The carbon intensity (CI) of biofuel's well-to-pump life cycle is calculated by life cycle analysis (LCA) to account for the energy/material inputs of the feedstock production and fuel conversion stages and the associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions during these stages. The LCA is used by the California Air Resources Board's Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program to calculate CI and monetary credits are issued based on the difference between a given fuel's CI and a reference fuel's CI. Through the Tier 2 certification program under which individual fuel production facilities can submit their own CIs with their facility input data, the LCFS has driven innovative technologies to biofuel conversion facilities, resulting in substantial reductions in GHG emissions as compared to the baseline gasoline or diesel. A similar approach can be taken to allow feedstock petition in the LCFS so that lower-CI feedstock can be rewarded. Here we examined the potential for various agronomic practices to improve the GHG profiles of corn ethanol by performing feedstock-level CI analysis for the Midwestern United States. Our system boundary covers GHG emissions from the cradle-to-farm-gate activities (i.e. farm input manufacturing and feedstock production), along with the potential impacts of soil organic carbon change during feedstock production. We conducted scenario-based CI analysis of ethanol, coupled with regionalized inventory data, for various farming practices to manage corn fields, and identified key parameters affecting cradle-to-farm-gate GHG emissions. The results demonstrate large spatial variations in CI of ethanol due to farm input use and land management practices. In particular, adopting conservation tillage, reducing nitrogen fertilizer use, and implementing cover crops has the potential to reduce GHG emissions per unit corn produced when compared to a baseline scenario of corn–soybean rotation. This work shows a large potential emission offset opportunity by allowing feedstock producers a path to Tier 2 petitions that reward low-CI feedstocks and further reduce biofuels' CI. The prevalence of significant acreage that has not been optimized for CI suggests that policy changes that incentivize optimization of this parameter could provide significant additionality over current trends in farm efficiency and adoption of conservation practice.


Jane is of the new generation of information professionals: open, enthusiastic, committed, demand-responsive. Between workshops at a CTA seminar on farmers organisations, she spoke with Spore about her work, deeds and dreams. Listen in to a chat under a tree.

She has just said, intoning it three times, that 'Information is power'. Why is that so important to her? 'When someone has information and knowledge, they have confidence, and the skills to take informed decisions.' Is she saying that a person is only a full person when they have full confidence, that some people she works with are not full people, not full farmers? In a way, she agrees. Some farmers do not have full confidence, even though they and their predecessors may have been farming for centuries. They have information about practical aspects, of course, but they do not have enough about the market. If you re a farmer and don t know what the market demand is, you may be producing maize very well, according to best farming practices, but there may be no market. And then you lose interest in your maize, because it has lost its value for you.

What about the power angle, we wonder? Our work, Jane reflects, is about people having the power and confidence that comes from being informed. Most times people fear to stand up and speak, because they re not so sure whether they are going to say the right thing. If you re informed, then you re confident, you can say the right thing, or ask the right question at the right time. It helps you to be involved.

She works in, she is, the information department of her organisation, we remark, so she must have the key to a lot of people s confidence. To some extent, she admits, I do, to their confidence and their power. I select information, and I am its gateway.

In fact, I need more confidence to get more correct information. The other people working in our organisation could be the source, and I need them to appreciate the role of information more. They may be a scientist, agriculturalist, extension worker, or in marketing or credit, and when I ask them for an article, they may feel they have other, more important work.

Do people really still think like that, we prompt her, in the 21st century, in the information age, do some people resist? Not outright, we are assured, not intentionally. The thing is that most people do not appreciate information because it is not tangible, you cannot touch and feel it. An extension worker can tell a farmer about growing maize, about the spacing to use, and she shows the spacing; or about seeds, and she shows the seeds, and the farmer can appreciate. With information, it does not feel so immediate.

She leans forward, wanting to sound more positive. Some people do appreciate information, though. Some farmers write into the Farmers Voice (FV) magazine. We joke, in passing, about how readers letters are at the front of her magazine and at the back in Spore, and about which is better. She tells of a farmer in the central region, whom she met at a workshop on effective communication. He told her 'I read an article about a farmer in another part of the country growing passion fruit and oranges, and I thought if my fellow farmer can do it, why not me?' Passion fruit is now his major source of income, and he is better able to survive. What he impressed on his fellow participants in the workshop was to appreciate knowledge, and to always seek it. For him, knowledge changed his life.

There was another farmer I wrote about, he didn t know English, so he couldn t read it himself. He was read about even in Denmark, where UNFFE s major donor is. A Danish farmers organisation got interested, and when they sent a film crew to Uganda they visited him. Finally he was given a special course in extension work, because he was seen as a farmer who can pass on knowledge to his fellow farmers. Believe you and me, he has become very confident; when he comes to the office now, he s not the same person I met the first time on his farm. He s blossomed, he ll come and ask for this and that, knowing that he knows what other people want to know.

Is everyone special like that farmer, we wonder? Not everyone: some read something, appreciate it and put it into practice, others will not do anything concrete. Is information, we chip in, a lot like seeds falling on fertile or stony ground, as in the Biblical tale? Jane develops the idea: it s not a question of stony ground. The land may well be fertile, but it may need rainfall. Some information may fall on its fertile land but it lacks rain. People s energy can do the same to information as rainfall to a seed.

She talks proudly about her organisation s radio shows, its cassette libraries for farmers in six languages. About how each copy of FV is read by four people, how it reaches schools, how she wants to increase circulation above the current ceiling of 2,000 and finance it with advertising.

What has disappointed her? The printed press s scant coverage of agriculture. The attitudes of journalists wanting facilitation and editors putting in news about growing beans, but not bigger issues which affect policy. She fires herself up and talks about holding a workshop for journalists, to win their pens.

Does she have a dream, a professional dream? Her eyes glitter more, her hand strokes the air firmly. I want to be in a network, helping get the right information to the farmers. There s a need for a one-stop shop but it hasn t happened yet because people she means investors, support agencies have not appreciated the value of information circulating. But, we all know, they haven t met Jane yet. Confidence personified.

[caption to illustration]

Jane Kyomuhendo Baitwa runs the information service of the Uganda National Farmers Federation (UNFFE) formerly the UNFA association in Kampala and is editor of their Farmers Voice magazine. She is a trained journalist with radio experience, and with a master s degree in political science from Makere University.

The opinions expressed in Viewpoint are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CTA.


Interactions between protein domains and their position and movement relative to each other are essential for the stability and normal functioning of a protein molecule. Features of the movement of domains may define the mechanism of enzymatic reactions. Therefore, the description of this motion is an important task in the analysis of the structures and functions of multidomain proteins. In the current work, we investigated the influence of pressure and temperature on changes in the movement of the two domains of the protein Nip7, expressed by deep-water (Pyrococcus abyssi) and shallow-water (Pyrococcus furiosus) archaea. The results of the present study show that the interdomain interfaces of the Nip7 proteins of P. abyssi and P. furiosus are formed by stable hydrophobic interactions. It was shown that high pressure and high temperature significantly changed the orientation of domains in Nip7 proteins which perhaps was connected with functional features of these domains. It was found that increasing the pressure significantly changed the angle of rotation of these domains, to a greater extent in the shallow-water protein, while an increase in temperature slightly reduced the angle of rotation of these domains. Moreover, the results suggest that the type of motion of the domains under study is similar to shear motion.


Competitive sports competitions' aerobics motions are elegant and artistic, and well received by national people; it has been rapidly developed and gradually popularized in Chinese universities campuses. Targeted at Chinese universities aerobics development factor "University students in school satisfaction with universities aerobics development", "Aerobics athletes training times", "Aerobics athletes duration per one training", "Aerobics athletes' age", "Aerobics coaches' age", "Aerobics coaches' education background", it makes factor analysis and gets aerobics development mainly rely on aerobics coaches and aerobics athletes themselves such two factors. Only the two are well mutually adjusted then can let Chinese aerobics to be better developed.


We compared growth rates and efficiencies of pelagic bacteria from an extremely acidic mining lake (pH 2.6, mean depth 4.6 m) supplied with different sources of carbon: (1) excreted by phytoplankton, (2) derived from benthic algae, (3) entering the lake via ground water, and (4) leached from leaf litter. Bacteria exhibited high growth rate and efficiency on exudates of pelagic and benthic algae. In contrast, they showed a lower growth rate and efficiency with organic carbon from ground water, and grew at a very high rate but a very low efficiency on leaf leachate. Results from stable isotope analyses indicate a greater importance of benthic exudates and leaf leachate for bacteria in the epilimnion, and a higher impact of ground water sources in the hypolimnion. Given the magnitude of differential source inputs into the lake, we suggest that benthic primary production was the most important carbon source for pelagic bacteria. The benthic-pelagic coupling seems to be more relevant in this shallow acidic lake with low pelagic carbon dioxide concentrations than in neutral lakes.


The aim of study was to determine whether summarizing skills could be developed in 4th grade primary school students. We designed a 5-month intervention programme as an experimental study, in which teachers trained students in the experimental group in their ability to summarize, which is one of the important strategies that enhance reading comprehension. 190 students in 4th grade from 8 primary schools in Slovenia participated in the study. We evaluated students' general reading competency, their metacognitive knowledge about reading and their ability to make summaries of two short and one longer expository text (pretest, posttest and follow-up test). The general reading competency explained the most variance in summarizing at pretest and posttest by experimental and control group of students. In the follow-up test, the summarizing from posttest was the strongest predictor in both groups and in the experimental group also the metacognitive knowledge about reading. The results showed that teachers can develop summarizing skills in students by systematically training them to use these skills, but the training effects decrease if the learning environment does not encourage students to use these skills.


More and more people use the Internet and for more purposes than for some years ago - for shopping, paying their bills etc. Using the Internet help people socializing in many ways, but it also brings problems - identity and privacy problems. To solve these problems, several companies and organizations are trying to build som kind of identity manager that shall help people to control their identities online. Two of them are PRIME, a European Union-financed project and Microsoft.The purpose of this essay is to describe a number of identity managers, and to compare CardSpace, built by Microsoft, and a prototype developed by PRIME, in more detail. The comparison will focus on history functionality that helps users keep track of data they have sent. To find out what people want to see in a history function like this, a user test was performed where 12 test persons evualated PRIME and CardSpace.The history function of PRIME is much more advanced than the history function of CardSpace. It enables users to search for transactions and it shows more details of each transaction. But, it should be added that PRIME is not a working program yet, just a prototype, and therefore it is easier to include functionality that the researchers wish to include, but that may be hard to realize. CardSpace is included in Windows Vista and should be possible to use if websites were CardSpace-enabled.The user test showed that people were positive to use an identity manager when they send information online. The program most of the test persons preferred was PRIME, because it enabled them to search for transactions. The test also resulted in some important criteria to think about when building a usable identity manager. They are:- Make a nice user interface that is easy to use, with a simple language.- Make it easy to find the transactions, e.g. via a search function, and make it possible to see all transactions in one place.- Show as much information about the transactions as possible.- Help functionality should exist and should also be searchable.- Integration of history function and the web browser would make it easier for the user


In this paper we propose an approach to exploit the fine-grained knowledge expressed by individual human annotators during a hate speech (HS) detection task, before the aggregation of single judgments in a gold standard dataset eliminates non-majority perspectives. We automatically divide the annotators into groups, aiming at grouping them by similar personal characteristics (ethnicity, social background, culture etc.). To serve a multi-lingual perspective, we performed classification experiments on three different Twitter datasets in English and Italian languages. We created different gold standards, one for each group, and trained a state-of-the-art deep learning model on them, showing that supervised models informed by different perspectives on the target phenomena outperform a baseline represented by models trained on fully aggregated data. Finally, we implemented an ensemble approach that combines the single perspective-aware classifiers into an inclusive model. The results show that this strategy further improves the classification performance, especially with a significant boost in the recall of HS prediction.


Ion chromatography (IC) is the premier technique for the separation of inorganic and organic ions. Two fundamental elution regimes, namely isocratic and gradient elution, are available for separation but both are often inadequate for the separation of complex mixtures. Hence, complex elution profiles involving multiple isocratic and linear gradient steps have become the most attractive solution to accomplish the desired separations. However, the number of parameters requiring trial-and-error optimisation of such elution profiles demands a huge investment in time. This problem can be solved through the development of in-silico (computerised) simulation, and ultimately optimisation, methods.
The Virtual Column Separation Simulator (Dionex Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA, USA) is an efficient commercial software package for simulating and optimising IC separations. However, it has a number of limitations. The objective of this study was to address the limitations of the Virtual Column Separation Simulator and improve its prediction and optimisation abilities. This project focussed on improving the algorithms used for simulation and modelling of retention and peak width.
This study commenced with an evaluation of the maximum tolerable prediction error thresholds for retention time and peak width needed for an accurate in-silico optimisation. A sample mixture is normally designed to be separated within a time window of less than 30 minutes. So the acceptable maximum prediction error evaluation was analysed based on a 30-min separation. This analysis indicated that retention time had a much greater influence than peak width on the accuracy of in-silico optimisation. It was found that the acceptable average error limits for representative prediction were 2.5% and 35% for retention time and peak width respectively.
Three retention time algorithms and two peak width models were proposed in this study for modelling IC separations. Prediction of analyte retention times under complex eluent profiles using these methods relied on monitoring the analyte displacement through the chromatographic column. The three devised algorithms mapped the position of the analyte in different ways where the position mapping methods of the three algorithms relied on mathematical iteration (which this algorithm was entitled the "linear analyte displacement model"), integrated displacement equations and numerical segmented isocratic steps. The three algorithms were found to be highly similar in their predictive errors, which were all 4% on average. Peak width modelling was much more difficult due to well known peak broadening processes. Two empirical peak width models were found to be viable for peak width simulation of analyte under complex eluent profiles. The first peak width model measured the compression exerted from each individual step using a weighting function with a compression term calculation. The second peak width model simulated the peak width using only the eluting retention factor under isocratic conditions. Both models were found to deliver predictive errors of 17% on average.
In summary, this study indicated that the retention time simulation of analytes using the newly derived models can be predicted with an average error of ≤ 4%, which is very close to the target acceptable average error limit of 2.5% required for reliable prediction. The second aspect of the modelling process investigated the broadening of the chromatographic during a separation. It was found that the width of an analyte peak could be simulated reliably using both of the derived models with an average error of ≤ 17%. This can be compared to the error threshold of up to 35% that was determined to be manageable for reliable peak width simulation. Hence, two peak width models investigated were deemed to achieve this target.
Retention prediction in the Virtual Column Separation Simulator requires the input of analyte information. This information is stored inside the pre-existing data library and is known as embedded data. This data has been collected over a period of 5 years, and to use this embedded data to predict analyte retention on newer columns could be problematic due to the variability in column manufacture and tubing configuration. This incompatibility issue was more obvious when this older embedded data, collected on 4 mm i.d columns, was used to predict separations on the new micro-bore (2 mm) and capillary (0.4 mm) IC columns as a result of the changes in column internal diameter that results in changes related to wall effects, phase ratios and total ion-exchange capacities. These changes will somewhat alter the overall separation selectivity. A method, which was coined "porting", has been used to calibrate the pre-existing data library with minimal experimental input. This process allowed the data to be "refreshed" for newer columns, along with those of different internal dimensions, and allowed retention time simulation to be reliably performed. By incorporation of this porting methodology for calibration and the linear analyte displacement model for retention prediction, a predictive error of 3% was achieved for these newer column formats while employing data collected on older column formats.


Generative models produce realistic objects in many domains, including text, image, video, and audio synthesis. Most popular models—Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)—usually employ a standard Gaussian distribution as a prior. Previous works show that the richer family of prior distributions may help to avoid the mode collapse problem in GANs and to improve the evidence lower bound in VAEs. We propose a new family of prior distributions—Tensor Ring Induced Prior (TRIP)—that packs an exponential number of Gaussians into a high-dimensional lattice with a relatively small number of parameters. We show that these priors improve Frechet Inception Distance for GANs and Evidence Lower Bound for VAEs. We also study generative models with TRIP in the conditional generation setup with missing conditions. Altogether, we propose a novel plug-and-play framework for generative models that can be utilized in any GAN and VAE-like architectures.


Worm containment must be automatic because worms can spread too fast for humans to respond. Recent work proposed network-level techniques to automate worm containment; these techniques have limitations because there is no information about the vulnerabilities exploited by worms at the network level. We propose Vigilante, a new end-to-end architecture to contain worms automatically that addresses these limitations.
 In Vigilante, hosts detect worms by instrumenting vulnerable programs to analyze infection attempts. We introduce dynamic data-flow analysis: a broad-coverage host-based algorithm that can detect unknown worms by tracking the flow of data from network messages and disallowing unsafe uses of this data. We also show how to integrate other host-based detection mechanisms into the Vigilante architecture. Upon detection, hosts generate self-certifying alerts (SCAs), a new type of security alert that can be inexpensively verified by any vulnerable host. Using SCAs, hosts can cooperate to contain an outbreak, without having to trust each other. Vigilante broadcasts SCAs over an overlay network that propagates alerts rapidly and resiliently. Hosts receiving an SCA protect themselves by generating filters with vulnerability condition slicing: an algorithm that performs dynamic analysis of the vulnerable program to identify control-flow conditions that lead to successful attacks. These filters block the worm attack and all its polymorphic mutations that follow the execution path identified by the SCA.
 Our results show that Vigilante can contain fast-spreading worms that exploit unknown vulnerabilities, and that Vigilante's filters introduce a negligible performance overhead. Vigilante does not require any changes to hardware, compilers, operating systems, or the source code of vulnerable programs; therefore, it can be used to protect current software binaries.


Although understanding causation is an essential part of nearly every problem domain, it has resisted formal treatment in the languages of logic, probability, and even statistics. Autonomous artificially intelligent agents need to be able to reason about cause and effect. One approach is to provide the agent with formal, computational notions of causality that enable the agent to deduce cause and effect relationships from observations. During the 1990s, formal notions of causality were pursued within the AI community by many researchers, notably by Judea Pearl. Pearl developed the formal language of structural models for reasoning about causation. Among the problems he addressed in this formalism was a problem common to both AI and law, the attribution of causal responsibility or actual causation. Pearl and then Halpern and Pearl developed formal definitions of actual causation in the language of structural models. Within the law, the traditional test for attributing causal responsibility is the counterfactual "but-for" test, which asks whether, but for the defendant's wrongful act, the injury complained of would have occurred. This definition conforms to common intuitions regarding causation in most cases, but gives non-intuitive results in more complex situations where two or more potential causes are present. To handle such situations, Richard Wright defined the NESS Test. Pearl claims that the structural language is an appropriate language to capture the intuitions that motivate the NESS test. While Pearl's structural language is adequate to formalize the NESS test, a recent result of Hopkins and Pearl shows that the Halpern and Pearl definition fails to do so, and this thesis develops an alternative structural definition to formalize the NESS test.


The human homeobox-containing gene Hox 2.1 (hHox 2.1) and its murine cognate mHox 2.1 are part of evolutionarily conserved gene clusters, encode an identical Antennapedia-type homeodomain, and are expressed in a similar pattern in the developing embryo. We have isolated cDNA clones of hHox 2.1 and found that the human/murine Hox 2.1 gene structure is strikingly conserved, with only 3 out of 269 amino acid differences in the entire predicted protein sequence. We show that purified hHox 2.1 protein is a sequence-specific DNA binding protein capable of binding to a variety of DNA sequences, including multiple sites in the promoter of the hHox 2.1 gene. In a footprint titration assay, the apparent affinity of the hHox 2.1 protein for a consensus binding site (LP) increases when the site is present in tandem copies. Quantitative footprint challenge experiments revealed that the in vitro half-life of the protein-DNA complex is less than 30 s for a single LP binding site (kd greater than 1.4 min-1), but 126 min for proteins bound to two tandem LP binding sites (kd = 5.5 x 10(-3) min-1). A domain distinct from the homeodomain is necessary for cooperative DNA binding, because a 61-amino-acid peptide containing only the Hox 2.1 homeodomain can specifically bind to LP sites, but exhibits no cooperativity. A different full-length human homeodomain protein, hHox 1.3, was also found to show cooperative DNA binding quantitatively similar to hHox 2.1. Therefore, cooperative DNA binding to adjacent sites may be a crucial component in the overall affinity of mammalian Antennapedia-type homeodomain proteins for their DNA target sites.


The emergence of informal settlements in Romania is the result of a mix of factors, including some social and urban planning policies from the communist and post-communist period. Squatting was initially a secondary effect of the relocation process and demolition of housing in communist urban renewal projects, and also a voluntary social and housing policy for the poorest of the same period. Extension and multiple forms of informal settlements and squatting were performed in the post-communist era due to the inappropriate or absence of the legislative tools on urban planning, properties' restitution and management, weak control of the construction sector. The study analyzes the characteristics and spatial typologies of the informal settlements and squatters in relationship with the political and social framework of these types of housing development.


Sorafenib (Nexavar) is an oral multi‐kinase inhibitor that targets tumor growth and angiogenesis, having encouraging efficacy and tolerability in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and other tumors. However, hand–foot syndrome (HFS), a frequently reported adverse event under sorafenib treatment, sometimes causes interruption of the treatment or dose reduction. This study was conducted to review sorafenib‐associated HSF in Japanese patients, to facilitate improvement of the management of HFS in clinical practice. We reviewed the combined results on HFS in three sorafenib studies in Japanese patients: (A) a phase II study of metastatic renal cell carcinoma; (B) a phase I study of solid tumor; and (C), phase I study of hepatocellular carcinoma. Severity of HFS was graded as 1–3 based on the modified grading scale of National Cancer Institute – Common Toxicity Criteria version 2.0 and Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events version 3.0. A total of 189 patients were included for analyses. The incidence of all‐grade HFS was 51% (55% in A, 39% in B and 44% in C), and the incidence of grade 3 HFS was 7% (9% in A, 0% in B and 7% in C). Incidence of HFS seemed dose‐dependent. These events were observed within 3–9 weeks after initiation of sorafenib treatment. The majority of HFS was manageable with symptomatic treatment and HFS caused permanent discontinuation of sorafenib in only one patient (in study A). The incidence of sorafenib‐associated HFS is high compared to other adverse events. However, the present analyses showed that HFS under sorafenib treatment is well manageable in Japanese patients.


In this article, we propose a flexible and efficient reversible logic synthesizer. It exploits the complementary advantages of two methods: Reed-Muller Reversible Logic Synthesis (RMRLS) and Decision Diagram Synthesis (DDS), and is thus called Reed-Muller Decision Diagram Synthesis (RMDDS). RMRLS does not scale to a large number of qubits (i.e., quantum bits). DDS tools, even though efficient, add a large number of ancillary qubits and typically incur much higher quantum cost than necessary. RMDDS overcomes these obstacles. It is flexible in the sense that users can either optimize the number of qubits or the quantum cost in the circuit implementation. It is also efficient because the circuits can be synthesized within user-defined CPU times. This combination of flexibility and efficiency has been missing from synthesizers presented earlier. When used to synthesize reversible functions, RMDDS reduces the number of qubits by up to 79.2p (average of 54.6p) when the synthesis objective is to minimize the number of qubits and the quantum cost by up to 71.5p (average of 35.7p) when the synthesis objective is to minimize quantum cost, relative to DDS methods. For irreversible functions (which are automatically embedded in reversible functions), the corresponding best (average) reductions in the number of qubits is 42.1p (22.5p) when minimizing the number of qubits, and in quantum cost, it is 63.0p (25.9p) when minimizing quantum cost.


I. GENERAL ARGUMENT Closely interrelated public opinion on trade, border security, and defense issues has divided Canadians along predictable and traditional lines that reflect the persistence of certain continuities. As always, Canadians differ sharply on relations with the United States. They apply their conception of this relationship to their positions on issues of the day, as on border security after September 11, and to Operation Iraqi Freedom and missile defense in early 2003. As usual this debate is playing out inside that most Canadian of institutions, the Liberal party. (1) How the Liberals handle their differences on these matters in their ongoing leadership exercise likely will determine how Canada defines its relationship with the US in the coming years. We can identify continuities or recurring themes in Canada's approach to the United States, and in Canadian foreign policy generally. In 1951 External Affairs Minister (and later Prime Minister) Lester Pearson observed at the height of the Cold War and the Korean War that "it is not very comfortable to be in the middle these days." (2) Pearson also conceded in 1951 that "the United States is now the dominating world power on the side of freedom. Our preoccupation is no longer whether the United States will discharge her international responsibilities, but how she will do it and whether the rest of us will be involved." (3) Here Pearson betrayed an early concern with process, or the practice of foreign policymaking. That is, he assigned importance to how decisions are made. Pearson and most Canadian political leaders since his time have expressed a preference for multilateral policymaking through institutions like the United Nations. Adapting Robert Keohane's definition, we may define multilateralism as a decision-making style or process seeking to coordinate national policies and undertake international initiatives in war and diplomacy through formal associations or institutions which countries support over time. (4) To over-generalize, we may divide most Canadians into three groups respecting their positions on Canada's desired relationship with the United States. Nationalists and continentalists represent the two polarities. Both may be found in the inclusive Liberal party. However, appropriately for Canada's ideologically flexible pivot party, neither polarity dominates within the party or in the general population. Many Canadians, and probably the majority of non-elites, fall somewhere in between. They harbor no ideologically driven agenda, but they wish Canada to safeguard its sovereignty and distinct identity from external (in Canada this means American) assimilation forces--up to a point. (5) Canada's nationalists, both internationalists and multilateralists on the left side of politics, believe that Canada should maintain a national image and reputation as different from the United States as possible. They worry that closer trade and border ties threaten Canada's sovereignty and endanger the survival of those differences that endure and matter to them. (6) But they confine their nationalist ardor to the relationship with the United States. They let their internationalism trump their nationalism when they eagerly surrender Canada's sovereignty to an array of multilateral institutions. Many nationalists deplore what they consider to be American arrogance, presumption, free-market economics, and great power tendencies toward unilateralism in foreign policy. By contrast, for them Canada exemplifies a diverse and multicultural "caring and sharing social mosaic buttressed by a government-sustained welfare state, a universal identity-conferring medicare system, and a middle-power commitment to multilateral resolutions to international crises through institutions like the UN and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and through activities like peacekeeping." (7) Nationalists fear that a closer relationship with the United States saps those qualities that provide a society and values that make Canada superior to its southern neighbor. …


Reconfigurability in versatile systems of modular robots is achieved by changing the morphology of the overall structure as well as by connecting and disconnecting modules. Recurrent connectivity changes can cause misalignment that leads to mechanical failure of the system. This paper presents a new approach to reconfiguration, inspired by the art of origami, that eliminates connectivity changes during transformation. Our method consists of an energy-optimal reconfiguration planner that generates an initial 2D assembly pattern and an actuation sequence of the modular units, both resulting in minimum energy consumption. The algorithmic framework includes two approaches, an automatic modeling algorithm as well as a heuristic algorithm. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by applying the algorithms to Mori, a modular origami robot, in simulation. Our results show that the heuristic algorithm yields reconfiguration schemes with high quality, compared with the automatic modeling algorithm, simultaneously saving a considerable amount of computational time and effort.


The present study was designed to evaluate the potential protective effects of the cysteinyl leukotriene receptor blocker montelukast (MNK) and the xanthine oxidase inhibitor febuxostat (FBX) and their combination on a model of acute gouty arthritis induced by intraarticular injection of monourate sodium crystal (MUC) injection in rats. Additionally, we established an HPTLC method for the quantitative determination of both drugs simultaneously and applied this method to detect this combination in rat plasma. In this study, the treated male Wistar rats were grouped as follows: a negative control group injected with phosphate buffer saline (PBS) and a positive control group injected with MUC in their tibiotarsal joint. Four groups were treated orally with diclofenac (4 mg kg-1), MNK (10 mg kg-1), FBX (5 mg kg-1) and MNK plus FBX before MUC injection in their tibiotarsal joints. MUC injection in joints without pretreatment led to a progressive significant increase in joint diameter and heavy leucocytic infiltration compared to the PBS-injected joints. Treatment with diclofenac or a combination of MNK and FBX significantly decreased both joint diameters and leucocytic infiltration compared to the MUC group. MNK or FBX treatment attenuated leucocytic infiltration and significantly decreased joint diameters compared to the MUC group. Thus, MNK and FBX can prevent the development of MUC-induced acute gouty arthritis in rats. Also, MNK can be an alternative preventive treatment, particularly in elderly patients who cannot tolerate NSAIDs or corticosteroid. Furthermore, a new thin-layer chromatographic method combined with fluorescence detection was developed and validated for the simultaneous estimation of a mixture of FBX and MNK in spiked human plasma. In this method, we employed TLC aluminium plates precoated with silica gel G 60F254 as the stationary phase and chloroform : methanol (9 : 1, v/v) as the mobile phase. The optimized mobile phase selected for development gives compact bands (Rf values are 0.28 and 0.63 for FBX and MNK, respectively). The emission intensities were measured using a K400 optical filter after excitation at 322 nm. The linear regression data for the calibration plots showed excellent linear relationship (r = 0.9990 and 0.9996 for FBX and MNK, respectively), and the linearity range was 10.0-800.0 ng per band for both drugs. According to ICH-guidelines, this method was validated for precision, accuracy, robustness and selectivity. Also, the limits of detection and quantitation were calculated. In addition, stability studies on the studied mixture were performed. Statistical analysis proved that this method is reproducible and selective for the estimation of a mixture of FBX and MNK.


As a top executive, you've almost certainly forged strategic alliances with other companies. Some of these deals have worked--but many others have likely failed. In fact, companies worldwide launch more than two thousand strategic alliances every year, and more than half never deliver as promised. In Strategic Alliances, Steve Steinhilber proves that, despite the odds, alliances are critical to the business strategy for companies competing globally: customers want integrated solutions to their problems, and that's pushing companies to work together to create differentiated offerings. Equally crucial, well-managed alliances generate important forms of business value, including new products and accelerated growth. Drawing on his experience as the head of Cisco's Strategic Alliances group, Steinhilber has created tools and guidelines that will help you forge alliances that work. He describes the three essential building blocks of successful alliances and explains how to establish: The right framework--by articulating how an alliance will help you achieve your company's strategic business goals and identifying potential partners The right organization--by staffing your alliance organization with the right people and constantly honing their skills The right relationships--by cultivating trust among the many key internal contacts in your organization and your alliance partners Engaging and authoritative, Strategic Alliances shows you how to manage strategic partnerships more effectively and maximize their value in a complex and changing business environment. From our new Memo to the CEO series--solutions-focused advice from today's leading practitioners.


The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare American and Thailand education for secondary school teachers, with an attempt to gain insight into the practices of the teacher education in the two countries, for the benefit of improvement of secondary teacher preparation in Thailand. A survey of literature pertaining to secondary teacher education was made. Supplementary information was obtained through a questionnaire from six secondary schools in Thailand. In addition, a number of bulletins from colleges in the United States were utilized to corroborate information gleaned from the literature. The findings were (1) professional education in the teacher preparation of Thailand was more emphasized than that in the United States, (2) a number of educational agencies in the United States contributed to the development of secondary teacher education while teacher education in Thailand developed solely through the work of the Ministry of Education, (3) teaching requirements in Thailand were not as rigid as in the United States, (4) the Thailand government appropriated a large portion of the national budget for educational development, but more and better trained personnel was needed, (5) in the United States at least a bachelor's degree was required for secondary teaching, but a minority of secondary school teachers in Thailand had a degree. The generalizations were (1) the welfare of the nation depended upon the education of its people; and the progress of education, in terms of quality and quantity, is a consequence of good education programs; (2) the preparation of secondary school teachers was as essential as secondary education itself; (3) a good teacher education provided for teaching competence; (4) education, like other branches of social science, needed improvement which call for experimentation and research; and it was also true in teacher education; (5) teaching as a profession was promoted through the works of professional organizations; (6) the heart of a teacher preparation program was the curriculum which comprised general education, specialized education, and professional education, or, non-professional education and professional education; (7) pre-service education and in-service education were necessary for the prospective teacher and the teacher who was teaching; (8) teachers and prospective teachers needed assistance and supervision; and (9) a good teacher education program should be cooperatively planned by professional educators, teachers, students, and the public. The recommendations were (1) more cooperative effort should be given to teacher education programs; (2) requirements for teachers at secondary level should become more rigid, especially in the area of professional education; (3) prospective teachers should become much more familiar with educational research; (4) relationship of the public with the teacher education program should be encouraged; (5) teaching as a profession should be raised to a higher standard through the strengthening of professional organizations and the strengthening of teacher preparation programs; (6) supervision of instruction should be expanded to provide assistance to all teachers in all areas of secondary teaching; and (7) the improvement of teacher education should be recognized as a crucial factor in making the teaching profession more attractive to capable young men and young women.


It is still difficult for biofuel producers to prove the contribution of their biofuels to reducing carbon emissions because the production of biofuel feedstocks can cause land use change (LUC), which in turn causes carbon emissions. A carbon map can serve as a basis to prove such contribution. I show how to calculate a carbon map according to the sustainability requirements for biofuel production adopted by the European Commission (EU-RED) for the Brazilian Cerrado. Based on the carbon map and the carbon balance of the production process I derive maps showing the possible emission savings that would be generated by biofuels based on soy and sugarcane if an area were to be converted to produce feedstock for this biofuel options. I evaluate these maps according to the criterion contained in the EU-RED of 35% minimum emission savings for each biofuel option compared to its fossil alternative. In addition, to avoid indirect LUC effects of the EU-RED that might offset any contribution of biofuels to reducing carbon emissions. I argue that all agricultural production should be subject to a carbon assessment. In this effort, the calculated carbon maps can be the basis for a climate friendly land use planning that is binding for all agricultural production in the Cerrado.


Deep learning has shown outstanding performance in various machine learning tasks. However, the deep complex model structure and massive training data make it expensive to train. In this paper, we present a distributed deep learning system, called SINGA, for training big models over large datasets. An intuitive programming model based on the layer abstraction is provided, which supports a variety of popular deep learning models. SINGA architecture supports both synchronous and asynchronous training frameworks. Hybrid training frameworks can also be customized to achieve good scalability. SINGA provides different neural net partitioning schemes for training large models. SINGA is an Apache Incubator project released under Apache License 2.


In just 24 sessions of about an hour, youll learn how to build robust, efficient business workflows with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Using a straightforward, step-by-step approach, each lesson builds the real-world foundation you need to succeed with WF from the ground up. Filled with hands-on code examples, this book walks you through creating every type of workflow supported by .NET 3.5s powerful new version of WF. One step at a time, youll discover how to host workflows, manage workflow lifecycles, integrate with Web services and WCF applications, create custom activities, and moreeverything youll need to solve real-world problems with WF! Step-by-step instructions carefully walk you through the most common WF questions, issues, and tasks. Q&As help you build and test your knowledge. Notes point out shortcuts, solutions, and potential problems to avoid. New terms are clearly defined and explained. Learn how to... Understand the value of workflows and their role in general .NET and advanced business process management systems Run workflows from and exchange data with .NET applications Create sequential, state-machine, and data-driven workflows Define multi-level approval workflows that execute in parallel and escalate Develop rulesets and manage them from SQL databases Track your workflows to make them more agile and governable Use Dynamic Update to change running workflows Work with exceptions, compensation, and transactions Expose workflows as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and call Web services from workflows via WCF Expose workflows as Web services and call Web services from workflows Create basic, queued, event-driven, and composite custom activities


'Land is integral to the identity of Pacific Islanders and in Fiji; this could not be truer. As Ratu Mosese Volavola once said, "For the Fijian community, their land is an extension of themselves. It is part of the Fijian soul, and the concept of the "vanua"-the land and the people-lies at the heart of Fijian identity. Land represents life and sustenance, race and culture, and Fijians cling fiercely to their ownership of it". Much has been written about the conflict that occurs between descendants of the indentured system and the iTaukei while at the same time, failing to
acknowledge other groups also competing for an identity in Fiji. The British colonial government's aims to protect the rights and way of life of indigenous Fijians (and colonial
economic imperatives) necessitated the importation of not only indentured Indians to Fiji but also groups of Melanesians from Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Although there is extensive inter-marriage with the iTaukei, the small Melanesian community retains a distinct identity. Many cannot claim land rights and so have settled on land that has been leased, in most cases, by the Anglican Church in Fiji. In 2008, a ruling in the High Court of Fiji was significant in the fight for an identity by this community by allowing them to remain on land that had been given
to them by the customary owners. This paper looks at the type of identity that they will construct for themselves after this ruling and whether it will be a separate identity from the iTaukei and whether the identity will offer them more or less legal protection from the government.'


The synthesis and characterization of a series of Ge,Al-ZSM-5 samples made in hydroxide media is reported. X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) indicate there is a germanium-rich overlayer on these crystals. Electron microscopy results validate this conclusion, and also indicate that the aluminum distribution through the samples is uniform. While powder X-ray diffraction does not reveal the presence of an impurity, the nitrogen adsorption isotherms show a reduced nitrogen uptake before the surface overlayer material is removed. The crystal size and the germanium uptake appear to correlate strongly with pH, as lower pH values lead to higher germanium uptake and larger crystal size. X-ray absorption spectroscopy indicates that the germanium is tetrahedrally coordinated in the zeolite framework, and that GeO2 is not present in these samples after they have been ion exchanged with sodium nitrate solutions. This work highlights some of the complexities involved in characterizing ...


The Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) is Canada's main electronic interbank funds transfer system that financial institutions use daily to transmit thousands of payments worth several billions of dollars. The LVTS is different than real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems because, while each payment is final and irrevocable, settlement occurs on a multilateral net basis at the end of the day. Furthermore, LVTS payments are secured by a collateral pool that mutualizes losses across participants in the event of a default. In this paper, we use the Bank of Finland Simulator to examine the implications of fully collateralizing LVTS payments, similar to an RTGS. An important caveat to consider, however, is that the simulations do not take into account the anticipated change in payment behaviour in response to a change in collateral requirements. In this regard, we include a queuing mechanism to at least reflect more efficient use of liquidity. The results indicate that collateral requirements vary by participant and some participants actually require less collateral in the simulation than what is required under the current LVTS design.


King County, Washington, adopted a Surface Water Design Manual in January 1990. This manual, which has served as a resource guide in developing similar manuals throughout the Pacific Northwest and across the United States, defines the analyses and measures required to control drainage impacts of development projects in the County. Since the Manual's adoption, ongoing research has suggested revisions to facility requirements for improved stormwater quantity and quality control. Subsequent state and federal regulations mandate revisions be made to the manual to further address water quality. Recent growth management policies dictate increased development densities within the urbanizing areas of the County. This paper summarizes the changes to be made to the Manual and describes the technical and political processes utilized to address conflicting concerns of the County, the development community and the general public.


Does the Bible justify Zionism? Since the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948, Torah and tank have become increasingly inseparable, resulting in the forced expulsion and subjugation of millions of indigenous Palestinians. Nur Masalha's groundbreaking new book traces Zionism's evolution from a secular settler movement in the late 19th century, to the messianic faith it has become today. He shows how the biblical language of 'chosen people' and 'promised land' has been used by many Christian and Jewish Zionists as the 'title deeds' for Israel, justifying ethnic division and violence. With Edward Said, Masalha argues that a new politics of peace can only be achieved through a single, democratic state, which replaces religious zealotry with secular equality.


Linear aminoalkanoic acids (AAAs) and mercaptoalkanoic acids (MAAs) were characterized as bifunctional ligands to tether CdSe QDs to nanocrystalline TiO2 thin films and to mediate excited-state electron transfer (ET) from the QDs to TiO2 nanoparticles. The adsorption of 12-aminododecanoic acid (ADA) and 12-mercaptododecanoic acid (ADA) to TiO2 followed the Langmuir adsorption isotherm. Surface adduct formation constants (Kad) were ∼10(4) M(-1); saturation amounts of the ligands per projected surface area of TiO2 (Γ0) were ∼10(-7) mol cm(-2). Both Kad and Γ0 differed by 20% or less for the two linkers. CdSe QDs adhered to ADA- and MDA-functionalized TiO2 films; data were well modeled by the Langmuir adsorption isotherm and Langmuir kinetics. For ADA- and MDA-mediated assembly values of Kad were (1.8 ± 0.4) × 10(6) and (2.4 ± 0.4) × 10(6) M(-1), values of Γ0 were (1.6 ± 0.3) × 10(-9) and (1.2 ± 0.1) × 10(-9) mol cm(-2), and rate constants were (14 ± 5) and (60 ± 20) M(-1) s(-1), respectively. Thus, the thermodynamics and kinetics of linker-assisted assembly were slightly more favorable for MDA than for ADA. Steady-state and time-resolved emission spectroscopy revealed that electrons were transferred from both band-edge and surface states of CdSe QDs to TiO2 with rate constants (ket) of ∼10(7) s(-1). ET was approximately twice as fast through thiol-bearing linker 4-mercaptobutyric acid (MBA) as through amine-bearing linker 4-aminobutyric acid (ABA). Photoexcited QDs transferred holes to adsorbed MBA. In contrast, ABA did not scavenge photogenerated holes from CdSe QDs, which maximized the separation of charges following ET. Additionally, ABA shifted electron-trapping surface states to higher energies, minimizing the loss of potential energy of electrons prior to ET. These trade-offs involving the kinetics and thermodynamics of linker-assisted assembly; the driving force, rate constant, and efficiency of ET; and the extent of photoinduced charge separation can inform the selection bifunctional ligands to tether QDs to surfaces.


Purpose: To describe dietary behaviors and examine relationships between selected factors and dietary behaviors among type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Method: Seventy T2DM patients from a hospital in Yogyakarta who met the inclusion criteria were recruited. Patient's dietary behaviors were measured by the Dietary Behaviors Questionnaire developed for this study with adequate reliability. The questionnaire comprised of four dimensions: recognizing the amount of calorie needs, selecting healthy diet, arranging a meal plan, and managing dietary behaviors challenges. Higher scores indicate better dietary behaviors. Result: More than half of the patients were women (54.3%) with an average age of 56.8 years and diabetes duration of 9.7 years. The results revealed a moderate level of the total score of dietary behaviors. Considering each dimension, the results showed a moderate level of recognizing the amount of calorie needs, selecting healthy diet, and managing dietary behaviors challenges. The patients reported a high level of arranging meal plans. Pearson's correlation was used to examine the relationships between selected factors and dietary behaviors. There was a positive significant relationship between the knowledge regarding diabetic diet and the total dietary behaviors scores (r = .36, p< .01). There were positive significant relationships between the knowledge regarding diabetic diet and the dimensions of recognizing the amount of calorie needs (r = .27, p< .05), selecting healthy diet (r = .35, p< .01), and managing dietary behaviors challenges (r = .28, p< .05). In contrast, the findings indicated no significant relationship between knowledge regarding diabetic diet and arranging a meal plan dimension. Furthermore, there was no significant relationship between the diabetes duration and dietary behaviors. Conclusion: Dietary behaviors among T2DM patients in Yogyakarta were at a moderate level. Knowledge regarding diabetic diet is essential. Further study regarding intervention in increasing patients' knowledge is needed to achieve better dietary behaviors. Keywords: Dietary behaviors, type 2 diabetes mellitus, knowledge, Yogyakarta, Indonesia


The chance discovery of a composer of whom the present writer had previously been unaware; who was allegedly a pupil of J.S. Bach; whose list of compositions occupied no small space in modern lexicographical entries, let alone in Eitner's now largely obsolete catalogue; who, according to Feder in his article entitled Decline and Restoration in Protestant Church Music - a History, though highly regarded in his day, had not received detailed consideration: such were the factors which gave impetus to the present day. No sooner was that study underway than it transpired that others, too, had been struck by the deficiency noted by Feder. Already in 1970, the American scholar Robert Ellis Snyder had prepared a doctoral thesis on the choral music of Gottfried August Homilius. More significantly, the East German scholar Hans Hohn had published a comprehensive survey of the composer's life and work which was subsequently published in a revised and shortened form in 1980. Far from undermining the work undertaken by the present writer, the above-mentioned studies helped to give it sharper focus. Snyder's contribution, valuable both for the attention drawn anew, through his editorial work in Volume 2, to the composer's music, and still more for his English translation of the Generalbass, nonetheless left room for deeper analysis and evaluation of Homilius' works. John's signal achievement, his painstaking collation of documentary evidence of the composer's life, remains largely inaccessible to the English reader who has no command of German. Further, his evaluation of the man and his compositions, based on an albeit rigorous survey, is vitiated by a tendency to play down the importance of theology in the formation of the composer's character and to portray him, in a one-sided way, as a torch-bearer for an emergent and emancipated bourgeoisie. Thirdly, John failed to distinguish correctly between the Passion Cantata So gehst du nun mein Jesu hin on the one hand and on the other the Markuspassion which bears the same subtitle and which turned out to be one of Homilius' lengthiest and most substantial works. These factors, then, helped to give shape to the present study which, as far as its author has been able to establish, is the first of substantial length to be undertaken in Britain. The first chapter of Volume I is devoted to a summary of Homilius' life. Relying, though by no means exclusively, on John, details are given of the composer's background, of his earlier life and education, of his first frustrated attempts to secure employment and his eventual success in being appointed organist of the Frauenkirche in Dresden in 1742, of his subsequent preferment in 1755 to the post of Cantor of the Kreuzkirche in the same city, of his varied life and success as cantor, teacher and organist over against a background of social upheaval, and finally of the circumstances of his death in 1785. Chapter 2 is deovoted to a general survey of the music. While account is taken of John's findings, the content is larely an independent survey of Homilius' music based on the main on manuscripts held in the Music Department of the Staatsbibliothek der Stiftung PreussischerKulturbesitz in West Berlin. The chapter contains details of the extant works, both published and in manuscript, new information about the dating of works established in the course of research, and, following a brief description of the main genres of music encountered (Oratorios, cantatas, motets and settings of the Magnificat), a discussion of the texts which underpin the works. Attention is then directed to the music: to the characteristics of the composer's musical language and to the techniques of composition and orchestration which he employs. From this study there emerges the picture of a composer who had full command of the musical dialects of his day, but whose obedience to a task which was essentially musico-theological kept him from producing music of lasting appeal. Chapters 3 and 4 constitute the main burden of the present study. The first of these is devoted to a study of the St Mark Passion both as a structure and as a theological statement. Through detailed analysis and comparison with similar works it is suggested that Homilius' work has its own particular theological stamp, in particular that he is more concerned with the life which faces his listeners in the here and now and with present moral choices than with affording to the listener a spiritual experience of the road to Golgothe. Unlike J.S. Bach who is content to let the gospel speak for itself, Homilius incorporates in the work a particular theological view of the work of Christ. Both factors conspire with others of a more musical nature to deprive this work of that timeless quality which characterises Bach's great Passions. In Chapter 4 the music is subjected to systematic analysis. If the arias emerge as the least satisfactory component, the recitatives are remarkably fluent, and the work as an entity proves to have been carefully and indeed ingeniously planned. Conclusions are drawn in Chapter 5, though a review of the most important literature, about the man, the composer and the St Mark Passion in particular. While there is some evidence to support the view, championed by John, that Homilius had certain progressive reflexes, Rudolf Steglich's 1915 analysis of him as an essentially conservative being seems the more perceptive and compelling, however dubious his comparison of Homilius with C.P.E. Bach. As a composer Homilius had great facility, but his musical language, shot through with gracious vocabulary and popular idiom, lacked innate strength. It is a language limited, too, by the composer's intellectual horizons and by his very pre-occupation with theology and his ecclesiastically based meier. As an oratorio Passion the St Mark Passion, a monumental work, is unique among the pieces which Homilius composed for performance during Holy Week. Of his entire oeuvre this work above all is both an expression of his debt to the Baroque past and at the same time an acknowledgement that he has left that past far behind. Volume I is furnished with three appendices. The first is devoted to a Choralbuch which sheds light both on the dating of works and on Homilius' treatment of the chorale. The second contains details of larger works and cantatas in manuscript. Musical incipits are given, where they were available, in order to facilitate more reliable identification of works. Appendix 3 contains diagrams and musical examples relevant to Chapters 2 and 4. Volume II contains a performance edition of Homilius' St Mark Passion furnished with a 3-part Critical Apparatus, containing 1) Text and Translation, 2) Notes on the Edition - including details of the manuscript, its provenance, an attempt to date the work, and an evaluation of its dedication to Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia - and 3) Notes on Performance.


This paper proposes a unique overview of trade policies trends since the launch of the Doha Round, based on detailed data on tariffs and trade covering 130 countries. We show that regionalism has delivered limited effective liberalization so far, leading to only a 0.3 percentage point (p.p.) cut in the worldwide average applied tariff duty between 2001 and 2013. WTO commitments (1.0 p.p. average cut) and unilateral liberalizations on a most-favored-nation (MFN) basis (1.3 p.p.) mattered far more on average, with more uneven consequences. As a result, we reckon that trade policy changes between 2001 and 2013 more than halved the worldwide welfare gains to be expected from the tariff-cutting provisions of the hypothetical Doha Agreement. If all ongoing RTA negotiations were concluded, expected gains would fall to one-third of their 2001 level.


Since the past three decades, numerous contributions have been made by the traditional finance proponents in assisting investors making good investment decisions assuming that they are rational decision makers, and unbiased in predicting the future. Nevertheless, proponents of behavioural finance always argued that people do act in irrational manner and often make predictable errors in their forecasts thus violated these assumptions. Market anomalies and crashes are some of the examples that explain the existence of psychological bias that lead to inefficient outcomes. When come to investing, different investors would have different investment style and strategy, depending on their objectives. Some don't even have strategy and would rather ask for 'hot tips' or listening to rumours. Prior studies revealed that some investors would prefer listening to strangers when the stock is fundamentally strong and consistent with their investment goals. This consequently would affect their investment objectives, causes mispricing, discourage trading among market participants and contribute towards market inefficiencies. Thus, in line to address this gap, the main objective of this research is to study the factors that influence investors' decision-making style and investment success. The research framework is adopted from Muhammad and Abdullah (2009), which suggested that investors' decision-making style and investment success could be influenced by the ability to analyze the environmental, financial and economic information (i.e rational manner) and individuals' emotions and frame of references (irrational manner). The research identified that investors' decision-making style is heavily influenced by financial analysis in which contributes towards their investment decision success. In other words, investors are rational when making decision investing in the capital market. On the other hand, other variables do not show any significant relationship with the dependant variable.


The gastric antral mucosa was studied histologically in 22 patients with atrophic gastritis, of whom 11 had high levels and 11 had normal levels of serum gastrin. The antrum was graded histologically from normal to grade 3 gastritis. All patients with hypergastrinaemia (nine seropositive and two seronegative for parietal cell antibody) had either a normal antrum or minimal (grade 1) antral gastritis. In contrast all but one patient without raised serum gastrin (nine seronegative and two seropositive for parietal cell antibody) had severe (grades 2-3) antral gastritis. Thus circulating gastrin levels observed in patients with gastritis and achlorhydria can be directly related to the presence or absence of antral mucosal damage. Comparison of the histological appearances of the antral mucosa with serum gastrin and parietal cell antibody status has provided a basis for the separation of two distinctive forms of atrophic gastritis.


An in vitro 3D system enables testing of pro- and anti-angiogenic factors. New blood vessels form from existing ones through a process called angiogenesis. Excessive or impaired angiogenesis contribute to various diseases, including cancer and diabetic retinopathy (excessive angiogenesis) or diabetic foot ulcers and impaired wound healing (impaired angiogenesis). Thus, drugs that can influence this morphogenetic process are clinically important; however, the currently available methods to assay the effects of such drugs are limited. Nguyen et al. developed a three-dimensional platform consisting of two cylindrical channels in a collagen matrix. Into one channel, endothelial cells were injected and formed a "parent" vessel through which medium was perfused; into the other channel, various pro- or anti-angiogenic cocktails were perfused, creating a gradient through the intervening matrix. Introduction individually of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF), or monocyte chemotactic protein-1 (MCP-1) failed to stimulate invasion of endothelial cells into the matrix, but introduction of sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) or the phorbol ester PMA stimulated migration of single cells (S1P) or collective cell migration (PMA). Two different cocktails containing combinations of these factors stimulated angiogenic sprouting that ultimately resulted in an endothelial lining of the factor-delivery channel and microvessels connecting the two channels. The integrity of the connected vessels was confirmed by tracking beads introduced into the vessels. Analysis of the morphological characteristics of the newly sprouting vessels confirmed that they recapitulated in vivo events, such as the formation of filopodia-extending tip cells and polarized stalk cells. Although introduction of either a VEGF inhibitor or an inhibitor of the S1P receptor blocked angiogenesis, examination of the morphological characteristics revealed differential effects on sprouting that depended on the inhibitor and the growth factor cocktail into which the inhibitor was introduced. Thus, this system could be useful in exploring mechanisms that regulate various steps in the angiogenic process and in screening for factors or drugs that alter this complex process. D.-H. T. Nguyen, S. C. Stapleton, M. T. Yang, S. S. Cha, C. K. Choi, P. A. Galie, C. S. Chen, Biomimetic model to reconstitute angiogenic sprouting morphogenesis in vitro. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 110, 6712–6717 (2013). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The Construction Industry in Australia is plagued by mistrust and deception and the biggest feeder to this environment is the volatile relationship between the projects' main contractor and its subcontractors. To date the majority of the research inquiry has largely centred on the main contractor's perspective with little consideration given to the views and opinions of subcontractors. This is a working paper and is part of a wider research project which aims to provide academics and practitioners with factors influencing distrust within the contractual relationship. Hence this research investigates the importance of subcontractors to industry and the influencing factors that promote the lack of collaboration and distrust. The initial findings are presented based on literature review and a structured questionnaire distributed to 30 randomly selected Australian contractors working in the commercial construction industry operating in Melbourne, Victoria. The findings suggest that the contractual obligations of a standard form contract such as overtime, retention payments, unclear scope of works, unsigned variation dockets, variation works, hidden clauses in contracts, withholding drawing revisions and extension of time were to blame, as well as deceptive measures which have now become standard practice and occur on-site daily.


Measurements of urban tree canopy cover are crucial for managing urban forests and required for the quantification of the benefits provided by trees. These types of data are increasingly used to secure funding and justify large-scale planting programs in urban areas. Comparisons of tree canopy measurement methods have been conducted before, but a rapidly evolving set of new technologies and applications may leave urban foresters wondering, "Which method is most appropriate for my circumstances?" This analysis compares two well-established measures of local tree canopy and building cover with a third, relatively untested technique. Field-based visual estimations (using the USDA Forest Service's i-Tree protocols), summaries of highresolution land cover data using geographic information systems (GIS), and an analysis of skyward-oriented hemispherical photographs at 215 roadside sites across the five diverse counties of New York City, New York, U.S., are the methods evaluated herein. The study authors found no statistically significant differences between the methods when comparing tree canopy; however, the hemispherical camera had a tendency to overestimate building coverage. It is concluded that hemispheric photo techniques are understudied in urban areas, and that the i-Tree and GIS-based approaches are complementary and reinforcing tools indispensable for both the urban forest management and research communities.


The Management of Aquatic Ecosystems through Community Husbandry was demonstrated in Hail Haor from 1999 to 2008 to ensure sustainable wetland resources management and conservation. This paper focused the importance of diversified livelihood options for the resources users to increase income, diversify income sources and improve the wetland productivity. A long-term support to 2,004 resources users was provided to explore income generation schemes through skills and credit. Income generation activities were adopted in 15 different types of trades that covered poultry and livestock rearing, fish culture, operating small business, tailoring or establishing tree nursery. These offered greater income and stability for the resources users. The overall income gained by the resources users around 64% where income generation activities contributed 50% of the total income they gained in 2006. Fishing effort was reduced almost 43% and over 14% fishers left fishing. New livelihoods helped them moving into other occupations reducing dependency on wetland resources that enabled habitat and fish stock recovery. Exploring diversified livelihoods could help the resources users to involve in wetland resources restoration process without livelihood deprivation. Key words : Resources user; livelihood option; fishing effort; wetland restoration; resources conservation DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jowe.v5i0.4905 J Wet Eco 2011 (5): 59-65


Aversive emotions are likely to be a key source of irrational human decision-making but still little is known about the underlying neural circuitry. Here, we show that aversive emotions distort trust decisions and cause significant changes in the associated neural circuitry. They reduce trust and suppress trust-specific activity in left temporoparietal junction (TPJ). In addition, aversive emotions reduce the functional connectivity between TPJ and emotion-related regions such as the amygdala. We also find that the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) plays a key role in mediating the impact of aversive emotions on brain-behavior relationships. Functional connectivity of right pSTS with left TPJ not only predicts mean trust taking in the absence of negative emotions, but aversive emotions also largely remove this association between TPJ-pSTS connectivity and behavioral trust. These findings may be useful for a better understanding of the neural circuitry of affective distortions and may thus help identify the neural bases of psychiatric diseases that are associated with emotion-related psychological and behavioral dysfunctions.


The utility of the SPAD-502 chlorophyll meter for nondestructive and rapid field determination of leaf nitrogen (N) has been demonstrated in agricultural crops, but this technology has not yet been extended to woody crop applications. Upper canopy leaves from a 5-year-old plantation of two eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides Bartr. ex Marsh.) clones established on a former agricultural field were collected to determine the relationship between SPAD values and foliar N. The two clones, Stoneville-66 and Stoneville-75, differed in chlorophyll concentrations but had similar leaf N concentrations; relationships between N, chlorophyll, and SPAD values were not influenced by clone. Total chlorophyll was closely associated with total N concentration (mass basis) and content (area basis) (r 2 = 0.76 and 0.66, respectively), and SPAD values accurately predicted total N concentration and content (r2 = 0.74 and 0.67, respectively). Results from this study indicate that SPAD-502 values < 32 signify a N deficiency level severe enough to limit the productivity of eastern cottonwood. The SPAD-502 chlorophyll meter shows promise as a tool for rapid field estimation of leaf N concentration or content in eastern cottonwood trees. Our findings support the development of this technology for use in eastern cottonwood or other short-rotation woody crop applications. Future investigations should be expanded to examine other eastern cottonwood clones on other site types and to standardize sampling protocols for various stages of tree phenology.


Core competence as a concept has been implemented and studied within the for-profit sector for some decades. The concept is used to understand, develop and sustain competitive advantage and, in contrast to purely market oriented strategies, takeoff from the internal unique strengths within organizations. There exists almost no research on or use of the core competence concept within the non-profit sector. However leaders and decision-makers at non-profit organizations are also challenged to develop their organizations, either to be relevant for its target group or to compete for funding. Doing this without renouncing on the mission and core values requires appropriate strategies and a well-developed compass. The concept of core competence is anticipated to contribute to such processes. This thesis sets out to study whether the concept of core competence can be identified within the sector, and if so, how it can be described and how it is linked to associated concepts, and particularly, how the model for this proposed by Ljungquist (2008, 2010) can be applied. The thesis also explores how the concept of core competence is linked to non-profit sector specific characteristics, more specifically in what way core competence is related to the mission of the organization and how resources unique to non-profit organizations like members, volunteers and supporters possibly contribute to core competence. Finally, the notion of a special added value (Weerawardena and Mort, 2001; Wijkstrom and Malmborg, 2005) among NPOs will be discussed in relation to core competence as defined by the NPOs included in this paper. The thesis is based on a multiple-case study that includes two national organizations in Sweden and two local organizations in Canada. Findings indicate that core competence exists within the four organizations and that it is linked to each organization's mission. Also, it is indicated that resources are linked not only by its utilization of, but also by its contribution, to core competence. In other aspects, core competence and its associated concepts identified concur with models developed for the for-profit sector. The characteristics of support mechanisms, like systems, routines, capacities and communication are similar as well as other competencies that have the characteristics of development and adaptation.


In Environmentalism Unbound, Robert Gottlieb proposes a new strategy for social and environmental change that involves reframing and linking the movements for environmental justice and pollution prevention. According to Gottlieb, the environmental movement's narrow conception of environment has isolated it from vital issues of everyday life, such as workplace safety, healthy communities, and food security, that are often viewed separately as industrial, community, or agricultural concerns. This fragmented approach prevents an awareness of how these issues are also environmental issues.After tracing a history of environmental perspectives on land and resources, city and countryside, and work and industry, Gottlieb focuses on three compelling examples of this new approach to social and environmental change. The first involves a small industry (dry cleaning) and the debate over pollution prevention approaches; the second involves a set of products (janitorial cleaning supplies) that may be hazardous to workers; and the third explores the obstacles and opportunities presented by community or regional approaches to food supply in the face of an increasingly globalized food system.


The chiral lattice is a unique structural network not symmetric to its mirror image, and with a negative Poisson's ratio. Previous investigations have considered this structural network for the design of superior structural components with sandwich construction, but these were limited by the in-plane Poisson's ratio predicted to be exactly -1. This paper presents estimates of the mechanical properties of the chiral lattice obtained from a multi-cell finite-element model. It is shown that the chiral lattice has a shear stiffness bound by that of the triangular lattice and it is very compliant to direct stresses. The minimum in-plane poisson's ratio is estimated to be approximately -0.94.


This paper proposes a novel non-parametric multidimensional convex regression estimator which is designed to be robust to adversarial perturbations in the empirical measure. We minimize over convex functions the maximum (over Wasserstein perturbations of the empirical measure) of the absolute regression errors. The inner maximization is solved in closed form resulting in a regularization penalty involves the norm of the gradient. We show consistency of our estimator and a rate of convergence of order $ \widetilde{O}\left( n^{-1/d}\right) $, matching the bounds of alternative estimators based on square-loss minimization. Contrary to all of the existing results, our convergence rates hold without imposing compactness on the underlying domain and with no a priori bounds on the underlying convex function or its gradient norm.


The focus of this study is to analyze how Nicaraguan workers in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors were affected by structural adjustment programs. I analyze three objective well-being indicators: health, education and material well being. Previous research on Nicaragua has investigated how structural adjustment has affected the agricultural and manufacturing sectors separately. This study aims to seek out how the two sectors are affected differently or similarly by structural adjustment. The data analyzed for this research are from a survey conducted by Measure Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). Measure DHS conducts nationally representative, population-based surveys in developing countries. My dependent variables include: literacy, highest education achieved, ownership of radio, ownership of telephone, number of rooms for sleeping, material used to construct the floor, and immunization for Diphtheria, Polio and Measles. Three departments were analyzed to represent the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. Managua represents the manufacturing sector, Chinandega represents the agricultural sector and the RAAS, because of its autonomous nature is used as a control variable. This study utilizes two representative household surveys 1997(11528 households) and 2001 (11328 households). Data analysis revealed that the manufacturing sector made more improvements than the agricultural sector in education and material-well being, and the agricultural sector made more improvements than the manufacturing sector in health. Overall, Nicaraguan workers in the agricultural sector were worse off as a result of structural adjustment than workers in the manufacturing sector.


In a study of the division of professional fees in 74 large, public company bankruptcy cases concluded from 1998 through 2003, we find that 79% of court-awarded fees are awarded for services rendered directly to the debtor in possession. Only 20% are awarded for services rendered to creditors committees, only one half of one percent are awarded for services rendered to equity committees, and less than one percent are awarded for services rendered by court appointed professionals. Fifty-three percent of the fees were awarded to attorneys, 42% to financial advisors, 5% to accountants, and a fraction of 1% to all other professions combined. Of the 53% that went to attorneys, more than two thirds went to bankruptcy attorneys and less than one third went to "special" or "ordinary course" counsel performing nonbankruptcy work. We estimated regression models for the fees of each of five types of professionals: (1) attorneys, (2) DIP bankruptcy attorneys, (3) DIP special attorneys, (4) financial advisors, and (5) DIP financial advisors. Debtor size, case duration, and the number of attorney firms working were the principal determinants of attorneys fees. But those factors were only weak determinants of financial advisors' fees. The strongest determinants of financial advisors' fees were court (the Delaware and New York courts awarded more to financial advisors) and the trend over time. Over the period of our study, the fees of financial advisors increased at the rate of 25% per year. Courts did not award higher fees to financial advisors in cases where the debtor sold its business or a controlling interest in its business. By comparing the results of our study with the results of LoPucki and Whitford's study of reorganizations in early 1980s, we find a sharp increase in the employment of financial advisors by creditors' committees and a sharp decline in the employment of professionals by equity committees. We found that several factors thought to cause DIP bankruptcy attorneys fees to be higher in fact did not. They include whether the DIP lead attorneys were a New York firm, whether the DIP lead attorneys were from a city distant from the courts, and the hourly rates charged by the attorneys.


Increases in human population and activities have lead to significantly enhanced inputs of carbon and nitrogen fiom both point and difiuse sources to rivers, estuaries, and coastal seas, altering the global carbon and nitrogen biogeochemical cycles. This increased load has had a marked ecological impact globally, with detrimental changes to primary production, conununity stricture and water quality. Understandmg the nature and cycling of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and nitrogen (DON), significant components of the global carbon and nitrogen cycles, in estuaries will provide better estimates of C and N transport to coastal and ocean waters. This study involves: (1) optimisation of the h i ^ temperature catalytic oxidation (HTCO) analytical method used for reliable analysis of DOC and total, dissolved nitrogen (TDN), (2) investigation of spatial and temporal variations of DOC and DON, and other reliated determinands, in two contrasting estuarine environments, the Yealm and Plym, in south-west England, (3) investigation of DON bioavailability using a bacterial incubation experiment, and (4) preliminary work on the use of stable nitrogen isotope ratios to identify DON sources. The sampling and analytical protocols required for rapid, precise and reliable determinations of DOC and DON, using the coupled HTCO-chemiluminescence technique, are described ui this study. This metiiod gave detection limits of approxunately 6.2 \iM C and 0.46 | i M N , and precisions of < 2-3 % and < 3-5 % (n=3-5) for DOC and TDN, respectively. The mean DOC and TDN of the CRMs analysed, over a period of 2 years, were 48 ± 3.9 | i M C and 20 ± 1.5 nM N that were close to the certified values of 44 45 pM C and 21 | i M N , respectively. Concentrations of DOC ranged from 61 | i M C at the seaward end to 335 pM C at the fresh water end for the Yealm, and 71 290 |j,M C for the Plym. DON concenfrations were mamly m the range of 1.8 62 pM N for the Yeahn, and 4-94 \iM N for the Plym. The enhanced DON concenfrations in the Yealm might be the result of sewage discharges and agricultural run off, while in the Plym they may be due to sewage discharge, run off from the Chelson Meadow landfill and other anthropogenic activities within the urban Plym catchment. Except during a limited numbers of surveys, DOC and DON generally behaved in a non conservative manner in these estuaries. Nifrate and filterable reactive phosphate (FRP) behaved relatively conservatively m the Yealm, but were more non-conservative in the Plym. The spatial distribution of DOC and DON concenfrations in the Plym Estuary appeared much more mfluenced by anthropogenic uiputs relative to distributions in the Yealm Estuary. The seasonal variation of DOC and DON was characterised by lower concenfrations during winter and a slight increase in spring and suimner followed by highest concenfrations during late smmner and auturrm, suggesting a sfrong link to seasonally variable phytoplankton production. The confribution of DON to die TDN pool ranged between 4 and 79 % for the Yealm, and 3.5 84 % for the Plym. Higher values (53 79 %) were observed during late summer, emphasising the important contributions of DON to TDNpool. Incubation experiments usmg the Plym Estuary water mdicated that 30 58 % of DON was bioavailable for heterofrophic bacterial utilisation; at the same time nitrate concentrations increased by 9 35 %, presumably through mineralization of DON. From the studies undertaken in the present work, it may be concluded that the omission of DON in estuarine and coastal water studies will result in underestimation of the total nifrogen load. As a significant part of the DON appeared to be bioavailable, ignoring this fraction will result in an underestimation of eutrophication pressures on coastal and ocean waters. iv


This work is an ethnography of the Serbian black metal music scene. Through
ethnographic descriptions and a study of the manner in which social scientists have
conceptualized youth movements and scenes in the past decades it is hoped to present a
study of an international phenomenon from the perspective of a Serbian music scene.
Many of the current anxieties concerning the post-socialist decline in mainstream
consensus and its substitution with forms of youth culture as 'politics by other means' will
be addressed.
These social scenes are a response to the demands and possibilities that
contemporary modernity produces in the Balkans and within capitalist society in general.
Both Serbia and the black metal scene, have in the past been represented as both 'other'
and dangerous to the body politic of Europe. The disjuncture between perception and
experience are explored here through techniques of ethnographic representation and
embodied descriptions of the attraction and internal logics that operate both within Serbia
and the wider black metal music scene.
Hospitality, scene myth-making, cathartic effervescence, masculinity and a
'volkish' performance of identity are some of the themes explored here through the
medium of music and its capacity to both mirror and contest extremes of ideology and
violence. This work also takes into account the 'flows' of influence and discourse that
exist in scenic networks that link Scandinavian Satanic Paganism, the extreme right in
Polish and Russian metal music and a receptive but deeply individualistic Serbian version
of a shared scenic space. Despite the scenes' links to extremist discourses this thesis
reveals insights into a (scene based) virulently patriotic Pan-Slavic identity. An identity
which manages to regularly contradict and efface many of the tensions that outside
observers would typically expect to exist between Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians and their
surrounding neighbors, in reflexive and surprising ways.


Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.


Co-teaching can be defined with a multitude of formats in a variety of educational settings. Its underlying concept is that at least two professionals collaborate during their instruction and strengthen their delivery, resulting in improved student outcomes. Partnerships that can be deemed as co-teaching could include pairing various combinations of university instructors, teachers of English-language learners, special education service providers, and student teachers but the following review of co-teaching targets the special education service model.
 In the preschool through high school setting, the continuing trend toward greater inclusion of students with disabilities means that all teachers are faced with teaching their content to increasingly diverse students. A popular service used to accomplish inclusive practices from preschool to high school is co-teaching. Co-teaching is a service by which students with disabilities and their teachers collaborate together for the purpose of providing students with and without disabilities access to the general education curriculum with specially designed instruction. Co-teaching usually occurs for a designated portion of the instructional day.
 By carefully planning together, co-teaching pairs provide more intense instruction to the entire class based on the general education content and the learning goals for students with disabilities. While instructing together, both teachers often form smaller instructional groups for more individualized lessons. The co-teachers use their assessment data to inform future instruction within the inclusive classroom. By implementing the effective co-teaching practices of shared planning, instructing, and assessing, teachers become equal partners for the benefit of all students.


Objectives To evaluate: (1) to what extent family carers of people supported by specialised palliative care services felt they had been provided with information, support and aftercare and (2) how this varied by type of palliative care service, length of enrolment and characteristics of deceased. Methods A cross-sectional postal survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire with nine items on information, support and aftercare provided by specialised palliative care services to family carers. Flemish family carers of people who had made use of specialised palliative care services at home or in hospital were contacted. Results Of all primary family carers (response rate of 53.5% resulting in n=1504), 77.7% indicated they were asked frequently by professionals how they were feeling. Around 75% indicated they had been informed about specific end-of-life topics and around 90% felt sufficiently supported before and immediately after the death. Family carers of people who had died in a palliative care unit, compared with other types of specialised palliative care services, indicated having received more information, support and aftercare. Conclusions Family carers evaluate the professional assistance provided more positively when death occurred in a palliative care unit. Policy changes might be needed to reach the same level of care across all specialised palliative care services.


PURPOSE
The purpose of this paper was to compare the ability of fluorescence-aided caries excavation (FACE) to remove infected dentin in primary teeth with that of conventional methods.

METHODS
Sixty-six extracted carious primary teeth were divided according to lesion size into 3 groups of 22 teeth. Caries excavation was carried out with a slow-speed handpiece and round burs for all groups. In the first group, caries was excavated conventionally using visual tactile criteria. In the second group, a caries detector dye was used to detect carious dentin. In the FACE group, cavities were excited with violet light (370-420 nm) and observed through a 530 nm highpass filter. Orange-red fluorescing areas were removed. Undecalcified thin slices were prepared, stained with Giemsa, and examined for presence of infected dentin using light microscopy. Four samples were lost during processing.

RESULTS
Histology showed infected dentin in significantly less FACE samples (3 of 22) compared to conventional excavation (9 of 20; P=.03), but not significantly less compared to caries detector (5 of 20; P=.35).

CONCLUSIONS
Within the limitations of this in vitro study, it can be concluded that fluorescence-aided caries excavation is more effective than conventional excavation in removal of infected primary dentin.