We introduce the task of historical text summarisation, where documents in historical forms of a language are summarised in the corresponding modern language. This is a fundamentally important routine to historians and digital humanities researchers but has never been automated. We compile a high-quality gold-standard text summarisation dataset, which consists of historical German and Chinese news from hundreds of years ago summarised in modern German or Chinese. Based on cross-lingual transfer learning techniques, we propose a summarisation model that can be trained even with no cross-lingual (historical to modern) parallel data, and further benchmark it against state-of-the-art algorithms. We report automatic and human evaluations that distinguish the historic to modern language summarisation task from standard cross-lingual summarisation (i.e., modern to modern language), highlight the distinctness and value of our dataset, and demonstrate that our transfer learning approach outperforms standard cross-lingual benchmarks on this task.


A new history of the United States that turns American exceptionalism on its head American Empire is a panoramic work of scholarship that presents a bold new global perspective on the history of the United States. Drawing on his expertise in economic history and the imperial histories of Britain and Europe, A. G. Hopkins takes readers from the colonial era to today to show how, far from diverging, the United States and Western Europe followed similar trajectories throughout this long period, and how America's dependency on Britain and Europe extended much later into the nineteenth century than previously understood. In a sweeping narrative spanning three centuries, Hopkins describes how the revolt of the mainland colonies was the product of a crisis that afflicted the imperial states of Europe generally, and how the history of the American republic between 1783 and 1865 was a response not to the termination of British influence but to its continued expansion. He traces how the creation of a U.S. industrial nation-state after the Civil War paralleled developments in Western Europe, fostered similar destabilizing influences, and found an outlet in imperialism through the acquisition of an insular empire in the Caribbean and Pacific. The period of colonial rule that followed reflected the history of the European empires in its ideological justifications, economic relations, and administrative principles. After 1945, a profound shift in the character of globalization brought the age of the great territorial empires to an end. American Empire goes beyond the myth of American exceptionalism to place the United States within the wider context of the global historical forces that shaped the Western empires and the world.


This guide aims to bring together all the electronic resources (e-books, e-journals, databases, streaming media) and digital content available through The Evergreen State College Library.


This paper describes our system participating in the aspect-based sentiment analysis task of Semeval 2014. The goal was to identify the aspects of given target entities and the sentiment expressed towards each aspect. We firstly introduce a system based on supervised machine learning, which is strictly constrained and uses the training data as the only source of information. This system is then extended by unsupervised methods for latent semantics discovery (LDA and semantic spaces) as well as the approach based on sentiment vocabularies. The evaluation was done on two domains, restaurants and laptops. We show that our approach leads to very promising results.


Tobacco smoke off-gassing from prior exposure releases contaminants that are equivalent to several cigarettes of secondhand smoke. The contamination of indoor nonsmoking environments with thirdhand smoke (THS) is an important, poorly understood public health concern. Real-time THS off-gassing from smokers into a nonsmoking movie theater was observed with online and offline high-resolution mass spectrometry. Prominent emission events of THS tracers (e.g., 2,5-dimethylfuran, 2-methylfuran, and acetonitrile) and other tobacco-related volatile organic compounds (VOCs) coincided with the arrival of certain moviegoers and left residual contamination. These VOC emission events exposed occupants to the equivalent of 1 to 10 cigarettes of secondhand smoke, including multiple hazardous air pollutants (e.g., benzene and formaldehyde) at parts-per-billion concentrations. Nicotine and related intermediate-volatility nitrogen-containing compounds, which vaporized from clothes/bodies and recondensed onto aerosol, comprised 34% of observed functionalized organic aerosol abundance. Exposure to THS VOC emission events will be considerably enhanced in poorly ventilated or smaller spaces in contrast with a large, well-ventilated theater—amplifying concentrations and potential impacts on health and indoor chemistry.


Human security is a new and contested concept. Although gaining legitimacy in many academic and policy communities, it has no single accepted definition, no universal foreign policy mandate and no consensuscommanding analytic framework for its measurement. This is in part do to a perceived conceptual ambiguity coupled with an inherent paradox in its measurement the broader the spectrum of human security measured, the more difficult data collection and aggregation become. This paradox has forced the six existing measuring methodologies to be either broad and conceptually accurate, but of questionable feasibility and reliability, or narrow and feasible, but not representative of the full range of insecurities. In response to this difficulty, a measuring methodology is proposed centered around a new perception of space. Selecting indicators based on their regional relevance and aggregating them using their common denominator, location, allows the methodology to be conceptually broad, analytically accurate and practically feasible. Using a Geographic Information System, this methodology documents threats, allows for analysis of spatial correlations, and provides an invaluable tool for policy makers in regions of high vulnerability. This methodology was tested through a case study in Cambodia. 13 human security threats were established and spatially referenced local data were collected detailing them. An overlay analysis of high threat regions in each of the 13 threats revealed 'hotspots' of insecurity and a correlation analysis revealed a significant relationship between high landmine contamination and high poverty, dengue fever, HIV/AIDS, domestic violence and gun injuries. In addition, poverty was spatially correlated with dengue fever, domestic violence and landmines. While these correlations do not imply necessary causality, they do show a degree of significance that warrants further inquiry


The effect of interfacial scattering on anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) and anomalous Hall effect (AHE) was studied in the (Ta12n/Fe36n)n multilayers, where the numbers give the thickness in nanometer and n is an integer from 1 to 12. The multilayer structure has been confirmed by the XRR spectra and STEM images of cross-sections. The magneto-transport properties were measured by four-point probe method in Hall bar shaped samples in the temperature range of 5 − 300 K. The AMR increases with n, which could be ascribed to the interfacial spin-orbit scattering. At 5 K, the longitudinal resistivity (ρxx) increases by 6.4 times and the anomalous Hall resistivity (ρAHE) increases by 49.4 times from n =1 to n =12, indicative of the interfacial scattering effect. The skew-scattering, side-jump and intrinsic contributions to the AHE were separated successfully. As n increases from 1 to 12, the intrinsic contribution decreases because of the decaying crystallinity or finite size effect and the intrinsic contrib...


Epithelia are key barriers to infections. In periodontal disease, the gingival sulcular epithelium becomes ulcerated. In this report, we test the hypothesis that short-chain carboxylic acids (SCCA) inhibit keratinocyte proliferation, increase necrosis and apoptosis, and may thus promote ulceration. SCCA produced by bacteria are present at millimolar concentrations in the periodontal pockets of subjects with periodontal disease. SCCA concentrations are higher in subjects with severe disease than in those with mild disease, and are not detectable in healthy subjects. Cell proliferation is critical for maintenance of epithelial barrier function. All SCCA tested, when neutralized, decreased epithelial cell proliferation (as measured by 3H-thymidine incorporation) in a dose-dependent manner. We found that epithelial cell viability decreased with increasing SCCA concentrations, accounting at least partly for the decreased 3H-thymidine incorporation. For all conditions we tested, SCCA-induced apoptosis preceded and exceeded necrosis. While the molecular mechanism(s) for these effects remain to be determined, the results indicate that SCCA derived from caries- or periodontal disease-associated bacteria could alter gingival barrier function.


We report on experimental and numerical investigation of two-photon coincidence properties of the parametric spontaneous down-converted field excited by a high brightness blue LED in bulk lithium iodate crystal. Ratio of up to 11.5% of coincidence, which cannot be attributed to classical coincidences, to single photon counts was recorded at the outputs of multimode fibers, demonstrating well-preserved biphoton property. This result, combined with practically useful power of the source, suggests its possible application for a class of quantum experiments.


SCOPE
To explore the effect of a healthy Nordic diet on the global transcriptome profile in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of subjects with metabolic syndrome.

METHODS AND RESULTS
Subjects with metabolic syndrome undergo a 18/24 week randomized intervention study comparing an isocaloric healthy Nordic diet with an average habitual Nordic diet served as control (SYSDIET study). Altogether, 68 participants are included. PBMCs are obtained before and after intervention and total RNA is subjected to global transcriptome analysis. 1302 probe sets are differentially expressed between the diet groups (p-value < 0.05). Twenty-five of these are significantly regulated (FDR q-value < 0.25) and are mainly involved in mitochondrial function, cell growth, and cell adhesion. The list of 1302 regulated probe sets is subjected to functional analyses. Pathways and processes involved in the mitochondrial electron transport chain, immune response, and cell cycle are downregulated in the healthy Nordic diet group. In addition, gene transcripts with common motifs for 42 transcription factors, including NFR1, NFR2, and NF-κB, are downregulated in the healthy Nordic diet group.

CONCLUSION
These results suggest that benefits of a healthy diet may be mediated by improved mitochondrial function and reduced inflammation.


This article explores how placemaking took place in architectural and design studios working with migrant and displaced communities at universities in three countries. Placemaking is a dimension of architectural and urban design practice that is emulated in architectural design studios – and often takes the form of a top-down and expert-driven exercise. In contrast, bottom-up placemaking is constituted through spontaneous and everyday practices in a given locality. The studios engaged with social scientists with a particular focus on displaced and immigrant communities. In Delhi, a multi-disciplinary social design studio at Ambedkar University applied community engagement and a service design approach to sustainable social interventions with a physical design component. At the University of Brighton, UK, an architectural design/build studio aimed at actual construction and transgressed the studio boundary to work closely with a charity supporting young refugees. In Norway, architecture students in an urbanism studio at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design surveyed an immigrant-dominated modernist housing district and proposed architectural and urban space interventions. Across the studios, student projects ranged from visualising futures to physical and social interventions. Learning outcomes varied, including design and planning skills, community engagement methods, co-design approaches and training in reflexivity. Venturing beyond the studio entailed engaging in sociocultural learning practices, engaging urban complexities and challenging expert authority and epistemologies in architecture and design education.


In this contribution, we study the increase in metalorganic-low pressure chemical vapor deposited (MO-LPCVD) ZnO thin films conductivity by hydrogen plasma post-treatment. We show that this improvement is linked to defect passivation at grain boundaries, decreasing the electron traps density and resulting in the almost complete suppression of the electron scattering at grain boundaries. For a 2 μm thick non-intentionally doped ZnO layer, electron mobility reaches after treatment values close to 60 cm2V-1s-1 (corresponding to an increase of 100%), with a carrier density still as low as 3 x1019 cm-3 (+1.5 x1019 cm-3). Such layers have an absorbance below 2-3% in the range of 400 to 1100 nm making them among the most transparent and conductive materials reported so far. In addition, we demonstrate that hydrogen plasma posttreated ZnO layers can be used as front electrode for producing highly transparent and conductive electrodes. Eventually, it is shown that hydrogen plasma treatment can also be used on the complete thin film solar cell stack (back contact and silicon device) to improve the cell performances.


The age and formation of zircons in Neoproterozoie migmatites from the northern Grampian Highlands are assessed using field observations, imaging and U-Pb isotope dilution techniques. Acicular zircons within monzogranitie leucosomes provide evidence for neocrystalline growth during localized anatexis. U-Pb zircon data show that formation of the regional gneissose fabric, melt generation and new zircon growth occurred at 840 ±11 Ma contemporaneous with peak metamorphism. These data and previously dated shear fabrics at c. 800 Ma, confirm that a Neoproterozoic tectonometamorphic event affected at least part of the metasedimentary sequence southeast of the Great Glen Fault. Data from detrital zircons indicate a Palaeoproterozoic/Grenville province, rather than Archaean, as the most likely source for the sedimentary protolith. In the absence of identifiable orogenic discontinuities within the Scottish Highlands, we question current correlations with Laurentian passive margin sequences, and the inferences that the rocks of the Grampian Block only experienced a simple Caledonian (Palaeozoic) orogenic history.


Disorders of movement and posture associated with cerebral palsy (CP) often
lead to childhood difficulties with feeding, eating, drinking and swallowing which extend into
adulthood. The consequences of compromised eating and drinking skills include respiratory
disease, due to food and fluid entering the lungs, and malnutrition, leading to poor growth and
health. There is no agreement in clinical and research contexts about the classification of
eating and drinking abilities of people with CP to reflect severity of limitations to function.
The study aim was to develop a valid and reliable system to classify eating and drinking
performance of people with CP, using a pragmatic Mixed Methods approach.


OBJECTIVE
To explore the reliability and validity of the Objective Structured Assessment of Ultrasound Skills (OSAUS) scale for point-of-care ultrasonography (POC US) performance.

BACKGROUND
POC US is increasingly used by clinicians and is an essential part of the management of acute surgical conditions. However, the quality of performance is highly operator-dependent. Therefore, reliable and valid assessment of trainees' ultrasonography competence is needed to ensure patient safety.

METHODS
Twenty-four physicians, representing novices, intermediates, and experts in POC US, scanned 4 different surgical patient cases in a controlled set-up. All ultrasound examinations were video-recorded and assessed by 2 blinded radiologists using OSAUS. Reliability was examined using generalizability theory. Construct validity was examined by comparing performance scores between the groups and by correlating physicians' OSAUS scores with diagnostic accuracy.

RESULTS
The generalizability coefficient was high (0.81) and a D-study demonstrated that 1 assessor and 5 cases would result in similar reliability. The construct validity of the OSAUS scale was supported by a significant difference in the mean scores between the novice group (17.0; SD 8.4) and the intermediate group (30.0; SD 10.1), P = 0.007, as well as between the intermediate group and the expert group (72.9; SD 4.4), P = 0.04, and by a high correlation between OSAUS scores and diagnostic accuracy (Spearman ρ correlation coefficient = 0.76; P < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS
This study demonstrates high reliability as well as evidence of construct validity of the OSAUS scale for assessment of POC US competence. Hence, the OSAUS scale may be suitable for both in-training as well as end-of-training assessment.


A rather impoverished fauna of only nine species of non-marine Ostracoda, belonging to seven genera was recovered from the classic intertrappean locality of Mohagaonkala (Mohgaon-Kalan), in Central India. Two species are cytherids and the remainder cyprids. Three of the species are new: Gomphocythere paucisulcata sp. nov., Cypridopsis elachistos sp. nov. and Zonocypris labyrinthicus sp. nov., while the remaining six species have been described previously from a variety of Upper Cretaceous localities in Peninsular India. Although one species Frambocythere tumiensis (Helmdach) occurs outside India, the sub-species which occurs at this locality, F. t. lakshmiae Whatley & Bajpai, is an Indian endemic. The present fauna confirms that the non-marine Ostracoda of the intertrappeans are essentially endemic to India, despite prior claims to the contrary.


Integrated models consist of interacting component models that represent various natural and social systems. They are important tools to improve our understanding of environmental systems, to evaluate cause–effect relationships of human–natural interactions, and to forecast the behaviour of environmental systems. The construction of these models is a conceptual and technical challenge, as it requires integrating various environmental processes, often occurring at different spatial or temporal scales. Several software tools are available supporting the development of integrated models but their diversity and IT–orientation hampers domain specialists like hydrologists in the construction and assessment of integrated models. This dissertation contributes to the development of one modelling framework allowing for the construction of component models, their multi–scale coupling to integrated models, and the analysis thereof. We consider different aspects including the model syntax and execution, spatial and temporal scaling, integration of legacy models, support for model analysis and semantic interoperability. We propose solutions to these issues tailored to domain specialists. Model construction and evaluation becomes difficult for domain specialists when technical barriers are present. We show that operations implementing domain specific concepts can be used by modellers to express spatio–temporal processes in component models, and they can be used to express couplings and therefore feedback effects between component models. To execute models described with domain specific concepts, we analyse with a client–server and a request–reply approach two control flow mechanisms for component models and integrated models. Both approaches allow for the sound execution of multi–scale integrated models. The client–server approach allows for better optimisation of the model execution due to the overall knowledge of the model. By introducing the accumulator as a generic model building block, we provide the modeller a means to program scale transfer operations on space and time with operations representing domain concepts similar to map algebra operations. The accumulators allow for a coupling of multi–scale components without the need to modify process implementations and spatial or temporal characteristics of individual component models. We present two ways to integrate existing models into the modelling frameworks, allowing therefore to reuse functionality from available legacy models. The integration of external models done by software engineers on the level of APIs provides modellers functionality in the same modelling language as components are constructed. The integration of applications by system calls is easier to realise for domain specialists. The numerical implementation representing environmental processes does not necessarily expose the scientific meaning of component models. We develop a formal description allowing for a semantically enhanced description of spatial and temporal characteristics of the main model building blocks, and evaluate whether an implementation–independent formalisation improves the scientific interoperability. We demonstrate that the presented concepts for component construction and multi–scale coupling can be merged into one modelling platform. Software framework prototypes are used in illustrative case studies, where we construct component models with spatio–temporal processes simulating amongst others land use change and hydrological processes, and couple these to integrated models.


Vertically oriented GaAs nanowires (NWs) are grown on Si(111) substrates using metal–organic chemical vapor deposition. Controlled epitaxial growth along the 〈111〉 direction is demonstrated following the deposition of thin GaAs buffer layers and the elimination of structural defects, such as twin defects and stacking faults, is found for high growth rates. By systematically manipulating the AsH3 (group-V) and TMGa (group-III) precursor flow rates, it is found that the TMGa flow rate has the most significant effect on the nanowire quality. After capping the minimal tapering and twin-free GaAs NWs with an AlGaAs shell, long exciton lifetimes (over 700 ps) are obtained for high TMGa flow rate samples. It is observed that the Ga adatom concentration significantly affects the growth of GaAs NWs, with a high concentration and rapid growth leading to desirable characteristics for optoelectronic nanowire device applications including improved morphology, crystal structure and optical performance.


This is a pioneer study investigating the relationship between environmental compliance and TFP convergence for SMEs. It examines the impacts of environmental compliance, and its combination with innovation, on TFP convergence of manufacturing SMEs. We applied the dynamic panel regression method to estimate stochastic TFP. We find evidence of a s-convergence but a s-divergence. Impacts of environmental practices of firms—pollution abatement and control expenditure, and environmental treatment—are only significant through their interaction with innovation. The s-convergence in firms' TFP is influenced by their industrial identity, while firms' size and investment have marginal impacts.


Partial Order Causal Link (POCL) planning follows the principle of least commitment in that it maintains only a partial order on its actions to prevent unnecessary early commitment during search. This can reduce the search space significantly by systematically representing up to an exponential number of action sequences in just a single search node. Progress on goal achievement is represented fully by this partial order and by causal links, which represent the causal relationships between these actions as well as between the initial state and goal. Plan existence for a state in classical planning thus corresponds to plan existence for a partial plan in POCL planning. Yet almost no theoretical investigations for POCL plan existence were conducted so far. While delete-relaxation makes plan existence tractable in classical planning, we show it to be NP-hard in POCL planning unless the current plan is totally ordered or causal links are almost completely ignored.


Using a wide range of operational research (OR) optimization examples, Applied Operational Research with SAS demonstrates how the OR procedures in SAS work. The book is one of the first to extensively cover the application of SAS procedures to OR problems, such as single criterion optimization, project management decisions, printed circuit board assembly, and multiple criteria decision making. The text begins with the algorithms and methods for linear programming, integer linear programming, and goal programming models. It then describes the principles of several OR procedures in SAS. Subsequent chapters explain how to use these procedures to solve various types of OR problems. Each of these chapters describes the concept of an OR problem, presents an example of the problem, and discusses the specific procedure and its macros for the optimal solution of the problem. The macros include data handling, model building, and report writing. While primarily designed for SAS users in OR and marketing analytics, the book can also be used by readers interested in mathematical modeling techniques. By formulating the OR problems as mathematical models, the authors show how SAS can solve a variety of optimization problems.


A fundamentals based monetary policy rule, which would be the optimal monetary policy without commitment when private agents have perfectly rational expectations, is unstable if in fact these agents follow standard adaptive learning rules. This problem can be overcome if private expectations are observed and suitably incorporated into the policy maker's optimal rule. These strong results extend to the case in which there is simultaneous learning by the policy maker and the private agents. Our findings show the importance of conditioning policy appropriately, not just on fundamentals, but also directly on observed household and firm expectations.


Title of dissertation: EFFICIENT CROSS LAYER DESIGNS FOR IEEE 802.11 WIRELESS NETWORKS Tamer Nadeem, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Ashok Agrawala Department of Computer Science Various properties of wireless networks, such as mobility, frequent disconnections and varying channel conditions, have made it a challenging task to design networking protocols for wireless communications. In this dissertation, we address several problems related to both the routing layer and medium access control (MAC) layer in wireless networks aiming to enhance the network performance. First, we study the effect of the channel noise on the network performance. We present mechanisms to compute energyefficient paths in noisy environments for ad hoc networks by exploiting the IEEE 802.11 fragmentation mechanism. These mechanisms enhance the network performance up to orders of magnitude in terms of energy and throughput. We also enhance the IEEE 802.11 infrastructure networks with a capability to differentiate between different types of unsuccessful transmissions to enhance the network performance. Second, we study the effects of the physical layer capture phenomena on network performance. We modify the IEEE 802.11 protocol in a way to increase the concurrent transmissions by exploiting the capture phenomena. We analytically study the potential performance enhancement of our mechanism over the original IEEE 802.11. The analysis shows that up to 35% of the IEEE 802.11 blocking decisions are unnecessary. The results are verified by simulation in which we show that our enhanced mechanism can achieve up to 22% more throughput. Finally, we exploit the spatial reuse of the directional antenna in the IEEE 802.11 standards by developing two novel opportunistic enhancement mechanisms. The first mechanism augments the IEEE 802.11 protocol with additional information that gives a node the flexibility to transmit data while other transmissions are in its vicinity. The second mechanism changes the access routines of the IEEE 802.11 data queue. We show analytically how the IEEE 802.11 protocol using directional antenna is conservative in terms of assessing channel availability, with as much as 60% of unnecessary blocking assessments and up to 90% when we alter the accessing mechanism of the data queue. By simulation, we show an improvement in network throughput of 40% in the case of applying the first mechanism, and up to 60% in the case of applying the second mechanism. EFFICIENT CROSS LAYER DESIGNS FOR IEEE 802.11 WIRELESS NETWORKS


The aim of this Element is to foreground Native American conceptions of sovereignty and power in order to refine the place of settler colonialism in American colonial and early republican history. It argues that Indigenous concepts of sovereignty were rooted in complex metaphorical language, in historical understandings of alliance, and in mobility in a landscape of layered interconnections of power. Where some versions of the interpretive paradigm of settler colonialism emphasise the violent 'elimination of the native', this work shows that diplomatic transactions between the Iroquois Confederacy and British colonial and imperial agents reveal a hybrid language of alliance, sovereignty and territory. These languages and concepts of intercultural diplomacy provide contexts that suggest a more nuanced and dynamic relationship between colonialism and Indigenous power.


Today our understanding of the vibrational thermodynamics of materials at low temperatures is emerging nicely, based on the harmonic model in which phonons are independent. At high temperatures, however, this understanding must accommodate how phonons interact with other phonons or with other excitations. We shall see that the phonon-phonon interactions give rise to interesting coupling problems, and essentially modify the equilibrium and non-equilibrium properties of materials, e.g., thermodynamic stability, heat capacity, optical properties and thermal transport of materials. Despite its great importance, to date the anharmonic lattice dynamics is poorly understood and most studies on lattice dynamics still rely on the harmonic or quasiharmonic models. There have been very few studies on the pure phonon anharmonicity and phonon-phonon interactions. The work presented in this thesis is devoted to the development of experimental and computational methods on this subject. Modern inelastic scattering techniques with neutrons or photons are ideal for sorting out the anharmonic contribution. Analysis of the experimental data can generate vibrational spectra of the materials, i.e., their phonon densities of states or phonon dispersion relations. We obtained high quality data from laser Raman spectrometer, Fourier transform infrared spectrometer and inelastic neutron spectrometer. With accurate phonon spectra data, we obtained the energy shifts and lifetime broadenings of the interacting phonons, and the vibrational entropies of different materials. The understanding of them then relies on the development of the fundamental theories and the computational methods. We developed an efficient post-processor for analyzing the anharmonic vibrations from the molecular dynamics (MD) calculations. Currently, most first principles methods are not capable of dealing with strong anharmonicity, because the interactions of phonons are ignored at finite temperatures. Our method adopts the Fourier transformed velocity autocorrelation method to handle the big data of time-dependent atomic velocities from MD calculations, and efficiently reconstructs the phonon DOS and phonon dispersion relations. Our calculations can reproduce the phonon frequency shifts and lifetime broadenings very well at various temperatures. To understand non-harmonic interactions in a microscopic way, we have developed a numerical fitting method to analyze the decay channels of phonon-phonon interactions. Based on the quantum perturbation theory of many-body interactions, this method is used to calculate the three-phonon and four-phonon kinematics subject to the conservation of energy and momentum, taking into account the weight of phonon couplings. We can assess the strengths of phonon-phonon interactions of different channels and anharmonic orders with the calculated two-phonon DOS. This method, with high computational efficiency, is a promising direction to advance our understandings of non-harmonic lattice dynamics and thermal transport properties. These experimental techniques and theoretical methods have been successfully performed in the study of anharmonic behaviors of metal oxides, including rutile and cuprite stuctures, and will be discussed in detail in Chapters 4 to 6. For example, for rutile titanium dioxide (TiO2), we found that the anomalous anharmonic behavior of the B1g mode can be explained by the volume effects on quasiharmonic force constants, and by the explicit cubic and quartic anharmonicity. For rutile tin dioxide (SnO2), the broadening of the B2g mode with temperature showed an unusual concave downwards curvature. This curvature was caused by a change with temperature in the number of down-conversion decay channels, originating with the wide band gap in the phonon dispersions. For silver oxide (Ag2O), strong anharmonic effects were found for both phonons and for the negative thermal expansion.


Television is on the verge of both decline and rebirth. Vast technological change has brought about financial uncertainty as well as new creative possibilities for producers, distributors, and viewers. This volume from Goldsmiths Press examines not only the unexpected resilience of TV as cultural pastime and aesthetic practice but also the prospects for public service television in a digital, multichannel ecology.

The proliferation of platforms from Amazon and Netflix to YouTube and the vlogosphere means intense competition for audiences traditionally dominated by legacy broadcasters. Public service broadcasters—whether the BBC, the German ARD, or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—are particularly vulnerable to this volatility. Born in the more stable political and cultural conditions of the twentieth century, they face a range of pressures on their revenue, their remits, and indeed their very futures. This book reflects on the issues raised in Lord Puttnam's 2016 Public Service TV Inquiry Report, with contributions from leading broadcasters, academics, and regulators. With resonance for students, professionals, and consumers with a stake in British media, it serves both as historical record and as a look at the future of television in an on-demand age.


A "professional malpractice of anthropologists to exaggerate the exotic character of other cultures" (Bloch 1977:285) has been detrimental to the study of cultural universals. This is highly regrettable because "universals not only exist but are important to any broad conception of the task of anthropology" (Brown 1991:5). Further, in the anthropological study of indigenous religions, a focus on differences has caused an apparently universal aspect of religion to be overlooked: the claim that ancestors influence the living and/or are influenced by the living. We argue here that such claims of communication between the dead and their descendants are universal and may be the key to understanding the universality of religious belief. Claims of ancestor interaction with the living have not been recognized as universal because the anthropologists' stress on differences has caused them to be overly narrow in their definitions of both "ancestor" and "worship." Hence, they have tended to overlook the fundamental similarities between religions that have ancestor worship and those that are said to lack it. This division is theoretically significant because even when ancestor worship is found in a majority of the cultures used in a study (e.g., Swanson 1964), its nonuniversality requires it to be explained in terms of unique aspects of certain cultures (see Swanson 1964:97-108). If ancestor worship were recognized as a universal aspect of religion, its explanation would offer a deeper understanding of religious behavior. One reason for the inability to recognize the universality of ancestor worship is that the term is often reserved for those societies where the dead are explicitly called by a term that is translated as ancestor, thus excluding societies whose religious practices concern ghosts, shades, spirits, souls, totemic plants and animals, or merely the dead. For example, Lehmann and Myers (1993:284) state that [a] major problem with Spencer's argument [that ancestor worship was the first religion] is that many societies at the hunting-and-gathering level do not practice ancestor worship. The Arunta of Australia, for example, worshiped their totemic plants and animals, but not their human ancestors. Distinguishing between ancestors and totemic plants and animals is questionable since totems are clearly ancestral in that they identify a person with a line of ancestors (e.g., one's father, father's father, etc.). Indeed, Harris (1989:405) points out that the Australian form of totemism "is a form of diffuse ancestor worship . . . [because by] taking the name of an animal such as kangaroo ... people express a communal obligation to the founders of their kinship group." The role of ancestors is also obscured in many descriptions of societies whose religions are based on more general, and hence, supposedly nonancestral, spirits or gods. An example of this is the hunters and gatherers living in the Kalahari who are often referred to as the !Kung. Although Lee (1984:103) does state that the !Kung's "religious universe is inhabited by a high god, a lesser god, and a host of minor animal spirits," he also states that "the main actors in [the !Kung's religious] world are the //gangwasi, the ghosts of recently deceased !Kung" (Lee 1984:103). The failure to see the connection between ancestors and spirits or gods often causes societies to be excluded from the ancestor worship category. For example, Lehmann and Myers (1993:284) state that [w]hen the living dead are forgotten in the memory of their group and dropped from the genealogy as a result of the passing of time (four or five generations), they are believed to be transformed into "nameless spirits," non-ancestors. . . . Similarly, Tonkinson (1978:52) claims that the Mardu lack ancestor worship because they cannot remember the names of specific distant ancestors, despite the fact that their religious rituals focus on "Ancestral Beings. …


We used a multi-round, two-party exchange game in which a healthy subject played a subject diagnosed with a DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual-IV) disorder, and applied a Bayesian clustering approach to the behavior exhibited by the healthy subject. The goal was to characterize quantitatively the style of play elicited in the healthy subject (the proposer) by their DSM-diagnosed partner (the responder). The approach exploits the dynamics of the behavior elicited in the healthy proposer as a biosensor for cognitive features that characterize the psychopathology group at the other side of the interaction. Using a large cohort of subjects (n = 574), we found statistically significant clustering of proposers' behavior overlapping with a range of DSM-IV disorders including autism spectrum disorder, borderline personality disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and major depressive disorder. To further validate these results, we developed a computer agent to replace the human subject in the proposer role (the biosensor) and show that it can also detect these same four DSM-defined disorders. These results suggest that the highly developed social sensitivities that humans bring to a two-party social exchange can be exploited and automated to detect important psychopathologies, using an interpersonal behavioral probe not directly related to the defining diagnostic criteria.


The sustainable transportation of liquid fuels in a piping system can be interrupted due to slug flow, which causes the severe unsteady loading on pipelines. A feature that is particularly affected by this problem is the oil transportation pipeline, where gas is often combined with the produced oil. In order to fully understand the behavior of such flows, it is imperative to simulate the effective zones along the span of the pipelines. This will allow the designer of the piping system to estimate the required pumping power through the evaluation of the pressure drop in the slug oil/gas flow. This paper reports the oil/gas flow phenomena in a horizontal pipe with a large diameter of 0.16 m, with 3-dimensional, transient, incompressible fluids, utilizing STAR-CCM+ commercial software. The volume of fluid (VOF) model was adopted to track the interface between the two phases. The operational conditions for the cases studied were extracted for the slug zone from the Baker chart. The slug flow was achieved accordingly, which gives us granted validation with the experimental source. The numerical procedure allowed the determination of the pressure drop. Also, the transient behavior of the slug flow was predicted through the tracking of the slug development in the pipe segment. Moreover, the proposed model could be extended to simulate other types of two-phase flow regimes.


This study investigated sexual function in women with a history of severe intrafamilial childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and the correlation between sexual problems and the severity of CSA, adult support during childhood and current psychiatric symptoms. The sample consisted of 158 women who subsequently began specialized group psychotherapy for CSA sequellae. Clinical interview and questionnaires (Present Sexual Function, Sexual and Body Satisfaction, Symptom Check List 90-R) were used for data collection in a cross sectional study design. Non-parametric analysis, linear and logistic regression analysis were applied. Of the women, 63% were unsatisfied with their current sexual life, 39% felt uncomfortable with physical endearments and 71% were unsatisfied with their body. Only 82% had an active sexual life and, of these, 73% reported at least one sexual problem, 48% orgasmic problems and 45% dyspareunia. The occurrence of sexual problems was significantly correlated to childhood physical violence, current psychological distress, flashbacks in sexual situations and discomfort with physical endearment. The prevalence of sexual pain disorders were also positively correlated to "no adult support" in childhood. The present study finds that psychiatric patients in terms of women with a history of intrafamilial CSA have wide-ranging sexual problems. It is crucial to screen for sexual problems and address them during treatment.


This study examined the influence of temperature, concentration, shearing time, and storage time on the rheological properties, i.e. the dynamic viscosity and shear stress, as a function of shear rate of chitosan solubilized in weakly acid solutions. The results showed that shear thinning behavior (pseudoplastic non-Newtonian behavior) was pronounced at temperatures from 20 to 50 °C, but was more remarkable at lower temperature. In addition, the activation energy value derived from ln h vs. 1/T data was found to be 20.86 kJ mol-1. When the effect of concentration was studied, the shear thinning behavior was pronounced at all concentrations. The effect of shearing time on the dynamic viscosity and shear stress of chitosan solutions did not show any significant differences at all shearing times applied in this study. Furthermore, an increase in viscosity was obtained with extending the period of storage to 3 months, after which a drop in viscosity was recorded. Thermal properties of chitosan films were also investigated by employing thermogravimetric analyses (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) in this work. Results of TGA revealed that the decomposition of the chitosan film proceeds in 2 distinct stages, which was confirmed with DSC curves.


Weather derivatives (WD) are different from most financial derivatives because the underlying weather cannot be traded and therefore cannot be replicated by other financial instruments. The market price of risk (MPR) is an important parameter of the associated equivalent martingale measures used to price and hedge weather futures/options in the market. The majority of papers so far have priced non-tradable assets assuming zero MPR, but this assumption underestimates WD prices. We study the MPR structure as a time dependent object with concentration on emerging markets in Asia. We find that Asian Temperatures (Tokyo, Osaka, Beijing, Teipei) are normal in the sense that the driving stochastics are close to a Wiener Process. The regression residuals of the temperature show a clear seasonal variation and the volatility term structure of CAT temperature futures presents a modified Samuelson effect. In order to achieve normality in standardized residuals, the seasonal variation is calibrated with a combination of a fourier truncated series with a GARCH model and with a local linear regression. By calibrating model prices, we implied the MPR from Cumulative total of 24- hour average temperature futures (C24AT) for Japanese Cities, or by knowing the formal dependence of MPR on seasonal variation, we price derivatives for Kaohsiung, where weather derivative market does not exist. The findings support theoretical results of reverse relation between MPR and seasonal variation of temperature process.


Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) 2015, Hermanus, Western Cape, 6-9 September 2015. Due to copyright restrictions, the attached PDF file only contains the abstract of the full text item. For access to the full text item, please consult the publisher's website.


Abstract. Digital elevation models (DEMs) are a gridded representation of
the surface of the Earth and typically contain uncertainties due to data
collection and processing. Slope and aspect estimates on a DEM contain
errors and uncertainties inherited from the representation of a
continuous surface as a grid (referred to as truncation error; TE) and from
any DEM uncertainty. We analyze in detail the impacts of TE and propagated
elevation uncertainty (PEU) on slope and aspect. Using synthetic data as a control, we define functions to quantify both TE
and PEU for arbitrary grids. We then develop a quality metric which captures
the combined impact of both TE and PEU on the calculation of topographic
metrics. Our quality metric allows us to examine the spatial patterns of
error and uncertainty in topographic metrics and to compare calculations on
DEMs of different sizes and accuracies. Using lidar data with point density of ∼10 pts m−2 covering
Santa Cruz Island in southern California, we are able to generate DEMs and
uncertainty estimates at several grid resolutions. Slope (aspect) errors on
the 1 m dataset are on average 0.3∘ (0.9∘) from TE and
5.5∘ (14.5∘) from PEU. We calculate an optimal DEM resolution
for our SCI lidar dataset of 4 m that minimizes the error bounds on
topographic metric calculations due to the combined influence of TE and PEU
for both slope and aspect calculations over the entire SCI. Average slope
(aspect) errors from the 4 m DEM are 0.25∘ (0.75∘)
from TE and 5∘ (12.5∘) from PEU. While the smallest grid
resolution possible from the high-density SCI lidar is not necessarily
optimal for calculating topographic metrics, high point-density data are
essential for measuring DEM uncertainty across a range of resolutions.


This analysis of U.S. environmental policy offers a conceptual framework that serves as a valuable roadmap to the array of laws, programs, and approaches developed over the last four decades. Combining case studies and theoretical discussion, the book views environmental policy in the context of three epochs: the rise of command-and-control federal regulation in the 1970s, the period of efficiency-based reform efforts that followed, and the more recent trend toward sustainable development and integrated approaches at local and regional levels. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the new approaches and places these experiments within the larger framework of an emerging trend toward community sustainability. Toward Sustainable Communities assesses environmental policy successes and failures at the subnational, regional, and state levels and offers eight case studies of policy arenas in which transformations have been occurring—from air and water pollution control and state and local climate change policy to open space preservation, urban growth, and regional ecosystem management. It discusses the various meanings of sustainability and whether the concept can serve as a foundation for a new era of environmental policy. The second edition has been substantially updated, with five new chapters (including the chapter on climate change) and all other chapters revised and shortened. It is suitable as a primary or secondary text for environmental policy courses and as a resource for scholars and policymakers. Contributors include Elisa Barbour, Michele M. Betsill, Daniel J. Fiorino, Marc Gaden, Lamont C. Hempel, Michael E. Kraft, William D. Leach, Mark Lubell, Daniel A. Mazmanian, Nicole Nakagawa, Kent E. Portney, Daniel Press, Paul A. Sabatier, Barry G. Rabe, and Michael B. Teitz. American and Comparative Environmental Policy series


Information technologies have dramatically change education, both within and out of classroom. The learning and training activities in organizations become crucial, which help organizations to increase their knowledge assets and obtain competitive advantages. While organizing learning activities or developing the learning plan for learners at work, the capabilities of learners and the requirements of the tasks which they undertake in business processes should both be considered. In this in-progress research, following the design science paradigm, we intend to build a task-based learning space for learners at work. The task-based learning space is designed to help agents to increase their capabilities or improve the cognitive levels of their capabilities to meet the requirements of tasks. We formally defined the conceptual frameworks, which formally conceptualized the concepts including agent profiling, agent allocation, task profiling, knowledge unit et al. Algorithms of agent-task matching and learning plan development are also introduced. Finally, we propose conclusions and plans to develop this research in the future.


During the last few years much interest has been focused on the photoprotective role of zeaxanthin. In excessive light zeaxanthin is rapidly formed in the xanthophyll cycle from violaxanthin, via the intermediate antheraxanthin, a reaction reversed in the dark. The role of zeaxanthin and the xanthophyll cycle in photoprotection, is based on fluorescence quenching measurements, and in many studies a good correlation to the amount of zeaxanthin (and antheraxanthin) has been found. Other suggested roles for the xanthophylls involve, protection against oxidative stress of lipids, participation in the blue light response, modulation of the membrane fluidity and regulation of abscisic acid synthesis. The enzyme violaxanthin de-epoxidase has recently been purified from spinach and lettuce as a 43-kDa protein. It was found as 1 molecule per 20-100 electron-transport chains. The gene has been cloned and sequenced from Lactuca sativa, Nicotiana tabacum and Arabidopsis thaliana. The transit peptide was characteristic of nuclear-encoded and lumen-localized proteins. The activity of violaxanthin de-epoxidase is controlled by the lumen pH. Thus, below pH 6.6 the enzyme binds to the thylakoid membrane. In addition ascorbate becomes protonated to ascorbic acid (pKa= 4.2) the true substrate (Km= 0.1 mM) for the violaxanthin de-epoxidase. We present arguments for an ascorbate transporter in the thylakoid membrane. The enzyme zeaxanthin epoxidase requires FAD as a cofactor and appears to use ferredoxin rather than NADPH as a reductant. The zeaxanthin epoxidase has not been isolated but the gene has been sequenced and a functional protein of 72.5 kDa has been expressed. The xanthophyll cycle pigments are almost evenly distributed in the thylakoid membrane and at least part of the pigments appears to be free in the lipid matrix where we conclude that the conversion by violaxanthin de-epoxidase occurs.


Art historians have often minimized the variety and complexity of seventeenth-century Spanish painting by concentrating on individual artists and their works and by stressing discovery of new information rather than interpretation. As a consequence, the painter emerges in isolation from the forces that shaped his work. Jonathan Brown offers another approach to the subject by relating important Spanish Baroque paintings and painters to their cultural milieu. A critical survey of the historiography of seventeenth-century Spanish painting introduces this two-part collection of essays. Part One provides the most detailed study to date of the artistic-literary academy of Francisco Pacheco, and Part Two contains original studies of four major painters and their works: Las Meninas of Velazquez, Zurbaran's decoration of the sacristy at Guadalupe, and the work by Murillo and Valdes Leal for the Brotherhood of Charity, Seville. The essays are unified by the author's intention to show how the artists interacted with and responded to the prevailing social, theological, and historical currents of the time. While this contextual approach is not uncommon in the study of European art, it is newly applied here to restore some of the diversity and substance that Spanish Baroque painting originally possessed.


The main goal of this Article is to, based on short analysis of basic futures characteristics as commodity and financial instruments, as well as contemporary situation of national commodity and financial market development, study the possibilities for commodity futures introduction in national financial system. The current year proved that unexpected natural circumstances, such as draught, could provoke the weaker harvest in agricultural production, having, on the other hand, many negative consequences, from poor market supply, through higher prices and potential inflation impact, to other market disturbances with many negative effects on general economic stability. The final part of the paper indicates the real possibilities for commodity futures introduction in Serbia, particularly in domain of their application in agribusiness and necessary steps which should be taken in order to realize its development and application.


This paper is devoted to the analysis of semantic features of some English and Uzbek proverbs about science and knowledge. The equivalents of some proverbs in a target language are given for interpreting them in the other language to find out several important innovative ways of translation and contrasting their peculiarities in the English and Uzbek languages. The results and examples of this paper can help to distinguish some differences in the meanings of the English and Uzbek proverbs about science, knowledge and to learn linguocultural peculiarities of them.


Development of browning induced in 'Braeburn' apple (Malus ×domestica Borkh.) fruit by a damaging CO 2 concentration was monitored weekly using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) during a 4-week storage trial (0.5 °C, 2 kPa O 2 /7 kPa CO 2 ). Discrete patches of high-intensity signal, distributed randomly throughout the fruit, were observed in multislice images of samples after 2 weeks of storage; these patches were eventually confirmed as being sites of browning reactions after dissection at the end of the trial. Subsequently (weeks 3 and 4), signal intensity at sites of incipient damage increased and patches enlarged and coalesced. After 2 weeks of storage, the extent of affected tissue, averaged across all image slices, was 1.5%, increasing to 15.9% and 21.3% after 3 and 4 weeks. The average rate at which tissue damage spread in individual slices was 0.81 (range: 0-3.70) cm 2 .d -1 between weeks 2 and 3, declining to 0.32 (range: 0-1.55) cm 2 .d -1 in the final week. Tissue damage induced under these conditions did not spread at the same rate at all locations within individual fruit, nor was it preferentially located toward the stem or calyx ends of the fruit.


A significant part of current Internet attacks originates from hosts that are distributed all over the Internet. However, there is evidence that most of these hosts are, in fact, concentrated in certain parts of the Internet. This behavior resembles the crime distribution in the real world: it occurs in most places, but it tends to be concentrated in certain areas. In the real world, high crime areas are usually labeled as "bad neighborhoods". The goal of this dissertation is to investigate Bad Neighborhoods on the Internet. The idea behind the Internet Bad Neighborhood concept is that the probability of a host in behaving badly increases if its neighboring hosts (i.e., hosts within the same subnetwork) also behave badly. This idea, in turn, can be exploited to improve current Internet security solutions, since it provides an indirect approach to predict new sources of attacks (neighboring hosts of malicious ones). In this context, the main contribution of this dissertation is to present the first systematic and multifaceted study on the concentration of malicious hosts on the Internet. We have organized our study according to two main research questions. In the first research question, we have focused on the intrinsic characteristics of the Internet Bad Neighborhoods, whereas in the second research question we have focused on how Bad Neighborhood blacklists can be employed to better protect networks against attacks. The approach employed to answer both questions consists in monitoring and analyzing network data (traces, blacklists, etc.) obtained from various real world production networks. One of the most important findings of this dissertation is the verification that Internet Bad Neighborhoods are a real phenomenon, which can be observed not only as network prefixes (e.g., /24, in CIDR notation), but also at different and coarser aggregation levels, such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and countries. For example, we found that 20 ISPs (out of 42,201 observed in our data sets) concentrated almost half of all spamming IP addresses. In addition, a single ISP was found having 62% of its IP addresses involved with spam. This suggests that ISP-based Bad Neighborhood security mechanisms can be employed when evaluating e-mail from unknown sources. This dissertation also shows that Bad Neighborhoods are mostly applicationspecific and that they might be located in neighborhoods one would not immediately expect. For example, we found that phishing Bad Neighborhoods are mostly located in the United States and other developed nations – since these nations hosts the majority of data centers and cloud computing providers – while spam comes from mostly Southern Asia. This implies that Bad Neighborhood based security tools should be application-tailored. Another finding of this dissertation is that Internet Bad Neighborhoods are much less stealthy than individual hosts, since they are more likely to strike again a target previously attacked. We found that, in a one-week period, nearly 50% of the individual IP addresses attack only once a particular target, while up to 90% of the Bad Neighborhoods attacked more than once. Consequently, this implies that historical data of Bad Neighborhoods attacks can potentially be successfully employed to predict future attacks.
Overall, we have put the Internet Bad Neighborhoods under scrutiny from the point of view of the network administrator. We expect that the findings provided in this dissertation can serve as a guide for the design of new algorithms and solutions to better secure networks.


The potential health risk from exposure to chemically contaminated soil can be assessed from bioavailability studies. The aims of this research were: (a) to determine the dermal bioavailability of contaminants in soil for representatives of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon class of chemicals, namely, benzo(a)pyrene and naphthalene, and (b) to examine the relative contribution of soil matrix and chemical sequestration in soil with time ("aging") on their bioavailability. In vitro flow-through diffusion cell studies were performed utilizing dermatomed male pig skin and radioactive chemicals to measure dermal penetration. Volatilization of naphthalene was predominant in reducing the amount of chemical available for dermal penetration. Immediate contact with either of two soils reduced volatilization, however, only the soil with higher clay content resulted in reduced penetration. Aging in higher sand content soil and higher clay content soil further reduced skin penetration by 23 and 70 fold, respectively, versus naphthalene in the absence of soil. Benzo(a)pyrene penetration was reduced >88% following immediate contact with either soil with further reductions occurring after aging. While aging in either soil reduced the dermal penetration of both naphthalene and benzo(a)pyrene, the effect on naphthalene was much greater. The results of this study suggest that the bioavailability from dermal exposure to the polycyclic aromatic chemicals examined can be significantly reduced by soil matrix and aging in soil, resulting in reduced potential health risk following dermal exposure.


Purpose

Epileptic encephalopathies (EEs) are the severe form of childhood epilepsy and phenotypically heterogeneous disorders with different underlying genetic defects. EEs are always accompanied with developmental delay/mental retardation and behavior problems. Finding the genetic basis of epileptic encephalopathies with developmental delay/mental retardation can be valuable not only for diagnosis but also for guiding treatment and providing disease prognosis.

Methods and Results

A customized panel of 90 genes related to epileptic encephalopathies was utilized to screen for potential genetic variants via targeted next generation sequencing (NGS). A total of 78 children with epilepsy and developmental delay/mental retardation were analyzed with an average read depth of 265.3 ± 68.3X. Mutations were found in 23 (9 boys and 14 girls) probands, and the overall mutation identification rate was 29.5% (25.0% for males and 33.3% for females). Fifteen (65.2%) mutations involve ion channels, including SCN1A, KCNT1, SCN2A, SCN8, KCNB1 and KCNQ2. The other (34.8%) mutations involve CDKL5, ALG13, GFAP, SNAP25, STXBP1 and SYNGAP1. Sixteen (69.6%) of the identified mutations were confirmed to be de novo and one (4.3%) was found to be paternal mosaicism. Channelopathies were found to be the major cause of both early onset (≤6 months) and later onset of unclassified EE as well as febrile seizure cases. On the contrary, patients with infantile spasms or West syndrome were mainly caused by mutations in non-ion channel proteins, whereas patients of epilepsy with developmental delays and/or mental retardation were caused by mutations in both channel and non-channel genes.

Conclusion

NGS is a valuable and reliable diagnostic tool to detect the gene mutation in epileptic children with developmental delay/mental retardation. This cost-effective method shortens the course from seizure onset to genetic diagnosis. By understanding the gene mutations and genotypephenotype correlation better, clinical practitioners could provide the optimal anticonvulsant and treatment.


Aim/Purpose: In this study, the research proposes and experiments with a new model of collecting, storing, and analyzing big data on customer feedback in the tourism industry. The research focused on the Vietnam market.

Background: Big Data describes large databases that have been "silently" built by businesses, which include product information, customer information, customer feedback, etc. This information is valuable, and the volume increases rapidly over time, but businesses often pay little attention or store it discretely, not centrally, thereby wasting an extremely large resource and partly causing limitations for business analysis as well as data.

Methodology: The study conducted an experiment by collecting customer feedback data in the field of tourism, especially tourism in Vietnam, from 2007 to 2022. After that, the research proceeded to store and mine latent topics based on the data collected using the Topic Model. The study applied cloud computing technology to build a collection and storage model to solve difficulties, including scalability, system stability, and system cost optimization, as well as ease of access to technology.

Contribution: The research has four main contributions: (1) Building a model for Big Data collection, storage, and analysis; (2) Experimenting with the solution by collecting customer feedback data from huge platforms such as Booking.com, Agoda.com, and Phuot.vn based on cloud computing, focusing mainly on tourism Vietnam; (3) A Data Lake that stores customer feedback and discussion in the field of tourism was built, supporting researchers in the field of natural language processing; (4) Experimental research on the latent topic mining model from the collected Big Data based on the topic model.

Findings: Experimental results show that the Data Lake has helped users easily extract information, thereby supporting administrators in making quick and timely decisions. Next, PySpark big data processing technology and cloud computing help speed up processing, save costs, and make model building easier when moving to SaaS. Finally, the topic model helps identify customer discussion trends and identify latent topics that customers are interested in so business owners have a better picture of their potential customers and business.

Recommendations for Practitioners: Empirical results show that facilities are the factor that customers in the Vietnamese market complain about the most in the tourism/hospitality sector. This information also recommends that practitioners reduce their expectations about facilities because the overall level of physical facilities in the Vietnamese market is still weak and cannot be compared with other countries in the world. However, this is also information to support administrators in planning to upgrade facilities in the long term.

Recommendation for Researchers: The value of Data Lake has been proven by research. The study also formed a model for big data collection, storage, and analysis. Researchers can use the same model for other fields or use the model and algorithm proposed by this study to collect and store big data in other platforms and areas.

Impact on Society: Collecting, storing, and analyzing big data in the tourism sector helps government strategists to identify tourism trends and communication crises. Based on that information, government managers will be able to make decisions and strategies to develop regional tourism, propose price levels, and support innovative programs. That is the great social value that this research brings.

Future Research: With each different platform or website, the study had to build a query scenario and choose a different technology approach, which limits the ability of the solution's scalability to multiple platforms. Research will continue to build and standardize query scenarios and processing technologies to make scalability to other platforms easier.


Heat shock protein 90 (HSP90) functions as a molecular chaperone that regulates the conformation of many signaling proteins implicated in oncogenesis. Thus, HSP90 comprises an appealing therapeutic target that could be blocked to achieve concurrent inhibition of multiple signaling pathways. Preclinical data suggest that, although HSP90 is expressed at high levels in normal cells, the HSP90 inhibitor 17-allylaminogeldanamycin (17-AAG) selectively kills cancer cells. The reason for this selectivity, however, has been unclear (see Neckers and Lee). Kamal et al. used a competitive binding assay to show that 17-AAG had a higher binding affinity for HSP90 from malignant cell lysates than HSP90 from normal cell lysates or purified HSP90. The authors used immunoprecipitation together with Western analysis to show that, although normal and malignant cells contained comparable levels of HSP90, HSP90 from tumor cells--but not normal cells--was almost entirely in multiprotein complexes with cochaperones. HSP90 from tumor cells showed higher adenosine 5´-triphosphatase (ATPase) activity than that from normal cells, indicating that tumor HSP90 was functionally active. When purified HSP90 was reconstituted in vitro with four cochaperones (HSP70, HSP40, Hop, and p23), both its affinity for 17-AAG and its ATPase activity increased. The authors proposed a model in which HSP90 facilitates malignant progression by rescuing mutant and overexpressed proteins and thereby enabling cell survival. The context-dependent affinity of HSP90 for at least some inhibitors--together with its regulation of various oncoproteins--may allow it to serve as a valuable target in cancer therapy. A. Kamal, L. Thao, J. Sensintaffar, L. Zhang, M. F. Brown, L. C. Fritz, F. J. Burrows, A high-affinity conformation of Hsp90 confers tumour selectivity on Hsp90 inhibitors. Nature 425, 407-410 (2003). [Online Journal] L. Neckers, Y.-S. Lee, The rules of attraction. Nature 425, 357-358 (2003). [Online Journal]


The spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR) has an elevated efferent sympathetic nerve activity, suggesting that the renal handling of sodium and water may be altered. This study evaluated the renal neurogenic influence on the rate of achieving sodium balance in adult SHRs and Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats after either a step increase or step decrease in fixed sodium intake. Conscious, unrestrained rats with either innervated or denervated kidneys were initially placed on a low-sodium (0.3 mEq/d) or high-sodium (5.0 mEq/d) intake by intravenous infusion. Hourly urinary sodium excretion was determined 24 hours before and 72 hours after sodium intake had been increased from low to high or decreased from high to low. After either step change in fixed sodium intake, both innervated SHRs and innervated WKY rats achieved sodium balance within 24 hours. Similarly, the time course of achieving sodium balance was nearly identical between WKY rats with innervated and denervated kidneys after either switch in sodium intake. In SHRs receiving a step increase in sodium intake, both innervated and denervated kidneys increased urinary sodium excretion equally for 9 hours; however, at this time, innervated SHRs continued to increase sodium excretion rapidly, whereas denervated rats were delayed in a further response. Thus, innervated SHRs achieved sodium balance approximately 18 hours sooner than denervated SHRs. Differences in urinary sodium excretion did not result from concomitant changes in plasma renin activity or mean arterial pressure.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


The Voss Advanced Undergraduate Leadership Experience (VALUE), is a student cohort program with a competitive application process. Students must have a prerequisite level of leadership education and self-select into one of three designated tracks. Students are paired with faculty and community mentors to learn about operations and collaboration in today's organizations. The program culminates with students developing an e-Portfolio, which is evaluated to measure student learning outcomes.


This paper assesses the impact of the geographic diversification of bank holding company (BHC) assets across the United States on their market valuations. Using two new identification strategies based on the dynamic process of interstate bank deregulation, we find that exogenous increases in geographic diversity reduced BHC valuations. We also find that the geographic diversification of BHC assets increased insider lending and reduced loan quality. Taken together, these findings are consistent with theories predicting that geographic diversity intensifies agency problems. The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com., Oxford University Press.


It is known that sustained muscular contractions can cause muscular pain, which explains. the prevalence of neck pain of employees in static and semi-static work such as dentistry, sewing machine and computer operation. Additionally, exposure to high and sustained gravitational forces in high perfonnance combat pilots is another source of neck pain in the workplace. Individuals with neck pain have been found to show decreased neck strength, in particular neck flexor strength has been found to be less than that of the general population. It has been suggested that neck-conditioning exercises may be useful in the prevention and rehabilitation of neck pain. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare EMG activation levels of selected superficial neck muscles using two neck-training modalities in flexion, extension and lateral bending. The two training modalities were a pin-loaded machine (Cybex) and Thera-Band (TB). Seventeen subjects (eig.'1t males and nine females) each performed six trials. For Cybex the exercise intensities were SOo/~, 70% and 90% of3RM and for T-B, three intensities were tested; Green T -8, Blue T -B and Black T -B. In each trial, subjects completed two contractions in flexion, extension and lateral bending while being filmed by a five-camera Motion Analysis system operating al 120Hz and whilst three sites atound the neck were monitored bilaterally for EMG activation. Motion analysis data was used to define the concentric ana eccentric portions of each exercise and a linear eilveiOpe was calculated from the EMG data. EMG data were then nonnalised to maximum voluntary isometric contraction and the average and peak EMG activation wete calculated. A one-way ANOV A with repeated measures was used to compare between exercise modalities/intensities and post-hoc differences were perfonned via Least Squared Differences. Significant differences (p<O.OS) were evident when comparing the different intensities of the Cybex rrtodality to Cach other atld also when the Cybex intensities were compared to the T -B in flexion, extension and the majority of variables in lateral bending. There were no significant differences between the differing colours of T-8 in the majority of contraction variables. This study demonstrated that the 50% Cybex condition was not a suitable progression from the Black T-B, but appeared to be a reasonable ex~rcise in the strengthening of the neck in high-risk occupations such as high perfonnance ~.;ombat pilots. Regression equations generated from the EMG data in the Cybex modality revealed that a 30% Cybex condition may "bridge" the gap in intensity between the Black T -B and the 50% Cybex condition. All TheraBand intensities resulted in low-level EMG activation and is therefore an ideal mode of exercise to be used in injury rehabilitation programs.


Oswald Theodore Avery studied strains of pneumococcus of the genus Streptococcus in the US in the first half of the twentieth century. This bacterium causes pneumonia, a common cause of death at the turn of the twentieth century. In a 1944 paper, Avery demonstrated with colleagues Colin Munro MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, instead of protein, formed the material of heritable transformation in bacteria. Avery helped untangle some of the relationships between genes [3] and developmental processes.


The idea that Christianity was related to the antisemitism that informed the Holocaust was widely resisted in the early years following WW II discovery of Nazi exterminations of Jews. Yet before the end of the Holocaust century the major bodies of Christianity had labeled traditional Christian attitudes toward Jews as the fuel for "fires of hatred," declared the Church "sinful and in need of conversion," and called for the Church to "submit her own history to critical examination." By the turn of the millennium, formal confessions had not only been made throughout western Christendom for atrocities perpetrated against Jews historically, but also for what was said to be a necessary causal relation between Christian teachings and the Nazi antisemitism that informed the Holocaust. In the light of these admissions, and the growing scholarly consensus that it is no longer tenable to claim that Christian teachings on Jews are unrelated to the Holocaust, this study traces a triad of foundational teachings embodying the doctrines of Christian dominion, Jewish subservience, and perpetual Jewish suffering from their inception through the Third Reich. Not only were these teachings, along with their attendant ideas, terms, and concepts, the single most important weapon-group in early Christianity's supersessionist arsenal, they were the means by which clusters of mutually dependent ideas about Jews were sealed with divine authority and delivered to modern western culture. The history of this complex development not only helps us to understand how ancient Christian theological claims became modern secular weapons to use against Jews in the twentieth century, it explains how the former can justly be called a necessary cause of the Holocaust some nineteen years later.


FORTMED 2020 is the fifth edition of the International Conference on Fortifications of the Mediterranean Coast. The Conference has been held in March 26th, 27th and 28th 2020 in Granada (Spain), at the Laboratory of Archaeology and Architecture of the City (Laboratorio de Arqueología y Arquitectura de la Ciudad, LAAC) of the School of Arabic Studies (Escuela de Estudios Árabes, EEA), a research centre that belongs to the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC). The main objective of FORTMED conferences is to exchange and share knowledge for a better understanding, assessment, management and exploitation of the built Cultural Heritage. The focus is on defensive architecture in the Mediterranean area, from the Antiquity to the present day, although it does not exclude other fortifications built overseas but high influenced by those on the Mediterranean.


A case study has been done at Dynapac Compaction Equipment AB in Karlskrona in order to improve the internal flow of the production. The "Supermarket Storage", an adjoining storage that feed material to the lean production in the "Z-line" assembly line with the help of kitting, was chosen to be focused during the optimization of the internal flow. Also, due to the little academic research about kitting it was decided to focus the research on the kitting process and identify how to optimize it.The purpose of the research is to determine optimization methods of a kitting process and fill in the gap in the subject field about kitting optimization. Given the research time limit, the focus was only on the kitting process in the Supermarket Storage and no optimization could change the storage's layout. This resulted in three research question that will be investigated in the thesis. Which common approaches exist when it comes to optimizing a kitting process? What is the result of each optimizing method in the time aspect? When should an optimization method be used, compared to the other methods that will be tested in this research?In order to solve these questions, was a needfinding process used in order to identify the kitting process current problems and the needs of the employees. With this, three optimization methods were identified and selected to be used to optimize the kitting process; optimization of routing, optimization of family grouping and optimization of an electronic system. The optimization of routing focused on the route that the kitters travel and the optimization of the family grouping focused on the article distribution in the Supermarket Storage; there each kitting operation's articles should be stored in the same zone. Finally, the optimization of the electronic system, investigated the possibility to utilize a pick to scan system with the kitting process.Each optimization was implemented in different field experiment in order to identify how each optimization affected the kitting process. This resulted in that each optimization had improved the kitting process time efficiency and the electronic system had the biggest impact. Some other results were also observed during the experiments. The route optimization improved the learning curve of the kitting process and the family grouping optimization decreased the bottlenecks in kitting process. The electronic system optimization also implemented new benefits that resulted in a profit 2.5 times the cost of the system. Some of the benefits include removal of unneeded processes, quality control of the kitting process and statistics gathering that can be used to improve the process in the future.These results imply that all three optimization methods can be used in order to improve the time efficiency of a kitting process in a similar storage layout. The routing optimization should be used in a kitting operation with a high rotation of new kitters. The family grouping should be used in a kiting process with bottlenecks in the process and low organization of the article distribution. Ultimately, the electronic system optimization should be used in a kitting process that has unneeded processes and has the need of new tools that the electronic system can implement.


Introduction. Part I: HDTV Fundamentals. Chapter 1: What the Heck Is HDTV? Chapter 2: Shopping Smart. Chapter 3: Cables and Connections. Chapter 4: Hooking Up Your HDTV. Chapter 5: Mounting Your HDTV. Part II: Getting HDTV Programming. Chapter 6: Who's Showing HDTV? Chapter 7: Something's in the Air. Chapter 8: The Cable Guy. Chapter 9: Rocket Science. Chapter 10: Internet-Based HDTV. Part III: Movie Machines. Chapter 11: DVDs. Chapter 12: Getting Into DVRs. Chapter 13: Taping Time. Part IV: HDTV Gadgets Galore. Chapter 14: Gaming Consoles. Chapter 15: Camcorders. Chapter 16: Gadgets. Part V: Sensory Overload. Chapter 17: Understanding Audio. Chapter 18: Home-Theater Audio. Chapter 19: Setting the Mood. Chapter 20: Enhancing Your HDTV. Part VI: Geek Stuff. Chapter 21: TV Engineering. Chapter 22: Projecting a Good Image. Chapter 23: Thin Is In. Chapter 24: Good Ol' Tubes. Part VII: The Part of Tens. Chapter 25: More than Ten Places to Buy an HDTV. Chapter 26: More Than Ten HDTV Accessories. Index.


OBJECTIVE
To analyze genome-wide changes in chondrocyte gene expression in a surgically induced model of early osteoarthritis (OA) in rats, to assess the similarity of this model to human OA, and to identify genes and mechanisms leading to OA pathogenesis.

METHODS
OA was surgically induced in 5 rats by anterior cruciate ligament transection and partial medial meniscectomy. Sham surgery was performed in 5 additional animals, which were used as controls. Both groups underwent 4 weeks of forced mobilization, 3 times per week. RNA was extracted directly from articular chondrocytes in the OA (operated), contralateral, and sham-operated knees. Affymetrix GeneChip expression arrays were used to assess genome-wide changes in gene expression. Expression patterns of selected dysregulated genes, including Col2a1, Mmp13, Adamts5, Ctsc, Ptges, and Cxcr4, were validated by real-time polymerase chain reaction, immunofluorescence, or immunohistochemistry 2, 4, and 8 weeks after surgery.

RESULTS
After normalization, comparison of OA and sham-operated samples showed 1,619 differentially expressed probe sets with changes in their levels of expression > or = 1.5-fold, 722 with changes > or = 2-fold, 135 with changes > or = 4-fold, and 20 with changes of 8-fold. Dysregulated genes known to be involved in human OA included Mmp13, Adamts5, and Ptgs2, among others. Several dysregulated genes (e.g., Reln, Phex, and Ltbp2) had been identified in our earlier microarray study of hypertrophic chondrocyte differentiation. Other genes involved in cytokine and chemokine signaling, including Cxcr4 and Ccl2, were identified. Changes in gene expression were also observed in the contralateral knee, validating the sham operation as the appropriate control.

CONCLUSION
Our results demonstrate that the animal model mimics gene expression changes seen in human OA, supporting the relevance of newly identified genes and pathways to early human OA. We propose new avenues for OA pathogenesis research and potential targets for novel OA treatments, including cathepsins and cytokine, chemokine, and growth factor signaling pathways, in addition to factors controlling the progression of chondrocyte differentiation.


This study explores a framework for theorizing the participatory media approach by examining local experiences on communication and development through the perspectives of health communication technicians, their relationships with senders and receivers in health programs and projects, and how they conduct the process of communication planning, implementation, and evaluation. The study addresses the following three main questions: (1) Who are the health communicators and what are their roles in participatory communication? (2) What is the level of participatory communication in health programs and projects? and (3) What are the approaches and characteristics of participatory communication in health programs and projects in the Philippines? The study reveals that communication technicians perceive their communication strategies as long-term processes that address the felt needs of communities with the participation of beneficiaries in planning communication that is sensitive to the culture of, beneficial to the majority of, and owned by the community.


The preacher Henry Ward Beecher was once the most famous man in America. Although he is now often unnoticed, history has attested to Beecher's influence on important elements of contemporary rhetorical style and homiletic theology. In his largest pronouncement on the theory of preaching, his Yale lectures, Beecher set out a theory of preaching that declared the goal of preaching to be a core transformation of the listeners through an aesthetic connection to the Divine presence. As a part of this process, Beecher argued in favor of an ecumenically Christian form of "taste" that would sensitize the audience to the existence of a new kind of knowledge: a divinely inspired linkage of logos and pathos that Beecher referred to as the Doctrine of Love.


The purpose of this column is to discuss innovations and quality improvement efforts in a variety of long-term care settings. These issues are of importance to healthcare professionals as our nation faces the burgeoning growth of the aging population, creating increased demand for improved and innovative long-term care services. This column is coordinated by Marilyn J. Rantz, PhD, RN, FAAN, NHA, e-mail: email@example.com.


section 204 of the Act may revoke the approval of that petition upon notice to the petitioner on any ground other than those specified in § 1205.1 when the necessity for the revocation comes to the attention of this Service. (b) Notice of intent. Revocation of the approval of a petition of self-petition under paragraph (a) of this section will be made only on notice to the petitioner or self-petitioner. The petitioner or self-petitioner must be given the opportunity to offer evidence in support of the petition or self-petition and in opposition to the grounds alleged for revocation of the approval. (c) Notification of revocation. If, upon reconsideration, the approval previously granted is revoked, the director shall provide the petitioner or the selfpetitioner with a written notification of the decision that explains the specific reasons for the revocation. The director shall notify the consular officer having jurisdiction over the visa application, if applicable, of the revocation of an approval. (d) Appeals. The petitioner or self-petitioner may appeal the decision to revoke the approval within 15 days after the service of notice of the revocation. The appeal must be filed as provided in part 1003 of this chapter, unless the Associate Commissioner for Examinations exercises appellate jurisdiction over the revocation under part 103 of 8 CFR chapter I. Appeals filed with the Associate Commissioner for Examinations must meet the requirements of part 103 of this chapter.


The demand for global video has been burgeoning across industries. With the expansion and improvement of video-streaming services, cloud-based video is evolving into a necessary feature of any successful business for reaching internal and external audiences. Over-the-top (OTT) video streaming, e.g., Netfix and YouTube, has been dominating the global IP traffic in recent years. More than 50% of OTT video traffic are now delivered through content distribution networks (CDNs). Even though multiple solutions have been proposed for improving congestion in the CDN system, managing the ever-increasing traffic requires a fundamental understanding of the system and the different design fexibilities (control knobs) to make the best use of the hardware limitations. In Addition, there is no analytical understanding for the key quality of experience (QoE) attributes (stall duration, average quality, etc.) for video streaming when transmitted using CDN-based multi-tier infrastructure, which is the focus of this thesis. The key contribution of this thesis is to provide a white-box analytical understanding of the key QoE attributes of the enduser in cloud storage systems, which can be used to systematically address the choppy user experience and have optimized system designs. The ?rst key design involves the scheduling strategy, that chooses the subset of CDN servers to obtain the content. The second key design involves the quality of each video chunk. The third key design involves deciding which contents to cache at the edge routers and which content needs to be stored at the CDN. Towards solving these challenges, this dissertation is divided into three parts. Part 1 considers video streaming over distributed systems where the video segments are encoded using an erasure code for better reliability. Part 2 looks at the problem of optimizing the tradeoff between quality and stall of the streamed videos. In Part 3, we consider caching partial contents of the videos at the CDN as well as at the edge-routers to further optimize video streaming services. We present a model for describing a today's representative multi-tier system architecturefor video streaming applications, typically composed of a centralized origin server, several CDN sites and edge-caches. Our model comprehensively considers the following factors: limited caching spaces at the CDN sites and edge-routers, allocation of CDN for a video request, choice of different ports from the CDN, and the central storage and bandwidth allocation. With this model, we optimize different quality of experience (QoE) measures and present novel, yet efficient, algorithms to solve the formulated optimization problems. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms signi?cantly outperform the state-of-the-art strategies. We take one step further and implement a small-scale video streaming system in a real cloud environment, managed by Openstack, and validate our results


Faecal coliform (FC) concentration was monitored weekly in the Tangipahoa River over an eight year period. Available USGS discharge and precipitation data were used to construct a nonparametric multiplicative regression (NPMR) model for both forecasting and backcasting of FC density. NPMR backcasting and forecasting of FC allowed for estimation of concentration for any flow regime. During this study a remediation effort was undertaken to improve disinfection systems of contributing municipal waste water treatment plants in the watershed. Time-series analysis of FC concentrations demonstrated a drop in FC levels coinciding with remediation efforts. The NPMR model suggested the reduction in FC levels was not due to climate variance (i.e. discharge and precipitation changes) alone. Use of the NPMR method circumvented the need for construction of a more complex physical watershed model to estimate FC loading in the river. This method can be used to detect and estimate new discharge impacts, or forecast daily FC estimates.


Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM), Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) images obtained in 1991, 2005 and 2014 with maps, and field survey data were used to classify land use and land cover (LULC) changes over 23 years and predict soil erosion risk locations in the Khlong Kui watershed (73,700 ha), Prachuap Khiri Khan province, Thailand. Classified images together with soil features, slope and rainfall data were used to identify potential risk areas of soil erosion. Based on field check data, the overall classification accuracy was accessed from random samples that resulted as 80% for 1991, 83% for 2005 and 86% for 2014. The study discovered that rice field and rangeland increased by 1.12 and 2.81%, respectively, deciduous forest, and on the other hand, it decreased by 8.28%. GIS analysis identified the potential risk areas of soil erosion as 46,431 ha (0.63%) at very high risk.


Skin detection is a well-studied area in color imagery and is useful in a number of scenarios to include search and rescue and computer vision. Most approaches focus on color imagery due to cost and availability. Many of the visible-based approaches do well at detecting skin (above 90%) but they tend to have relatively high false-alarm rates (8%-15%). This article presents a novel feature space for skin detection in visible and near infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The features are derived from known spectral absorption of skin constituents to include hemoglobin, melanin, and water as well as scattering properties of the dermis. Fitting a Gaussian mixture to skin and background distributions and using a likelihood ratio test detector, the features presented here show dominating performance when comparing receiver-operating characteristic curves (ROCs) and statistically significant improvement when comparing equal error rates and area under the ROC (AUC). A detection/false-alarm probability of 98.6%/1.1% is achieved for the averaged equal error rate (EER). EER values for the proposed feature space show a 5.6%-11.2% increase in detection probability with a 6.0%-11.6% decrease in false-alarm probability compared to well performing color-based features. The AUC shows a 0.034-0.173 increase in total area under the curve compared to well performing color-based features.


Notable changes to human comfort are underway that add greatly to the complexity of existential processes. These are «inter-ethnic violence» and «economic polarisation». Historically, these have resisted resilience from urban recovery in intractable contexts. Among the «wicked problems» confronting future actors and agents of newly emerging frontiers of research and policy are those addressing the «dark side» of innovation and entrepreneurship. This is seldom studied in economic geography but such are the negativities associated with so many dimensions of not only technology but its deformations and inhuman inversions that there will, for sure, be future growth for a wide range of social, natural, applied sciences and technology fixes for human dilemmas into the foreseeable future. We consider «resilience» in prefatory remarks on two intractable cases. Contrariwise, in this brief paper on «new technological spaces», attention is devoted to two new «cybersecurity» spatial types, each of which consists in an under-explored «dark side». In this, not in the long term, the naturally optimistic research outlook of the academic will be obscured by the demands of a more pessimistic outlook for the short term. Two of our selected sub-fields, in cyber-security and structured finance, reference both the «dark web» for illegal and terroristic communication and «dark pools». The paper reviews the economic geographies of these «apocalypses» and draw conclusions.


South Africa has embarked on fiscal policy reforms in an attempt to grow its economy and to resolve the structural problems in the country. The macroeconomic reform that was implemented in 1996 with the introduction of the Growth Employment and Redistribution Policy did not yield the intended results. This attests the notion that the macroeconomic reform is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic growth. Once the macroeconomic policy is refined to provide an enabling environment for economic activity, then the country must reform its microeconomic policy. South Africa like other developing countries followed in the footsteps of the developed countries and implemented the aforementioned steps in their fiscal policy reforms. This research appraises the programmes that support the microeconomic reforms in South Africa, and assesses their value in driving growth. The findings reveal that the microeconomic reforms received substantial support from the fiscus and the policies developed are well aligned to addressing the challenges in the South African situation. Although both the process and fiscal framework are in place, the main challenge is effective implementation of the policy framework.


In recent times, in the academic field related to the training of L2 pronunciation teachers, the already existing gap between fundamental research and the application of its results in the classroom has widened. In some degree, this has been a consequence of that training being focused on methodological aspects more than on the intrinsic knowledge of the subject to be taught. In this article, on the basis of two concrete examples, the need for keeping pronunciation teachers permanently informed about the findings of the basic research in phonetics / phonology is defended as a means to achieve a very fruitful interaction between the two sides, theoretical ad applied, of the discipline.