In the application of high-power lasers, damage to active laser materials, and to components of laser system, generally determines the limit of useful laser performance. Accordingly, there is great interest in reducing the susceptibility of optical elements ot damage. Damage in transparent dielectrics arises from three major causes, particulate inclusions or microinhomogeneities in the material, self-focusing within the materials, and surface damage due to plasma formation. The state of understanding of these phenomena, and the thresholds observed, where they have been determined, will be discussed. Dependence on pulse length will also be considered. Although most of the research accomplished to date on laser damage has concentrated on Nd-glass, the advent of very high-powered gas lasers has stimulated interest in the development of damage resistant component materials for use in the ir. Crystalline dielectrics appear to be the most likely candidate materials for ir windows. Nonlinear optics materials are particularly susceptible to damage, since they are generally exposed to high intensity radiation. Asa final item, damage in thin film dielectric coatings are considered.


Previous research has established that the predictions of game theory are quite sensitive to the assumptions made about the players' beliefs. We evaluate the severity of this robustness problem by characterizing conditions on the primitives of the model—the players' beliefs and higher-order beliefs about the payoff-relevant parameters—for the behaviour of a given Harsanyi type to be approximated by the behaviour of (a sequence of) perturbed types. This amounts to providing belief-based characterizations of the strategic topologies of Dekel et al. (2006). We apply our characterizations to a variety of questions concerning robustness to perturbations of higher-order beliefs, including genericity of types that are consistent with a common prior, and we investigate the connections between our notions of robustness and the notion of common $p$-belief of Monderer and Samet (1989).


In the winter of 1996, Canada's third largest financial institution, the Bank of Montreal, launched a now infamous advertising campaign in which it asked the question: Can a bank change? While the resulting ads naturally responded in the affirmative, many other large financial institutions were asking themselves the same question. The dramatic acceleration since the mid-to-late 1980's of the rate at which banks are establishing branches and/or investing in financial institutions outside of their home markets combined with the dismantling by governments around the world of many traditional regulatory restrictions is resulting in the re-making of the financial services industry in its entirety. Central to this process has been a wave of mergers and alliances, many of which increasingly cut across the classical sectoral sub-divisions (commercial banking, securities, insurance etc.). The end result has been the gradual emergence of singular financial amorphisms capable of offering any service globally. In addition to these structural changes, an important result of this wave of mergers, alliances and foreign investment has been that financial institutions have become global players in terms of market presence, rather than just loan portfolios. This, in turn, has meant that the volume and importance of international trade in financial services has substantially increased in recent years. As the international trade of financial services has developed, governments have sought to establish a framework of rules to govern it. However, this process has not occurred in a vacuum. Over the past 15 years, international trade in goods has become substantially freer, international trade in services (of which financial services constitute a part) has grown dramatically, and international capital flows have become more open. While volumes have been written about both international trade in goods and international capital flows and a burgeoning literature exists on trade in services, comparatively little has been written specifically about international trade in financial services. This paper is designed to help fill this void. The core of the paper consists of three specific cases: (1) the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA); (2) the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); (3) the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade in Financial Services. These selections constitute a logical progression. The CUSFTA was the first trade agreement ever to include provisions on financial services. The NAFTA, negotiated shortly thereafter contains the most far-reaching provisions in the world in this area. Finally, the WTO Financial Services Agreement marks the first time that such disciplines have been successfully negotiated on a global level. In order to make an examination of an Agreement consisting of 56 different schedules possible, this section will focus on the commitments of a number of sample countries in a specific region of the world, namely Latin America.


"A three-factor model using the standardized-unexpected-earnings and cashflow-to-price factors explains 15 well-known asset pricing anomalies." Our data-mining experiment provides a backdrop against which such claims can be evaluated. We construct three-factor linear pricing models that match return spreads associated with as many as 15 out of 27 commonly used firm characteristics over the 1971-2011 sample. We form target assets by sorting firms into ten portfolios on each of the chosen characteristics and form candidate pricing factors as long-short positions in the extreme decile portfolios. Our analysis exhausts all possible 351 three-factor models, consisting of two characteristic-based factors in addition to the market portfolio. 65% of the examined factor models match a larger fraction of the target return cross-sections than the CAPM or the Fama-French three-factor model. We find that the relative performance of the complete set of three-factor models is highly sensitive to the sample choice and the factor construction methodology. Our results highlight the challenges of evaluating empirical factor models.


This study assesses the relationship between political partisanship and attitudes and behavior with respect to the Swine Flu crisis of 2009 in general, and the U.S. mass vaccination program in particular. I argue that even seemingly non-partisan political issues like public health are increasingly characterized by partisan polarization in public attitudes, and that such polarization is in part attributable, at least in part, to the breakdown of the information commons that characterized the American mass media from roughly the 1950s until the early 1990s. In its place has arisen an increasingly fragmented and niche-oriented media marketplace in which individuals are better able to limit their information exposure to attitudes and opinions that reinforce, rather than challenge, their preexisting beliefs. I test my argument against a variety of data sources, including opinion surveys and state level Swine Flu vaccination rate data.


We introduce a novel bottom-up approach to fabricate by self assembly a metamaterial from metallic nanoparticles in a two-step process. In the first step, a metamaterial made of densely packed silver nanoparticles is required. The material dispersion with increasing nanoparticle densities, from dispersed to randomly packed nanoparticles, was measured by spectroscopic ellipsometry, demonstrating high permittivity values in the visible. In the second step, this material was used to prepare spherical clusters by a method based on oil-in-water emulsion. The optical properties of these clusters were equally investigated by spectroscopic means. Comparisons with rigorous numerical simulations clearly indicate that, depending on the cluster size, their spectral response can be unambiguously associated with the excitation of a magnetic dipole resonance. As a consequence, such spherical clusters are promising building blocks for future metamaterials possessing a magnetic response in the visible range.


Milling arbor is may be considered as an extension of the machine spindle on which milling cutter are securely mounted and rotated. The arbor is subjected to complex stress conditions such as combine's axial loads, bending and twisting moments and cyclic or dynamic loads [8]. So it is necessary to analyze the behavior of the spindle under different loading conditions and with the use of different theories of failure. In this research paper milling arbor is analyzed using ANSYS software and the different stresses such as bending stress, torsional shear stress, principal stress and von-misses stress are determined [6]. The results are validated against analytical solution and the errors are within the allowable limits, and shape optimization using iterative technique is done based on the stress valve obtained; an iterative process was carried out. A new Shape was formulated whose stress valve well within the limits.


The application of WSN/ZigBee is growing popularity and how to connect WSN/ZigBee to the present standard network seamlessly is an issue what is worth studying. In this paper, it designs and realizes a ZigBee—Wi-Fi wireless gateway based on STM32W108 RF chip and embedded Wi-Fi module. In ZigBee network, wireless gateway as a sink, it receives data from sensor nodes and interacts with them. In WLAN, wireless gateway communicates with PC or network servers by means of AP. Both the hardware scheme and software scheme of the wireless gateway are introduced. Then the performance of the wireless gateway is tested, and the result shows that it can be used for general purposes and the performance is stable. The wireless gateway can realize communication effectively between ZigBee network and WLAN.


1081 Objectives Several 18F-labeled lipophilic phosphonium cations have been developed for myocardial perfusion imaging, but most of them require multistep synthesis and/or suffer from significant in vivo defluorination. Recently, 18F-19F isotope exchange on ammoniomethyl-trifluoroborate (AmBF3) was shown to be a facile radiofluorination strategy, and the resulting 18F-AmBF3 conjugates exhibited high in vivo stability. In this study, we synthesized and evaluated two 18F-AmBF3-conjugated phosphonium cations as potential myocardial perfusion imaging agents. Methods Two AmBF3-conjugated phosphonium cations, Z04026 and Z04059, were each synthesized in 4 steps starting from tris(4-methylphenyl)phosphine and tris(3,5-dimethylphenyl)phosphine, respectively. 18F-labeling was performed via 18F-19F isotope exchange with 18F-fluoride, and purified by solid-phase extraction. Lipophilicity was measured by shake flask method. Biodistribution and imaging studies were performed in CD-1 mice. Results 18F-labeled Z04026 and Z04059 were obtained in 12±4 and 17±4% radiochemical yield with >97% radiochemical purity. LogD7.4 of 18F-Z04026 and 18F-Z04059 were 0.1 and 1.1, respectively. Imaging and biodistribution studies showed rapid clearance of both tracers from blood, and their excretion was via both hepatobiliary and renal pathways. At 1 h p.i., the heart uptake was 0.2±0.1 %ID/g for 18F-Z04026 and 1.0±0.7 %ID/g for 18F-Z04059. The heart-to-blood and heart-to-muscle ratios were 1.0±0.2 and 1.5±0.2 for 18F-Z04026, and 8.3±1.9 and 2.8±0.5 for 18F-Z04059. Conclusions More lipophilic 18F-Z04059 showed higher heart uptake and heart-to-background contrast than 18F-Z04026. However, zwitterionic AmBF3 might jeopardise free entry of both tracers into myocardium as their heart uptake values are much lower than those (> 20% ID/g) of previously reported 18F-labeled phosphonium cations.


Analytical anarchism is a subset of political economy that takes neither rules as given nor assumes that monopoly enforcement of such rules exists. This approach is the positive study of endogenous rule formation by individuals within a particular society. Such rules emerge out of the self-interest of such individuals, though not necessarily from any deliberate design. We outline and explain two theoretical approaches that have been used to illustrate various historical cases of anarchism across time and place. We distinguish between an exclusionary approach to analytical anarchism and an inclusionary approach to analytical anarchism. Though these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, they are distinct from each other, in that they illustrate alternative mechanisms under which the conditions of anarchy can be relatively peaceful and productive.


The uppermost Llandovery to lower Wenlock Coralliferous 'Group' in SW Pembrokeshire is here redefined as a single formation with two members. The Coralliferous Formation is approximately 150 m thick and comprises a basal unit of granule- to pebble-grade rudite beds, the Renney Slip Member, overlain by interbedded mudstones and fine sandstones of the Deadman's Bay Member. The Renney Slip Member lies unconformably above the Skomer Volcanic Group and includes 12.4 m of coarse grained, granule- and pebble-rich rudites, with beds up to 0.94 m thick. Three lithofacies are recognized within this unit: coarse, granule-rich rudite beds are interpreted as a variety of mass flow deposits, some of which have been reworked in a marine environment; thick sandstones with planar and ripple lamination are shoreface to offshore transition zone deposits; silty mudstones interbedded with very fine grained sandstones represent marine offshore deposits, formed largely below mean storm wave base. These facies associations, and abundant bioturbation, indicate an environment with a strong marine influence, and a proximal source of coarse grained sediment. The Renney Slip Member is reinterpreted in the context of a fan delta depositional model. At least seven cycles of deposition are recognized, each showing an upwards-fining pattern, representing deposition from fan delta, shoreface–transition zone to open marine environments. These patterns of deposition are attributed to localized tectonic movements causing variations in relative sea level. At the time the Renney Slip Member was deposited, the southern Welsh Basin margin is interpreted as a fault-block extensional margin, with the landmass of Pretannia to the south. Though fan-delta deposition took place southwards against the uplifted footwall of the Wenall Fault, the basin margin lay to the south of the Ritec Fault.


The gravity-driven spreading of one fluid in contact with another fluid is of key importance to a range of topics. These phenomena are commonly described by the two-layer shallow-water equations (SWE). When one layer is significantly deeper than the other, it is common to approximate the system with the much simpler one-layer SWE. It has been assumed that this approximation is invalid near shocks, and one has applied additional front conditions to correct the shock speed. In this paper, we prove mathematically that an effective one-layer model can be derived from the two-layer equations that correctly capture the behavior of shocks and contact discontinuities without additional closure relations. The result shows that simplification to an effective one-layer model is justified mathematically and can be made without additional knowledge of the shock behavior. The shock speed in the proposed model is consistent with empirical models and identical to front conditions that have been found theoretically by von Karman and Benjamin. This suggests that the breakdown of the SWE in the vicinity of shocks is less severe than previously thought. We further investigate the applicability of the SW framework to shocks by studying one-dimensional lock-exchange/-release. We derive expressions for the Froude number that are in good agreement with the widely employed expression by Benjamin. The equations are solved numerically to illustrate how quickly the proposed model converges to solutions of the full two-layer SWE. We also compare numerical results from the model with results from experiments and find good agreement.The gravity-driven spreading of one fluid in contact with another fluid is of key importance to a range of topics. These phenomena are commonly described by the two-layer shallow-water equations (SWE). When one layer is significantly deeper than the other, it is common to approximate the system with the much simpler one-layer SWE. It has been assumed that this approximation is invalid near shocks, and one has applied additional front conditions to correct the shock speed. In this paper, we prove mathematically that an effective one-layer model can be derived from the two-layer equations that correctly capture the behavior of shocks and contact discontinuities without additional closure relations. The result shows that simplification to an effective one-layer model is justified mathematically and can be made without additional knowledge of the shock behavior. The shock speed in the proposed model is consistent with empirical models and identical to front conditions that have been found theoretically by von...


Hopes for hormonal rejuvenation appear periodically throughout history—with the most prominent attempt occurring around the turn of the 20th century only to vanish in the 1930s following the discovery of testosterone, which discredited testis extracts and manipulations. In recent decades, there has been a renewed attempt for hormonal rejuvenation with testosterone in men.

Today, 8 decades since the first clinical use of testosterone,1 the sole unequivocal indication for testosterone treatment is as replacement therapy for men with pathological hypogonadism (ie, organic disorders of the reproductive system).2 Yet despite no proven new indications, global testosterone sales increased 100-fold over the last 3 decades, including increases of 40-fold in Canada and 10-fold in the United States from 2000-2011.3 This was achieved by marketing strategies that circumvented the need for efficacy and safety testing of testosterone for male aging by stretching the definition of the term hypogonadism to encompass virtually any condition associated with low circulating testosterone levels. Promoted under the rubric "low T" (also referred to as andropause or late-onset hypogonadism), this process was facilitated by individual physicians and professional societies that minimized the fundamental distinction between pathological hypogonadism and functional states (including aging) associated with low circulating testosterone levels.


The future of the South African workforce is under threat. The objective of the research is to prove that a need for AIDS teaching in schools exists and to provide guidelines for its implementation through the alteration of schooling in South Africa. The research is based on various case studies, interviews, personal observations and literature studies.
Due to the threat of economic decline posed by HIV/AIDS in South Africa, a need exists to change the behaviour of the future economically active workforce. Recent studies in Africa show that teenage girls are five to six times more likely to become HIV-infected than boys their age. Furthermore, children whose mothers are uneducated risk a 45 percent greater chance of premature death than children whose mothers have post-primary education.
Since there are more female HIV carriers than males, girls' education is an absolute priority. The development of more child-friendly AIDS literature that can be used in schools and for community projects in rural areas is vital. Furthermore, a weekly life-skills period with a strong focus on AIDS should be introduced at schools from grade one to grade twelve to emphasise the importance of the topic to pupils.


The motion of colloidal particles on a periodic optical potential energy landscape in the presence of an external driving force may result in particle separation. In contrast to recent methods of holographic or interferometric generation of such landscapes, we use an acousto-optic deflector to create two-dimensional landscapes. We present what is believed to be the first experimental realization of fractionation with simultaneous sorting of four different sizes of colloidal microparticle into laterally separated parallel laminar streams.


Policy networks is a body of literature dedicated to modelling state-civil society relationship formats. In this particular relationship, an interest group with privileged (insider) access to the party in power gains advantage in the policymaking process by utilizing party's ability to make political appointments in the civil service. The parentela (or type 1 parentela) was first discovered by Joseph La Palombara (1964) in 1960s Italy and was documented later again by Greer (1994) in 1920s-1970s Northern Ireland. Still, there has been no parentela research since 1994, save for Yishai (1992), who argued the parentela did not exist in Israel in 1980s. It seems the concept is considered of little utility to the academic community today. At the same time, as a category of policy networks, the parentela is also susceptible to the wider criticism of Thatcher (1997) and Dowding (1995; 2001) that the policy network literature is unable to introduce causal dynamics in its models and distinguish between network features and network independent variables. This study, therefore, addresses both criticisms by studying the party-group-civil service relationship in Bulgaria, for the period 2013-2015, using 26 elite interviews and a number of cases. Results show that this particular policy network is still viable today. They support Yishai (1992) that hegemonic parties have no effect on parentela formation. The study demonstrates that the cooperation between ruling parties, in need of funds, and organised businesses (groups), in need of market advantage, produces the parentela. In a case study on construction tenders, the study demonstrates La Palombara's parentela, by exposing the process of how ruling parties intervene in the civil service through political appointees to ensure construction projects are granted to their party insider groups. The study also discovers a new parentela dynamic, labelled as type 2 parentela, where the party intervention extends further to the free market by affecting party insider's market competitors through prejudiced regulatory inspections that disrupt targeted businesses' operations temporarily or altogether.


A series of 10 new 1,3-thiazolidin-4-one (3a-3j) were synthesized from different schiff base of N-((1E)-(3-chloro-5,7-dimethyl-2-naphthyl) methylene)aniline (2a-2j) with thioaceticacid. The chemical structures of these compounds were confirmed by means of 1 H NMR, IR and mass analysis. Newly synthesized compounds were screened in vitro for their antimicrobial activity against varieties of bacterial strains such Staphylococcus epidermidis, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and fungi strain Aspergillus niger at 40 µg/mL. The resulted of compounds shows that chloro and flouro substituted 1,3-thiazolidine-4-one derivatives are showing quite well activity as compare to the other functional groups.


Binswanger's disease (BD) is a condition characterized by prominent brain atrophy with ventricular dilatation, diffuse white matter (WM) lesions and a scattering of lacunar infarcts. BD patients have dementia, and have vascular risk factors, focal cerebrovascular deficits and evidence of subcortical cerebral dysfunction. From our clinical studies, the most effective prophylaxis against the development of BD is to manage the hypertension, especially a high nocturnal blood pressure, in the early stage patients showing only a scattering of lacunes and/or mild WM lesions. The pathogenesis of BD is likely to be chronic cerebral ischemia due to hypertensive small artery disease with capillary collagenosis, which causes the multiple lacunes and the alterations in the glia and axons. In addition, arterial hypertension and a subsequent dysfunction of the blood–brain barrier (BBB) may cause the WM lesions. A compromised BBB will permit the entry of serum components, immunoglobulins, complements and fibrinogen into the perivascular neural parenchyma. These substances may subsequently activate both astro‐ and microglia and thus damage the myelin structures. Experimentally, immunosuppressants, cyclosporin A and FK 506 suppressed both the glial activation and WM changes after chronic cerebral hypoperfusion. The pro‐thrombotic state of the microcirculation in BD patients may also contribute to local inflammation and the BBB dysfunction, because thrombin and prostanoids are in‐volved in various tissue reactions including brain edema and glial activation. Therefore, novel therapeutic ap‐proaches using the administration of anti‐thrombin and cyclo‐oxygenase‐2 inhibitors as well as immunosup‐pressants may be useful for preventing the progression of BD.


Imitation learning trains control policies by mimicking pre-recorded expert demonstrations. In partially observable settings, imitation policies must rely on observation histories, but many seemingly paradoxical results show better performance for policies that only access the most recent observation. Recent solutions ranging from causal graph learning to deep information bottlenecks have shown promising results, but failed to scale to realistic settings such as visual imitation. We propose a solution that outperforms these prior approaches by upweighting demonstration keyframes corresponding to expert action changepoints. This simple approach easily scales to complex visual imitation settings. Our experimental results demonstrate consistent performance improvements over all baselines on image-based Gym MuJoCo continuous control tasks. Finally, on the CARLA photorealistic vision-based urban driving simulator, we resolve a long-standing issue in behavioral cloning for driving by demonstrating effective imitation from observation histories. Supplementary materials and code at: \url{https://tinyurl.com/imitation-keyframes}.


A rich and unforgettable tragic-comic novel of sexual intrigue and political scheming, The House of Ulloa is one of the greatest works of nineteenth-century Spanish literature. The House of Ulloa follows pure and pious Father Julian Alvarez, who is sent to a remote country estate to put the affairs of the marquis, an irresponsible libertine, in order. When he discovers moral decadence, cruelty and corruption at his new home, Julian's well-meaning but ineffectual attempts to prevent the fall of the House of Ulloa end in tragedy. Combining gothic elements with humour and social satire, The House of Ulloa is the finest achievement of Emilia Pardo Bazan, a prolific writer, feminist, traveller and intellectual, and one of the most dynamic figures of her time. Brilliantly balancing biting satire and gothic undertones, and evoking a rich sense of place, this is a wonderful novel that deserves to be ranked with the other great books of the period. The Countess Emilia Pardo Bazan was born in 1851 and married at sixteen. After separating from her husband, she embarked on an affair with novelist Benito Perez Galdos. The House of Ulloa (1886) is generally considered as her masterpiece among her many literary works. Professor Paul O'Prey is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Roehampton, London. Lucia Graves has translated works by Robert Graves, Anais Nin, Katherine Mansfield and Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and is the author of a memoir, A Woman Unknown, and a novel, The Memory House. "An absolutely first-rate novelist [...] Bazan's genius lies in the way she mixes comedy, farce, realism and heightened-pitch hysteria with a dash of gothic [...] People may travel by donkey in this book, but it could have been written yesterday". (Nick Lezard, Guardian). "Pardo Bazan's mastery of social types and of the political currents that swirled around the liberal revolution are unsurpassed in Spanish literature...O'Prey and Graves ...avoid awkward literalisms while nonetheless remaining true to the spirit of the original". (New Criterion).


Unlike normal diffusion, in anomalous diffusion, the movement of a molecule is described by the correlated random walk model where the mean square displacement of a molecule depends on the power law of time. In molecular communication (MC), there are many scenarios when the propagation of molecules cannot be described by normal diffusion process, where anomalous diffusion is a better fit. In this paper, the effects of anomalous subdiffusion on concentration-encoded molecular communication (CEMC) are investigated. Although classical (i.e., normal) diffusion is a widely-used model of diffusion in molecular communication (MC) research, anomalous subdiffusion is quite common in biological media involving bio-nanomachines, yet inadequately addressed as a research issue so far. Using the fractional diffusion approach, the molecular propagation effects in the case of pure subdiffusion occurring in an unbounded three-dimensional propagation medium have been shown in detail in terms of temporal dispersion parameters of the impulse response of the subdiffusive channel. Correspondingly, the bit error rate (BER) performance of a CEMC system is investigated with sampling-based (SD) and strength (i.e., energy)-based (ED) signal detection methods. It is found that anomalous subdiffusion has distinctive time-dispersive properties that play a vital role in accurately designing a subdiffusive CEMC system. Unlike normal diffusion, to detect information symbols in subdiffusive CEMC, a receiver requires larger memory size to operate correctly and hence a more complex structure. An in-depth analysis has been made on the performances of SD and ED optimum receiver models under diffusion noise and intersymbol interference (ISI) scenarios when communication range, transmission data rate, and memory size vary. In subdiffusive CEMC, the SD method.


Handbook of Neuroemergency Clinical Trials, Second Edition, focuses on the practice of clinical trials in acute neuroscience populations, or what have been called neuroemergencies. Neuroemergencies are complex, life-threatening diseases and disorders, often with devastating consequences, including death or disability. The overall costs are staggering in terms of annual incidence and costs associated with treatment and survival, yet despite their significance as public health issues, there are few drugs and devices available for definitive treatment. The book focuses on novel therapies and the unique challenges their intended targets pose for the design and analysis of clinical trials. This volume provides neurologists, neuroscientists, and drug developers with a more complete understanding of the scientific and medical issues of relevance in designing and initiating clinical development plans for novel drugs intended for acute neuroscience populations. The editors provide the best understanding of the pitfalls associated with acute CNS drug development and the best information on how to approach and solve issues that have plagued drug development.Presents a comprehensive overview on clinical trials and drug development challenges in acute neuroscience populationsProvides neurologists, neuroscientists and drug developers with a complete understanding of scientific and medical issues related to designing clinical trialsEdited by leaders in the field who have designed and managed over 50 neuroemergency clinical trials


The world is complex, Richard Posner observes in his most recent book, Reflections on Judging. It follows that, to resolve real-world disputes sensibly, judges must be astute students of the world's complexity. The problem, he says, is that, thanks to disposition, training, and professional incentives, they aren't. Worse than that, the legal system generates its own complexity precisely to enable judges "to avoid rather than meet and overcome the challenge of complexity" that the world delivers. Reflections concerns how judges needlessly complexify inherently simple law, and how this complexification can be corrected. Posner's diagnoses and prescriptions range widely — from the Bluebook to the law school curriculum. But the principal culprit, in Reflections as in many of Posner's previous writings, is legal formalism and, in particular, the textualist and originalist approaches to legal interpretation associated with Justice Antonin Scalia. Indeed, the book's centerpiece is a substantially expanded version of a scathing, previously published review of Scalia's book, co-authored with Bryan Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Accordingly, this article, a review of Reflections produced for the Michigan Law Review's annual book review issue, focuses on the debate between Posner and Scalia. After offering a scorecard of blows landed and missed, I argue that the debate reveals two ironies. First, Posner's criticisms often misfire precisely because he fails to appreciate the irreducible complexity of law. Despite common rhetoric, the central thesis of contemporary originalism is not about the activity denominated "interpretation." Rather, it is fundamentally a claim about the content of law. Contemporary originalists by and large believe that what the law is — what our legal powers, duties, and rights are — is fully determined by semantic qualities of promulgated texts. What those texts say is, for that reason, what the law is. This is not true of all originalists, but it is true of the dominant (Scalian) branch. It is a picture of law of breathtaking simplicity. In short, the canard that law is simple is vastly more congenial to originalism than to whatever nonoriginalist picture of law Posner might have inchoately in mind. Second, if this orthodox originalist conception of law is mistaken, we are far from agreed on an alternative account. If we are ever to understand the underpinnings of legal precepts — how the normative entities that are legal powers, duties, rights, and permissions, correspond to or are produced by such facts as the enactment of legal texts, the issuance of judicial opinions, and the dispositions and behaviors of legal actors — that understanding will come, almost certainly, from advances in legal theory. Yet Posner is disdainful of legal and constitutional theory — of the field, and not only of its current practitioners. That is unfortunate. What are the determinants of legal content is a theoretical question of great difficulty. Posner should not be so dismissive of the field that tries to resolve it.


Threshold and efficiency of optical parametric oscillation in whispering gallery resonators have been predicted to depend strongly on the coupling strength. Our experiments, varying the coupling strength continuously over 3 orders of magnitude, confirm these predictions. The pump threshold changes by a factor of 20, allowing the adaptation of the system to a wide range of input powers. The minimum threshold of 0.20 mW occurs for significant pump undercoupling. The efficiency increases monotonically with coupling, spanning 4 orders of magnitude with a maximum efficiency of 30% in contact yielding output powers exceeding 1 mW.


In 2006, Massachusetts enacted a sweeping health insurance law that mirrors the legislation currently before Congress. After signing the measure, Gov. Mitt Romney (R) wrote, "Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced." But did the legislation achieve these goals? And what other effects has it had? This paper is the first to use Current Population Survey data for 2008 to evaluate the Massachusetts law, and the first to examine its effects on the accuracy of the CPS's uninsured estimates, self-reported health, the extent of "crowd-out" of private insurance for both children and adults, and in-migration of new Massachusetts residents.We find evidence that Massachusetts' individual mandate induces uninsured residents to conceal their true insurance status. Even setting that source of bias aside, we find the official estimate reported by the Commonwealth almost certainly overstates the law's impact on insurance coverage, likely by 45 percent. In contrast to previous studies, we find evidence of substantial crowdout of private coverage among low-income adults and children. The law appears to have compressed self-reported health outcomes, without necessarily improving overall health. Our results suggest that more than 60 percent fewer young adults are relocating to Massachusetts as a result of the law. Finally, we conclude that leading estimates understate the law's cost by at least one third, and likely more.Our results hold important lessons for the legislation moving through Congress. As in Massachusetts, there has been no effort to estimate the cost of the private health insurance mandates that legislation would impose on individuals and employers. The costs may therefore be far greater than legislators and voters believe, while the benefits may be smaller than the conventional wisdom about Massachusetts suggests.


Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularemia, is a pathogen capable of survival and growth in a vast array of environments ranging from arthropod vectors to over one hundred different mammalian hosts, including humans. An understanding of the mechanisms that this bacterium uses to adapt to these varied environments is vital to fully understanding its pathogenesis. The environmental signals that Francisella responds to include low iron concentrations, oxidative stress, and temperature. The work described in this dissertation constitutes a significant step forward in our understanding of Francisella adaptation specifically to the host intracellular environment. We have shown that bacterial growth conditions have a great impact on bacterial phenotypes, particularly on the ability of Francisella to induce or inhibit macrophage cytokine production. We have identified a specific eukaryotic molecule, spermine, which is abundant in the intracellular environment and leads to significant changes in bacterial phenotypes and gene expression. We also present the first evidence of a role for the abundant Francisella IS elements in the regulation of transcription by functioning as spermine-responsive promoters. The ability of the bacterium to adapt to this signal is vital to its survival and a mutant lacking this sensing mechanism is highly attenuated. A thorough analysis of different culture conditions has lead to the identification of both known and putative virulence factors that may be important for altering host cell responses to F. tularensis. Our results demonstrate a novel mechanism of host-pathogen interaction and could have significant implications for other intracellular pathogens.


In this paper, we study bidirectional LSTM network for the task of text classification using both supervised and semisupervised approaches. Several prior works have suggested that either complex pretraining schemes using unsupervised methods such as language modeling (Dai and Le 2015; Miyato, Dai, and Goodfellow 2016) or complicated models (Johnson and Zhang 2017) are necessary to achieve a high classification accuracy. However, we develop a training strategy that allows even a simple BiLSTM model, when trained with cross-entropy loss, to achieve competitive results compared with more complex approaches. Furthermore, in addition to cross-entropy loss, by using a combination of entropy minimization, adversarial, and virtual adversarial losses for both labeled and unlabeled data, we report state-of-theart results for text classification task on several benchmark datasets. In particular, on the ACL-IMDB sentiment analysis and AG-News topic classification datasets, our method outperforms current approaches by a substantial margin. We also show the generality of the mixed objective function by improving the performance on relation extraction task.1


Droughts are one of the most devastating natural hazards faced by the United States today. Severe droughts of the twentieth century have had large impacts on economies, society, and the environment, especially in the Great Plains. However, the instrumental record of the last 100 years contains only a limited subset of drought realizations. One must turn to the paleoclimatic record to examine the full range of past drought variability, including the range of mag- nitude and duration, and thus gain the improved understanding needed for society to anticipate and plan for droughts of the future. Historical documents, tree rings, archaeological remains, lake sediment, and geomorphic data make it clear that the droughts of the twentieth century, including those of the 1930s and 1950s, were eclipsed several times by droughts earlier in the last 2000 years, and as recently as the late sixteenth century. In general, some droughts prior to 1600 appear to be characterized by longer duration (i.e., multidecadal) and greater spatial extent than those of the twentieth century. The authors' assessment of the full range of past natural drought variability, deduced from a com- prehensive review of the paleoclimatic literature, suggests that droughts more severe than those of the 1930s and 1950s are likely to occur in the future, a likelihood that might be exacerbated by greenhouse warming in the next century. Persistence conditions that lead to decadal-scale drought may be related to low-frequency variations, or base-state shifts, in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, although more research is needed to understand the mechanisms of severe drought.


An increasing amount of activity is taking place in the U.K. capital markets with respect to wind power financing, coinciding with an expected long-term shift out of growth stocks and into high-income securities. The market is now asking the question of how much risk is involved in the U.K. regulatory system for wind power. The U.K. system is market-based and is riskier and more complex than the fixed-price tariff regimes found elsewhere in Europe. However, it is also one of the only systems to offer upside potential to investors. Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) are the tradable instruments that sit at the center of the system. Understanding the mechanics of the U.K. Renewables Obligation and the drivers of ROC prices is fundamental to the valuation and assessment of U.K. wind power investments. We introduce the ROC Price Map to simplify analysis and to establish reasonable price bands within which ROCs are likely to trade.


Introduction This paper expands the analogy between motor racing team pit stops and patient handovers. Previous studies demonstrated how the handover of patients following surgery could be improved by learning from a motor racing team. This has been extended to include contributions from several motor racing teams, and by examining transfers at several different interfaces at a non-specialist UK teaching hospital. Methods Letters of invitation were sent to the technical managers of nine Formula 1 motor racing teams. Semistructured interviews were carried out at a UK teaching hospital with 10 clinical staff involved in the handover of patients from surgery to recovery and intensive care. Results Three themes emerged from the motor racing responses; (1) proactive learning with briefings and checklists to prevent errors; (2) active management using technology to transfer information, and (3) post hoc learning from the storage and analysis of electronic data records. The eight healthcare themes were: historical working practice; problems during transfer; poor awareness of handover protocols; poor team coordination; time pressure; lack of consistency in handover practice; poor communication of important information; and awareness that handover was a potential threat to patient safety. Conclusions The lessons from motor racing can be applied to healthcare for proactive planning, active management and post hoc learning. Other high-risk industries see standardisation of working practices, interpersonal communication, consistency and continuous development as fundamental for success. The application of these concepts would result in improvements in the quality and safety of the patient handover process.


One of the most neglected aspects of sports training is flexibility or suppleness. Considerable time is devoted to improving strength, stamina, style and speed, but little or no attention is paid to flexibility training. Almost all sportsmen commence a training session with what they term a ""warm-up"". Too often this warm-up is based on archaic, traditional methods which do not include appropriate or scientific flexibility exercises.


This article describes the overlay welding of a cobalt alloy. This overlay is made by the plasma transfer arc (PTA) welding technology. Cobalt alloy is overlaid on a creep resistant steel as the seat of a high-pressure steam valve. High-pressure steam valves are used in the energy, nuclear, petrochemical, oil, gas and pharmaceutical industries. Creep resistant high alloy steels are weldable with proper welding conditions, including stress relieving. Cobalt alloys, on the other hand, have worse weldability. Overlay welding of these heterogeneous materials is possible as well with meeting specific conditions especially proper welding parameters. In this article, the whole experiment is described, including design of the part that is overlaid by plasma arc welding. The technological procedure of overlay welding is described, including a description of the welding equipment, subsequent evaluation and all standards and specified inspections needed for welding procedure qualification (WPQR). WPQR qualification of overlay welding was also done and finished with Notify Body.


In the attempt to implement sustainable development, there is a definition that the use of natural source to keep it uses by the next generation well, both in quantity and quality. It needs to be supported by caring the environment both by the government and the community itself. The community awareness can be seen at its role on the management of domestic garbage. Several socio-economic factors such as age, sex, education, income, job, and the knowledge of environment have effect on community awareness in the management of domestic garbage. This study used logistic regression model which aimed at measuring to what extend the effect of the socio-economic factors to domestic garbage management in East Nusa Tenggara Province in 2013. It uses secondary data of Environmental Awareness Behaviour Survey that done in 2013 by the Central Agency on Statistics. The result of this study used α = 0,05, showed that the variable of sex, age group of  the head household among 40-59 years old and the knowledge of environment did not have effect on household garbage management behavioral. Level education of the patriarch and capital income affected positively on domestic garbage management behavioral. Variable of age group of the patriarch above 60 years old did negatively affected to the domestic garbage management behavioral. Although knowledge about the environment did not affect eco-friendly behavior, but the knowledge about the environment has to be continued to be disseminated to the public. Right knowledge about the behavior of environmental awareness is a major component of internal factors that can drive change one's attitude to be more concerned about the environment


That humans exploit animals, often in cruel ways, is not open to doubt. Reponsibility for exploitation and cruelty lies unambiguously on the human side of any human-animal divide. For this reason, relations between humans and animals might be described as profoundly asymmetrical (Schiktanz 2004: 2). Asymmetry emerges whenever animals are confined for human purposes, for instance in farms, zoos and homes. As Schiktanz (2004: 2) puts it, "the animal itself has usually no opportunity to force its necessities – everything depends on the good will of the human 'owner'". Such asymmetric relations are apparently inevitable, especially in the agricultural domain where billions of animals are raised for slaughter. In fact, farm-based asymmetry is undoubtedly widespread as the modern industrial system leads to the ever-greater intensification, industrialisation and mechanisation of animal production (Fiddes, 1990; Rifkin, 1992; Strassart and Whatmore, 2003).


Concrete deformation due to temperature and moisture condition will always develop simultaneously and interactively. The environmentally (hygral and thermally) induced stress and deformation are essential to concrete durability. To simulate the deformation of concrete caused by the coupling effect of temperature and moisture, a numerical simulation approach is proposed comprising analytical process and finite element analysis is proposed based on the mechanism of heat and moisture transfer in porous medium. In analytical method, Laplace transformation and transfer function were used to simplify and solve the coupled partial differential equations of heat and moisture transfer. The hygro-thermal deformation of concrete is numerically simulated by finite element method (FEM) based on the obtained temperature and moisture stress transformed from the solved moisture distribution. This numerical simulation approach avoids the complex eigenvalues, coupling difficulty and low accuracy in other solving method, and also effectively calculates the moisture induced shrinkage which is almost impossible using familiar FEM software. Furthermore, a software named Combined Temperature and Moisture Simulation System for concrete (CTMSoft) was represented and developed by a mix programming of Visual Basic, Matlab and ANSYS. CTMSoft provided a simple and more intuitive interface between user and computer by providing a graphical user interface (GUI). The validity of the numerical simulation approach was verified by two cases analysis.


We studied test preparation activity among fourth-grade math and science teachers in New Jersey, using a survey of almost 300 teachers and observations of and interviews with almost 60. New Jersey uses a mix of open-ended and multiple-choice tests; links few stakes to test results, except for publication of scores; and offers limited professional development to teachers. New Jersey teachers are adopting specific techniques associated with more inquiry-oriented instruction, but their basic approach does not appear to be changing. Teachers do teach the content on the test with a new wrinkle. When more students are passing a test in one subject area than in another, emphasis shifts to the area with low scores. We found more direct instruction in lower socioeconomic districts but not less inquiry-oriented instruction. Finally, principal support has more influence on the test preparation strategies teachers use than does pressure to comply.


We studied the toxicological interaction of 46 micropollutants from a biologically treated wastewater effluent in mixtures with silica, amine-modified silica, titanium dioxide and magnetite nanoparticles. The pollutants tracked in this work were polar pharmaceuticals belonging to different therapeutic groups, some of their metabolites and artificial sweeteners, the concentrations of which were mostly in the tens to hundreds of ng L−1 range. The results showed particularly high adsorption for furosemide, gemfibrozil and the aminopyrine metabolite 4FAA. There was preferential adsorption of the less polar compounds on the less polar nanoparticles. The total amounts of compounds adsorbed and quantified were 13.4, 4.8, 10.8 and 7.1 μg g−1 for SiO2, SiO2–NH2, TiO2 and Fe3O4, respectively. The toxicity of wastewater–nanoparticle mixtures was assessed using the bioluminescent cyanobacterium Anabaena sp. PCC 7120 CPB4337. The interactions were quantified by means of the combination index (CI)-isobologram method. The binary mixtures of wastewater with SiO2, SiO2–NH2 and TiO2 displayed antagonism for the lower affected fractions, which corresponded to the lower concentrations. For higher effects and for the Fe3O4 nanoparticles over the whole tested range, the mixtures were additive leading to synergism for the higher affected fractions. No internalization was observed. The results showed that the reduced toxicant bioavailability due to the interaction with nanoparticles is relevant for micropollutants at environmental concentrations. The amount of anthropogenic pollutants retained by metal oxide nanoparticles has significant toxicological effects.


At CRPP in Villigen (Switzerland), the superconducting windings of the EDIPO and SULTAN test facilities need to be protected in case of quench. The detection of a quench, which triggers the protection circuit, is based on the comparison of the voltages on the windings with preset thresholds. Each facility has two quench detection systems, one for the main coils and one for the primary coil of superconducting transformer (TRAFO), which supplies the operating current to the test samples. In the years between 2010 and 2013, a Quench Detection System (QDS) has been developed for EDIPO main coils and for its TRAFO. Afterwards, the 25 years old SULTAN QDS has been updated, for its magnet system and TRAFO, on the basis of the work done before for EDIPO. The four QDS are described and the commissioning of the two EDIPO QDS and the SULTAN-TRAFO QDS is reported. The features of the QDS are discussed, including reliability, sensitivity, and reaction time. The lessons learned can be conveniently extrapolated to other QDS for large coils based on voltage threshold.


Road accidents caused by human error are amongthe main causes of the death in the world. Specifically, drowsiness and unconsciousness while driving are responsible for many fatal accidents on highways. Accuracy and performance are key metrics related to many researched techniques for the detection of drivers' drowsiness. To improve these metrics, in this paper,a new method based on image processing and deep learning is proposed. The proposed method is based on facial region diagnosing using the Haar-cascade method and convolutional neural network for drowsiness probability detection. Evaluation analysis of the proposed method on the UTA-RLDD dataset with stratified 5-fold cross-validation showed a high accuracy of 96.8% at a speed of 10 frames per second, which is higher than those that have previously been reported in the literature. For further investigation, a custom dataset including 10 participants in different light conditions was collected. The result of all experiments showed the great potential of the proposed methodfor practical applications in intelligent transportation systems


This objective of this study was
to determine the impact of antimicrobial carcass washes on beef trim quality in
the production of frankfurters. Twenty-four beef carcasses were randomly
applied a different antimicrobial wash treatments (TRT) during the harvest
procedure: 82° C water (CON), peroxyacetic acid (PAA), or lactic acid (LA).
Beef carcasses were analyzed for microbial counts and carcass pH. Frankfurters
were produced using carcass trim at two different batter temperature processes
(PROC): 4°C (CP) or 21°C (HP). Frankfurters were analyzed for cook loss,
emulsion stability (ES), color (Minolta L*, a*, b*) over 60-day storage, purge
loss, texture, and sensory analysis. LA carcass had a lower pH (6.36; P<0.001) 30 min post wash compared to
other wash treatments. Frankfurters produced from CON trim had the highest ES
water (P<0.0001) and ES fat (P<0.0001) separation where the LA and
PAA treatments were not significantly different (P>0.05). The HP frankfurters had less ES water (P<0.0001) and ES fat separation (P<0.0001) when compared to CP.
However, the CP had a higher cook yield (P=0.002).
The HP frankfurters had higher internal and external L* values (P<.0001; P<.0001, respectively). The CP frankfurters had a higher a*
(redness) internal color values (P<.0001).
However, the HP frankfurters had a higher external a* value (P<.0001). The HP frankfurters
displayed higher internal and external b* (yellowness) values (P<.0001). Sensory results displayed the CP frankfurter
to have an increase in hardness (P=0.004),
a decrease in cohesiveness (P=0.03)
and an increase in juiciness (P<.0001). Texture analysis hardness (P=0.009) and chewiness (P=0.01) results showed the CON
frankfurters were significantly harder than PAA (P<0.05), while LA were not different from CON or PAA
frankfurters (P>0.05). The CP frankfurters were found to have a
decrease in springiness (P=<.001)
and cohesiveness (P=0.03). There was a significant difference in
microbial reduction of pre to post wash petri film counts for all treatments
(Log10CFU/mL) of aerobic plate count (P= <0.0001), E.coli
coliform (P= 0.0002), yeast (P=0.04) and mold (P= <0.001). TRT was found
to be significant for APC (P=0.06)
and yeast (P=0.004). Overall, our research indicated antimicrobial
wash treatments have little effect on frankfurter quality and displayed viable
methods for reducing microbial growth on beef carcasses.


The paper addresses the issue of extraction of implicit information conveyed by systematic audio-visual contingencies. A group of infants was tested, with help of the Eye-Tracking analysis system, on a simple inference task provided by short film sequences. The video sequences displayed geometrical objects while the audio played two-word utterances, spoken in an artificial language mimicking the Swedish phonotactics, implicitly referring to the different shapes and colours of the objects. The films were initiated with a static baseline image where the display was divided in four quadrants showing four objects, one in each quadrant. This initial procedure was intended to measure the subject's spontaneous looking preference towards each of the objects. Finally after the exposure phase, a test phase was initiated where questions equivalent to "Can you see a cube?" or "Can you see the red (one)?" spoken in the artificial language were asked. At this point the results suggest that the subjects are efficient at picking up the underlying information structure. Further analyses are expected to show more differentiated picture regarding the performance of infants of different age as well as generalization of nouns and adjectives. This is currently being analyzed and will be reported at the conference.


Alexander Bickel was quite uneasy about judicial review, particularly how it was used by the Warren Court, yet he desperately sought to identify its virtues and thereby defend it. This chapter argues that Bickel failed in his struggle to reconcile judicial review with democratic values and that the cause is empirical error in his key assumptions. Contained within Bickel's characterization of the countermajoritarian difficulty are several assertions which can be examined empirically. Bickel variously claims that: legislation reflects majority preferences; Supreme Court decisions are inconsistent with majority preferences; Supreme Court decisions are final and irreversible; and the Court is unique or "deviant" in its countermajoritarianism. Each assumption is faulty and consequently dooms from the start Bickel's efforts to reconcile judicial review with democratic values.


Land surface albedo is a critical variable needed in land surface modeling. The conventional methods for estimating broadband albedos rely on a series of steps in the processing chain, including atmospheric correction, surface angular modeling, and narrowband-to-broadband albedo conversions. Unfortunately, errors associated with each procedure may be accumulated and significantly impact the accuracy of the final albedo products. In an earlier study, we developed a new direct procedure that links the top-of-atmosphere spectral albedos with land surface broadband albedos without performing atmospheric correction and other processes. In this paper, this method is further improved in several aspects and implemented using actual Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imagery. Several case studies indicated that this new method can predict land surface broadband albedos very accurately and eliminate aerosol effects effectively. It is very promising for global applications and is particularly suitable for nonvegetated land surfaces. Note that a Lambertian surface has been assumed in the radiative transfer simulation in this paper as a first-order approximation; this assumption can be easily removed as long as a global bidirectional reflectance distribution function climatology is available.


1. The first studies of this thesis concerned human phagocytic cells in vivo as they responded to physical trauma in an experimental skin abrasion. This showed the sequence of cellular responses during acute infla¬ mmation and provided quantitative data about the phago¬ cytic cell concentrations at each stage. 2. In an identical skin abrasion several antibiotics, administered systemically, were assayed. This provided information about the approximate concentration of each drug in acute inflammatory exudates. 3. A series of in vitro tests were performed to quantify the rate at which phagocytic cells, or the various anti¬ biotics, could inactivate Staphylococcus aureus type 42b. The concentrations used were based on concentrations measured in vivo (paragraphs 1 and 2 above). These studies showed that phagocytosis by human granulocytes is rapid (T-§= 5.6 minutes), but subsequent intracellular killing is much slower. In a cell-free system different antibiotics had variable rates of bacte¬ rial inactivation but, in general, these rates were., of the same order as the rate of intracellular killing by normal/ normal human granulocytes. All these experiments utilised phagocytic cells and antibiotics separately. 4. The most important findings relate to the combined action of phagocytic cells and antibiotics (particularly ampicillin). The first clinical studies showed that during antibiotic therapy the rate of intracellular killing usually decreased. This effect could not be demonstrated by adding ampicillin in vitro to granu¬ locytes during their phase of intracellular killing. However, when ampicillin was administered orally to 4 healthy subjects there was a decrease of intra¬ cellular killing at 1 and 2 hours. The exact cause has not been established, but collaborative work indi¬ cates that this may be the result of inhibition by ampicillin of leucocyte myeloperoxidase and interference with other enzymes involved in the production or break¬ down of intravacuolar hydrogen peroxide. 5. The importance of these findings is discussed in the light of a growing awareness that antibiotic therapy has considerable limitations and may have serious adverse effects. ANTIBIOTICS AND HUMAN PHAGOCYTIC CELLS


The Library-Smart House partnership seeks to design and implement a sustainable, virtual environment for collaboration that will seamlessly integrate project communication and information access. This virtual environment will provide a means for increased collaboration between students, faculty, librarians and outside contributors as well as ensure the sustainability of the project in coming years. The Smart House is a student-led, multidisciplinary project to retrofit an existing house to be a living-laboratory. The house will be a platform for testing innovations in the areas of energy, health, environment, interaction, and lifestyle. The ultimate goal of the organization is to improve the quality of life for those living and working in an urban residential setting. The Smart House is a collaborative design project not only across different disciplines, but also across student year and domain knowledge levels. This collaboration produces a wide array of student information needs and presents a unique opportunity for library collaboration. The Library plans to study the effectiveness of information literacy instructional techniques through the contextual setting of the Smart House. The Library seeks to improve the ability of participants to access, evaluate, and use high quality research materials effectively through a variety of instructional strategies. By developing and maintaining a virtual infrastructure for information awareness and access using relevant technologies, the library will be able to assist students at their point of need. More direct instruction will be provided through a series of active learning workshops combined with specialized research consultation. We believe that this project will promote the lifelong learning skills necessary for the Engineer of 2020 1 by providing interdisciplinary collaboration paired with information literacy instruction within the framework of Smart House design.


The accepted definition of pain is 'an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage'. Analgesia is the alleviation or the absence of pain. Damaging or threatening physiological changes activate sensory neurons that support homeostasis, which drive autonomic, motoric, immune, behavioural, emotional and mnemonic responses. In humans, nociceptive neurons directly activate limbic sensory (insula) and limbic motor (cingulate) cortices as well as somatosensory cortices; they also produce glial and other immune (inflammatory) and stress-related (sympathetic) responses, which can lead to chronic pathological pain, considered by many to be a disease state. The pharmacologies of these overlapping systems involve numerous common agents, such as glutamate, adenosine, substance P, catecholamines, opioids, cannabinoids, prostanoids and so on, but accelerating advances in technology and in our knowledge of these systems suggest that selectively analgesic pathways and agents may be found that could underpin clinically useful therapies for chronic pain.

Key Concepts:

Small-diameter primary afferent fibres that innervate all tissues of the body (except the brain itself) and signal damaging or threatening physiological changes (as the sensory component of homeostasis) underlie pain sensation.

In humans, pain is associated with activation of limbic sensory (insula) and limbic motor (cingulate) cortices, as well as the somatosensory cortices; the first two regions may represent the feeling and the motivation (unpleasantness) of pain, respectively.

Primary afferent neurotransmitters are most commonly glutamate and adenosine. A host of peptides, growth factors and other neuromodulatory agents may also be co-released. These agents work together to effects changes on other neurons and on glia.

Activation of primary afferents contributes to (neurogenic) inflammation via release of neurotransmitters/neuromodulators from peripheral terminals that activate other nociceptors as well as cause increased permeability and vasodilation of local blood vessels.

Hyperalgesia, that is, pain caused by normally nonpainful events as well as increased responses to painful events, is produced by activation of local immune (glial) elements, sensitisation of peripheral and central neurons, and responsiveness to low-threshold (tactile) A-beta and C fibres.

Endogenous anti-nociceptive inhibitory systems underlie the effects of vibration, cooling and cardiorespiratory events on pain and are supported by aminergic, opiatergic and cannabinoid agents.

Chronic, pathological pain (lasting longer than 3–6 months) can result if injury or disease alters the balance of the homeostatic and immune systems to produce a persistent 'pain memory'. Conversely, intense, unremitting pain can produce homeostatic, emotional, nutritional and sleep imbalances that can be fatal.

Opiates including morphine and the endogenous peptides inhibit nociceptive activity in the periphery and at all levels of the neuraxis. They are more effective for inflammatory pain than for pain resulting from injury to the nervous system. Opiate effects can be heightened by local anesthetics and adrenergic agonists.

Keywords:

nociception;
injury;
inflammation;
hyperalgesia;
spinothalamic


RATIONALE
Survivors of critical illness suffer significant limitations and disabilities.

OBJECTIVES
Ascertain whether severe sepsis is associated with increased risk of so-called geriatric conditions (injurious falls, low body mass index [BMI], incontinence, vision loss, hearing loss, and chronic pain) and whether this association is measured consistently across three different study designs.

METHODS
Patients with severe sepsis were identified in the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative cohort interviewed every 2 years, 1998 to 2006, and in linked Medicare claims. Three comparators were used to assess an association of severe sepsis with geriatric conditions in survivors: the prevalence in the United States population aged 65 years and older, survivors' own pre-sepsis levels assessed before hospitalization, or survivors' own pre-sepsis trajectory.

MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS
Six hundred twenty-three severe sepsis hospitalizations were followed a median of 0.92 years. When compared with the 65 years and older population, surviving severe sepsis was associated with increased rates of low BMI, injurious falls, incontinence, and vision loss. Results were similar when comparing survivors to their own pre-sepsis levels. The association of low BMI and severe sepsis persisted when controlling for patients' pre-sepsis trajectories, but there was no association of severe sepsis with injurious falls, incontinence, vision loss, hearing loss, and chronic pain after such controls.

CONCLUSIONS
Geriatric conditions are common after severe sepsis. However, severe sepsis is associated with increased rates of only a subset of geriatric conditions, not all. In studying outcomes after acute illness, failing to measure and control for both preillness levels and trajectories may result in erroneous conclusions.


Purpose: Previous research, undertaken using a Super 8 camera and non-continuous data, has reported that with increasing age, people are more likely to sleep in the right lateral position. It has been postulated that this is due to age related alterations in cardiovascular function. This pilot study was undertaken to determine if collection and analysis of continuous sleep data was a feasible method for further investigation of this topic and to determine the sample size required for an adequately powered study. Increased understanding of age related changes in sleep position may provide valuable information to improve sleep quality and nursing care of the elderly person.

Method: Research at the Centre for Sleep Research, University of South Australia, investigated the association between age and sleep position. Infra-red illumination and video cameras recorded the sleep patterns of 12 subjects for two nights. Videos were examined and the amount of time spent in each sleep position was calculated in seconds.

Results: In a one-way analysis of variance, sample sizes of 19, 19, and, 19 are necessary from the three age groups whose means are to be compared. The expected means are 20, 25 and 45 for the three age groups respectively. The total sample of 57 subjects achieves 82% power to detect differences among the means versus the alternative of equal means using an F test with a 0.05 significance level.

Conclusions: The results of this pilot study support further investigation of the relationship between age and lateral sleep position preference, and particularly the physiological parameters which may underpin the adoption of different sleep positions with increasing age. The described method is appropriate and modifications are suggested to further improve future studies.


The publication of the Proceedings of the Validation of Dive Computer Workshop is cosponsored by NTNU and the Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority. The symposium was convened by the Baromedical and Environmental Physiology Group of NTNU on August 24, 2011, at the 37th Annual Meeting of the European Underwater and Baromedical Society in Gdansk, Poland.


Introduction: Androgen suppression therapy for prostate cancer is controversial due to adverse fatal and non-fatal cardiovascular outcomes reported in some studies. However, effects of androgen suppression on stroke have not been fully assessed in the elderly. Methods: Patients diagnosed with prostate cancer during 2007-2013 in a large community-based healthcare system were identified from the Cancer Registry, electronic records, and billing codes. Those who underwent androgen suppression therapy with Gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist (GnRH) were propensity-matched to patients treated without androgen suppression therapy by age at cancer diagnosis, race/ethnicity, disease stage and outcome, body mass index and use of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Tests of independence and Cox proportional hazards models were used to examine effects of hormone therapy on acute myocardial infarction (AMI), stroke, and mortality outcomes. Models also adjusted for patient comorbidities. Results: A total of 1282 patients and 641 matched-pairs were identified, with mean diagnosis age of 69 yr and follow-up period of 3.05 yr. Effects of androgen suppression therapy on AMI (P=0.051) and stroke (P=0.062) were of marginal to non-significance, but adjusted-odds of death and combined AMI, stroke, and death were 1.61 times (P=0.002; odds ratio [OR] 95% CI: 1.19-2.18) and 1.70 times (P 74 yr) was discovered for combined outcomes, suggesting increased probability of AMI, stroke, and/or death with age (8.6-20.0%; P=0.003) for patients without androgen suppression but elevated risk of outcomes across all age groups (18.3-22.4%; P=0.546) for men treated with androgen suppression therapy. Conclusion: Endogenous androgen suppression presents elevated risk of combined cardiovascular and death outcomes, especially for men


Experience has shown that the E-Type multiple indicator kriging (MIK) estimation technique often works well for resource estimation in stockwork mineralisation that contains a mixture of high and low-grade mineralisation types that are difficult or impossible to separate spatially. E-Type MIK, like ordinary kriging (OK) is a smoothing estimator and where data is sparse can result in estimates of grade tonnage curves that do not reflect the true block variability at selective mining unit (SMU) scale. The rank and replace (RR) estimation methodology is designed to reproduce both local block accuracy and true block variability at SMU scale and has shown good results when used with highly skewed unimodal diffusive style mineralisation. This paper examines the use of RR with mosaic style mineralisation typically found in stockworks via a case study using real data from Newcrest's Telfer West Dome deposit. Resource level estimation results for ordinary kriging (OK), E-Type MIK and RR are compared to close spaced grade control models as the reference reality. Results show that stationarity requirements and declustering can severely impact on the usefulness of the rank and replace technique and that it should only be used where trends are not too strong and data are relatively uniformly spaced. This does not rule out its application to stockwork or mosaic style deposits. However, in this case, the presence of trends and different data densities requires the non-stationary domain to be further broken down into sub domains for the RR technique to be effective.


DESPITE recent passage of the "America Competes Act," we can hope that the obsession with mathematics and science will abate somewhat. People as disparate as Rep. George Miller (DCalif.) and Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch (see "Not by Geeks Alone," Wall Street Journal, August 8) have addressed the need to get the arts, music, social studies, and history back into the curriculum. Maybe Bill Gates and the Business Roundtable will give it a rest for a while. More than that, I hope all of this means we can start paying serious attention to how schooling affects or influences students' experiences and lives outside of school. I admit that's an un-American goal. Aside from Dewey and the progressives, Americans have overwhelmingly viewed education as instrumental--as something that leads to something else, rather than as a valuable entity in itself. Typically that "something else" is a job. I think if more attention were paid to making school relevant to later experiences outside of school and outside of the workplace, we might see Americans enjoying richer personal, social, and communal lives off the job, and we might see them less enthralled by "American Idol" and Britney. Looking at the impact of schools outside the school setting gets into the realm of "transfer" of learning and knowledge. Space is too short for a general treatment of transfer studies--a tricky and subtle field. (I dealt with those to some extent in the May 1992 column.) Specific aspects of transfer, as they relate to the question of school affecting experience outside of school, were examined more recently by Kevin Pugh and David Bergin. They reviewed and summarized the research literature in the December 2005 issue of Educational Researcher. Pugh and Bergin begin by noting the distinction between high-road and low-road transfer. Low-road transfer involves the automatic transfer of highly practiced skills, with little need for reflective thinking. High-road transfer requires conscious formulation of an abstraction that permits a connection between two situations. A sad finding from the research literature is that students often cannot take either road. An 11-year-old baking cookies asked her father, "Do two one-quarters make two fourths? I know it does in math, but what about in cooking?" Pugh and Bergin write that learning must be deep and connected and must involve metacognitive activity if much transfer to new contexts is to take place. Alas, most research in this field has involved transfer from one setting to another within the school, not from the school setting to some other context. Thus we know even less about what conditions of learning in school facilitate the transfer of that learning to situations and events out of school. How does in-school learning affect learning in other contexts? How, for instance, does learning science in a classroom affect learning experiences in a museum or a zoo? The little research that has been done suggests both that students need careful preparation for their zoo/museum experience and that they seldom get it. Another area of research is out-of-school learning that is prompted by in-school learning. This is where experiences with a subject in school lead to continued interest in and pursuit of the topic outside of school. The rate of such interest appears to be low. One study interviewed students and found that 47% reported no instances of school-prompted interest, while 38% reported only one. Students in this study were asked such things as whether they ever examine their parents' bank statements because they have taken an accounting class or whether they draw people because they have taken an art class. In another study, researchers found that 45% of students never used things when they were outside of school that they had learned in school, never read during leisure about school subjects, and never talked with friends outside of school about school subjects. …


To predict flood and debris flow dynamics a numerical model, based on 1D De Saint Venant (SV) equations, modified for including erosion/deposition processes along the path, was developed. The McCormack–Jameson shock capturing scheme was employed for the solution of the equations, written in a conservative law form. This technique was applied to determine both the propagation and the profile of a two-phase debris flow resulting from the instantaneous and complete collapse of a storage dam. To validate the model, comparisons have been made between its predictions and laboratory tests concerning flows of water and homogeneous granular mixtures in a uniform geometry flume reproducing dam-break waves. Agreements between computational and experimental results are considered very satisfactory for mature (non-stratified) debris flows, which embrace most real cases. To better predict immature (stratified) flows, the model was improved in order to feature, in a more realistic way, the distribution of the particles of different size within the mixture. The level of maturity of the flow is assessed by an empirical, yet experimental based, criterion. The model, at this stage, should be able to predict the whole debris flow phenomenon, i.e. the triggering, mobilising and stopping processes of both mature and immature debris flows in different dam-break conditions. On the whole, the model proposed can easily be extended to channels with arbitrary cross sections for debris flow routing, as well as for solving problems of unsteady flow in open channels by incorporating the appropriate initial and boundary conditions. The model could also be improved to predict and assess the propagation and stoppage processes of debris and hyperconcentrated flows in mountainous catchments and river basins, triggered by extreme hydrological events, once validated on the basis of field data.


The burning question on every ambitious fee-earner's lips is: 'how do I make partner at this firm?' Fully updated with the latest insights to tackle all the most current challenges in this fast developing industry, this 2nd edition of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life is your route map to making it to the top in a professional services firm. It shows you how to stand out, be in the right place at the right time and build your kitbag of skills to overcome the many hurdles and reach the Holy Grail of becoming partner. This book reveals what it really takes to make it, and what it will involve once you're there. It helps you make an informed decision on whether or not this is the right step for you, and guides you on how to become a partner and still sustain a healthy work/life balance. Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie show you the rules of the game, laying bare exactly what you need to do to take the ultimate step.


How to create cultural clusters in historical regions Is there a way of attempting to stabilize economy by making a cultural cluster in a historical city? This is the central question in my thesis. The cluster theory has influenced many sectors around the world. Firenze has been chosen as study case because the city is a good representative of a historical region. Additionally, the region's system of industrial area is closer to a cluster system. Therefore, we can look into the shape of the cultural cluster in historical regions and their characteristic by analyzing Firenze's industrial area. This analysis will be also applied to Gyeongju's cultural cluster. Keywords: Cultural cluster, cluster, Firenze, Gyeongju, historical regions


Many pathological conditions are closely related with an increase in tissue stiffness. For many years, experts performed manual palpation in order to measure elasticity changes, however, this method can only be applied on superficial areas of the human body and provides crude stiffness estimation. Elastography is a technique that attempts to characterize the elastic properties of tissue in order to provide additional and useful information for clinical diagnosis. For more than twenty years, different research groups have developed various elastography modalities with a strong interest for quantitative images during the last decade. Recently, comparative studies among different elastographic techniques have been performed in order to better characterize biomaterials, to cross-validate several shear wave elastographic modalities and to study the factors that influence their precision and accuracy. This comparison works may contribute to achieve standardization in quantitative elastography and their use in commercial equipment for their application in human patients. However, there is still a limited literature in the field of quantitative elastography modalities comparisons. This thesis focuses on the comparison between two elastographic techniques: crawling wave sonoelastography (CWS) and single tracking location-acoustic radiation force impulse (STL-ARFI). The comparison shows the estimation of the shear wave speed (SWS), lateral resolution, contrast and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) in homogeneous and inhomogeneous phantoms using both techniques. The SWS values obtained with both modalities are validated with mechanical measurements that are considered as ground truth. The SWS results for the three different homogeneous phantoms (10%, 13%, and 16% gelatin concentrations), show good agreement between CWS, STL-ARFI and mechanical measurements as a function of frequency. The maximum accuracy errors obtained with CWS were 2.52%, 1.63% and 2.26%. For STL-ARFI, the maximum errors were 6.22%, 5.63% and 4.08% for the 10%,13% and 16% gelatin phantom respectively. For lateral resolution, contrast and CNR estimated in the inhomogeneous phantoms, it can be seen that for vibration frequencies higher than 340 Hz, CWS presents better results than the obtained with STL-ARFI using distances between the push beams (∆x) higher than 4 mm. However, using these vibration frequencies will not be feasible for in vivo tissues due to attenuation problems. It that sense, for lower vibration frequencies than 300 Hz and ∆x among 3 mm and 6 mm, comparable lateral resolution, contrast and CNR was obtained. Finally, the results of this study contribute to the data currently available for comparing elastographic techniques. Moreover, the methodology implemented in this document may be helpful for future standardization for different elastographic modalities. A mis queridos padres por su comprensión, cariño y apoyo incondicional.


Investigation of a New Method of Estimating Acoustic Intensity and Its Application to Rocket Noise Benjamin Young Christensen Department of Physics and Astronomy, BYU Master of Science An alternative pressure-sensor based method for estimating the acoustic intensity, the phase and amplitude gradient estimation (PAGE) method, is presented. This method is similar to the finite-difference p-p (FD) method, in which the intensity is estimated from pressure measurements made using an array of closely spaced microphones. The PAGE method uses the same hardware as the FD method, but does not suffer from the frequency-dependent bias inherent to the FD method. Detailed derivations of the new method and the traditional FD method are presented. Both methods are then compared using two acoustic fields: a plane wave and a three monopole system. The ability to unwrap the phase component of the PAGE method is discussed, which leads to accurate intensity estimates above previous frequency limits. The uncertainties associated with both methods of estimation are presented. It is shown that the PAGE method provides more accurate intensity estimates over a larger frequency bandwidth. The possibility of using a higher-order least-squares estimation with both methods is briefly demonstrated. A laboratory experiment designed to validate the PAGE method was conducted. The preliminary results from this experiment are presented and compared to analytical predictions. Finally, the application of the PAGE method to a static rocket test firing is presented. The PAGE method is shown to provide accurate intensity estimates at frequencies that are higher than possible with just the FD method.


Psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers have long recognized that people have multiple identities—based on attributes such as organizational membership, profession, gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and family role(s)— and that these multiple identities shape people's actions in organizations. The current organizational literature on multiple identities, however, is sparse and scattered and has yet to fully capture this foundational idea. I review and organize the literature on multiple identities into five different theoretical perspectives: social psychological; microsociological; psychodynamic and developmental; critical; and intersectional. I then propose a way to take research on multiple identities forward using an intrapersonal identity network approach. Moving to an identity network approach offers two advantages: first, it enables scholars to consider more than two identities simultaneously, and second, it helps scholars examine relationships among ∗Email: firstname.lastname@example.com The Academy of Management Annals, 2014 Vol. 8, No. 1, 589–659, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19416520.2014.912379 # 2014 Academy of Management 589 D ow nl oa de d by [ A ca de m y of M an ag em en t] a t 1 2: 30 2 8 M ay 2 01 4 identities in greater detail. This is important because preliminary evidence suggests that multiple identities shape important outcomes in organizations, such as individual stress and well-being, intergroup conflict, performance, and change. By providing a way to investigate patterns of relationships among multiple identities, the identity network approach can help scholars deepen their understanding of the consequences of multiple identities in organizations and spark novel research questions in the organizational literature.


In the early days of Bee World, editorials were not 'considered necessary, or even desirable' and were reserved for explaining general policy and for announcing new developments. Editorials, particularly by guest writers well respected in beekeeping circles, are now a regular feature of the journal. However, for this issue I am returning more to the original concept for an editorial.


Scalable formal analysis of reactive programs demands integration of modular reasoning techniques with existing analysis tools. Principles such as abstraction, compositional refinement, and assume-guarantee reasoning are well understood for architectural hierarchy that describes the communication structure between component processes, and have been shown to be useful. In this paper, we develop the theory of modular reasoning for behavior hierarchy that describes control structure using hierarchic modes. From STATECHARTS to UML, behavior hierarchy has been an integral component of many software design languages, but only syntactically. We present the hierarchic reactive modules language that retains powerful features such as nested modes, mode reuse, exceptions, group transitions, history, and conjunctive modes, and yet has a semantic notion of mode hierarchy. We present an observational trace semantics for modes that provides the basis for mode refinement. We show the refinement to be compositional with respect to the mode constructors, and develop an assume-guarantee reasoning principle.


Abstract : During the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE), seven international operational centers participated in a dedicated modeling system intercomparison exercise from February to April 2008. The objectives were: (1) to show GODAE global-ocean and basin-scale forecasting systems of different countries in routine interaction and continuous operation, (2) to assess the quality and perform scientific validation of the ocean analyses and the forecasting performance of each system, and (3) to learn from this exercise in order to increase interoperability and collaboration in real time. The validation methodology has steadily improved through several validation experiments and projects performed within the operational oceanography community. It relies on common approaches and standardization of outputs, with a set of diagnostics based on fully detailed metrics that characterize its strengths and weaknesses, but it also provides error levels for ocean estimates. The ocean forecasting systems provide daily fields of mesoscale water mass distribution and ocean circulation, with an option for sea-ice variations. We present a subset of the intercomparisons performed over different areas, showing general ocean circulation in agreement with known patterns. We also present some accuracy assessments through comparison with observed data.


Mandarin Chinese zhishi (similar to English 'only'), comprised of the adverb zhi and the copula shi, can act as an adverb (ADV) or a discourse marker (DM). This study analyzes the role of zhishi in spoken discourse, based on the methodological and theoretical principles of interactional linguistics and conversation analysis. The corpus used in this study consists of three sets of data: 1) naturally-occurring daily conversations; 2) radio/TV interviews; and 3) TV panel discussions on current political affairs. As a whole, this study reveals that the notions of restrictiveness, exclusivity, and adversativity are closely associated with ADV zhishi and DM zhishi. In addition, the present data show that since zhishi is often used to express a 'less than expected' feeling, it can be used to indicate mirativity (i.e. language indicating that an utterance conveys the speaker's surprise). The data also show that the distribution of zhishi as an adverb or discourse marker depends on turn taking systems and speech situations in spoken discourse. Specifically, the ADV zhishi tends to occur in radio/TV interviews and TV panel news discussions, while the DM zhishi occurs more often in casual conversations.


Protected areas have emerged as major arenas of dispute concerning both indigenous people and environmental protection. In the Malay Archipelago, which contains 2 of the 34 biodiversity hotspots identified globally, rampant commercial exploitation is jeopardizing species and livelihoods. While protected areas remain the only hope for the imperilled biota of the Malay Archipelago, this protection requires consideration of the sustenance needs and economic aspirations of the local people. Putting forward the views of all the stakeholders of protected areas – conservation practitioners and planners, local community members, NGO activists, government administrators, biologists, lawyers, policy and management analysts and anthropologists – this book fills a unique niche in the area of biodiversity conservation, and is a highly valuable and original reference book for graduate students, scientists and managers, as well as government officials and transnational NGOs.


We propose a novel approach to model serially dependent positive-valued variables which realize a non-trivial proportion of zero outcomes. This is a typical phenomenon in financial time series observed at high frequencies, such as cumulated trading volumes. We introduce a flexible point-mass mixture distribution and develop a semiparametric specification test explicitly tailored for such distributions. Moreover, we propose a new type of multiplicative error model (MEM) based on a zero-augmented distribution, which incorporates an autoregressive binary choice component and thus captures the (potentially different) dynamics of both zero occurrences and of strictly positive realizations. Applying the proposed model to high-frequency cumulated trading volumes of both liquid and illiquid NYSE stocks, we show that the model captures the dynamic and distributional properties of the data well and is able to correctly predict future distributions.


When does self-interest influence public opinion on contentious public policies? The bulk of theory in political science suggests that self-interest is only a minor force in public opinion. Using nationally representative survey data, we show how financial and spatial self-interest and partisanship all shape public opinion on opioid treatment policy. We find that a majority of respondents support a redistributive funding model for treatment programs, while treatment funded by taxation based on a community's overdose rate is less popular. Moreover, financial self-interest cross-pressures lower-income Republicans, closing the partisan gap in support by more than half. We also experimentally test how the spatial burden of siting treatment clinics alters policy preferences. People across the political spectrum are less supportive when construction of a clinic is proposed closer to their home. These results highlight how partisanship and self-interest interact in shaping preferences on public policy with concentrated burdens.


A novel 3D continuum shell structure is introduced as inclusion for composite materials with special mechanical properties in this paper. Its geometry is based on a hollow re-entrant tetrahedron. In a composite, such an inclusion can demonstrate a closure effect induced by external compression. Its specific deformation mechanism results in a special character of deformation and affects effective (global) mechanical properties of the composite. A finite-element method is used to explore quantitatively and qualitatively the deformation mechanism of the suggested inclusion and its effect on the overall mechanical performance of the composite. In this study, geometrical features of the inclusion are used as parameters. The obtained results demonstrate that this kind of inclusion could reduce the composite's Poisson's ratio; moreover, its magnitude is adjustable by changing geometrical parameters of the inclusion. Besides, an overall hardening effect is achieved for the composite, with the magnitude of global stiffness also significantly affected by geometrical features of the inclusion. Thus, the developed inclusion actually provides a potential to develop new composites with a tunable Poisson's ratio and enhanced mechanical properties.


The Competition and Consumer Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2011 (Exposure Draft) seeks to prohibit anti-competitive disclosure of information by one competitor to another. The proposed prohibition under s 44ZZW seeks to ban the private disclosure of price-related information. The proposed prohibition under s 44ZZX seeks to ban the public or private disclosure of price-related and certain other information for the purpose of substantially lessening competition in a market. Neither prohibition has a cogent rationale. As a result, both suffer from dire overreach and are likely to produce unintended consequences. The most fundamental flaw is that the proposed prohibitions focus on information disclosure whereas the relevant economic concern is not information disclosure of itself but the facilitation of coordinated conduct by competitors. Another serious flaw is that the proposed exceptions to the prohibitions are too limited in scope. There is also a potential loophole, namely the conceivable use of continuous disclosure by public-listed companies as an avenue for getting around the prohibition against public disclosure of information under s 44ZZX.