Author(s): Serra-Diaz, JM; Franklin, J; Dillon, WW; Syphard, AD; Davis, FW; Meentemeyer, RK | Abstract: © 2016 John Wiley a Sons Ltd. Aim: Forest regeneration data provide an early signal of the persistence and migration of tree species, so we investigated whether species shifts due to climate change exhibit a common signal of response or whether changes vary by species. Location: California Floristic Province, United States; mediterranean biome. Methods: We related Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data from 2000-07 for 13 tree species to high-resolution climate and geographical data. Using methods from invasion ecology, we derived indices of species-specific regeneration overlap and central tendency change (range-wide global indicators) based on kernel density estimation of presence and absence of regeneration. We then built regeneration surfaces to identify areas of occurrence of high regeneration (regeneration hotspots, local indicators) in both geographical and climate space for 13 common tree species. Results: Differences between presence and absence of regeneration in forests varied in magnitude across species, with little evidence that tree regeneration is shifting to higher latitudes and elevations, the expected geographical fingerprint of climate change. We also identified potential topographic mediators of regeneration dynamics. Multiple regeneration hotspots were found for many species, suggesting the influence of non-climatic factors on regeneration. Differences between the presence and absence of regeneration in geographic and climate spaces were not always congruent, suggesting that shifting climate space and range area are not entirely coupled. Main conclusions: The distributions of regeneration in Californian forests show diverse signals, not always tracking the higher latitudinal-elevation fingerprint of climate change. Local regeneration hotspots are common in our analysis, suggesting spatially varying persistence of forest linked to natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Our results emphasize that projections of tree range shifts in the context of climate change should consider the variation of regeneration drivers within species ranges, beyond the overall climate signal.


This essay argues that American printers motivated by a deep commercial interest in fast and effective communication worked to overturn the British imperial postal service in 1774 and 1775. Printers enlisted merchants and members of the revolutionary elite, who also relied on long-distance communication through the post office for their own commercial and political purposes, to provide financial and political support. In making their case, printers mobilized a broad array of political ideology and imagery already familiar to colonists during the decade-long imperial crisis, emphasizing the political necessity of replacing the imperial institution. At the same time, they uncontroversially asserted that a new American post office would safeguard their precarious commercial ventures. The essay therefore demonstrates that printers were not "mere mechanics" but actively shaped the political debates leading to the American Revolution as part of a process that scholars have recently highlighted in a work on the economic and commercial influences on the Revolution. Furthermore, it grants the post office its due as part of the Habermasian public sphere; although understudied, the post office—both as a physical space and as a network through which information could travel—was a crucial means by which Americans developed a national infrastructure for political communications. Exploring the overthrow of the British post office, and the creation of an American post office, reveals an understudied but crucial episode to explain the symbiosis between politics and commerce during the American Revolutionary era.


Decentralized energy is growing in importance with time. The electricity being needed even in the most remote places, far from power stations, increases the importance of small power production devices such as micro-hydro devices like turbines. In this research, the velocity field in a meandering channel is studied in its natural conditions and with the introduction of spur-dikes, structures that prevent bank erosion, a natural phenomenon observed in meandering channels, with the use of computational fluid dynamics software. With the objective of improving the power production by investigating the changes of the flume velocities with the introduction of spur-dikes, one test without any spur-dike and three tests with it were conducted. Good results were reached, with velocities increasing between 10 to 20% with the introduction of these structures. In certain cases, the increase in power production can reach up to 85% than in a normal situation without spur-dikes in the river.


This article examines the stratifying effects of economic classifications. We argue that in the neoliberal era market institutions increasingly use actuarial techniques to split and sort individuals into classification situations that shape life-chances. While this is a general and increasingly pervasive process, our main empirical illustration comes from the transformation of the credit market in the United States. This market works as both as a leveling force and as a condenser of new forms of social difference. The U.S. banking and credit system has greatly broadened its scope over the past twenty years to incorporate previously excluded groups. We observe this leveling tendency in the expansion of credit amongst lower-income households, the systematization of overdraft protections, and the unexpected and rapid growth of the fringe banking sector. But while access to credit has democratized, it has also differentiated. Scoring technologies classify and price people according to credit risk. This has allowed multiple new distinctions to be made amongst the creditworthy, as scores get attached to different interest rates and loan structures. Scores have also expanded into markets beyond consumer credit, such as insurance, real estate, employment, and elsewhere. The result is a cumulative pattern of advantage and disadvantage with both objectively measured and subjectively experienced aspects. We argue these private classificatory tools are increasingly central to the generation of ''market-situations'', and thus an important and overlooked force that structures individual life-chances. In short, classification situations may have become the engine of modern class situations. 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd.


Genomic DNA extraction is an important step in plant molecular biological research. The objective of the study was to recommend the customized genomic DNA extraction method for some kobiraji medicines in Bangladesh. The customized plant genomic DNA extraction method extracted eight different ayurvedic medicine powders such as Phyllanthus emblica, Withania somnifera, Abroma augusta, Syzygium cumini, Oroxylum indicum, Chrysogenum aurium, Mucuna pruriens and Terminalia bellirica. The quantity of the extracted genomic DNA was measured and tested at 260 nm using Nanodrop® ND-1000 spectrophotometer and the quality of DNA was determined by the horizontal agarose gel electrophoresis using 1% agarose in TBE buffer at constant voltage of 60 V. Genomic DNA extraction gave original and real DNA with amplifiable and usable amount for all the powder medicine tested. Sufficient amount of DNA was obtained from the powder medicines, but no result found in electrophoresis as the DNA size was too large.


The goals of this research were to document the historical selection applied by Nguni breeders that contributed to the national genetic evaluation scheme, and to offer prospective breeding objectives to guide future selection practices. Genetic selection differentials, weighted by number of offspring, and unweighted, were calculated for the recorded traits, and were used to quantify differences between natural and imposed selection. Index-in-retrospect methods were used to quantify differences between the traits in selection that were applied. Economic values for the prospective breeding objectives were derived through simulation. Results indicate that relatively little directional selection has been applied to Nguni as a breed, and that historically bulls and heifers were selected according to divergent criteria. Breeding objectives indicated that production, profitability and sustainability goals were largely complementary, but reflected a change from past selection practices. Breeders are advised to be intentional and consistent in the application of selection criteria.


Platelet rich plasma (PRP) is the autologous plasma fraction with a platelet‐rich cellular component which is enriched with a number of growth factors. Due to its availability and low cost, PRP has become an increasingly popular clinical tool as an alternative source of growth factors for various applications, for example, tendon regeneration but with limited success in clinical trials. The main objective of the current study was to determine whether activated PRP [i.e., platelet rich plasma‐clot release (PRCR)] could be used to induce the proliferation and collagen synthesis in human tenocyte in vitro. The advantage of using PRCR is that the platelet‐derived bioactive factors are more concentrated and could initiate a more rapid and accelerated healing response than PRP. Our results demonstrated that 10% PRCR treatment accelerated the extent of cell proliferation and collagen production by human tenocytes in vitro. The expression of specific tenocyte markers were similar to conventional fetal bovine serum (FBS)‐treated tenocytes implanted in mice within 14 days of implantation in diffusion chambers. Moreover, relatively more collagen fibrils were evident in PRCR‐treated tenocytes in vivo as compared to 10% FBS‐treated cells. Overall, our feasibility study has indicated that PRCR can induce human tenocyte proliferation and collagen synthesis which could be implemented for future tendon regeneration in reconstructive surgeries. © 2011 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 30:982–990, 2012


A novel microelecromechnical system (MEMS) inertial switch based on the surface micromachining technology was developed, which mainly consists of a proof mass as the movable electrode and a compliant stationary electrode above the proof mass, whose deformation during the contact process would enhance the contact effect and prolong the switch-on time. Based on the original design which had already realized the enhancing effect to some extent, the device structure was redesigned as a centrosymmetric structure with the stationary electrode changed from two bridge-type beams to one cross beam in order to reduce the off-axis sensitivity. More importantly, a contact point was installed on top of the proof mass, changing the effective contact area of the stationary electrode from its end to the center, which undergoes the largest deformation. Therefore, the contact effect would be improved further, which has been confirmed by the ANSYS transient simulation. This simulation combined with the Simulink dynamic simulation described the device behavior, which were in agreement with the drop hammer tests. The threshold acceleration of the redesigned inertial microswitch was around 70 g, and the tested switch-on time reached 30 mus, more satisfactory than the original design.


Privacy is defined as the right to control, edit, manage, and delete information about oneself and decide when, how, and to what extent this information is communicated to others. Therefore, every person should ideally be empowered to manage and protect his own data, individually and independently of others. This assumption, however, barely holds in practice, because people are by nature biologically and socially interconnected. An individual's identity is essentially determined at the biological and social levels. First, a person is biologically determined by his DNA, his genes, that fully encode his physical characteristics. Second, human beings are social animals, with a strong need to create ties and interact with their peers. Interdependence is present at both levels. At the biological level, interdependence stems from genetic inheritance. At the social level, interdependence emerges from social ties. In this thesis, we investigate whether, in today's highly connected world, individual privacy is in fact achievable, or if it is almost impossible due to the inherent interdependence between people. First, we study interdependent privacy risks at the social level, focusing on online social networks (OSNs), the digital counterpart of our social lives. We show that, even if an OSN user carefully tunes his privacy settings in order to not be present in any search directory, it is possible for an adversary to find him by using publicly visible attributes of other OSN users. We demonstrate that, in OSNs where privacy settings are not aligned between users and where some users reveal a (even limited) set of attributes, it is almost impossible for a specific user to hide in the crowd. Our navigation attack complements existing work on inference attacks in OSNs by showing how we can efficiently find targeted profiles in OSNs, which is a necessary precondition for any targeted attack. Our attack also demonstrates the threat on OSN-membership privacy. Second, we investigate upcoming interdependent privacy risks at the biological level. More precisely, due to the recent drop in costs of genome sequencing, an increasing number of people are having their genomes sequenced and share them online and/or with third parties for various purposes. However, familial genetic dependencies induce indirect genomic privacy risks for the relatives of the individuals who share their genomes. We propose a probabilistic framework that relies upon graphical models and Bayesian inference in order to formally quantify genomic privacy risks. Then, we study the interplay between rational family members with potentially conflicting interests regarding the storage security and disclosure of their genomic data. We consider both purely selfish and altruistic behaviors, and we make use of multi-agent influence diagrams to efficiently derive equilibria in the general case where more than two relatives interact with each other. We also propose an obfuscation mechanism in order to reconcile utility with privacy in genomics, in the context where all family members are cooperative and care about each other's privacy. Third, we study privacy-enhancing systems, such as anonymity networks, where users do not damage other users' privacy but are actually needed in order to protect privacy. In this context, we show how incentives based on virtual currency can be used and their amount optimized in order to foster cooperation between users and eventually improve everyone's privacy.[...]


Christianity came very early to Africa, as attested by the Gospels. The agencies by which it spread across North Africa and into the Kingdom of Aksum remain largely unknown. Even after the rise of Islam cut communications between sub-Saharan Africa and the churches of Rome and Constantinople, it survived in the eastern Sudan kingdom of Nubia until the 15th century and never died in Ethiopia. The documentary history of organized missions begins with the Roman Catholic monastic orders founded in the 13th century. Their evangelical work in Africa was closely bound up with Portuguese colonialism, which both helped and hindered their operations. Organized European Protestant missions date from the 18th-century evangelical awakening and were much less creatures of states. Africa was a particular object of attention for Evangelicals opposed to slavery and the slave trade. Paradoxically this gave an impetus to colonizing ventures aimed at undercutting the moral and economic foundations of slavery in Africa. Disease proved to be a deadly obstacle to European- and American-born missionaries in tropical Africa, thus spurring projects for enrolling local agents who had acquired childhood immunity. Southern Africa below the Zambezi River attracted missionaries from many parts of Europe and North America because of the absence of the most fearsome diseases. However the turbulent politics of the region complicated their work by restricting their access to organized African kingdoms and chieftaincies. The prevalent mission model until the late 19th century was a station under the direction of a single European family whose religious and educational endeavors were directed at a small number of African residents.
 Catholic missions acquired new energy following the French Revolution, the old Portuguese system of partnership with the state was displaced by enthusiasm for independent operations under the authority of the Pope in Rome. Several new missionary orders were founded with a particular focus on Africa.
 Mission publications of the 19th and 20th centuries can convey a misleading impression that the key agents in the spread of African Christianity were foreign-born white males. Not only does this neglect the work of women as wives and teachers, but it diverts attention from the Africans who were everywhere the dominant force in the spread of modern Christianity. By the turn of the 20th century, evangelism had escaped the bounds of mission stations driven by African initiative and the appearance of so-called "faith missions" based on a model of itinerant preaching. African prophets and independent evangelists developed new forms of Christianity. Once dismissed as heretical or syncretic, they gradually came to be recognized as legitimate variants of the sort that have always accompanied the acculturation of religion in new environments.
 Decolonization caught most foreign mission operations unawares and required major changes, most notably in the recruitment of African clergy to the upper echelons of church hierarchies. By the late 20th century Africans emerged as an independent force in Christian missions, sending agents to other continents.


Belonging emerged in the 1990s as a conceptual framework to promote student success, retention and engagement in Higher Education (Tinto, 1993; Hurtado & Carter, 1997). Belonging is the sense of mattering and interpersonal connectedness: a basic human need, it enhances motivation and drives behaviour (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Strayhorn, 2012). Generally, its application within higher education has been to discrete student cohorts, often based on ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status or first-year transitioning status (Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Strayhorn, Bie, Dorime-Williams, & Williams, 2016; Ribera, Miller & Dumford, 2017). RMIT University, Australia's second largest higher education provider, has a diverse student body. Student retention at RMIT University remains relatively high, however, recent evaluations have indicated that students believe the university is not doing enough to help foster a sense of belonging and friendship. In response, the university has positioned student belonging as a major strategic focus area in 2017-2018, and has developed a whole of institution RMIT Belonging Strategy. The strategy emerges from an extensive internal stakeholder consultation process and builds on the research of The Belonging Project (Clarke & Wilson, 2016). The strategy identified and tested five drivers that impact student belonging at the university, and proposed a measurement framework to form an 'index' of belonging that can be tracked and reported using existing university data sets. This paper focuses on the innovative and collaborative work of developing an evidence based, data driven enterprise wide strategy for inclusive belonging, and presents a roadmap of the process.


Bulgaria is a country with abundant natural, historic, and architectural resources providing a rich foundation for a variety of tourism activities. Bulgaria used to be a holiday destination for the former Soviet bloc but mismanagement and foot-dragging in economic reforms prevented it from capitalizing on this past experience. The purpose of this discussion is to outlay the current situation of the Bulgarian tourism by using the secondary data provided by government and consulting reports. The objective of this study is to assess information reporting needs of the Bulgarian tourism in its effort to gain recognition in the world tourism arena.


Co-convictions are court convictions made at the same time as a more serious conviction. Their importance has been little recognized.We investigate their value using data on two separate serious crimes. Taking official conviction careers in England and Wales (1979—2001) for blackmail (n = 5774) and kidnapping offenders (n = 7291), we considered how much information on co-convictions is normally overlooked, and how knowledge of co-convictions contributes to predicting serious recidivism. We identified that co-convictions were pervasive, with 54 per cent of convictions for blackmail and 77 per cent for kidnapping having co-convictions. Co-convictions provided extra explanatory power in predicting the risk of a subsequent sexual or violent offence for both blackmail and kidnapping. For blackmail, most types of co-conviction were associated with a significantly raised relative risk, whereas for kidnapping, only co-convictions which were not acquisitive, sexual or violent had a significantly raised relative risk. We concluded that co-convictions are a useful measure of short-term specialization and are important when predicting serious recidivism.


We present an overview of Clousot, our current tool to statically check CodeContracts. CodeContracts enable a compiler and languageindependent specification of Contracts (precondition, postconditions and object invariants). Clousot checks every method in isolation using an assume/guarantee reasoning: For each method under analysis Clousot assumes its precondition and asserts the postcondition. For each invoked method, Clousot asserts its precondition and assumes the postcondition. Clousot also checks the absence of common runtime errors, such as null-pointer errors, buffer or array overruns, divisions by zero, as well as less common ones such as checked integer overflows or floating point precision mismatches in comparisons. At the core of Clousot there is an abstract interpretation engine which infers program facts. Facts are used to discharge the assertions. The use of abstract interpretation (vs usual weakest precondition-based checkers) has two main advantages: (i) the checker automatically infers loop invariants letting the user focus only on boundary specifications; (ii) the checker is deterministic in its behavior (which abstractly mimics the flow of the program) and it can be tuned for precision and cost. Clousot embodies other techniques, such as iterative domain refinement, goal-directed backward propagation, precondition and postcondition inference, and message prioritization.


Purpose – The paper aims to synthesize some key insights from social network theory and systems thinking to better understand the existence and dynamics of institutional complexity – the source of institutional change and innovation – in service ecosystems.Design/Methodology/approach – This conceptual paper integrates insights from social network theory (e.g., Burt, 1992; Granovetter, 1973) and systems thinking (e.g. Simon, 1996) to elaborate the service ecosystems perspective on institutional complexity and innovation.Findings – S-D logic and its service ecosystem perspective (Lusch and Vargo, 2014; Vargo and Akaka, 2012; Vargo et al., 2015) imply that value is created by systems consisting of actors who fundamentally do the same thing: cocreate value by exchanging and integrating resources (Vargo and Lusch, 2011). This view results in a systemic notion of value cocreation that highlights the role of institutions as the 'glue' of service ecosystems that both enables and constrains value cocreation (Edvardsson et al., 2014; Vargo and Akaka, 2012). In this paper, we extend the service ecosystems perspective on innovation as institutional change in value cocreation by elaborating the dynamics of institutional complexity – the coexistence and interaction of numerous and partially conflicting institutional arrangements – crucial for agency and change in service ecosystems (Siltaloppi et al., 2014). Building on the notions of 'weak ties', 'structural holes' and 'near-decomposability' as well as the triadic view inherent in them, the paper argues that service ecosystems can be seen as complex systems characterized by near-decomposability. This implies that parts or subsystems of service ecosystem(s) interact with one another with varying frequency and tie 'strengths' resulting in inconsistencies and incompatibility of institutional arrangements between the subsystems that causes institutional complexity especially as actors can be simultaneously embedded in several subsystems and their respective institutional arrangements.Research implications – The paper highlights the importance of 1) triads as a unit of analysis, 2) complexity in institutional arrangements, actors' role constellations and mutual interactions, and 3) varying density of interaction between subsystems of service ecosystem for building a better understanding of institutional complexity, change and innovation in service ecosystems.Originality/value – This paper is among the first to integrate insights from social network theory and systems thinking to elaborate institutional complexity in service ecosystems.Key words – Service ecosystems, Institutions, Innovation, Social Network theory, Systems thinking, TriadsPaper type – Conceptual paper


This paper explores processes of cultural appropriation, and specifically Augustan visual receptions of pharaonic Egypt. As a test case, I consider the possibility of Egyptianizing precedents for the Ara Pacis, including the architecture of Middle and New Kingdom jubilee chapels. This requires looking at the Augustan interventions into the traditional temple complexes of Egypt, the transmission of imperial ideas about pharaonic Egypt to Rome, their uses there, and the role of pharaonic appropriations within a broader landscape of Aegyptiaca in


Revealed preferences for equal college access may be due to beliefs that equal access increases societal income or income equality. To isolate preferences for those goods, we implement an online discrete choice experiment using social statistics generated from true variation among commuting zones. We find that, ceteris paribus, the average income that individuals are willing to sacrifice is (1) $4,984 to increase higher education enrollment by 1 standard deviation (14 percent); (2) $1,168 to decrease rich/poor gaps in higher education enrollment by 1 standard deviation (8 percent); and (3) $2,900 to decrease the 90/10 income inequality ratio by 1 standard deviation (1.66). In addition, we find that political affiliation is an important moderator of preferences for equality. While both Democrats and Republicans are willing to trade over $4,000 to increase higher education enrollment by 1 standard deviation, Democrats are willing to sacrifice nearly three times more income to decrease either rich/poor gaps in higher education enrollment or the 90/10 income inequality ratio by 1 standard deviation.


In federated learning systems, clients are autonomous in that their behaviors are not fully governed by the server. Consequently, a client may intentionally or unintentionally deviate from the prescribed course of federated model training, resulting in abnormal behaviors, such as turning into a malicious attacker or a malfunctioning client. Timely detecting those anomalous clients is therefore critical to minimize their adverse impacts. In this work, we propose to detect anomalous clients at the server side. In particular, we generate low-dimensional surrogates of model weight vectors and use them to perform anomaly detection. We evaluate our solution through experiments on image classification model training over the FEMNIST dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed detection-based approach significantly outperforms the conventional defense-based methods.


In this essay I plan to show how Wharton, through Lily, criticised society, and more specifically its expectations of women. My thesis is that Wharton and her character Lily exposed the upper class society of New York, and its ruthlessness, by voicing a woman's point of view. Therefore, the main purpose here is to reveal the complexity of the lives women led in order to fulfil society's expectations and I thereby plan to explore what it was like living in a world governed by strict rules of conduct.


This paper discusses some of the core issues around the intersection between intellectual property, technological standards and competition policy in the European Union. In particular, it examines the so-called trade-off between 'openness' and innovativeness. Traditional economic theory suggests that only exclusive ownership of intellectual property provides the necessary incentives for companies to invest in innovation. In a standards context where technological specifications should be as widely-promulgated as possible, the inclusion of exclusive IP rights can create access problems and may result in technological bottlenecks or consumer harm. This is especially the case with respect to open source software, which is sometimes legally incapable of including standards which include royalty-bearing IP. It is for these reasons that recently some EU governments, consumer groups and companies have demanded so-called 'open standards' whereby any IP included is licensed on a royalty-free basis. This push for 'open standards' has met with some strong opposition both from the private sector as well as from some formal standard-setting organizations, who argue that failure to reward IP owners for their investment will lead to inferior and less innovative standards in the long run. This essay applies pressure to this argument, by deploying arguments from the literature of network effects. However, it is also argued that royalty-free standard-setting may result in standards which are less open than royalty-bearing standards .This paradoxical result is due to open standards' increased vulnerability to attack by the increasing number of companies pursuing a pure IP business model, and who are discouraged from participating in royalty-free standard-setting. The essay suggests a number of legal and strategic tactics which could be used to prevent this outcome, but concludes that if standards are to be and remain truly open, stake-holders should be prepared to fight for them in terms of both IP management and by pushing for changes to the IP regime in general.


This essay argues that the economic contribution of certain firms – be they small, young or rapidly growing – has to be understood in a broader context of creative destruction. Growth of some firms requires contraction and exit of some other firms to free up resources that can be reallocated to expanding firms. Entry and expansion are flip sides to exit and contraction and the process through which the factors of production are put into different use defines structural transformation. We analyze institutions and policies conducive to structural transformation, in particular the expansion of high-growth firms (HGFs), since they have empirically been shown to contribute disproportionately to economic development. Firm growth is viewed as resulting from the continuous discovery and use of productive knowledge. Rapid firm growth requires a set of economic actors with complementary competencies that work together to identify and commercialize novel business ideas. The institutional framework determines the incentives for these individuals to acquire and utilize knowledge. We identify a number of institutions that encourage the creation of HGFs and promote structural transformation. In particular, our analysis points to the key roles played by tax structures, labor market regulation, and the contestability of service markets. Even in advanced economies, there is a large untapped economic potential which can be unleashed by institutional changes, such as the opening up of closed markets for entrepreneurial competition. However, there is no "quick-fix" that will boost the frequency of HGFs and structural transformation. Our analysis suggests that policymakers need to adopt a broad approach and implement a wide array of complementary institutional reforms to increase the prevalence of HGFs and to facilitate structural transformation.


Introduction: A large number of patients present to the Emergency Department (ED) with sepsis, severe sepsis or septic shock. Septic shock is associated with 40% mortality risk and is the most common cause of death in the ICU. Moreover, survivors of septic shock are at risk of permanent organ dysfunction, prolonged hospital stay and long term institutionalization. Many of these complications can be minimized and may be avoided by prevention via public health improvement and education, early identification of sepsis, and timely effective intervention. Methods: IHI quality improvement methodology applied to guide our work. The Quality Leaders from ED, ICUs and general wards were invited to participate and collaborate to develop and test the Sepsis 6 Pathway. From the data collected so far we noted the following: Sepsis patients ages range from as young as 19 to 89 years. The most common sepsis diagnoses are septic shock, pneumonia and urosepsis. For the initial management of sepsis patients 49% are managed in the ED. In August we started monitoring delays in time between the patient's admission and criteria met for sepsis diagnosis; and the time between criteria met for sepsis and referral to ICU. If the patient is admitted to the ward this can be as long as days. If the patient is admitted to MICU or ED it ranges from 0 minutes – 1 hrs. The time between criteria met for sepsis and treatment initiated is the most important indicator we are monitoring, which based on the data collected so far averages between 0 minutes – 1 day. Conclusion: Sepsis causes avoidable and preventable patient harm. A multi-faceted approach may help reduce morbidity and mortality. Early implementation of the sepsis 6 pathway is underway in HMC across main acute care areas. Outcome measures will be collected and compared against international standards.


The present study compares use of assistive technology for the visually challenged students provided by the special schools in the Medinipur division under the Districts of Bankura, Purulia, Paschim Medinipur, Jhargram and Purba Medinipur and that of the special schools in the Burdwan division under the districts of Birbhum, Purba Bardhaman, Paschim Bardhaman and Hooghly for providing services to the visually challenged students of secondary and higher secondary level. The study reveals that the institutes meant for the visually challenged should increase access, availability and funding for assistive technology through efforts and initiatives. Only one institute in Medinipur division i.e. Vivekananda Mission Asram (VMA) uses sufficient Braille resources and Assistive technology. Among the institutes in Burdwan division Asansol Braille Academy uses sufficient Braille resources and assistive technology. It has been revealed from the study that due to improper information about the assistance from the Government level (both Central and State) these institutes are suffering from shortage of funds. Also shortage of teaching faculty in these institutes is another hindrance in the overall development of the visually challenged students. The school authorities must take initiatives in introducing assistive technologies to visually-challenged students and they should get proper training in using it. There is great need of development and implementation of laws, regulations, policies, practices and procedures or organizational structures that promote access to Assistive Technology devices and services because people with disabilities have to stop being underrepresented in libraries.


Environmental degradation is another issue that highlighted the drawbacks of the highly promoted economic relations in the last two centuries. In conceptual terms its solution was found in a variety of models out of which only sustainable development became a widespread support for policy making. The paper examines how the basic underpinning stands compared with the actual policies framed at global level and which are the prospects of success in a world that is more and more influenced by globalization. It was found that widening the scope of economy could bring in progress toward sustainability, but this also supposes a shift in the drivers of demand from global to local.


Government intervention in labour markets is often justified by citing phenomena in actual labour markets which deviate from the predictions of neoclassical theory. The case for such intervention will be considerably weakened if the anomalous phenomena can be explained by implicit labour market theories that are extensions of the neoclassical theory. The purpose of the current research is to test two well-defined alternative implicit labour markets models of the labour market for scientists. The test makes use of a longitudinal data set compiled by the author that contains data for scientists on number of citations per year and on annual salaries. The evidence, although somewhat mixed, tends to support the "learning model" over the "incentives model". The most dramatic evidence is that the effect of citations on salaries declines as the scientist gains experience. More evidence will be required before we can reach sound general conclusions on the empirical success of the theories.


This article has two goals: providing legal and policy analysts with a basic understanding of the types of computer models that are used in studying climate change, and thinking through the uses and limitations of these models for courts and agencies. Because this article covers a good deal of fairly diverse terrain, it may be helpful to identify four key "take away" points: 1. Climate models establish a lower end estimate for global temperature impacts, but the distribution is less clearly bounded on the high side - or in simpler terms, the high-end risk may be considerable. The models are better at predicting temperature patterns than precipitation patterns, and global predictions are considerably firmer than more localized ones. 2. Economic models are much less advanced, and their conclusions should be used with caution. Unfortunately, economists are not always carefully about incorporating uncertainty into their policy recommendations. 3. Climate scientists have created a unique institutional system for assessing and improving models, going well beyond the usual system of peer review. Consequently, their conclusions should be entitled to considerable credence by courts and agencies. 4. Model predictions cannot be taken as gospel. There is considerable residual uncertainty about climate change impacts that cannot be fully quantified. The uncertainties on the whole make climate change a more serious problem rather than providing a source of comfort. The policy process should be designed with this uncertainty in mind. For instance, rather than focusing on a single cost-benefit analysis for proposed regulatory actions, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which oversees federal regulatory policy, might do better to require the development of standardized scenarios for agencies to use.


"The Rough Guide to The Bahamas" is your definitive handbook to these beautiful islands. From the finest scuba and snorkelling spots on Paradise Island to the bustling cities of Nassau and Freeport, the full-colour section introduces all of the region's highlights. For every town and village, there are comprehensive and opinionated listings of all the best resorts, hotels, bars and restaurants, to suit all tastes and budgets, plus a new Author's Pick' feature to highlight the very best options. There is plenty of practical advice for a host of outdoor activities from hiking and fishing to surfing and kayaking. The guide also includes lively accounts of Bahamian history, culture and wildlife and comes complete with maps covering the entire region. "The Rough Guide to The Bahamas" is like having a local friend plan your trip!


Domestic agricultural policy and trade policy are closely linked. Thus, research, including long-term forecasting activities, must take into account the domestic as well as international implications of trade policy issues. The seventh meeting of the Consortium on Trade Research on June 23-24, 1983, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, focused on the problems facing international agricultural trade in the eighties; current research efforts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Canada, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Secretariat; and the status, problems, and applications of long-term forecasting models.


Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is one of the most popular technologies nowadays that facilitate the user by providing different features as instant messages, phone calls, video calls, and voicemails. Basic VoIP protocols were designed to be efficient instead of secure. After numerous attacks on these protocols several solutions were proposed to prevent against these threats. In this paper, we focus on the security of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) that is used to initiate, modify, and terminate the VoIP sessions. The paper presents the design and implementation of secure layered architecture for SIP, which adds a new layer to the standard SIP layer model and entitled as Security layer. The Security layer provides authentication, authorization, adaptable feature, and secure key exchange, based on our newly designed protocol, named as Session Initiation Protocol using Single Sign-On (SIPSSO). In order to implement the secure layered architecture based on SIPSSO, we have developed an Android Secure Call application and extend the open source Asterisk accordingly. After the designing and implementation phases, we have verified the SIPSSO protocol formally by using an automated security verification tool, Scyther. Our analysis results reveal that by adding Security layer, we ensured protection against different SIP attacks such as Eavesdropping, Man In The Middle (MITM) attack, Message Tampering, Replay attack, Session Teardown, and Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT).


Recent researches are geared towards finding alternative sources of renewable energy and solar power seems to be an attractive avenue and currently, dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) have gained worldwide attention. This study aimed to fabricate DSSC that makes use of an improvised conductive glass, with zinc oxide in nappy cream as photoanode and mangosteen pericarp extract as a sensitizer. It sought to find the effect of DSSC processing on the conductivity and performance in terms of current, voltage, and power density generated, and evaluate its stability. Ordinary 1/8" mirror was made conductive glass by stripping the gray coat with very fine sandpaper then heating to remove the orange coat. Conductivity was good (2.1 ohms) and etching with povidone-iodine provided transparency for the photoanode. The DSSCs were capable of producing a mean current of 0.0007 mA and mean voltage of 2.8670 mV that last for ninety minutes. The present study showed DSSCs could be constructed using indigenous materials. Further research is needed for finding ways to improve its efficiency and lifespan. By knowing the principles of the DSSCs, and enhancing the innovativeness and creativity of the current DSSC, researchers can overcome the lack of expensive materials and equipment for future studies.


The analysis by gender differences of the economic and social effects of the great crisis and of the weak recovery has a paradigmatic value to understand the growing difficulties of the South and consequently of the country as a whole. The investigation carried out on the dynamics of female employment over the last fifteen years, characterised by the most serious post-war crisis, allows us to highlight some structural constraints of the Italian system to labour market participation which, if not removed, strongly affect the possibilities of economic and social recovery of our country. Such structural constraints have in Southern regions so great dimensions that undermine «the economic and social fundamentals » of this area. The worsening of the main social indicators clearly recalls the indissoluble link between the southern question and women's issues. The lack of valorisation of the female labour force - on average more educated in the South - on the labour market, is the determinant of a third issue, i.e. the social issue, which characterizes South Italy, weakening the possibility of a stronger recovery throughout the country.


This report provides a portrait of the Black population in the United States and discusses its distribution at the national level and at lower levels of geography.1, 2 It is part of a series that analyzes population and housing data collected from the 2010 Census. The data for this report are based on the 2010 Census Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, which was the first 2010 Census data product released with data on race and Hispanic origin and was provided to each state for use in drawing boundaries for legislative districts.3


Structures that formed on the southern flank of the Ozark dome, in the foreland of the late Paleozoic Ouachita orogeny, have received little modern study. New mapping of the western Buffalo River region of northern Arkansas identifies diversely oriented faults and monoclinal folds that displace the generally flat lying Mississippian Boone Formation over a 180 m elevation range. Kinematic measurements and spatial relations reveal the presence of both east-striking normal faults and broader northeast-striking dextral strike-slip fault zones that acted in a coordinated fashion to accommodate constrictional strain, in which north-south extension was balanced by vertical and east-directed shortening. North-south extension in the Buffalo River region probably reflects Pennsylvanian–Early Permian deformation within the flexural forebulge of the developing Ouachita orogeny, which closed progressively westward along the southern margin of the craton.


By adding user interface to the usual router, an improved functional router is implemented in this paper. The proposed router is developed based on the SA1110 processor, and the system contains 1 ethernet port, 2 PCMCIA slots, and 1 serial communication port. The Emdedded Linux is adopted as an operating system, and application programs are implemented by using QT/Embedded.


Hydraulic fracturing—also known as fracking or hydrofracking—is a highly controversial process used for the extraction of oil and natural gas. To date, regulation at the federal level—by Congress and the EPA—has failed to set clear standards for use of the technique. Many proponents of fracking applaud the positive economic impacts, job creation, and a future of American energy independence that are associated with its use across the United States. There are, however, a number of areas of environmental concern associated with hydraulic fracturing.


In everyday life, the visual system is remarkably good at recognizing materials across a wide range of viewing conditions. This paper addresses the problem of identifying real samples of materials from appearance. Here, we consider gloss as an appearance attribute that could reveal certain information about object properties. We prepared twelve samples of glass and PMMA and eroded these using different agents. The gloss and haze of the samples were measured at 60 degrees via a gloss meter. For all samples, the surface roughness properties were measured. Microfacet distributions were derived from measured BRDFs using an inverted microfacet model. We conducted a visual ranking experiment using the pair comparison method. The psychophysical gloss ratings correlate well with the 60 degrees gloss index. Principal component analysis of the psychophysical results revealed a somewhat more complicated picture in which three components seem to play a role. We conclude that observers can apprehend the physical nature of the surface of real objects from features that are included in the BRDF and available in the gloss appearance.


Mobile data traffic is growing exponentially due to the popularization of smart phones, tablets and other data traffic appliances. One way of handling the increased data traffic is to deploy large antenna arrays at the base station, also known as Massive MIMO. In Massive MIMO, the base station having excessive number of transmit antennas, can achieve increased data rate by spatial-multiplexing terminals into the same time-frequency resource.This thesis investigates Massive MIMO in LTE in a single-cell deployment with up to 100 base station antennas. The benefits of more antennas are investigated with single-antenna terminals in a typical urban environment. The terminal transmitted sounding reference signals (SRS) are used at the base station to calculate channel state information (CSI) in order to generate an MRT precoder. With perfect CSI, the results showed that the expected terminal SINR depends on the antenna-terminal ratio. It was also showed that with spatial-multiplexed terminals and 100 base station antennas, the maximum cell throughput increased 13 times compared with no spatial-multiplexed terminals.Channel ageing causes inaccuracy in the CSI, the thesis showed that the variation in terminal SINR increased rapidly with less frequent SRS transmissions. When having moving terminals at 3 km/h, the difference between the 10th and 90th SINR percentile is 1 dB with an SRS transmission periodicity of 20 ms, and 17 dB with an SRS transmission periodicity of 80 ms. With 100 base station antennas and moving terminals at 3 km/h with an SRS periodicity of 20 ms, the maximum cell throughput decreased with 13% compared to when the base station has perfect CSI.The result showed that the maximum cell throughput scaled linearly with the number of base station antennas. It also showed that having the number of spatial-multiplexed terminals equal to the number of antennas is a reasonable assumption when maximizing the cell throughput.


This thesis aims to provide a better understanding of how Internet banking is prevailing in Pakistan. This purpose is achieved via two research questions which focus on how the bank's online environment (i.e. website) can be described as well as how customer services within this online environment can be described. A multiple case study strategy was used, focusing on two banks,namely Muslim commercial bank and Citibank Pakistan. Data was collected via Interviews and interaction with the websites, focusing on feedback from the customers using the banking websites. In using these websites for their banking, the findings show that the main benefits included lower costs, efficiency and time saving retention. Websites should have clear and concise information in order to build trust with the customer, and multimedia, graphic elements should be avoided, as this distracts customers from why they came to the site. In terms of customer service, loan information, language options, and a menu of multiple services were all found to be important. The main problem was found to be a lack of trust in the new banking channel by customers. However, effective complaint management can increase customers' loyalty and trust in Internet banking.


ABSTRACT This exploratory case study examined how two teachers used a comparative approach to teach genocide histories in a Holocaust Literature elective course. Through interviews and observations, we studied how the teachers guided students in comparing genocides as well as how they used survivor testimonies in their instruction. We found that teachers engaged in three types of comparison throughout the unit under study: defining genocide as the basis of comparison, discussing similarities and differences, and expanding students' knowledge of genocide beyond the Holocaust. The teachers set up their classrooms as safe places for learning about genocide as difficult history, yet they did not shield their students from its horrors. Additionally, they encouraged their students to take action against genocide outside of the classroom. This study adds to the limited empirical research on teaching comparative genocide and has implications for curriculum design and teacher education.


Deep neural networks suffer from over-fitting and catastrophic forgetting when trained with small data. One natural remedy for this problem is data augmentation, which has been recently shown to be effective. However, previous works either assume that intra-class variances can always be generalized to new classes, or employ naive generation methods to hallucinate finite examples without modeling their latent distributions. In this work, we propose Covariance-Preserving Adversarial Augmentation Networks to overcome existing limits of low-shot learning. Specifically, a novel Generative Adversarial Network is designed to model the latent distribution of each novel class given its related base counterparts. Since direct estimation of novel classes can be inductively biased, we explicitly preserve covariance information as the `variability' of base examples during the generation process. Empirical results show that our model can generate realistic yet diverse examples, leading to substantial improvements on the ImageNet benchmark over the state of the art.


In this study, I have used accounting ratios to analyze the financial performance of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in Pakistan after merger. I have analyzed their financial statements for four years (2006-2009) by using 20 vital ratios. In spite of certain limitations, accounting ratios are still considered as a convenient and reliable analytical tool. Ratio analysis, being a time-tested technique, is most frequently employed in all financial decision-making processes. The results show that the financial performance of RBS in the areas of profitability, liquidity, assets management, leverage, and cash flows has been quite satisfactory before the merger deal. It means that merger deal fails to improve the financial performance of the bank.


Background and Hypothesis: Hyperglycemia is a major source of disease and morbidity among the adult population. Prior studies correlate long-term high fat diet (HFD) mediated hyperglycemia with bone fragility and muscle weakness. Furthermore, the mechanism driving hyperglycemia between sexes are unknown. Our group previously showed that HFDs induced insulin resistance in male mice and glucose intolerance in female mice. This establishes the need to study the impact of long-term HFDs on the bones and muscles using an older cohort of both male and female mice. For that, we hypothesized a long-term HFD mediated hyperglycemia will change bone and muscle structures and impair their functions in adult male and female mice.
Experimental Design or Project Methods: 22-week C57Bl6 mice were fed either a HFD or low fat diet (LFD) for 25 weeks. After euthanasia, bones and muscles were harvested and evaluated using MicroCT, histology, and mechanical testing. Statistical analysis was performed using GraphPad Prism with p<0.05 considered significant.
Results: MicoCT data saw significant reductions to cortical thickness (p<0.05), bone mineral density (p<0.001), and increases to medullary area (p<0.05) among HFD males and females compared to LFD. HFD-males also experienced significant increase in cortical porosity (P<0.001) whereas no changes were noted in HFDfemales. Trabecular bone volume was relatively unchanged. HFD increased cortical osteoclast surface (p<0.001) for both sexes. Bone histology saw increased marrow adiposity among HFD-females (p<0.05). Muscle histology exhibited HFD-related reductions in myofiber diameter (p<0.001) for both sexes. Mechanical testing demonstrated reduced young's modulus (p<0.05) and yield stress (p<0.05) among HFD mice, despite non-significant differences in ultimate strength.
Conclusion and Potential Impact: The changes associated with a long-term HFD differed between sexes but still led to functional impairments of bone and muscle for both sexes, emphasizing the importance of looking further into the mechanisms responsible for these changes. This can potentially translate to the clinic in the treatment of musculoskeletal complications associated with HFDs.


Population growth, global warming acceleration, erosion of biodiversity and scarcity of natural resources are major challenges facing the territories. To better adapt and react to traumatic events in the short, medium and long term, many of them, such as metropolises, develop strategic documents in which the term "resilience" is increasingly used. Nowadays, diverse territorial shocks and pressures are at the heart of the strategic concerns and the concept of resilience. Besides, our development models are intimately linked to renewable natural resources, yet current management practices and methods call into question their capacity to regenerate. It is therefore interesting to consider the taking into account of so-called "renewable" natural resources in territorial strategies aiming at triggering resilience processes. The question underlying this working paper is to better understand to what extent the natural resources approach can enable territories to develop dynamic capabilities in order to improve their resilience? We contribute to a better understanding of the links between renewable natural resources, the dynamic capabilities of territories and local resilience strategies. An exploratory and qualitative research favoring a semi-inductive approach is conducted using the coding methods of Gioia, et al., (2013) adapted to secondary data.


Dermatomyositis and Polymyositis are autoimmune rheumatologic diseases with prominent feature of inflammatory myopathy. When the characteristic cutaneous manifestations coexist with myositis it is called dermatomyositis, otherwise it is polymyositis. There are also differences in histological findings. A 25-years-old lady presented with characteristic skin rash and progressive inflammatory proximal myopathy. The patient had difficulty in Activity of Daily Living (ADL) and ultimately she was unable to walk and became bed bound. Her muscle enzymes were very high, MRI and Electromyography (EMG) showed features of inflammatory myopathy (myositis). Muscle biopsy showed typical findings of dermatomyositis. She responded well with steroid and immunosuppressive drug along with exercise, physiotherapy and rehabilitation therapy. Now she is leading almost normal life with minimum maintenance dose of prednisolone and azathioprine.
JAFMC Bangladesh. Vol 17, No 2 (December) 2021: 91-94


The significant and sustained growth in services worldwide prompts IS researchers to give special attention to service and service concepts as core aspects of the IS field. This study proposes that 'viewing systems as services' is critical to extend the focus of technology&business alignment in service science re search. The study evaluates the influence of mHealth service quality on satisfaction, perceived value and continuance intentions using an interdisciplinary approach. The conceptual model is rooted in the traditional cognition & affective– conation chain bu t explicitly identifies system quality, interaction quality and information quality as the core dimensions of mHealth service quality. The model is validated in the context of a business&to&consumer (B2C) mHealth service systems using PLS path modeling. The results confirm that service quality has a direct impact on continuance intentions and an indirect impact through perceived value and satisfaction in mHealth service systems.


This edition of "The Septuagint with Apocrypha" (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament and the apocryphal books of the same linguistic origin) gives the complete Greek text along with a parallel English translation by Brenton.From the PrefaceThis edition of the Septuagint, including Apocrypha, giving the complete Greek text along with a parallel English translation by Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton (1807-1862), was first published in London in 1851.The Septuagint (from the Latin septuaginta, meaning "seventy," and frequently referred to by the roman numerals LXX) is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. The name derives from the tradition that it was made by seventy (or seventy-two) Jewish scholars at Alexandria, Egypt during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.). It has been preserved in a large number of manuscript copies of the original, and the Greek text in Brenton's edition is based on Vaticanus, an early fourth-century manuscript, with some reliance on other texts, particularly Alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript.Although it is not completely understood either when or why the translation was originally done, it is clear that it in large measure reflects the common language of the period and became the "Bible" of Greek-speaking Jews and then later of the Christians. It is worth noting that the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew Old Testament in certain ways: 1) the Greek text varies at many points from the corresponding Hebrew text; 2) the order of the Biblical Books is not the same--the threefold division of the Hebrew canon into the Law, Prophets, and Writings is not followed in the LXX; and 3) several books not found in the Hebrew are included in the LXX-- these books are known as the Apocrypha in the English Bible.While the majority of the Old Testament quotations rendered by the New Testament authors are borrowed directly from the Septuagint, a number of times they provide their own translation which follows the Hebrew text against the Septuagint. In general, the vocabulary and style of the Septuagint is reflected in the theological terms and phraseology chosen by the New Testament writers, and therefore, takes on particular significance for a better overall understanding of the Scriptures. It is not surprising--due to its early widespread use and enduring influence in the Church--that the order of the Biblical Books in the Septuagint, rather than that of the Hebrew O.T., became the accepted order.Although rejected by Protestants as non-canonical, the Apocryphal writings have enduring value as a literary and historical record of the intertestamental period. They often provide important background and illustrative material for a better understanding of the New Testament "world" and thus the New Testament itself.


Adverse drug reaction (ADR) is a major burden for patients and healthcare industry. It usually causes preventable hospitalizations and deaths, while associated with a huge amount of cost. Traditional preclinical in vitro safety profiling and clinical safety trials are restricted in terms of small scale, long duration, huge financial costs and limited statistical signifi- cance. The availability of large amounts of drug and ADR data potentially allows ADR predictions during the drugs' early preclinical stage with data analytics methods to inform more targeted clinical safety tests. Despite their initial success, existing methods have trade-offs among interpretability, predictive power and efficiency. This urges us to explore methods that could have all these strengths and provide practical solutions for real world ADR predictions. We cast the ADR-drug relation structure into a three-layer hierarchical Bayesian model. We interpret each ADR as a symbolic word and apply latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to learn topics that may represent certain biochemical mechanism that relates ADRs with drug structures. Based on LDA, we designed an equivalent regularization term to incorporate the hierarchical ADR domain knowledge. Finally, we developed a mixed input model leveraging a fast collapsed Gibbs sampling method that the complexity of each iteration of Gibbs sampling proportional only to the number of positive ADRs. Experiments on real world data show our models achieved higher prediction accuracy and shorter running time than the state-of-the-art alternatives.


C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) is best remembered as a literary critic, essayist, theologian, and novelist, and his famed tales The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters have been read by millions. Now, A. T. Reyes reveals a different side of this diverse man of letters: translator. Reyes introduces the surviving fragments of Lewis's translation of Virgil's epic poem, which were rescued from a bonfire. They are presented in parallel with the Latin text, and are accompanied by synopses of missing sections, and an informative glossary, making them accessible to the general reader. Writes Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost, "Virgil uses something more subtle than mere length of time...It is this which gives the reader of the Aeneid the sense of having lived through so much. No man who has read it with full perception remains an adolescent." Lewis's admiration for the Aeneid, written in the 1st century BC and unfolding the adventures of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy and became the ancestor of the Romans, is evident in his remarkably lyrical translation. C. S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid is part detective story, as Reyes recounts the dramatic rescue of the fragments and his efforts to collect and organize them, and part illuminating look at a lesser-known and intriguing aspect of Lewis's work.


This paper conducts general equilibrium (GE) estimation to evaluate the empirical contributions of macroeconomic shocks in explaining the exchange rate disconnect, excess volatility, and the uncovered interest parity (UIP) puzzles. We embed stochastic volatilities and limits-to-international arbitrage in a two-country New Keynesian model and estimate the GE system for the US and Euro area using higher-order approximation and full-information Bayesian methods. Assessing the roles of level vs. volatility shocks and linear vs. higher-order approximations, we find that shocks to macroeconomic fundamentals together with their uncertainties can account for a sizable portion—over 40%—of the observed exchange rate variations. Using the GE estimates, we then evaluate whether the fundamental shocks in our model can deliver the UIP relationship observed in the data, and more importantly, whether the results may differ conditionally vs. unconditionally. In line with findings in previous literature, several fundamental shocks individually can indeed generate patterns consistent with data. However, their contributions unconditionally in the GE setting are quantitatively insufficient to resolve the UIP puzzle. The presence of multiple shocks, their potential interactions, and the need for estimators to fit empirical dynamics of all observables beyond just the exchange rate are all likely reasons behind this "General Equilibrium Puzzle," which underscores the importance of GE estimation beyond simulations or partial-equilibrium analyses.


Although non-linear phenomena are common in human and non-human animal vocalisations, their functional relevance remains poorly understood. One theory posits that non-linear phenomena generate unpredictability in vocalisations, which increases the auditory impact of vocal signals, and makes animals less likely to habituate to call repetition. Female koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) produce vocal signals when they reject male copulation attempts that contain relatively high levels of non-linear phenomena, and thus may function as attention grabbing vocal signals during the breeding season. To test this hypothesis, we used playback experiments: firstly, to determine whether female rejection calls induce heightened behavioural responses in free-ranging male koalas during the breeding season, and secondly, to examine how the relative amount of non-linear phenomena in rejection calls influences male behavioural response. The results show that male koalas look for longer towards speakers broadcasting playback sequences of male bellows followed by a series of female rejection calls than those broadcasting only male bellows. In addition, female rejection call sequences with more subharmonics, higher harmonics-to-noise ratios, and less biphonation produced the greatest male looking responses. Our findings support the hypothesis that female koala rejection calls function to grab male attention during the breeding season, and indicate that subharmonics are the main acoustic feature that increases the auditory impact of these vocal signals.


This Article explores pernicious ambiguity, an interpretive problem that is not adequately acknowledged by the legal system. Pernicious ambiguity occurs when the various actors involved in a dispute all believe a text to be clear, but assign different meanings to it. Depending upon how the legal system handles this situation, a case with pernicious ambiguity can easily become a crapshoot. If the judge does not take heed of the competing interpretations as reflecting a lack of clarity, and if that judge happens to understand the document in a way helpful to a particular party, that party wins. Because the document is not seen as ambiguous, the document is declared clear. In reality, however, the document is even less clear than are ambiguous documents. The competing interpretations reflect a complete communicative breakdown. If language worked so poorly generally, it would not be possible to have a language-driven rule of law at all. The problem, perhaps ironically, is that the concept of ambiguity is itself perniciously ambiguous. People do not always use the term in the same way, and the differences often appear to go unnoticed. While all agree that ambiguity occurs when language is reasonably susceptible to different interpretations, people seem to differ with respect to whether those interpretations have to be available to a single person, or whether ambiguity occurs when different speakers of the language do not understand a particular passage the same way. Often, courts even ignore disagreement among judges as irrelevant to whether a document is clear on its face. This Article will show how these different notions of ambiguity emerge, and offer some explanations based on advances in linguistics, cognitive psychology and the philosophy of language. Examples are taken from cases concerning the interpretation of statutes, contracts and insurance policies.


The massive expansion of electronic resources has been identified as one of the major drivers behind the ˜explosion in the popularity of family history, which bring ease, convenience and accessibility to some parts of the research process. Amongst this expanse of easily-accessible raw materials, online local studies materials (recording both historical and contemporary aspects of a community) can add real context and value to researchers findings and experience; turning a genealogy into a family history. However, the vast majority of these do not appear visible to online family history researchers. Through three central foci (users, e-family history resources, and Local Studies Collections), this research investigates these resources and collections from the perspective of users, to establish how to make the added value of the local studies collections more visible and encourage increased engagement for those who cannot visit collections in person. Specific evaluative criteria for e-family history resources are presented, contributing to practitioners awareness and understanding of their nature; in turn helping maintain their service quality to researchers. Using a hybrid (primarily ethnographic) research approach, the study also examines the online research behaviour of family historians, identifying a taxonomy of actions (seeking of genealogical facts, local or social history; communicating with other researchers or resources; locating resources or instructive information; managing own information), strategies (search modifications and incorporation of background knowledge) and outcomes (outcome; direction (projected and actual)). From these categories, a model of Family Historians online information seeking has been developed. Researchers have both informational and affective needs, and are highly emotionally attached to the research process. Users universally used Ancestry, FamilySearch, ScotlandsPeople, and Genes Reunited far more than other sites, seeking out quality informational content and unique records, which must be successful for researchers. Google was a major method of access to these. Very few participants were preaware of ˜e-local studies websites, and were surprised by the variations in quality, inconsistencies in terminology and navigation, and invisibility of quality content. Despite a lack of ease of use, the content present on e-local studies sites and their usefulness and value had been demonstrated to researchers. This suggests significant demand for local information of this kind online where it is available and made known.


Making a Difference in Theory brings together original work from an international group of authors on the roles of theory in educational research and practice. The book discusses the different roles theory plays, can play and should play, both from a historical perspective and in light of contemporary discussions and developments. Particular attention is paid to the question of whether there are or should be distinctively educational forms of theory and theorising. The double engagement with the theory question in education and the education question in theory and theorising provides original insights in what theory does, might do or should do in educational research and practice. With contributions from internationally renowned authors in the field of educational theory, research and practice, the book will be of value to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in education.


The proteins BAX and BAK are key regulators of apoptosis, and one or the other has to be engaged to activate mitochondrial effects that lead to cell death. Studying cells from knockout mice lacking BAX and BAK, Hetz et al. discovered another role for these proteins by which cells adapt to stresses that involve the accumulation of misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). The unfolded protein response's protective effects were disrupted in the BAX-BAK double-knockout cells, apparently through the loss of direct interaction of BAX or BAK with the sensor for ER stress. Thus, BAX and BAK may act at multiple organelles to coordinate cellular responses to stress with the control of cell death. C. Hetz, P. Bernasconi, J. Fisher, A.-H. Lee, M. C. Bassik, B. Antonsson, G. S. Brandt, N. N. Iwakoshi, A. Schinzel, L. H. Glimcher, S. J. Korsmeyer, Proapoptotic BAX and BAK modulate the unfolded protein response by a direct interaction with IRE1α. Science 312, 572-576 (2006). [Abstract] [Full Text]


[1] A thin gash in the continental slope northwest of Monterey Bay, Ascension Canyon, is steep, with sides and axis both strongly supercritical to M2 internal tides. A hydrostatic model forced with eight tidal constituents shows no major sources feeding energy into the canyon, but significant energy is exchanged between barotropic and baroclinic flows along the tops of the sides, where slopes are critical. Average turbulent dissipation rates observed near spring tide during April are half as large as a two week average measured during August in Monterey Canyon. Owing to Ascension's weaker stratification, however, its average diapycnal diffusivity, 3.9 × 10−3 m2 s−1, exceeded the 2.5 × 10−3 m2 s−1 found in Monterey. Most of the dissipation occurred near the bottom, apparently associated with an internal bore, and just below the rim, where sustained cross-canyon flow may have been generating lee waves or rotors. The near-bottom mixing decreased sharply around Ascension's one bend, as did vertically integrated baroclinic energy fluxes. Dissipation had a minor effect on energetics, which were controlled by flux divergences and convergences and temporal changes in energy density. In Ascension, the observed dissipation rate near spring tide was 2.1 times that predicted from a simulation using eight tidal constituents averaged over a fortnightly period. The same observation was 1.5 times the average of an M2-only prediction. In Monterey, the previous observed average was 4.9 times the average of an M2-only prediction.


I. INTRODUCTION The environmental regulation of overseas military bases and operations should be an important component of the United States' foreign and national security policies. The Department of Defense (DoD) recognized over ten years ago that "America's national interests are inextricably linked with the quality of the earth's environment, and that threats to the environmental quality affect broad national economic and security interests...." (1) Environmental degradation, for instance, has been linked to destabilizing forces around the world, including "'poverty, disease, and suffering.'" (2) Global environmental issues, including deforestation, oceanic degradation, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollutants threaten the health and security of U.S. citizens and interests abroad. (3) Implementing environmental regulations overseas would thus further national security and foreign policy interests by promoting stabilizing policies, international cooperation, and goodwill. These considerations have important practical consequences for the DoD's development and implementation of overseas environmental policies. First, environmental regulations at overseas military bases and during operations protect the national security interests of all U.S. citizens. Of particular importance, regulations protect U.S. soldiers stationed overseas from environmental harms. Not only do these soldiers deserve the same level of environmental protection afforded soldiers on domestic bases, but those whose health is adversely affected by environmental conditions overseas may have diminished capacity to protect national security interests. Second, foreign nations, in response to U.S. policies that aim to respect and protect their natural resources, may provide the United States increased access to overseas bases. (4) Finally, acting in an environmentally responsible manner may improve the United States' image and facilitate relations with foreign nations. (5) The DoD's current overseas environmental policies are inadequate to effectively regulate the environmental consequences of overseas military bases and operations. The DoD, for instance, has * implemented discrete policies concerning environmental assessment, compliance, pollution prevention, and remediation that fail to provide a coherent roadmap for environmental regulation overseas. Furthermore, the DoD affords commanders a tremendous amount of discretion in the implementation of these policies and provides for a number of exemptions through which commanders may avoid compliance. The DoD's failure to implement a coherent and enforceable set of environmental policies has resulted in very real environmental harms overseas. The United States maintained 823 sites in 39 countries in FY 2007 (6) and has been involved in a number of overseas operations, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result of the DoD's failure to implement environmental policies that adequately regulate overseas military bases, U.S. forces have damaged the environments of host nations to such an extent that the costs for environmental cleanup and remediation of just one base "could approach Superfund proportions." (7) Furthermore, the lack of environmental regulations during overseas operations has permitted open burn pits at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, which spew smoke containing known carcinogens. (8) For instance, at Balad Air Force Base in Iraq, commanders utilized jet fuel in a burn pit--the sole means of trash disposal for four years--to burn 500,000 pounds of trash per day, including plastics, food, and medical wastes. (9) In a still-classified study, the Chief of Aeromedical Services stated that "the known carcinogens and respiratory sensitizers released into the atmosphere by the burn pit present both an acute and chronic health hazard to our troops and the local populations." (10) In fact, many soldiers who have been exposed to the burn pit have reported chronic cough and shortness of breath. …


Bovine herpesvirus 5 (BoHV-5) is a important cause of viral encephalitis in cattle in South America. Within the framework of developing a differential vaccine against BoHV-5, a deletion mutant was constructed based on a Brazilian BoHV-5 isolate. The target of the deletions were genes that code proteins implicated in the neurovirulence of BoHV-5, the glycoprotein I (gI), glycoprotein E (gE) and membrane protein US9. To construct the deletion mutant of BoHV-5, the flanking regions of all three genes were cloned in a prokaryotic plasmid. This deletion fragment was co-transfected with the viral DNA into bovine cells. Identification of deletion mutants was performed by immunostaining with an anti-gE monoclonal antibody. One of the gE negative viral populations found was purified, amplified and further examined by restriction endonuclesase analysis of its genomic DNA. The plaque sizes and penetration kinetics of the deletion mutant and wild type viruses were compared. The plaque sizes of the deletion mutant were significantly smaller than those of the parental strain (p ≤ 0.05), but no statistical differences were observed in penetration kinetics. The results indicate that the gI/ gE/US9 deletion mutant of BoHV-5 may have a reduced virulence in the host and is still viable enough to be a good candidate for the development of a BoHV-5 vaccine.


Background This paper identifies and discusses the benefits of taking a 'community grounded' approach to HIA in the context of a place based urban renewal setting and reflect on whether this is a useful approach for people and organisations wishing to undertake HIA's in similar settings. The HIA was on the redevelopment of the suburban town centre and focussed on the creation of a new multipurpose centre, improvements to a manmade pond and the relocation of sporting fields found in the area. The HIA team aimed to explore what the planned redevelopment of the local town centre area would mean for the local community and its potential health impacts upon residents. Methods The HIA followed the standard HIA steps. The HIA team took a community grounded approach where particular focus was give to engaging community members in the HIA process. This included community members being involved in the HIA working group, reference group and providing evidence for the HIA. Results The HIA report contained a series of recommendations for the redevelopment of the Airds Bradbury estate. These recommendations were presented to the Community Reference Group and were adopted by various stakeholders. Conclusions The community grounded approach influenced both how the HIA was carried out, the decisions that were made within the HIA and ultimately the finidings and recomendations. The HIA of this latest stage of the Airds-Bradbury estate redevelopment was a useful project to encourage further collaboration, dialogue and planning between redevelopment agencies, Local Government, and residents of the Airds Bradbury social housing estate.


The pH-sensitive affinity pair composed by neutravidin and iminobiotin was used to develop a multilayered Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) nanoprobe responsive to the acidic pH of tumor microenvironment. The multilayer system was assembled on meso-2,3-dimercaptosuccinic acid-coated iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles (MNP), which convey negative MRI contrast enhancement properties to the nanoprobe. The outer stealth PEG-layer is altered in acidic media due to the disruption of interactions between neutravidin–iminobiotin. As a consequence, the positively charged inner layer is exposed and enhances interactions with cells. The nanoprobe uptake by HCT116 cells cultured in vitro under acidic conditions had a 2-fold increase compared to the uptake at physiological pH. The uptake difference is particularly clear in T2-weighted MRI phantoms of cells incubated with the nanoprobes at both pH conditions. This work sets the proof-of-concept of a MNP-based MRI nanoprobe targeting acidic tumor microenvironment through the use of a specific bio-recognition interaction that is pH-sensitive. This tumor targeting strategy is potentially applicable to the generality of tumors since the typical hypoxic conditions and high glycolysis rate in cancer cells create an acidic environment common to the majority of cancer types.


We present a detailed experimental characterization of an optical storage technique that uses monodomain films of liquid-crystalline polymers (LCP's). This technique employs the trans–cis isomerization of cyanoazobenzene mesogenic groups of the LCP's, which is photoinduced in the glassy state. Changes in the molecular geometry leading to nonmesogen moieties and to a reorientation of the optical axis were found to be responsible for the observed strong variations of the anisotropic optical properties. These variations were characterized by means of UV–visible spectroscopy with polarized light. The optically induced trans–cis isomerizations as well as the complete thermal relaxation back to the trans state were found to be similar to those for amorphous polymers containing azobenzene-type groups. However, permanent changes were observed in the irradiated LCP monodomains. An altered orientational distribution in the illuminated area is responsible for the observed long-time stability. The original uniform orientational order of the LCP monodomains could be fully restored by annealing the samples well above the glass-transition temperatures of the polymers. Laser-induced grating experiments were performed to characterize the formation of a periodic modulation of the anisotropic refractive index as a function of time and intensity. A kinetic model that describes the grating formation due to the isomerization reaction is introduced and experimentally confirmed. A very high resolving power (3000 lines/mm) combined with large diffraction efficiencies (50%) could be achieved. Finally, the first hologram reversibly stored in a LCP is presented as practical example. Such a hologram has already lasted for more than two years at ambient.


This qualitative case study evaluated the effectiveness of the Academic Skills Discussion Group, a new retention intervention targeting undergraduate students on academic probation. This intervention utilized a support group structure to provide social and academic supports to academically-poor students. These supports incorporated didactic educational presentations and interpersonal discussions relating to life change and college expectations. The case comprised one pilot administration of the intervention for three student group members. Data was collected from pre/post-intervention resiliency surveys, grade point average comparisons, journal-entry analysis and semi-structured exit interviews. The researcher conducted inductive data analysis by coding participant statements for meaning, calculating and comparing survey results, and triangulating findings. Analysis provided case descriptions and themes regarding how participating in the intervention influenced students' resiliency, adjustment, and academic performance. Findings indicate that for most students, participation in the program coincided with improved academic performance and increased connectivity to the academic environment. Evaluative descriptions break down the recruitment strategy, examine benefits of participation and address future enhancements to the delivery of the intervention. Implications for higher education applications and future use of small group interventions are discussed.


Intellectual Property (IP) is a key intangible asset influencing corporate performance and its management is increasingly recognized as a central element of corporate strategy. Analysts however, have largely focused on IP management within the firm, overlooking the different and pervasive problem of how to manage IP in the context of inter-firm collaborative projects. Here, groups of firms, often competitors, and sometimes their customer organizations, collaborate in the design, development, manufacture and maintenance of complex products. Such collaborations involve exchanges of large amounts of proprietary technical data, facilitated through the use of advanced IT tools. How can organizations exploit the capabilities offered by these tools without increasing the vulnerability of IP assets to misappropriation or leakage? In the UK defense market an extensive set of formal contractual tools are being developed to support IP management in collaborative projects. Through an in-depth study of IP management practice in UK defense projects we analyze the extent to which contractual tools can combine with technical solutions to provide answers to the problems posed by IP management in complex, long-term collaborative projects. We conclude that contractual and technical tools must be underpinned by managerial changes that bring together functions that remain separated in most large corporations: IT management, and legal and commercial departments.


This study was an evaluation of the approach to change that is used in the public sector. The approach that is chosen ultimately has a bearing on the management of change in an organisation. The study used a case study method to explore the key question of the approach using the six dimensions of change. The South African Revenue Services (SARS) served as a case study typical of a model public sector organisation. The focus was on the KZN region of SARS where there has been an implementation of a change initiative called SlY AKHA (meaning we are building) recently. The whole process from the birth of this initiative was looked at using the six dimensions to evaluate and answer the question of the approach that was used in managing this change. The six dimensions can be classified into the two main theories referred to as Theory E and Theory O. It became evident during the study that there was not enough literature on change management in the public sector particularly in the South African context. What further complicated the issue was that the models as applied in the private sector couldn't be imported and applied in a public sector organisation. The approach that was used in the management of Siyakha at SARS was of a Theory E nature, although not all the dimensions of that theory were applied. In the main the finding was that Theory E approach was used. It also came to light that in the public sector, this might be the logical step to take particularly as the first step to ensure that change does happen. This is because of the unique circumstances that face public sector organisations particularly in South Africa. At the end a suggestion is made that there should be a sequencing of the approaches where Theory E is applied first followed by Theory O. The researcher also suggests a different combination of dimensions in the sequencing exercise that will ensure that the public sector's unique circumstances are taken into account.


Big data has now become a strong focus of global interest that is increasingly attracting the attention of academia, industry, government and other organizations. Big data can be situated in the disciplinary area of traditional geospatial data handling theory and methods. The increasing volume and varying format of collected geospatial big data presents challenges in storing, managing, processing, analyzing, visualizing and verifying the quality of data. This has implications for the quality of decisions made with big data. Consequently, this position paper of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Technical Commission II (TC II) revisits the existing geospatial data handling methods and theories to determine if they are still capable of handling emerging geospatial big data. Further, the paper synthesises problems, major issues and challenges with current developments as well as recommending what needs to be developed further in the near future. Keywords: Big data, Geospatial, Data handling, Analytics, Spatial Modeling, Review


The study included detection of the sites of ossification centers and their sequence of appearance in the forelimb bones of indigenous sheep fetuses by using double staining method with younger specimens and radiography or maceration methods with old specimens, as well as, histological study with some ages. The results showed that the primary ossification centers of the forelimb in indigenous sheep fetuses appeared firstly in the diaphyses of radius and ulna, humerus, scapula, metacarpus, phalanges and lastly in the carpal bone at an estimated age of 43, 45, 46, 47, 49 - 56 and 90-118 days old respectively. The results of statistical analysis of the total lengths of scapula, humerus, radius, ulna and metacarpus with the lengths of their ossified parts through the 7 th – 15 th weeks of fetus age, showed presence of significant differences in the average of these measurements among most of studied weeks. Also there was a significant differences in the average of relative increase in the total length and length of ossified part of diaphysis of studied bones during the 7 th week in comparison to the same average in the other studied weeks (8 th -15 th week) of indigenous sheep fetuses age.


The refraction per gram atom of oxygen, defined by a formula of either the Gladstone-Dale, the Newton, or the Lorentz-Lorenz type, equals the sum of terms characteristic of the component "metallic" elements, each of these terms being proportional to the number of atoms of that element per atom of oxygen. This is shown to be true (with but little error) for practically all classes of silicate glasses for which adequate data are available for testing the relationship. (Deviations from strict proportionality are, however, observed for glasses containing large amounts of lead.) Constants are derived empirically for use in the Gladstone-Dale and Newton type equations. Different constants are needed for triangularly surrounded and for tetrahedrally surrounded boron atoms. Using the equations previously derived for the calculation of the density and volume per oxygen, it is now possible to compute the refractive index (for the sodium D lines) of a wide variety of silicate glasses from the composition alone.


The increase in availability and popularity of mobile wireless devices has lead researchers to develop a wide variety of Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (MANET) protocols to exploit the unique communication opportunities presented by these devices. Devices are able to communicate directly using the wireless spectrum in a peer-to-peer fashion, and route messages through intermediate nodes, however the nature of wireless shared communication and mobile devices result in many routing and security challenges which must be addressed before deploying a MANET. In this paper we investigate the range of MANET routing protocols available and discuss the functionalities of several ranging from early protocols such as DSDV to more advanced such as MAODV, our protocol study focuses upon works by Perkins in developing and improving MANET routing. A range of literature relating to the field of MANET routing was identified and reviewed, we also reviewed literature on the topic of securing AODV based MANETs as this may be the most popular MANET protocol. The literature review identified a number of trends within research papers such as exclusive use of the random waypoint mobility model, excluding key metrics from simulation results and not comparing protocol performance against available alternatives.


This study investigates teenage attitudes towards unofficial versus mainstream media as a source of information. It starts from three unproven premises. First, that young people place more trust in unofficial online news than in mainstream media, because they feel a greater ownership of the cyberworld. Second, due to a perception of authoritarian control over Singapore's mainstream media, truth and accuracy in unofficial sources are of secondary importance to a feeling of ownership. Third, teenagers' need for accuracy is secondary to their need for ownership and differentiation; and, unofficial information sources are a badge of identity worn by the young. The study found that perceived ownership of a medium is secondary to its utilitarian function. Content is more important than platform. Off-line media were preferred for current affairs and sports, where reliability and convenience were important. This went in tandem with greater interest in current affairs among academic high fliers, and a greater interest in entertainment among others. Online media were preferred for entertainment and leisure information, where accuracy and reliability were secondary to attitude.


Crown rot, caused by the fungus Fusarium pseudograminearum, is a major constraint to winter cereal production in wheat, durum, barley and triticale in Australia. It is present at low levels in most years, but has its worst impact in dry years causing whiteheads that contain either no grain or pinched grain. It appears to be worst in heavy soils in the eastern wheat belt. Crown rot is estimated to cost the Australian grains industry up to $80 million per annum (Murray & Brennan, 2009). This fungus can survive in infected plant residues for many years and a wide host range among the cereals and grasses and infection can occur when plants come in close contact with those residues. The crowns at ground level and the stems close to the ground have a honey-brown discoloration and the insides of the leaf sheaths some-times have a faint pink colour typical of the casual fungus. At heading, scattered white heads appear in the crop, especially in dry seasons. The disease can be confused with Take-All where the white heads appear more in patches than as isolated heads.

Currently, there are no registered chemicals for crown rot control. Management options to control crown rot are limited. Sowing between rows of standing stubble and using a less susceptible variety could reduce the crown rot incidence and increase grain production with a previous history of crown rot.