntagma Gassendi ofacially adhered to the Tychonic system, his effort to reconcile Kepler and Galileo, while already un- convincing by itself, appears completely futile.


Person re-identification (REID) is an important task in video surveillance and forensics applications. Most of previous approaches are based on a key assumption that all person images have uniform and sufficiently high resolutions. Actually, various low-resolutions and scale mismatching always exist in open world REID. We name this kind of problem as Scale-Adaptive Low Resolution Person Re-identification (SALR-REID). The most intuitive way to address this problem is to increase various low-resolutions (not only low, but also with different scales) to a uniform high-resolution. SR-GAN is one of the most competitive image super-resolution deep networks, designed with a fixed upscaling factor. However, it is still not suitable for SALR-REID task, which requires a network not only synthesizing high-resolution images with different upscaling factors, but also extracting discriminative image feature for judging person's identity. (1) To promote the ability of scale-adaptive upscaling, we cascade multiple SRGANs in series. (2) To supplement the ability of image feature representation, we plug-in a reidentification network. With a unified formulation, a Cascaded Super-Resolution GAN (CSR-GAN) framework is proposed. Extensive evaluations on two simulated datasets and one public dataset demonstrate the advantages of our method over related state-of-the-art methods.


Despite the administrative state's extensive scope, we know little about how it operates as an empirical matter. This Article provides the first comprehensive empirical examination of agency rulemaking, with and without prior public comment, from President Ronald Reagan to President George W. Bush. Using a large new dataset constructed from twenty years' (1983-2003) worth of federal agencies' semi-annual reports in the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, this Article analyzes variation in agency rulemaking activities with an emphasis on rulemaking at the beginning and end of presidential administrations and around shifts in party control of Congress -- midnight and crack-of-dawn regulatory activity -- while also assessing some patterns outside those periods. The empirical results offer new insights into the rulemaking process and the interplay of politics and regulation. Some of these insights are surprising. For example, certain agencies withdrew more proposed rules after political transitions in Congress than after a new President took office. Rather than capitalizing quickly on their electoral mandates, Presidents generally started fewer, not more, rules in the first year of their terms than in later years. Agencies generally did complete more rules in the final quarter of each presidential administration, but cabinet departments (as a group), finished slightly more actions after the 1994 election changed control of Congress than in President Clinton's last quarter. And although the press highlighted President Clinton's spate of midnight regulatory activity, President George H.W. Bush began nearly 50 percent more notice-and-comment rulemakings in the final quarter of his term than did President Clinton and nearly 40 percent more than President Reagan. The results have potentially far-reaching normative and doctrinal implications for the functioning and oversight of the administrative state. Politics aside, many agencies have engaged in considerable notice-and-comment rulemaking, suggesting that the traditional regulatory process may not be significantly ossified. Nevertheless, binding rulemaking without prior comment has increased across a wide range of agencies. Focusing on politics, these patterns of regulatory activity during political transitions undermine theories of judicial deference based entirely on agency expertise. But, at the same time, they do not support a political accountability theory based solely on the President. Rather, the regulatory trends call attention to the importance of Congress, in addition to the President, for bureaucratic oversight. In sum, the timing of rulemaking raises interesting questions about the effectiveness and legitimacy of the administrative state.


STUDY OBJECTIVE
To determine whether antibodies to vasopressin play a role in the development of diabetes insipidus or interfere with diagnosis and treatment.

DESIGN
Random plasma or serum samples for determining of antibodies to vasopressin were collected from patients and controls.

SETTING
Referral university hospital with most patients studied in the clinical research center.

PATIENTS
Twenty-nine healthy controls and 113 patients with polyuria (15 with primary polydipsia; 86 with neurogenic diabetes insipidus [60 studied before, 28 during, and 10 after antidiuretic hormone treatment]; and 12 with nephrogenic diabetes insipidus).

INTERVENTIONS
Antibodies were detected by incubating samples with radiolabeled 125I-arginine vasopressin. The effect of antibodies on diagnosis was studied by examining the relation of plasma vasopressin to osmolality measured during dehydration or infusion of hypertonic saline and the relation of urine osmolality to plasma vasopressin measured during dehydration.

MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS
Antibodies to vasopressin were not detected in patients with primary polydipsia, nephrogenic diabetes insipidus, or neurogenic diabetes insipidus studied before therapy with antidiuretic hormone. Antibodies were detected in 6 of 28 patients studied during such treatments. All 6 patients reported decreased antidiuretic response to previously effective therapy with arginine or lysine vasopressin but had normal response to desmopressin or chlorpropamide.

CONCLUSION
Diabetes insipidus does not result from spontaneously occurring antibodies to vasopressin. The antibodies occasionally develop during treatment with antidiuretic hormone and, when they do, almost always result in secondary resistance to its antidiuretic effect. Antibodies usually do not impair the response to other forms of therapy; they only rarely interfere with the diagnosis of diabetes insipidus, by falsely suggesting the presence of the partial nephrogenic form.


ABC (ATP Binding Cassette) proteins form one of the largest protein superfamilies. Most members are active membrane transporters translocating their substrates across the lipid bilayer of the plasma membrane or intracellular organelles. Multidrug transporters exhibit broad substrate specificity, exporting molecules with diverse chemical structures to protect organisms from xenotoxic compounds, and also play an important role in influencing the efficacy of therapeutic agents. High resolution structural information is required to reveal the conformational changes associated with the transport cycle and the interaction with small molecules, with the ultimate aim to develop strategies to pharmacologically modulate function and predict substrates properties. In this chapter we review available ABC protein structures and discuss advances in using this structural information for computational approaches that are aimed at elucidating the mechanism of substrate recognition and cargo translocation in the context of the ATP catalytic cycle of human multidrug ABC transporters.


Background: Loneliness is known to be associated with both poorer physical and mental health, being associated with increased mortality. Responses throughout the world to the current COVID-19 pandemic all incorporate varying degrees of social distancing and isolation. There is an imperative to provide a timely review and synthesis of the impact of COVID-19 on loneliness in the general population. Methods: PubMed was searched using the key terms 'COVID-19', 'coronavirus', 'SARS-COV2' and 'loneliness'. Fifty-four articles were identified and screened against the inclusion criteria. The inclusion criteria stipulated that the study needed to incorporate a measure of loneliness with participants being drawn from the general adult population. Twenty-four studies met the inclusion criteria. Results: The key data extracted from the 24 reviewed studies are presented and summarised with a focus on key demographics of participants, the research designs utilised, the measures of loneliness employed and the other variables assessed in the studies. Overall, the findings indicate that loneliness has been a significant issue during the current COVID-19 pandemic and loneliness is positively associated with mental health symptoms. However, there were inconsistencies in the results evident across studies. Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review of research investigating loneliness during the current COVID-19 pandemic in the general adult population. Despite the inconsistencies evident in some of the results across the studies, it is clearly apparent that loneliness is having an impact on the mental health and wellbeing of the general adult population. Furthermore, it is apparent that the current COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on loneliness in the general adult population and that loneliness is significantly positively associated with mental illness symptomatology. Thus, there is an imperative to address loneliness through public policy and interventions. The limitations of this review are noted and directions given for future research.


Resting state functional connectivity is defined as correlations in brain activity measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging without any stimulation paradigm. Such connectivity is dynamic, even over the course of minutes, and the development of tools for its analysis is an important challenge in neuroscience. We propose a novel data-driven technique to extract connectivity patterns from dynamic whole-brain networks of multiple subjects. Our technique is based on singular value decomposition and decomposes a collection of networks into linearly independent "eigennetworks" and associated time courses. To deal with the temporal redundancy of networks, we propose a novel subsampling method based on the standard deviation of the connectivity strength. We apply the proposed technique to dynamic resting-state networks of healthy subjects and multiple sclerosis patients, and show its potential to detect aberrant connectivity patterns in patients.


Previous statistical studies of the effects of UN peacekeeping have generally suggested that UN interventions have a positive effect on building a sustainable peace after civil war. Recent methodological developments have questioned this result because the cases in which the United Nations intervenedwere quite different from those in which they did not. Therefore the estimated causal effect may be due to the assumptions of the model that the researchers chose rather than to peacekeeping itself. The root of the problem is that UN missions are not randomly assigned. We argue that standard approaches for dealing with this problem (Heckman regression and instrumental variables) are invalid and impracticable in the context of UN peacekeeping and would lead to estimates of the effects of UN operations that are largely a result of the assumptions of the statistical model rather than the data. We correct for the effects of nonrandom assignment with matching techniques on a sample of UN interventions in post-Cold-War conflicts and find that UN interventions are indeed effective in the sample of post-civil-conflict interventions, but that UN interventions while civil wars are still ongoing have no causal effect.


This paper gives the first separation between the power of {\em formulas} and {\em circuits} of equal depth in the $\mathrm{AC}^0[\oplus]$ basis (unbounded fan-in AND, OR, NOT and MOD$_2$ gates). We show, for all $d(n) \le O(\frac{\log n}{\log\log n})$, that there exist {\em polynomial-size depth-$d$ circuits} that are not equivalent to {\em depth-$d$ formulas of size $n^{o(d)}$} (moreover, this is optimal in that $n^{o(d)}$ cannot be improved to $n^{O(d)}$). This result is obtained by a combination of new lower and upper bounds for {\em Approximate Majorities}, the class of Boolean functions $\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ that agree with the Majority function on $3/4$ fraction of inputs.
$\mathrm{AC}^0[\oplus]$ formula lower bound: We show that every depth-$d$ $\mathrm{AC}^0[\oplus]$ formula of size $s$ has a {\em $1/8$-error polynomial approximation} over $\mathbb{F}_2$ of degree $O(\frac{1}{d}\log s)^{d-1}$. This strengthens a classic $O(\log s)^{d-1}$ degree approximation for \underline{circuits} due to Razborov. Since the Majority function has approximate degree $\Theta(\sqrt n)$, this result implies an $\exp(\Omega(dn^{1/2(d-1)}))$ lower bound on the depth-$d$ $\mathrm{AC}^0[\oplus]$ formula size of all Approximate Majority functions for all $d(n) \le O(\log n)$.
Monotone $\mathrm{AC}^0$ circuit upper bound: For all $d(n) \le O(\frac{\log n}{\log\log n})$, we give a randomized construction of depth-$d$ monotone $\mathrm{AC}^0$ circuits (without NOT or MOD$_2$ gates) of size $\exp(O(n^{1/2(d-1)}))$ that compute an Approximate Majority function. This strengthens a construction of \underline{formulas} of size $\exp(O(dn^{1/2(d-1)}))$ due to Amano.


Information Systems is a relatively new curriculum area and one that is still growing in size and importance. It involves applied studies that are concerned with the ways people build and use computer-based systems in their organisations to produce useful information. Information Systems is, of necessity, a socio-technical discipline that has to deal with issues involving both people and machines; with the multitude of human and non-human entities that comprise an information system.

This thesis reports an investigation of how Information Systems curriculum is made and how the choices of individual lecturers or groups of lecturers to adopt or ignore a new concept or technology are formed. It addresses this issue by describing a study into how the programming language Visual Basic entered the Information Systems curriculum of an Australian university, and how it has retained its place there despite challenges from other programming languages. It is a study of curriculum innovation that involves an important but small change in the curriculum of a single department in a particular university.

Little of the literature on innovation deals with university curriculum and most reported work is focussed on research, development and diffusion studies of the adoption, or otherwise, of centrally developed curriculum innovations in primary and secondary schools. The innovation described here is of a different order being developed initially by a single university lecturer in one of the subjects for which he had responsibility. It is important primarily because it examines something that does not appear to have been reported on before: the negotiations and alliances that allow new material, in this case the programming language Visual Basic, to enter individual subjects of a university curriculum, and to obtain a durable place there.

The research investigates a single instance of innovation, and traces the associations between various human and non-human entities including Visual Basic, the university, the student laboratories, the Course Advisory Committee and the academic staff that made this happen. It follows the formation of alliances and complex networks of association, and how their interplay resulted in the curriculum change that allowed Visual Basic to enter the Information Systems curriculum, and to fend off challenges from other programming languages in order to retain its place there.

I argue that in this curriculum innovation no pre-planned path was followed, and that representations of events like this as straightforward or well planned hide the complexity of what took place. The study reveals the complex set of negotiations and compromises made by both human and non-human actors in allowing Visual Basic to enter the curriculum.

The study draws on the sociology of translations, more commonly known as actor-network theory (ANT) as a framework for its analysis. I show that innovation translation can be used to advantage to trace the progress of technological innovations such as this. My analysis maps the progress of Visual Basic from novelty to 'obvious choice' in this university's Information Systems curriculum.


Climate change is a multi-faceted challenge that is intrinsically connected to a broad range of other issue areas, and it must be addressed on multiple fronts. In considering the global response to climate change post-2020, it is important to consider not only the central role of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), but also the potential roles of other international regimes and initiatives, and links among them. This paper provides a brief overview of relevant non-UNFCCC venues and suggests some broad issues for policymakers.


The L-type (Cav1.2) voltage-gated calcium channels play critical roles in membrane excitability, gene expression, and muscle contraction. The generation of splice variants by the alternative splicing of the poreforming Cav1.2 α1-subunit (α11.2) may thereby provide potent means to enrich functional diversity. To date, however, no comprehensive scan of α1 1.2 splice variation has been performed, particularly in the human context. Here we have undertaken such a screen, exploiting recently developed "transcript scanning" methods to probe the human gene. The degree of variation turns out to be surprisingly large; 19 of the 55 exons comprising the human α11.2 gene were subjected to alternative splicing. Two of these are previously unrecognized exons and two others were not known to be spliced. Comparisons of fetal and adult heart and brain uncovered a large IVS3-S4 variability resulting from combinatorial utilization of exons 31–33. Electrophysiological characterization of such IVS3-S4 variation revealed unmistakable shifts in the voltage dependence of activation, according to an interesting correlation between increased IVS3-S4 linker length and activation at more depolarized potentials. Steady-state inactivation profiles remained unaltered. This systematic portrait of splice variation furnishes a reference library for comprehending combinatorial arrangements of Cav1.2 splice exons, especially as they impact development, physiology, and disease.


Lupus anticoagulants (LA) were first detected in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) in 1952 by Conley and Hartmann.1 They identified patients in whom the activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT) was prolonged and which did not correct on the addition of normal plasma. Although Conley and Hartmann's original description was in association with a haemorrhagic disorder, subsequent reports from the 1960s highlighted patients with thrombotic events in the presence of LA.2 The term 'lupus anticoagulant' was introduced by Feinstein and Rapaport in 1972.3 It has, however, caused some confusion because LA tend to be procoagulant in vivo, and most people who test positive for LA do not meet criteria for a diagnosis of SLE.4

LA are a subset of antiphospholipid antibodies (aPL) which also include anticardiolipin antibodies (aCL) and anti-β2 glycoprotein-I (anti-β2GPI) antibodies among others. The clinical significance of these antibodies is their association with venous or arterial thrombosis, or recurrent fetal loss. This association constitutes the antiphospholipid antibody syndrome (APS) for which there are revised classification criteria published in 2006.5 Some features not included in the classification criteria are associated with APS and are more commonly seen in children than adults. These include immune-mediated thrombocytopenia, haemolytic anaemia, migraine, chorea and epilepsy.6

This paper aims to highlight which children should be tested for LA, and the significance of LA if they are detected.

LA are a mixture of different immunoglobulins (IgG and IgM) that bind to various protein-phospholipid complexes.4 Targets include β2GPI, prothrombin, protein C and S and factor XI among others.7 In common with other antibodies, LA are produced by B lymphocytes. In the context of SLE, there is a generalised increase in production of autoantibodies. The reasons for production of LA in other contexts are …


A new approach for the non-linear buckling and large deflection analyses of isotropic and composite stiffened panels, as used in high speed craft, is presented.
Eight node isoparametric elements, formulated according to Marguerre shallow shell theory, are combined with three node beam elements, using the concept of equal displacements at the panel-stiffener interface, to represent the stiffened panels. Non-linear equilibrium equations are derived using the principle of virtual work applied to a continuum with a total Lagrangian description of motion.
The arbitrarily stiffened, shallow shell element is capable of modelling eccentric or concentric stiffeners attached to flat or imperfect panels under in-plane or transverse loads. Special modelling considerations for the loading and boundary conditions, required in the linear and non-linear buckling analyses of stiffened panels using arbitrarily stiffened finite elements, are suggested and discussed for the first time.
The Newton-Raphson incremental-iterative solution technique is used to obtain the non-linear response path. Results obtained in this investigation are compared with those available in the open literature to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed approach. Good agreement is found in all the investigated cases.


A multi-probe system has been developed to investigate the importance of electron temperature fluctuations turbulent transport in the Joint European Torus boundary plasma. The compact five-pin triple probe has been designed to reduce the phase delay of fluctuations due to the finite pin separation in the standard triple probe technique, while still avoiding the effects of probe shadowing. This probe has been found to have advantages over the standard triple probe in the region close to the separatrix (r-r(sep)<0.01 m), where the fluctuation wavelength is large. Importantly, results obtained with the probe support the standard estimation of cross-field particle flux, which ignores temperature fluctuations. They cannot be ignored, however, in the estimation of energy losses since measurements show that the conducted energy may be as large as the convected component. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.


Industry is increasingly moving towards utilizing HIPS to reduce flare loading and prevent the environmental impact of pressure venting. HIPS are becoming the option of choice to help alleviate the need to replace major portions of the flare system in existing facilities when adding new equipment or units. Another benefit is that a process unit protected by HIPS will relieve less frequently and perhaps with less quantity than a process unit designed for full flare loading. In some areas of the world this is becoming important as regulatory agencies place greater restrictions on release of greenhouse gases. Any justification for HIPS must be thoroughly documented through a hazard analysis, which identifies all potential overpressure scenarios and demonstrates that the HIPS can adequately address each scenario. The ability of the HIPS to adequately address overpressure is limited by the knowledge and skill applied in the identification and definition of overpressure scenarios. Ultimately, it is the owner/operator that must verify that HIPS works from a process and holistic viewpoint and achieves the necessary safety integrity.


That the world is globalizing has become a shibboleth and that the flows of information and media increasingly render the world into a global village has been a commonplace of commentary and punditry. In this essay, I seek to probe a little bit more how we see spaces inflected by globalised media – specifically what shape global space might be said to be. To do this I want to review some of the ways that media and information have been imagined relating to spaces – through notions of substitution, derealisation, transcendence and thence to consequence of dispersal, distanciation and social disintegration. From here I turn to examine the production of spatial relations through media, specifically notions of proximity and distance, centrality and peripherality. The analysis here will then turn to the case of Singapore which has sought to envision itself, and be seen by others, as a central hub in a new space of mediated global flows. In and through this account what I want to suggest is that very different spatial imaginaries are mobilized – indeed that these mediated spaces enact and produce different notions of spatiality.

Initially I outline how conventional, even critical, accounts produces pit 'place' against 'space', where a virtualization is seen as transcending or eroding experiential place. Thence I shall try to suggest instead a more relational space is produced. This then is in distinction to imaginaries that see either a scalar shift where globalised and mediated processes start to operate at a global scale, becoming disembedded from previously sedimented territorial scales, or one where a global exterior erodes or overwhelms a local interior. Thus we might look at the effects of global information as disrupting the Russian doll like spatial imaginary of nested scales of belonging and priority, with the local as most immediate through to the distant and attenuated world scale. Accounts here might look at a rescaling of key processes, where global process now outweighs local and produce a hierarchy of (conflicting) scales of processes. Instead the approach here sees places as always having been constituted out of relations between practices, as being produced through a variety of processes occurring between places. Places are the sites of entanglement of practices, and are produced by their relations. In this sense then relational space has a Leibnizean caste, that sees space created through the relations of objects rather than being a substantive matrix into which objects are inserted. This does not allow some notion of an Aristotelian inhabited place opposed to Cartesian, abstract space – an imaginary I shall show haunts much media commentary. That is where we can see in globalization that 'chaos and complexity have switched polarities from negative to positive, so too are all the expressions of disjunction and discontinuity being revisited as forms of a higher order… [But] Unlike the disjunction of collage that has characterized much of this century, the new disjunction is one of morphing' (Novak 1995) and to make the distinction clearer the latter involves 'warpage, not mechanics, not even alchemy, but the curving of the underlying spatial matrix itself' (Novak 1997). Thus what I am trying to suggest here is not simply the combination or coming together of new elements but the formulation of spatial orientation brought upon by global flows on information. It is then a Deleuzian vision, informed by theorizing multiplicity and hybridity, which sees the city as an abstract machine combining different kinds of spaces in a folded, pleated topology (Crang 2000b, page 314) .To do this I will focus upon the case of Singapore, as a city which has ridden the dragon of informational technology for 30 years and try to explore how it has formed a point where different relations and spaces recombine disrupting scalar notions of belonging and engagement, where the state is actively attempting to produce a sense of centrality but also one where borders are being reinscribed in informational space.


Previous research has established a correlation between air permeability (ka) and saturated hydraulic conductivity for agricultural soils based on ex situ air permeability (kex situ). In situ air permeability (kin situ) measurements in nonagricultural soils, however, have shown a decrease in correlation that may be attributed to soil anisotropy. Our objectives were: (i) to examine the effects of anisotropy on kin situ using a three‐dimensional air flow model; (ii) to develop a method to identify anisotropy using kin situ and kex situ measurements; and (iii) to determine the sample volume of an air permeameter as a function of the permeameter design and the anisotropy ratio. Numerical results showed that the ka measured in situ in anisotropic media results in some average of the horizontal and vertical permeabilities. The averaging depends on the degree of anisotropy and the ratio of the diameter to the insertion depth of the permeameter. Therefore, a shape factor developed for an isotropic soil can give unreliable results. We determined that paired in situ and ex situ permeability measurements can be used to infer the anisotropy ratio. This approach is more accurate if the vertical permeability, kaz, is higher than the horizontal, kax The sample volume does not extend outside of the air permeameter for high kax/kaz It is stretched vertically for low kax/kaz A field experiment showed qualitative agreement with model predictions, but anisotropy alone was not able to fully explain the difference between kin situ and kex situ


Following a request from the European Commission, the Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA GMO Panel) assessed the post-market environmental monitoring (PMEM) report for the 2012 growing season of maize MON 810 provided by Monsanto Europe S.A. The EFSA GMO Panel noted that the applicant used a similar methodology as the one previously established for monitoring maize MON 810 in 2009, 2010 and 2011. The EFSA GMO Panel therefore focused its assessment on the novel datasets specific to the 2012 growing season of maize MON 810, and not on the methodology. The data submitted by the applicant in its 2012 PMEM report do not indicate any adverse effects on human and animal health or the environment arising from maize MON 810 cultivation in 2012. However, having already highlighted the poor sensitivity of the methodology followed by the applicant, the EFSA GMO Panel strongly reiterates its previous recommendations for the improvement of the methodology. In addition, the EFSA GMO Panel recommends that the applicant: (1) further investigates effects observed during the monitoring of baseline susceptibility of target pests in Spain; (2) follow-up possible adverse effects of maize MON 810 on rove beetles.


Abstract : Among the numerous problems which arise in the context of radar signal processing is the problem of extraction of information from a noise corrupted signal. In this application the signal is assumed to be the superposition of outputs from multiple radar emitters. Associated with the output of each emitter is a unique set of parameters which are in general unknown. Significant parameters associated with each emitter are (1) the pulse repetition frequencies, (2) the pulse durations (widths) associated with pulse trains and (3) the pulse amplitudes. A superposition of the outputs of multiple emitters together with additive noise is observed at the receiver. In this study we consider the problem of decomposing such a noise corrupted lin- ear combination of emitter outputs into an underlying set of basis signals while also identifying the parameters associated with each of the emitters involved. Foremost among our objectives is to design a system capable of performing this decomposition/classification in a demanding real-time environment. We present here a system composed of three cascaded neural-analog networks which, in simulation, has demonstrated an ability to nominally perform the task of decomposition and classification of superposed radar signals under extremely high noise conditions.


This paper examines whether financial aggregates provide information useful for predicting real output growth and inflation, extending the inquiry conducted in Tallman and Chandra (1996). First, we investigate whether perfect knowledge of the future values of financial aggregates helps improve significantly the forecasting accuracy of output and inflation in a simple vector autoregression framework. The results display only one notable improvement to the forecasts with the addition of perfect information on the financial aggregates – future information on credit growth helps improve the prediction accuracy of real output growth. The improvement is most noticeable during the early 1990s recession. Second, we test whether the financial aggregates are important explanators within single-equation models that are more rigorously fitted to the data. We find only one instance in which an aggregate helps explain the variation in either real output growth or inflation – that is, the growth in credit helps explain the growth in real output in a particular specification of the output model. This finding, though, is sensitive to the choice of foreign output proxy. In sum, we conclude that while credit may have some useful information in times of financial restructuring it is unlikely that there is information in financial aggregates that is exploitable systematically for predicting either real output growth or inflation.


End-to-end trainable networks try to overcome error propagation, lack of generalization and overall brittleness of traditional modularized task-oriented dialoguesystem architectures. Most proposed models expand on the sequence-to-sequence architecture. Some of them don't track belief state, which makes it difficult to interact with ever-changing knowledge bases, while the ones that explicitly track the belief state do it with classifiers. The use of classifiers suffers from the outof-vocabulary words problem, making these models hard to use in real-world applications with ever-changing knowledge bases. We propose Structured Belief Copy Network (SBCN), a novel end-to-end trainable architecture that allows for interaction with external symbolic knowledge bases and solves the out-of-vocabulary problem at the same time. It explicitly uses the structure of the belief state in its architecture by using different sequential decoders with a copy mechanism for the different informable slots and a multi-label decoder for the requestable slots, and this provides better inductive bias. Through empirical results we show that SBCN achieves state-of-the-art results on dialogue datasets while providing a practical architecture that can be used in real-world applications.


Depredation by false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens) is a serious problem for pelagic longline fishing in the Coral Sea. These interactions have raised substantial ecological, economic and social concerns. McPherson et al. proposed post-processing of passive acoustic recordings to analyse general odontocete acoustic behaviour and assess the effectiveness of systems being developed to reduce depredation. The location system developed to address this need utilises signal Time of Arrival Differences (TOADs) between hydrophone pairs, which confines the signal source to a hyperboloid. Through the use of a sufficient number of receivers, the resultant intersecting hyperboloids can be analysed using a 'surface search' routine to determine source location. The results presented show the capabilities of the algorithm when used with a specific hydrophone array configuration, and the practicality of use for monitoring depredation. This paper provides an overview of the techniques and discusses the adaptability of its application.


Much of what is understood about canine coat color genetics focuses on single gene inheritance. However, within the traditional color patterns, there is noticeable variation, suggesting modification of known coat color alleles. Alleles of the Agouti Signaling Protein
(ASIP) gene control the temporal and spatial expression of red-based phaeomelanin and black-based
eumelanin pigments. While up to six ASIP alleles have been predicted by previous studies, only two alleles, ay fawn and a recessive black, have been identified as polymorphisms within ASIP. Through sequence analysis, a SINE insertion in intron 1 of ASIP was detected that segregates with the black-and-tan, saddle tan and recessive black phenotypes. Together with the diagnostic tests for the ay and a alleles, detection of the SINE allows for complete genotyping of the four common ASIP alleles: ay, aw, at, a. Salukis and Afghan Hounds exhibit a phenotype known as grizzle or domino. This phenotype is similar to the black-and-tan phenotype, also present in both breeds, though the phaeomelanin points extend further up the limbs, onto the ventral surface, and form a widow's
peak on the face. Sequencing of the Melanocortin 1 Receptor (MC1R) gene identified a G78V polymorphism that segregates with the grizzle/domino phenotype. Further genotype analysis
showed that expression of the grizzle/domino pattern requires a genotype interaction involving ASIP, MC1R, and Canine Beta-Defensin 103 (DEFB103). The saddle tan phenotype is present in scent hounds, terriers, and herding breeds, and is characterized by phaeomelanin pigment on the limbs, often extending to the midline of the back,
and encompassing the entire head. Genome wide association study analysis, fine mapping, and sequence analysis identified a 16 bp tandem duplication in intron 5 of the hnRNP-Associated with Lethal Yellow (RALY) gene that segregates with the black-and-tan phenotype, versus saddle tan, in Basset Hounds and Pembroke Welsh Corgis. In breeds that never have the saddle tan
phenotype, but frequently have the black-and-tan phenotype, the RALY duplication does not segregate with black-and-tan. This, together with further genotype analysis, suggests a gene interaction of ASIP, MC1R, DEFB103, RALY, and an additional modifier gene is required for
expression of saddle tan or black-and-tan.


Often when a longitudinal change is studied in a population of interest we find that changes over time are heterogeneous (in terms of time and/or covariates' effect) and a traditional linear mixed effect model [Laird and Ware, 1982] on the entire population assuming common parametric form for covariates and time may not be applicable to the entire population. This is usually the case in studies when there are many possible predictors influencing the response trajectory. For example, Raudenbush [2001] used depression as an example to argue that it is incorrect to assume that all the people in a given population would be experiencing either increasing or decreasing levels of depression. In such cases, a group-averaged trajectory can mask important subgroup differences. Our aim is to identify and characterize longitudinally homogeneous subgroups based on the combination of baseline covariates. We achieve this goal by constructing regression tree through binary partitioning. We propose two steps procedure for binary partitioning: 1) first, choose the most significant partitioning variable and 2) then choose the best split by repetitive evaluation of a goodness of fit criterion at all the splits of chosen partitioning variable. To remedy for the problem of multiple testing, we propose a single test to identify the instability of parameter(s) in longitudinal models for a given partitioning variable. We obtain asymptotic results and examine finite sample behavior of our method through simulation studies. Finally, we apply our method to study the changes in brain metabolite levels of HIV infected patients. Regression Trees for Longitudinal Data Madan Gopal Kundu and Jaroslaw Harezlak Indiana University Fairbank School of Public Health, Indianapolis, IN


The purpose of this investigation was to assess the effect of platelet rich plasma (PRP) on soft tissue healing after mandibular third molar surgery. In this semi-blinded clinical trial study, 30 patients requiring surgical extraction of soft tissue impacted mandibular third molar and who indicated a willingness to return for recall visits were recruited. Patients were divided into test and control groups. In the test group, PRP was placed in the extracted socket, whereas the control group had no PRP. The mean postoperative pain score (Visual Analog Scale) and the amount of wound dehiscence were lower for the test group and it was statistically significant. Although the mean bleeding time was lower in the test group, this difference was not significant. The dry socket incidence and the mean intrinsical mouth opening were not significant between both groups. The PRP in the test group reduced pain and better soft tissue healing compared with in the control group. This study showed that topical application of PRP had a beneficial effect in enhancing socket healing after third molar surgery.


With the significant growth in the cloud-based systems, many industries give their attention to cloud computing solutions. E-learning is a promising application area since its typical requirements such as dynamically allocation of computation and storage resources, coincide well with cloud characteristics. This paper presents some possible cloud solutions in e-learning environments by emphasizing its pros and cons. It is of paramount importance to choose the most suitable cloud model for an e-learning application or an educational organization in terms of scalability, portability and security. We distinguish various deployment alternatives of cloud computing and discuss their benefits against typical e-learning requirements.


Ensembles of artificial neural networks (ANN) have been used in the last years as classification/regression machines, showing improved generalization capabilities that outperform those of single networks. However, it has been recognized that for aggregation to be effective the individual networks must be as accurate and diverse as possible. An important problem is, then, how to tune the aggregate members in order to have an optimal compromise between these two conflicting conditions. Recently, we proposed a new method for constructing ANN ensembles — termed here Stepwise Ensemble Construction Algorithm (SECA)— which leads to overtrained aggregate members with an adequate balance between accuracy and diversity. We present here a more extensive evaluation of SECA and discuss a potential problem with this algorithm: the unfrequent but damaging selection through its heuristic of particularly bad ensemble members. We introduce a modified version of SECA that can cope with this problem by allowing individual weighing of aggregate members. The original algorithm and its weighed modification are favorably tested against other methods, producing an improvement in performance on the standard statistical databases used as benchmarks.


This Request for Comments (RFC) suggests a framework for the description, exchange and interlinking of Synthetic Biology data. The framework would create an open process for the evolution and "rolling" standardization of data models. It describes how data and data models are to be published, how they are exchanged and integrated between different parties, and how they can be extended, corrected and interlinked in a decentralized fashion. These goals are achieved by embracing the RDF (Resource Description Framework), a set of W3C standards. A one-sentence summary of this proposal would therefore be: "Use RDF according to the W3C standards." The PoBoL project (Provisional BioBrick Ontology Language, http://pobol.org) is based on this idea. This RFC does not describe a data model per se but only outlines a possible architecture and rules of data exchange.


Drawing on Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigms, this article explored two levels at which paradigms influence contemporary practical theology. The first level is reflective practice, where pastors and academics carry out the descriptive-empirical, interpretive, normative and pragmatic tasks of practical theological reflection on particular contexts. The second level is metatheoretical, where practical theologians make decisions about how they view the theory– praxis relationship, interdisciplinary work, the relative weight of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience and the theological rationale that justifies their approach. The article concluded by raising two challenges to the current paradigms of practical theology: the relationship between Christian particularity and the common good, and the wound of reason.


Introduction: The hormonal changes that happen during pregnancy may have effects on weight, blood pressure, dyslipidaemia, and possibly metabolic syndrome. The aim of this study was to determine the association between parity and metabolic syndrome in middle-aged women in Babol, Iran. Methods: A total number of 800 women, with the age range of 30 to 50, were selected through a systematic random sampling method and sampling propionate to size from Babol. The metabolic syndrome was diagnosed based on the criteria set by the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) III. The individuals' socio-demographic characteristics, the number of live births, pregnancies, lifestyles, current physical activity, and dietary factors were assessed. Logistic regression was used to determine the independent association between parity and the prevalence of metabolic syndrome. Results: The data were obtained from 633 participants (79.1%). The women, who reported a history of gravidity or parity, had a mean score of 2.4 ± 1.0. One hundred and ten (110, 17.4%) women had less than two parities and 523(82.6%) had two or more parties. Women who developed metabolic syndrome were more likely to have a higher parity at the time of interview (p= 0.001). Women with ≥ 2 parity had significantly higher odds of metabolic syndrome (OR= 1.91, 95% CI= 1.08-3.37). In addition, logistic regression analyses were then performed to assess the association of parity with each component of the metabolic syndrome. The women with ≥ 2 parity were significantly more likely to have abdominal obesity (p= 0.010). Conclusion: Higher parity or gravidity was associated with higher prevalence of metabolic syndrome in middle-aged women. Health policy makers should work with health providers to reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome in middle-aged multipar women.


Core-mantle structures in mineral grains have typically been interpreted as having formed during crystal plastic deformation. Optical, scanning electron, and transmission electron microscope investigations of what appear to be core- mantle structures in amphibole from the Cheyenne belt, southeastern Wyoming, indicate that subgrainlike structures (herein "subgrains") formed as a result of cataclastic rather than crystal plastic deformation. Optical and scanning electron microscope evidence to support a cataclastic origin include (1) the angular shape of subgrains with boundaries commonly parallel to (110) cleavage; (2) the wide variety of subgrain sizes; (3) the compositional zonation of the amphibole subgrains with actinolitic hornblende interiors overgrown by magnesio- hornblende; and (4) the observation that some of the undulatory extinction in porphyroclast cores is due to slip along cleavage planes. Whether dislocations observed in the amphibole grains were formed prior to cataclastic deformation (work hardening) or formed in response to crack propagation is unknown. The implication of these observations is that core-mantle structures in other minerals may, at least in some cases, have also formed during cataclastic deformation rather than during recovery and/or recrystallization. Therefore, optical identification of core-mantle structures is not a priori evidence for a crystal plastic deformation mechanism.


Gradual typing allows programs to enjoy the bene ts of both static typing and dynamic typing. While it is often desirable to migrate a program from more dynamically-typed to more statically-typed or vice versa, gradual typing itself does not provide a way to facilitate this migration. This places the burden on programmers who have to manually add or remove type annotations. Besides the general challenge of adding type annotations to dynamically typed code, there are subtle interactions between these annotations in gradually typed code that exacerbate the situation. For example, to migrate a program to be as static as possible, in general, all possible combinations of adding or removing type annotations from parameters must be tried out and compared. In this paper, we address this problem by developing migrational typing, which e ciently types all possible ways of adding or removing type annotations from a gradually typed program. The typing result supports automatically migrating a program to be as static as possible, or introducing the least number of dynamic types necessary to remove a type error. The approach can be extended to support user-de ned criteria about which annotations to modify. We have implemented migrational typing and evaluated it on large programs. The results show that migrational typing scales linearly with the size of the program and takes only 2–4 times longer than plain gradual typing.


The effective development and education of teachers is central to the enterprise of education itself, and teacher education is currently viewed as a key educational priority issue at European Union level, requiring attention and further development as part of a broad approach to the raising of educational standards internationally. However, it is not easy for those interested in the subject - policy makers, teacher educators, other academic researchers, serving teachers and student teachers - to access the wealth of material already published on teacher education. Addressing this issue, this five-volume collection will for the first time bring together the most important papers and articles published between 1797 and 2005. Comprising an introductory volume that provides a philosophical and historical foundation to the collection, this comprehensive work then presents four closely inter-related volumes focusing on issues within the field.


From Alexanderplatz, the bustling Berlin square ringed by bleak slums, to Moabit, site of the city's most feared prison, Death in the Tiergarten illuminates the culture of criminal justice in late imperial Germany. In vivid prose, Benjamin Hett examines daily movement through the Berlin criminal courts and the lawyers, judges, jurors, thieves, pimps, and murderers who inhabited this world. Drawing on previously untapped sources, including court records, pamphlet literature, and pulp novels, Hett examines how the law reflected the broader urban culture and politics of a rapidly changing city. In this book, German criminal law looks very different from conventional narratives of a rigid, static system with authoritarian continuities traceable from Bismarck to Hitler. From the murder trial of Anna and Hermann Heinze in 1891 to the surprising treatment of the notorious Captain of Koepenick in 1906, Hett illuminates a transformation in the criminal justice system that unleashed a culture war fought over issues of permissiveness versus discipline, the boundaries of public discussion of crime and sexuality, and the role of gender in the courts. Trained in both the law and history, Hett offers a uniquely valuable perspective on the dynamic intersections of law and society, and presents an impressive new view of early-twentieth-century German history.


ABSTRACT. Biological invasions are one of the greatest threats to native species in natural ecological systems. One of the most successful invasive species is Bromus tectorum L. (cheatgrass), which is having marked impacts on native plant communities and ecosystem processes. However, we know little about the effects of this invasion on native animal species in the Intermountain West. Because ants have been used to detect ecological change associated with anthropogenic land use, they seem well suited for a preliminary evaluation of the consequences of cheatgrass-driven habitat conversion. In our study, we used pitfall traps to assess ant community assemblages in intact sagebrush and nearby cheatgrass-dominated vegetation. Ant abundance was about 10-fold greater in cheatgrass-dominated plots than in sagebrush plots. We also noted differences in diversity and evenness between habitat types at both the species and the functional-group levels of organization. At the species level, Shannon's diversity index was greater in sagebrush plots than in cheatgrass-dominated plots. However, at the functional-group level, Simpson's and Shannon's diversity indices and the Brillouin evenness index were greater in cheatgrass-dominated plots than in sagebrush plots. Further, common species / functional groups tended to be more abundant while less common species / functional groups tended to be less abundant in cheatgrass-dominated plots compared to intact sagebrush plots. Patterns appear to be at least partially related to resource availabilities. This initial survey of ant communities from intact-native and altered vegetation types may be indicative of similar trends of biodiversity shifts throughout the Intermountain West where cheatgrass has successfully replaced native species. We also discuss the implications of ant communities on land management activities, specifically in the context of aridland restoration.


The objective of this study was to examine effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) on the ability to decrease anxiety and depression and increase mindfulness compared to cognitive-behavioral stress management (CBSM). Thirty-five subjects were recruited from a community healthcare center and took part in MBSR (n = 21) and CBSM (n =14) groups. There were no initial differences between MBSR and CBSM subjects on demographics including age, gender, education, and income. MBSR was an 8-week course using meditation, gentle yoga, and body scanning exercises to increase mindfulness. CBSM was an 8-week course using cognitive and behavioral techniques to change thinking and reduce distress. Anxiety, depression, and mindfulness were assessed before and after each group. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to examine initial group differences between MBSR and CBSM and between Latinos and Non-Latino Whites (NLWs). Effect sizes and paired t-tests were used to examine changes in pre to post measures within groups and ethnicities. Correlational analyses were used to examine changes in anxiety, depression, and mindfulness, as well as changes in mindfulness subscales. Chi-square analyses examined dropout rates between Latino and NLW subjects. Results showed no significant differences in depression and anxiety when comparing MBSR and CBSM groups, but effect sizes showed significant reductions in anxiety and depression and increases in mindfulness. MBSR also showed significant reductions in all three variables, while CBSM showed reductions in anxiety depression, but no changes in mindfulness. NLWs showed reductions in both anxiety and depression, while Latinos decreased only in depression. NLWs showed large effects on all variables, while Latinos showed small increases in mindfulness, medium reductions in anxiety, and large reductions in depression. There were significant correlations between reductions in anxiety and increases in mindfulness and between reductions in depression and increases in mindfulness. There were no significant differences in attrition between groups or ethnicities. Future research should compare cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness-based interventions in a large sample. Research may also benefit from studying the mechanisms involved in mindfulness instead of focusing on group differences.


With Photoshop Elements 6, the most popular photo-editing program on Earth just keeps getting better. It's perfect for scrapbooking, email-ready slideshows, Web galleries, you name it. But knowing what to do and when is tricky. That's why our Missing Manual is the bestselling book on the topic. This fully revised guide explains not only how the tools and commands work, but when to use them. Photoshop Elements 6 is packed with new features. You get a new Quick Edit function, Windows Vista compatibility, improved RAW conversion, a handy Quick Selection Tool, and more. In fact, there's so much to the latest version that it can be quite confusing at times. Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual carefully explains every feature the program has to offer by putting each one into a clear, easy-to-understand context --something no other book does! Learn to import, organize, and fix photos quickly and easily.Repair and restore old and damaged photos, and retouch any image.Jazz up your pictures with dozens of filters, frames, and special effects.Learn which tools the pros use -- you'll finally understand how layers work!Create collages and photo layout pages for greeting cards and other projects.Get downloadable practice images and try new tricks right away. This guide progresses from simple to complex features, but if you're ready for the more sophisticated tools, you can easily jump around to learn specific techniques. As always, author Barbara Brundage lets you know which Elements features work well, which don't, and why -- all with a bit of wit and good humor. Don't hesitate. Dive into Adobe's outstanding photo editor with Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual right away.


Despite increasing popularity, quality improvement programs (QIP) have had modest and variable impacts on enhancing the quality of physician practice. We investigate the heterogeneity of physicians' preferences as a potential explanation of these mixed results in France, where the national voluntary QIP the CAPI has been cancelled due to its unpopularity. We rely on a discrete choice experiment to elicit heterogeneity in physicians' preferences for the financial and non-financial components of QIP. Using mixed and latent class logit models, results show that the models should be used in concert to shed light on different aspects of the heterogeneity in preferences. In particular, the mixed logit demonstrates that heterogeneity in preferences is concentrated on the pay-for-performance component of the QIP, while the latent class model shows that physicians can be grouped in four homogenous groups with specific preference patterns. Using policy simulation, we compare the French CAPI with other possible QIPs, and show that the majority of the physician subgroups modelled dislike the CAPI, while favouring a QIP using only non-financial interventions. We underline the importance of modelling preference heterogeneity in designing and implementing QIPs. JEL Classification: I11; I18; C25


The requirement for commencing higher education students to apply principles of attribution in their early academic writing frequently creates frustration both for students and academic teaching staff. Teachers often provide information on the necessity of attribution, and considerable detail on the mechanics of how to reference, and express frustration at the failure of some students to demonstrate this in their writing. In turn, many students appear overwhelmed and confused by the expectations placed on them as early academic writers. This paper explores these expectations and questions current assessment practices, advocating a longer period of formative learning before students are required to competently and accurately apply attribution principles and referencing conventions in their writing. Using the threshold concept framework (Meyer & Land, 2005), it suggests viewing attribution as a 'conceptual gateway' through which students must pass in becoming academic writers, and explores some implications of this for teaching, learning and assessment.


Title of Document: NEW INSIGHT INTO ISOPRENOID BIOSYNTHESIS IN THE CYANOBACTERIUM SYNECHOCYSTIS SP. STRAIN PCC 6803 Kelly Ann Poliquin, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Directed By: Professor Elisabeth Gantt, Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics In cyanobacteria, many compounds including chlorophylls, carotenoids, and quinones are synthesized from the isoprenoid precursors isopentenyl diphosphate (IPP) and dimethylallyl diphosphate (DMAPP). These C5 compounds are products of the well-studied methylerythritol phosphate (MEP) pathway found in cyanobacteria, plant plastids, and many bacteria. Previous studies suggest that isoprenoid biosynthesis via the MEP pathway in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. strain PCC 6803 are more complex than those proposed for a model bacterium. Most notably, in vitro isoprenoid biosynthesis in Synechocystis is stimulated by compounds of the pentose phosphate cycle (PPC) and not by intermediates of the MEP pathway. Isoprenoid biosynthesis in Synechocystis was therefore further investigated by disrupting sll1556, a gene distantly related to type 2 IPP isomerase genes. This gene is not essential under optimal photosynthetic conditions (20 μmol photons/m/s). IPP isomerase activity could not be shown for the purified protein. Whereas in vitro PPC substrate stimulated isoprenoid biosynthesis could not be demonstrated in ∆sll1556 cell-free extracts, it was restorable upon addition of the recombinant Sll1556 protein. PPC-stimulated isoprenoid biosynthesis results in a progression of isoprenoid production (C5 to C10 to C20) in vitro, although PPC compounds were not found to serve as direct substrates. Isoprenoid synthesis activity was unaffected when LytB, the terminal enzyme of the MEP pathway responsible for the production of both IPP and DMAPP, was immunodepleted from the cell-free extract, suggesting LytB activity is not likely to contribute to the observed in vitro isoprenoid synthesis. The physiological importance of Sll1556 was revealed at high light (200 μmol photons/m/s). High light stress in the ∆sll1556 mutant is evident by slower cell growth, a decrease in chlorophyll and carotenoid content, and in fewer thylakoids per cell. Myxoxanthophyll, but not zeaxanthin, increased in high light cells. The exact function of Sll1556 remains to be elucidated, but the combined results are consistent with a role in isoprenoid biosynthesis that is particularly important under high light stress. The mechanism by which Sll1556 is involved in PPC-stimulated isoprenoid synthesis is discussed, as are future areas of exploration for research. NEW INSIGHT INTO ISOPRENOID BIOSYNTHESIS IN THE CYANOBACTERIUM SYNECHOCYSTIS SP. STRAIN PCC 6803


Effective engineering management is acknowledged as being fundamental to the successful operation of organizations. While traditional and contemporary approaches to operational engineering management are of great significance, there remains a need to make further advances in this field. Such advances will enable an increase in the competitiveness of an organization by contributing toward delivering quality products in shorter timescales at an acceptable cost. As such, there is a requirement for a more comprehensive and innovative approach that offers a means of improving the operational management of engineering. Existing approaches recognize coordination as an important and pervasive characteristic of operational engineering management; however, they fail to offer a consistent understanding and appreciation of the concept. This paper comprehensively identifies the key elements of operational design coordination, which will provide the basis for an improved approach to engineering management.


The Ecological Footprint methodology is a framework that tracks Ecological Footprint (humanity's demands on the biosphere) by comparing human demand against the regenerative capacity (Biocapacity) of the planet (WWF, 2010) to advance the science of sustainability. As such, the spatiotemporal dynamics of the Ecological Footprint (EF) and Biocapacity (BC) in a given watershed are important topics in the field of sustainability research based on remote sensing (RS) data and geographic information system (GIS) techniques.This paper reports on a case study of the Jinghe River Watershed using improved EF methodology with the help of GIS and high resolution remote sensing data, to quantitatively estimate the relationship between EF demand and BC supply and analyze their spatial distribution patterns at multiple spatial scales for four periods (1986, 1995, 2000 and 2008). We predict the future BC both overall, and of six categories of biological productivity area for the next four decades using the Markov Chain Method.The results showed that the spatial distribution of EF demand and BC supply were significantly uneven in the region, in which the per-capita EF of all counties located in the watershed increased continually from 1986 to 2008, and the EF per person of counties in the middle and lower reaches area was markedly greater than that in the upper reaches over time. On the supply side, the per-capita BC of all counties decreased gradually from 1986 to 2008, and the per-capita BC of counties in the upper reaches area was greater than that in the middle and lower reaches during the period, causing the uneven spatial distribution of Ecological budget-the gap between supply and demand, showed that the Jinghe River Watershed on the whole has begun to be unsustainable since 2008, with each county exhibiting differential temporal patterns. The prediction results showed that the total BC will increase continually from 2020 to 2050, and the BC of six categories will reduce, indicating that unsustainability in the region will escalate. As a whole, The EF demand has exceeded the BC supply, and the gap was widening in the Jinghe Watershed. This paper provided an in-depth portrait of the spatiotemporal dynamics of EF and BC, as well as their interactions with humanity and ecosystems.


Dependence is a common phenomenon, wherever one looks: ecological systems, astronomy, human history, stock markets - but what is the logic of dependence? This book is the first to carry out a systematic logical study of this important concept, giving on the way a precise mathematical treatment of Hintikka's independence friendly logic. Dependence logic adds the concept of dependence to first order logic. Here the syntax and semantics of dependence logic are studied, dependence logic is given an alternative game theoretic semantics, and results about its complexity are proven. This is a graduate textbook suitable for a special course in logic in mathematics, philosophy and computer science departments, and contains over 200 exercises, many of which have a full solution at the end of the book. It is also accessible to readers, with a basic knowledge of logic, interested in new phenomena in logic.


Type systems for secure information flow are useful for efficiently checking that programs have secure information flow. They are, however, conservative, so that they often reject safe programs as ill-typed. Accordingly, users have to check whether the rejected programs indeed have insecure flows. To remedy this problem, we propose a method for automatically finding a counterexample of secure information flow (input states that actually lead to leakage of secret information). Our method is a novel combination of type-based analysis and model checking; Suspicious execution paths (that may cause insecure information flow) are first found by using the result of a type-based information flow analysis, and then a model checker is used to check whether the paths are indeed unsafe. We have formalized and implemented the method. The result of preliminary experiments shows that our method can often find counterexamples faster than a method using a model checker alone.


Background: Pulmonary involvement in ulcerative colitis (UC) is thought to be rare. There is not a definite document about the question that "Is the lung a target organ in inflammatory bowel disease?" The aim of the present study is to compare lung function between cases with UC and healthy controls. This study will also be of interest about searching the outbreak of pulmonary function abnormalities in a sample of Iranian patients with UC and factors associated with severity of UC. Methods: In an analytic cross sectional study between July 2006 and September 2007, we evaluated 70 patients with histologically confirmed UC and 70 matched healthy people. Our checklist addressed demographic variables, symptoms, smoking behavior, drugs, laboratory findings and pulmonary function tests. Results: None of the lung volumes and capacities were significantly different in cases as compared to controls. Severity of UC was mild in 65.7%. It was correlated with smoking (P=0.019) and allergy (P=0.017). Patients with moderate UC had lower hemoglobin (P<.001), MCH (P=0.002), MCV (P=0.047), MCHC (P=0.028) and higher REFF (P=0.032) and BF (P=0.01). Conclusion: The controversies about the relation between UC and lung disease can be due to different sample sizes, activity of UC at the time of measurement of lung volumes, methods of measuring lung capacities at the time of PFT and different nationalities.


Medieval Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages. Edited by James Muldoon. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 1997. Pp. vii, 208. $49.95.) The subject of this important anthology is conversion to Latin Christianity from alien cults, mainly between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries. The one exception to the rule is an essay by Father Leonard P Hindsley, O.P, about conversio monastica, the spiritual progress of the Dominican nun, Margaret Ebner, through obedience to the discipline of her order. The nine collaborators have provided independent variations on the theme of conversion, each with its own foci of place and time. Two (ohn Howe, on the creation of a sacred topography of shrines, churches, and other sacredly taboo spaces as Europe assimilated Christianity; and Jonathan Elukin, on the suspicion of hidden or impending apostasy which haunted Jewish converts) span the entire period and gather materials from all over the map. The rest are studies on discreet events or texts, predominantly from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The extraordinary wealth of learning mustered into the volume unfolds to display articles on papal evangelistic missions to the Far East, the criss-crossing of religious borders in the Crusader states of the Levant, dilatory flirtations with which pagan Lithuania long tantalized the Teutonic Knights, literary recreations by Scandinavian writers of conversions which occurred centuries earlier, and the agonized, spiritual eroticism of a bed-ridden nun in an obscure corner of Germany. The three articles-all by women-grouped together under the heading, "Women in Conversion History," concern different subjects (from Merovingian Gaul to England and France in the waning Middle Ages). They have in common the proposition, imported from literary criticism, that, until recent times, articulating historical narrative was a privilege of dominant male elites. This valuable accent on historical narrative as an assertion of power allows a reflection on the admittedly limited homogeneity of Fragestellungen in the contributions to this volume. The facts that three out of the four female collaborators took up the theme that narrative expressed the class values of the narrator (including gendered ones),and that none of the seven male contributors adopted this perspective, open the way to other observations: that (with one exception) all the contributors received their professional training in the United States, that (with one exception) all of those professionally trained in the United States were educated in the northeastern corridor (where most still live), and that (with two exceptions) all have appointments in university posts. Unfortunately, I am unable to establish a generational profile of the collaborators. However, the limited homogeneity of Fragestellungen in the splendidly varied articles displays one common preoccupation of academic historians in North America during recent years, of which the importation from literary criticism, particularly from feminist criticism, is one sign. At least before the Reformation, Christian theologians agreed that conversion was a miracle wrapped up in the mystery of baptism. The seven historians and two linguists who collaborated to make this anthology run to political experience, rather than to miracle or mystery. …


Business and society (B&S) researchers, as well as practitioners, have been critiqued for ignoring those with less voice and power (e.g., women, non-literate, or indigenous peoples) often referred to as "fringe stakeholders." Existing methods used in B&S research often fail to address issues of meaningful participation, voice and power, especially in developing countries. In this article, we stress the utility of visual participatory research (VPR) methods in B&S research to fill this gap. Through a case study on engaging Ghanaian cocoa farmers on gender inequality issues, we explore how VPR methods may be used by researchers to achieve more inclusive, and thus more credible, stakeholder research that can improve decision making within businesses. Furthermore, we argue that ingrained social and environmental problems tackled by B&S research and the unique context in which they occur may open up new opportunities to develop participatory visual methods for social change.


The increasing need of computation resources in scientific applications has led to the emergence of metacomputing (or Grid Computing) techniques. DIET is a plateform for the integration of Network Enabled Servers in an ASP environment. In this paper, we exhibit experimental results obtained with the DIET (Distributed Interactive Engineering Toolbox) prototype that we develop. DIET is built on a CORBA based distributed architecture and thus benefit from a true distributed system base. The DIET architecture lays on a hierarchical interconnection of agents to avoid bottlenecks. We present the main algorithms to broke a client request for problem solving. The experimental results show the benefit of the distributed and hierarchical approach of DIET. We show how it extends the classical ASP model limits. Finally we present a reflection on the most efficient deployment of the platform.


Climatic changes and eustatic sea levels have been assumed to be the most important controllers of the Colorado River alluvial fan in northern Patagonia. Although the alluvial fan occurs in a region considered tectonically stable, there are pieces of evidence that the Miocene Andean orogeny has reactivated inherited structures, with subsequent geomorphological changes that date back to the Pleistocene. Besides, the clear evidence of neotectonism in the region and their effects on the evolution of this fan, it has not been studied in detail yet. In this study, we map and analyze six sections outcropping in different terraces of the alluvial fan with the primary aim of disentangling the role of tectonism, climate and eustatic changes on the evolution of the alluvial fan. This study is part of a bigger project aimed to understand the origin of the shallow lakes occurring in northern Patagonia. Our results indicate that the alluvial fan of the Colorado River was established in the area around the Middle Pleistocene. Evidence of deformations in Miocene to Pleistocene units indicates significant neotectonism during the Upper Pleistocene. By the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, tectonism produced incision generating a set of terraces. After this time, an important climate change from semiarid to arid favored the calcretization of some terraces. By the Pleistocene-Middle Holocene, the terraces were covered by ancient eolian sediment accumulated during dry conditions. By the Middle Holocene, a broad alluvial fan developed in the region under a warmer and more humid climate generating the Alluvial Colorado River-III deposit at the T3 terrace. In the late Holocene, aggradation process was favored by a high sea level and temperate-arid climate, producing T4 terrace. At the same time, this climate condition favored the local deflation-sedimentation processes that resulted in the deposition of modern eolian deposits (mE) over the T3 terrace. The depressions generated by the deflation were, later on, occupied by shallow lakes when the climate turn more humid. Subsequently, during regressive sea level condition, ca. 2000 years BP, the T4 terrace was partially eroded and the modern alluvial plain formed.


OF DISSERTATION INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN ESCALATION OF TOBACCO USE: IMPULSIVITY AND ALCOHOL USE Like adolescents, young adults are at risk of initiating tobacco use and escalating to daily use and tobacco dependence. However, not every young adult who uses cigarettes intermittently becomes tobacco dependent, and the time-course of those who transition to daily use varies widely. Individual differences likely contribute to the variability observed in patterns of tobacco use. This dissertation uses a multi-modal research approach to examine dimensions of impulsivity and alcohol use that are associated with vulnerability for escalation of cigarette smoking, and whether alcohol's effects on behavioral disinhibition impact cigarette consumption. Study 1 investigated the associations between dimensions of trait impulsivity, alcohol use, and smoking behavior in a crosssectional sample of young adults who varied in frequency of cigarette smoking. Study 2 expanded on the results of Study 1 by examining the separate and combined effects of impulsivity and alcohol use on escalation of tobacco use in a longitudinal study of young adults in their first three years of college to determine whether alcohol use and dimensions of impulsivity influenced trajectories of smoking behavior, and whether alcohol use and behavioral impulsivity changed across time as a function of tobacco use trajectories. Study 3 utilized a randomized, within-subject, placebo controlled design to examine whether alcohol-induced impairments in behavioral inhibition mediated the relationship between acute alcohol administration and ad-libitum cigarette consumption. Results from studies 1 and 2 indicated that alcohol use was associated with smoking frequency, and that dimensions of impulsivity (i.e. sensation seeking, lack of premeditation, and urgency) differentiated smoking groups. Study 3 found that acute alcohol increased smoking behavior, but alcohol impairment of inhibitory control did not mediate the relationship between alcohol and smoking consumption. Taken together, the results of these studies demonstrate that alcohol use and impulsivity play a significant role in tobacco use escalation, though more research is needed to determine the mechanism(s) that drive alcohol-induced increases in cigarette consumption.