The three-dimensional (3D) metric reconstruction of a scene from two-dimensional images is a fundamental problem in Computer Vision. The major bottleneck in the process of retrieving such structure lies in the task of recovering the camera parameters. These parameters can be calculated either through a pattern-based calibration procedure, which requires an accurate knowledge of the scene, or using a more flexible approach, known as camera autocalibration, which exploits point correspondences across images. While pattern-based calibration requires the presence of a calibration object, autocalibration constraints are often cast into nonlinear optimization problems which are often sensitive to both image noise and initialization. In addition, autocalibration fails for some particular motions of the camera.
To overcome these problems, we propose to combine scene and autocalibration constraints and address in this thesis (a) the problem of extracting geometric information of the scene from uncalibrated images, (b) the problem of obtaining a robust estimate of the affine calibration of the camera, and (c) the problem of upgrading and refining the affine calibration into a metric one. In particular, we propose a method for identifying the major planar structures in a scene from images and another method to recognize parallel pairs of planes whenever these are available. The identified parallel planes are then used to obtain a robust estimate of both the affine and metric 3D structure of the scene without resorting to the traditional error prone calculation of vanishing points. We also propose a refinement method which, unlike existing ones, is capable of simultaneously incorporating plane parallelism and perpendicularity constraints in the autocalibration process. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods are robust to image noise and provide satisfactory results.


In this paper, we examine the problem of count data clustering. We analyze this problem using finite mixtures of distributions. The multinomial distribution and the multinomial Dirichlet distribution (MDD) are widely accepted to model count data. We show that these two distributions cannot be the best choice in all the applications, and we propose another model called the multinomial generalized Dirichlet distribution (MGDD) that is the composition of the generalized Dirichlet distribution and the multinomial, in the same way that the MDD is the composition of the Dirichlet and the multinomial. The estimation of the parameters and the determination of the number of components in our model are based on the deterministic annealing expectation-maximization (DAEM) approach and the minimum description length (MDL) criterion, respectively. We compare our method to standard approaches such as multinomial and multinomial Dirichlet mixtures to show its merits. The comparison involves different applications such as spatial color image databases indexing, handwritten digit recognition, and text document clustering.


Mountain pine beetle (MPB) infestation and salvage logging create a post‐disturbance landscape composed of a patchwork of alive, dead, and clearcut forest stands. Subsequent impacts on runoff generation in snowmelt‐dominated hydrological regimes are largely a function of the proportion of landscape covered by each stand type, but basic information on snow accumulation variations between stand types following beetle infestation is lacking. This study examines snow accumulation in the post‐disturbance landscape of northern interior British Columbia, Canada, to quantify the effects of MPB‐related forest cover change. Field measurements collected in a live and a dead coniferous plot during the 2007 and 2008 winters are compared with those collected in a clearcut (canopy‐free control) to identify inter‐plot differences in snow depth, density, and water equivalent. Interannual variability in snow density and water equivalent is significantly affected by interannual variability in meteorological conditions. In high snow years, the dead and alive plots behave similarly due to the ability of large snowfalls to exceed the interception capacity of the canopy. In low‐to‐average snow years, however, distinct differences in snow accumulation between the dead and alive plots are observed. These are largely due to the canopy structure in the dead plot, which differs significantly from that in the healthy plot largely due to defoliation (needle drop) and the loss of fine branches and stems following beetle infestation. Research results provide key process information for modelling studies examining the effects of these changes on runoff generation at the watershed scale. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The United States government's national security activities, including the use of force, consume more than half of all federal discretionary spending and are carried out by the world's largest bureaucracy. Yet existing scholarship treats these activities as conduct to be regulated, rather than as forms of regulatory action.
This Article introduces a new paradigm for depicting what agencies involved in national security do. It posits that, like other agencies, the national security bureaucracy is best understood to be engaging in regulatory activity—by targeting, detaining, interrogating, and prosecuting enemies, patrolling the border, and conducting surveillance and covert actions. Also, like other agencies, this bureaucracy may overregulate—by using force or conducting surveillance more aggressively than necessary to achieve its objectives.
This warfare-as-regulation paradigm offers several advantages over the predominant paradigm. It provides a cohesive explanatory framework for recent trends, including the individuation of targeting decisions, the infusion of legality into warmaking, and widespread concern that national security decisionmaking favors aggressive policies and lacks sufficient transparency, accountability, and deliberation. Viewing warfare as regulation also helps reformers better identify the pathologies in the regulatory process and their true causes.
Using basic insights from public choice theory, and using the practice of targeted killing as a case study, this Article maps the power dynamics and bureaucratic incentives that drive national security regulating. It concludes that these dynamics and incentives systematically encourage overregulation. This Article then explores administrative law principles, institutional reforms, and new opportunities for political influence that may create countervailing anti-regulatory pressures.


We propose a framework for solving combinatorial optimization problems of which the output can be represented as a sequence of input elements. As an alternative to the Pointer Network, we parameterize a policy by a model based entirely on (graph) attention layers, and train it efficiently using REINFORCE with a simple and robust baseline based on a deterministic (greedy) rollout of the best policy found during training. We significantly improve over state-of-the-art results for learning algorithms for the 2D Euclidean TSP, reducing the optimality gap for a single tour construction by more than 75% (to 0.33%) and 50% (to 2.28%) for instances with 20 and 50 nodes respectively.


Popular figure-ground segmentation algorithms generate a pool of boundary-aligned segment proposals that can be used in subsequent object recognition engines. These algorithms can recover most image objects with high accuracy, but are usually computationally intensive since many graph cuts are computed with different enumerations of segment seeds. In this paper we propose an algorithm, RIGOR, for efficiently generating a pool of overlapping segment proposals in images. By precomputing a graph which can be used for parametric min-cuts over different seeds, we speed up the generation of the segment pool. In addition, we have made design choices that avoid extensive computations without losing performance. In particular, we demonstrate that the segmentation performance of our algorithm is slightly better than the state-of-the-art on the PASCAL VOC dataset, while being an order of magnitude faster.


The presence of glass beads in West African archaeological sites provides important evidence of long-distance trade between this part of the continent and the rest of the world. Until recently, most of these items came from historical Sub-Saharan urban centers, well known for their role in the medieval trans-Saharan trade. We present here the chemical analysis by Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) of 16 glass beads found in three rural sites excavated during the past decade: the funerary site of Dourou-Boro and settlement sites of Sadia, in central Mali, as well as the settlement site of Djoutoubaya, in eastern Senegal, in contexts dated between the 7th-9th and the 11th-13th centuries CE. Results show that the raw materials used to manufacture the majority of the glass most probably originated in Egypt, the Levantine coast and the Middle East. One bead is of uncertain provenance and shows similarities with glass found in the Iberian Peninsula and in South Africa. One bead fragment found inside a tomb is a modern production, probably linked to recent plundering. All of these ancient beads were exchanged along the trans-Saharan trade routes active during the rise of the first Sahelian states, such as the Ghana and the Gao kingdoms, and show strong similarities with the other West African bead assemblages that have been analysed. Despite the remoteness of their location in the Dogon Country and in the Falémé River valley, the beads studied were therefore included in the long-distance trade network, via contacts with the urban commercial centers located at the edge of the Sahara along the Niger River and in current southern Mauretania. These results bring a new light on the relationships between international and regional trade in Africa and highlight the complementarity between centres of political and economic power and their peripheries, important because of resources like gold for eastern Senegal.


Exerpt] Whether they are line managers, human resource management staff, or organizational psychologists, managers of human resources must make decisions (e.g., hiring, placement, training, compensation, performance appraisal, feedback, etc.) in which theories of human work behavior play an important role. I/O psychologists (and other social scientists) find the organizational environment a rich source of information for advancing knowledge and testing theories about employment relationships, their antecedents and consequences. Applied research articles inevitably discuss "practical implications," but what is the real value of human resource productivity improvement programs?


Machine learning competitions are susceptible to intentional overfitting. Numerai proposes Numeraire, a new cryptographic token that can be used in a novel auction mechanism to make overfitting economically irrational. The auction mechanism leads to equilibrium bidding behavior that reveals rational data scientists' confidence in their models' ability to perform well on new data. The auction mechanism also yields natural arguments for the economic value of a Numeraire token.


Learn the essential tools for developing a sound service-oriented architecture SOA Modeling Patterns for Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis introduces a universal, easy-to-use, and nimble SOA modeling language to facilitate the service identification and examination life cycle stage. This business and technological vocabulary will benefit your service development endeavors and foster organizational software asset reuse and consolidation, and reduction of expenditure. Whether you are a developer, business architect, technical architect, modeler, business analyst, team leader, or manager, this essential guide-introducing an elaborate set of more than 100 patterns and anti-patterns-will help you successfully discover and analyze services, and model a superior solution for your project,. Explores how to discover services Explains how to analyze services for construction and production How to assess service feasibility for deployment How to employ the SOA modeling language during the service identification and examination process How to utilize the SOA modeling patterns and anti-patterns for service discovery and analysis Focusing on the Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis Life Cycle Stage, this book will help you acquire a broad SOA Modeling knowledge base and leverage that to increase efficiency and productivity in the workplace.


The study identified the risk factors associated with breast cancer development and determined its prevalence. A cross sectional design using mixed method was adopted for the study. It was conducted in 22 Primary Health Care centres (PHCs) in Osogbo and Olorunda Local government areas of Osun State. A purposive sampling technique was used to select four hundred child bearing age women (19 - 44 years) who brought their babies for immunization at the 22 PHCs in the two selected local government areas in Osogbo. Respondents from each PHC were selected by proportionate sampling. Two instruments were used for data collection. The Short Form Breast Cancer Risk Questionnaire was used to collect data on the Socio-demographic profile and other relevant data related to breast cancer risk factors. In depth interview was also used to collect data on risk factors associated with breast cancer from 10 women selected from 3 PHCs out of the 22 PHCs which were randomly selected through balloting method. The Gail model which is a mathematical model was used to estimate individual five year absolute breast cancer risk. Women with score of 1.67% and above were categorized as high risk, 1.49 to 1.66% as average risk and a score < 1.49% as low risk. The rationale for using Gail model in the study is to classify the distribution of risk factors in the study according to the level of risks, (high, average and low) as explained above i.e. Women with score of 1.67% and above were categorized as high risk, 1.49 to 1.66% as average risk and a score < 1.49% as low risk. The logistic regression further revealed that family history of breast cancer increased significantly the odds of having higher risk of breast cancer development (OR = 1.12, 95% CI = 0.06–11.46, p-value = 0.002). However, increase in average duration of breastfeeding reduced significantly the odds of having higher risk of breast cancer (OR = 0.98, 95% CI = 0.97 - 1.00, p-value-0.013). The Gail model calculation revealed that 2.3% were at high risk, 2% were at average risk while 95.7% were at low risk. The researcher used the statistical modelling method (logistic regression) to examine the relative importance of each risk factor in predicting the outcome. This study concluded that the key risk factors for breast cancer development were presence of family history and short duration of breastfeeding.

 Key words: Assessment, breast cancer, reproductive age, risk factors, Gail model.


The objective of this study is to find out the optimum hot corrosion resistance and hardness for Inconel718 coated by simultaneous yttrium-doped aluminizing-siliconizing process. The hot corrosion parameters selected for the experiments are Na 2 SO 4 , NaCl, and V 2 O 5 . The optimization is carried out by choosing three input parameters at two levels. Multi objective optimization technique, TOPSIS optimization approach is used for maximizing the hot corrosion resistance (minimizing hot corrosion rate Kp),and hardness. ANOVA is performed to investigate the more influencing parameters on the multiple performance characteristics. It also helps to calculate percentage contribution of each parameter. Finally, accuracy of optimization was confirmed by conducting confirmations. Results indicate feasibility of TOPSIS analysis in continuous improvement in hot corrosion resistance.


Depending on how much information an adversary can access to, adversarial attacks can be classified as white-box attack and black-box attack. For white-box attack, optimization-based attack algorithms such as projected gradient descent (PGD) can achieve relatively high attack success rates within moderate iterates. However, they tend to generate adversarial examples near or upon the boundary of the perturbation set, resulting in large distortion. Furthermore, their corresponding black-box attack algorithms also suffer from high query complexities, thereby limiting their practical usefulness. In this paper, we focus on the problem of developing efficient and effective optimization-based adversarial attack algorithms. In particular, we propose a novel adversarial attack framework for both white-box and black-box settings based on a variant of Frank-Wolfe algorithm. We show in theory that the proposed attack algorithms are efficient with an O(1/√T) convergence rate. The empirical results of attacking the ImageNet and MNIST datasets also verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. More specifically, our proposed algorithms attain the best attack performances in both white-box and black-box attacks among all baselines, and are more time and query efficient than the state-of-the-art.


A study on characterization of local chicken eco-type for functional traits and production system was conducted at Fogera woreda of the Amhara National Regional state. Fogera woreda is one of the eight woredas bordering Lake Tana and it is predominantly classified as woinadega ecology while the annual temperature ranges form 22oC to 29oC. The survey report based on 72 household having chickens revealed that the flock size rage from 1 to 39. The nutritional management practices in the study area were of scavenging (main practice) and supplementary feeding. Wells and tap were the major sources of water. Most of the respondents (59.7%) used separate houses constructed exclusively for poultry. The flock management was without separation of sex or age groups and mating was random and nonseasonal. The prices of live chickens were affected by plumage color, comb type and seasonal demands (holidays and fasting seasons). Disease and shortage of supplementary feeds were the two major production barriers of expanding poultry production. Out of the 100 birds studied, the following plumage color pattern was observed in their respective proportions: complete white (Netch) (23%), complete black (Tikure) (7%), complete red (key) (39%), white with black or red tips (Netch Teterma) (4%), grayish mixture (Gebsima) (5%), red with white trips (key teterma) (2%), black with white tips (Tikure teterma) (2%) white with Brest part golden color (Libework) (8%), multi color (Anbsema) (2%), white with red strips (seran) (4%), and red brownish (Kokima) (4%). In term of body shape, most of the chicken population observed had a body shape of wedge and a crest (Gutya) head profile. Almost all of the male chicken had spur, while only half of the female chicken had spur. No shank feather was observed both in Male and Female chicken. For mature hens and cocks, the average shank length was 7.25 cm and 9.32 cm, respectively. The average body length was 17.75 cm and 21 cm for female and male, respectively. The ratio of cock to hen was found to be 1:3.21. On the other hand, the effective population size (Ne) and rate of change in inbreeding coefficient ( F) per year were 3.9 and 1.95, respectively. The monitoring data revealed that average number of eggs laid per clutch per hen was 13.19, while the average number of eggs incubated was 12.97, average number of chicks hatched was 10.23, the average number of chicks weaned was 7.63, the average of hen's age was 19.20 months and average weight of hens was 1.21 kg. The performance of egg production characters egg weight, yolk color, yolk weight albumin weight, shell weight and shell thickness were, 44.89m, 9.06, 16.28 gm, 22.13 gm, 5.52 gm, and 0.45 cm, respectively. On the other hand, the dressing percentage was found to be 58.5% for male and 49.38% for Female. All these findings indicated that the local eco-type, despite the relatively high temperature (it goes up to 30oC) and the swampy (wet land) Fogera plain have good potential for egg and meat production. Thus they could be used in other places with similar weather and environmental conditions.


The heart of any weighing system is the load cell. Whilst they are not exciting to watch, load cells are highly accurate transducers which provides the user with information not generally obtainable by other technology due to commercial factors. Load cells are designed to sense force or weight under a wide range of adverse conditions; they are not only the most essential part of an electronic weighing system, but also the most vulnerable. In order to get the most benefit from the load cell, the user must have a thorough understanding of the technology, construction and operation of this unique device. In addition, it is imperative that the user selects the correct load cell for the application and provide the necessary care for the load cell during its lifetime. Understanding these important issues and properly maintaining the load cells will ensure trouble free weighing for a long period of time.


This paper discusses the shaping of composites of angular harmonics (AHs) by means of diffraction optical elements (DOEs), their propagation in free space, and detection of a specific AH in the light beam. Modeling is done to show how the detection accuracy is affected by such distortions as scale mismatch, astigmatism, shift, and failure of the illuminating beam and the DOE to be coaxial. The traversal of obstacles in the form of coarse particles and their effect on the accuracy with which the AHs are detected are modeled. © 2005 Optical Society of America


The field of credit risk and corporate bankruptcy prediction has gained considerable momentum following the collapse of many large corporations around the world, and more recently through the sub-prime scandal in the United States. This book provides a thorough compendium of the different modelling approaches available in the field, including several new techniques that extend the horizons of future research and practice. Topics covered include probit models (in particular bivariate probit modelling), advanced logistic regression models (in particular mixed logit, nested logit and latent class models), survival analysis models, non-parametric techniques (particularly neural networks and recursive partitioning models), structural models and reduced form (intensity) modelling. Models and techniques are illustrated with empirical examples and are accompanied by a careful explanation of model derivation issues. This practical and empirically-based approach makes the book an ideal resource for all those concerned with credit risk and corporate bankruptcy, including academics, practitioners and regulators.


Today sensor data processing and information mining become more and more complex concerning the amount of sensor data to be processed, the data dimension, the data quality, and the relationship between derived information and input data. This is the case especially in large-scale sensing and measuring processes embedded in Cloud environments. Measuring uncertainties, calibration errors, and unreliability of sensors have a significant impact on the derivation quality of suitable information. In the technical and industrial context the raising complexity and distribution of data processing is a special issue. Commonly, information is derived from raw input data by using some kind of mathematical model and functions, but often being incomplete or unknown. If reasoning of statements is primarily desired, Machine Learning can be an alternative. Traditionally, sensor data is acquired and delivered to and processed by a central processing unit. In this paper, the deployment of distributed Machine Learning using mobile Agents forming self-organizing and self-adaptive systems (self-X) is discussed and posing the benefit for the enhancement of the sensor and data processing in technical and industrial systems. This also addresses the quality of the computed statements, e.g., an accurate prediction of run-time parameters like mechanical loads or health conditions, the efficiency, and the reliability in the presence of partial system failures


This paper presents a survey of the experiments on runaway electrons (RE) carried out recently in frames of EUROFusion Consortium in different tokamaks: COMPASS, ASDEX-Upgrade, TCV and JET. Massive gas injection (MGI) has been used in different scenarios for RE generation in small and medium-sized tokamaks to elaborate the most efficient and reliable ones for future RE experiments. New data on RE generated at disruptions in COMPASS and ASDEX-Upgrade was collected and added to the JET database. Different accessible parameters of disruptions, such as current quench rate, conversion rate of plasma current into runaways, etc have been analysed for each tokamak and compared to JET data. It was shown, that tokamaks with larger geometrical sizes provide the wider limits for spatial and temporal variation of plasma parameters during disruptions, thus extending the parameter space for RE generation. The second part of experiments was dedicated to study of RE generation in stationary discharges in COMPASS, TCV and JET. Injection of Ne/Ar have been used to mock-up the JET MGI runaway suppression experiments. Secondary RE avalanching was identified and quantified for the first time in the TCV tokamak in RE generating discharges after massive Ne injection. Simulations of the primary RE generation and secondary avalanching dynamics in stationary discharges has demonstrated that RE current fraction created via avalanching could achieve up to 70–75% of the total plasma current in TCV. Relaxations which are reminiscent the phenomena associated to the kinetic instability driven by RE have been detected in RE discharges in TCV. Macroscopic parameters of RE dominating discharges in TCV before and after onset of the instability fit well to the empirical instability criterion, which was established in the early tokamaks and examined by results of recent numerical simulations.


The AccessLex/LSSSE Bar Exam Success Initiative is the first multi-institutional investigation into the factors that help predict law school academic and first-time bar exam performance. Mixed effects linear and logit modeling techniques are used to analyze pre-admission data; law school transcript data; and bar exam performance data for almost 5,000 Spring 2018 and 2019 graduates from 20 law schools that participated in this study. Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) response data were also analyzed for a subset of about 2,000 graduates.

Our modeling techniques allowed us to localize the impact of the factors of interest, while also accounting for other factors. For example, our analyses of the impact of various student engagement factors on bar exam performance account for other potentially relevant factors such as law school grades.

We find that:

• LSAT score and undergraduate GPA (UGPA) are modestly associated with law school GPA (LGPA). LSAT score and first year (1L) LGPA yield the strongest association. Across our sample, a one-point increase in LSAT score is associated with a 0.04 increase in 1L LGPA. A one-tenth point increase in UGPA is associated with a 0.03 increase in LGPA (Figure 2).

• LGPA is the strongest predictor of bar exam performance, even at the early stages of matriculation. For example, a one standard deviation increase in 1L LGPA is associated with a 402 percent increase in the odds of bar passage (Figure 3).

• Positive growth in LGPA between the end of the first semester and graduation is associated with greater odds of passing the bar exam, particularly among graduates who struggled early on. Graduates with below average first-semester grades who experienced no LGPA growth had a 25 percent chance of passing the bar exam, compared to 43 percent among their peers who experienced average growth of about 0.17 grade points (Figure 5).

• Graduates who spent more than 21 hours per week on responsibilities such as caring for dependents or working a non-law-related job had lower third year (3L) LGPAs and bar passage odds than their peers who spent 0 to 5 hours on these activities (Figure 12).

• Graduates who worked in law-related jobs while in law school (Figure 9); graduates who felt that their law school experience contributed "very much" to their skills development (Figure 10); and graduates who regularly participated in class (Figure 11) were modestly more likely to pass the bar exam than other graduates.

Collectively, our results suggest that academic and bar exam success are driven by what happens in law school, not just early on, but throughout the experience—and the greatest opportunities for impact exist among those who struggle the most early on.


The K-12 community traditionally has not had this level of staffing
available for telecommunications planning. This document is intended
to bridge that gap and provides a recommended technical direction, an
introduction to the role the Internet now plays in K-12 education and
technical guidelines for building a campus data communications
infrastructure that provides internetworking services and connections
to the Internet. This memo provides information for the Internet
community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any
kind.


This brief essay responds to an article by Professor James A. Gardner, The Dignity of Voters - A Dissent, appearing in a symposium in the University of Miami Law Review. Gardner offers a sustained critique of a line of Supreme Court election law cases recognizing "dignitary rights" of voters, including Shaw v. Reno, recognizing the "unconstitutional racial gerrymander," Bush v. Gore, recognizing the right to have one's vote counted in a recount according to uniform voting procedures; and Purcell v. Gonzales, a voter identification case in which the Court recognized a right of voters not to have their votes "canceled out" by voter fraud (or their "feelings" hurt by such fraud).I make two points. First, Gardner mistakenly explains the dignitary rights cases as the Supreme Court embracing the "individual" rights side in the "rights-structure" debate among election law scholars. Instead, these developments show the Court embracing a misguided structural approach to election law cases (albeit clothed in the language of rights). Shaw reined in what the Court majority viewed as an out-of-control Justice Department overly interfering with state prerogatives in redistricting; Bush reined in what the Court majority viewed as an out-of-control Florida Supreme Court overly interfering with administrative recount procedures in the highly-charged context of a presidential election recount. Purcell reined in civil rights plaintiffs interfering with state administrative prerogatives in setting forth the rules for conducting elections. In each of these cases, voter "rights" are merely a stand-in for structural concerns of the Court.Second, using the individual rights approach, these cases were incorrectly decided. Under the individual rights approach, the Court should protect only "core" equality rights that affect the real allocation of political power among political equals in a democracy. In Shaw, the Court incorrectly protected voter rights in the districting process that had no potential to affect political power relationships. In Bush and Purcell, the Court failed to recognize rights on both sides of the case, and that the rights of voters on what turned out to be the losing side easily trumped rights on the winning side of the case. Thus, Gardner's conclusion that these cases were wrongly decided is absolutely correct, even using an individual rights framework to reach this result. The Court should continue to focus on rights in its election law jurisprudence, but not on inchoate "dignitary" rights that fail to affect the allocation of political power.


Benthic mixotrophic nanoflagellates (MNF) were studied in coastal sediments in Kiel Fjord, western Baltic Sea. Three types of surface sediment of different grain size were investigated, each along a vertical gradient within the first centimeter depth. A tracer experiment using fluores- cently labeled bacteria (FLB) was conducted to identify MNF and quantify their contribution to total bacterivory in different sediment types and depths. MNF abundances and their phagotrophic activ- ity did not vary significantly with sediment depth and grain size. Overall, mixotrophs contributed less to total nanoflagellates in sediments from Kiel Fjord (max. 2%) than those recorded from comparable pelagic systems, contributing a higher percentage to total phytoflagellates than to the total bacteri- vores (5 to 10 vs. 2 to 5%, respectively). Potential reasons for these findings could be extensive niche segregation for bacterial grazers, osmotrophic feeding strategies in sediments due to high bacterial abundances and/or rarely limiting nutrient conditions.


Public ownership is a way to provide goods and services where market performance is not satisfactory, or when the economy would otherwise be stagnant. This chapter provides a brief review of the existing theoretical and empirical literature and suggestions for further research. While far from exhaustive, our overview suggests that there is no unanimous body of research showing that the costs of public ownership overshadow its benefits. More research is needed on different forms of ownership, and we emphasise potential intrinsic motivation under private and public ownership as well as their impact on quality and on the constraints imposed by international competition. We also suggest research on renationalisation through buyer power and on the significance of governance quality.


According to Joss Whedon, the creator of the short-lived series Firefly (2002), the cult show is about "nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things." The chronicles of crewmembers on a scruffy space freighter, Firefly ran for only four months before its abrupt cancellation. In that brief time, however, it established a reputation as one of the best science-fiction programs of the new millennium: sharply written, superbly cast, and set on an exotic multicultural frontier unlike anything ever seen on the small screen. The show's large, enthusiastic fan following supported a series of comics and a theatrical film, Serenity (2005), that extended the story, deepened the characters, and revealed new wonders and dangers on the deep-space frontier.

In Firefly Revisited: Essays on Joss Whedon's Classic Series, Michael Goodrum and Philip Smith present a collection that reflects on the program, the characters, and the post-cancellation film and comics that grew out of the show. The contributors to this volume offer fresh perspectives on familiar characters and blaze new trails into unexplored areas of the Firefly universe. Individual essays explore the series' place in the history of the space-Western subgenre, the political economy of the Alliance, and the uses of music and language in the series to immerse audiences in a multicultural future.

These essays look at how the show offered viewers high adventure as well as engaged with a range of themes that still resonate today. As such, Firefly Revisited will intrigue the show's many fans, as well as Whedon scholars and anyone interested in the twenty-first-century renaissance of science-fiction television


The editorial introduction to this Footprint issue maps some of the latest developments in the field of queer studies and the realm of architecture and urban design. The aim is for a productive exchange between the fields since queer theory can be instrumental in moving beyond the heteronormative dominance in architectural thinking, which is characterized by an essentialist approach based on binary notions, rather than an understanding of architecture as an interface in material processes of becoming and producing differences. After a brief discussion of the history of exchanges between queer studies and architectural history and theory, the authors propose to complement the notion of queering with the new developments in the field of trans studies, which propose to rethink architecture in terms of a materialist understanding of buildings as bodies which are in a constant flux of change and becoming instead of fixed and stable objects or identities.


"The sharp increase in food prices over the past couple of years has raised serious concerns about the food and nutrition situation of poor people in developing countries, about inflation, and—in some countries—about civil unrest. Real prices are still below their mid-1970s peak, but they have reached their highest point since that time. Both developing- and developed-country governments have roles to play in bringing prices under control and in helping poor people cope with higher food bills. In 2007 the food price index calculated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) rose by nearly 40 percent, compared with 9 percent the year before, and in the first months of 2008 prices again increased drastically. Nearly every agricultural commodity is part of this rising price trend. Since 2000—a year of low prices—the wheat price in the international market has more than tripled and maize prices have more than doubled. The price of rice jumped to unprecedented levels in March 2008. Dairy products, meat, poultry, palm oil, and cassava have also experienced price hikes. When adjusted for inflation and the dollar's decline (by reporting in euros, for example), food price increases are smaller but still dramatic, with often serious consequences for the purchasing power of the poor. National governments and international actors are taking various steps to try to minimize the effects of higher international prices for domestic prices and to mitigate impacts on particular groups. Some of these actions are likely to help stabilize and reduce food prices, whereas others may help certain groups at the expense of others or actually make food prices more volatile in the long run and seriously distort trade. What is needed is more effective and coherent action to help the most vulnerable populations cope with the drastic and immediate hikes in their food bills and to help farmers meet the rising demand for agricultural products." from Author's text


This article is part of an ongoing project that examines how different segments of U.S.-Mexico border society carry on cross-border relationships, and how such contact affects their way of life. The focus here is on subgroups on the Mexican side of the border, with an emphasis on economic ties that exist with the U.S. side. The working categories I have devised are based on familiarity with border literature as well as knowledge accumulated through many years of observation and direct participation in the workings of border society. Lack of hard data necessarily makes my typology hypothetical and speculative. Ideally, fieldwork would sustain the generalizations about the various subgroups herein identified, but in the absence of such data my preliminary portrait may prove helpful in formulating strategies on how empirical research on this subject might be carried out. My chief aim, then, is to submit this conceptualization of border society for discussion and further reflection and refinement.


This thesis is about digitally controlled analog multiplier-accumulator (MAC) units and their utilization in communications applications. These units are implemented as switched-capacitor circuits, designed with switches (MOS transistors), capacitors (MOS transistors), and amplifiers (MOS transistors); using a CMOS technology. The switched-capacitor technique is a mean for analog discretetime signal processing where charges representing signal values are transported between capacitors of different sizes and by that implementing multiplicative and additive computations.These analog MAC units are suggested as signal processing engines in radio receivers; where they sample an intermediate-frequency radio waveform and weights individually samples with digitally controlled coefficients. One example of such an application is a programmable finite-duration impulse response (FIR) filter combined with decimation, where the bandwidth and center frequency is controlled by digitally means with virtually constant number of MAC units operating in parallel. However, non-finite amplifier gain in the switch-capacitance circuits give rise to an accumulation loss, which limits the useful FIR filter length. This accumulation may in some respect be compensated for in advance when the coefficient sequence is known. A simulation on a 399-tap FIR filter executed with signed 8-bit MAC units shows that the expected ultimate rejection is 65dB and true filter gain 38dB. Two types of FIR filters with decimation are suggested; quadrature FIR filters which computes the quadrature components at a desired input frequency, and low-IF filters which computes a band-pass signal at a desired input frequency.When comparing two equivalent mixed analog/digital systems implementations; an all-digital system featured by a front-end ND converter followed by digital MAC units, versus a sampled-analog system with front-end analog MAC units followed by an AID converter, the later wins in lowpower due to a relaxed requirement on the AID converter with applications where signal processing tasks are computed as the linear combination of input samples and digital coefficients. This is typical for systems where the input bandwidth is much larger then the desired bandwidth, such as radio environments. Hence, a motive for using analog MAC units is low power consumption.A typical application where the input bandwidth is larger than the desired bandwidth is in direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DS/SS) communications. The utilization of a signed 1-bit analog MAC unit on a fabricated test chip as simultaneous demodulator and despreader for DS/SS communications is demonstrated. From a 2Mchip/s direct-sequence spread quaternary-phase-shift keyed (DS/QPSK) signal waveform with 7 chips per data symbol, the test chip samples and weights the waveform in selected instants chosen according to the spreading code, which is known by the receiver, and accumulate these weighted samples to directly compute data symbol estimates as coordinates in an IQ diagram. With an input signal of 120μV effective voltage (-65dBm over 50Ω load) the signal- to-noise ratio ofthe detected data symbols is 23dB, which leads to the noise figure 16dB.In another demonstration, a signed 8-bit analog MAC test chip is utilized as a combined channel-select filter and demodulator. The center frequency of this filter is adjustable with a fixed sampling frequency. With a 357kSymbol/s QPSK modulated waveform with carrier frequency 1.43MHz, 2.5MHz, or 3.57MHz and power -61dBm, the test chip compute data symbol estimates as coordinates in an IQ diagram with a measured signal-to-noise ratio of 20dB. The ultimate rejection of these filters is measured to 25dB, and the noise figure is 29dB.


Objectives To investigate men's values and preferences regarding prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based screening for prostate cancer. Design Systematic review. Data sources We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO and grey literature up to 2 September 2017. Eligibility criteria Primary studies of men's values and preferences regarding the benefits and harms of PSA screening. Data extraction and synthesis Two independent reviewers extracted data and assessed risk of bias with a modified version of a risk of bias tool for values and preferences studies, the International Patient Decision Aid Standards instrument V.3 and the Cochrane Collaboration risk of bias tool. Results We identified 4172 unique citations, of which 11 studies proved eligible. Five studies investigated PSA screening using a direct choice study design, whereas six used decisions aids displaying patient-important outcomes. The direct choice studies used different methodologies and varied considerably in the reporting of outcomes. Two studies suggested that men were willing to forego screening with a small benefit in prostate cancer mortality if it would decrease the likelihood of unnecessary treatment or biopsies. In contrast, one study reported that men were willing to accept a substantial overdiagnosis to reduce their risk of prostate cancer mortality. Among the six studies involving decision aids, willingness to undergo screening varied substantially from 37% when displaying a hypothetical reduction in mortality of 10 per 1000 men, to 44% when displaying a reduction in mortality of 7 per 1000. We found no studies that specifically investigated whether values and preferences differed among men with family history, of African descent or with lower socioeconomic levels. Conclusion The variability of men's values and preferences reflect that the decision to screen is highly preference sensitive. Our review highlights the need for shared decision making in men considering prostate cancer screening. Trial registration number CRD42018095585.


'Muddy rules for cyberspace': Musings of a she-blogger.
Yvonne Downs
Although referring specifically to intellectual property rights, the above quotation from Burk (1998) gives a sense of the complex, emergent, often ambiguous terms on which we enter new digital spaces. In this paper I give an auto/biographical account of my experience of writing a blog for a number of months while doing research for my PhD. My account is located in the broader context of a consideration of 'cyberspace' and animates the contention that '(t)he new opportunities and constraints online interaction creates are double-edged, leading to results that can amplify both beneficial and noxious social processes' (Kollock and Smith 1999, p.4). Whilst acknowledging that 'cyberspace represents an exciting new medium which allows us to communicate, teach, learn and understand in ways never before imagined' (Bryant 2001) I also ask whether the multiplicity, mystification and mythologizing of cyberspace (Mosco 2005) has diverted our attention away from the question of 'what happens to gender when it goes through the hardware?' (Arpiz 1999). Although I touch on the relationship of cyberspace and physical spaces, relating my specific and limited experience of blogging as a PhD student clearly cannot provide definitive answers or adequately theorise the complexity of cyberspace. My aim is rather to instantiate a method of 'seeing with both eyes' (materially and discursively) relations of power within new digital spaces.
References
Arpiz, L. 1999. Preface. In: Harcourt, W. (ed). Women@internet: creating new cultures in cyberspace. London: Zed Books, pp. xii - xvi
Bryant, R. 2001. What kind of space is cyberspace? Minerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy Vol. 5,. pp. 138 - 155. [Online]. Available at http://www.mic.ul.ie/stephen/cyberspace.pdf . [Accessed 8th November 2010].

Burk, D. 1998. Muddy rules for cyberspace. In: J. Mackie-Mason and D. Waterman (eds). Telephony, the internet and the media: selected papers from the 1997 telecommunications policy research conference, pp.197-214.

Kollock, P. and Smith, M. 1999. Communities in Cyberspace. In: P Kollock and M Smith (eds) Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge pp 3-25
Mosco, V. 2005 The digital sublime. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.


Some leaders of Chinese local people's congresses emphasize autonomy in order to promote decentralization and enhance representation. Other legislative insiders favor sacrificing autonomy in order to strengthen capacity and improve oversight. Tight coupling between congresses appeals to local legislators because it offers opportunities to mobilize supporters, obtain resources, and expand jurisdiction, while representatives of higher congresses often oppose closer ties in order to preserve local initiative, safeguard elections, and reduce conflict with Party committees. In a reforming communist state, moreover, single legislatures may not be the right unit of analysis for assessing autonomy. Established boundaries, in the early stages of institutionalization, may apply to the legislative system as a whole rather than to its parts. And softening boundaries between congresses at different levels can harden boundaries against other bureaucracies.


South Africa's long legacy of racism and colonial exploitation continues to echo throughout post-apartheid society. For centuries, European conquerors marshaled surveillance as a means to control the black population. This began with the requirements for passes to track and control the movements, settlements, and labor of Africans. Over time, surveillance technologies evolved alongside complex shifts in power, culture, and the political economy.

This Chapter explores the evolution of surveillance regimes in South Africa. The first surveillance system in South Africa used paper passes to police slave movements and enforce labor contracts. To make the system more robust, various white authorities marked the skin of workers and livestock with symbols registered in paper databases. At the beginning of the twentieth century, fingerprinting was introduced in some areas to simplify and improve the passes. Under apartheid, the National Party aimed to streamline a national, all-seeing surveillance system. They imported computers to impose a regime of fixed race classification and keep detailed records about the African population. The legal apparatus of race-based surveillance was finally abolished during the transition to democracy. However, today a regime of Big Data, artificial intelligence, and centralized cloud computing has ushered in a new era of mass surveillance in South Africa.

South Africa's surveillance regimes were always devised in collaboration with foreign colonizers, imperialists, intellectuals, and profit-seeking capitalists. In each era, the United States increased its participation. During the period of settler conquest, the US had a modest presence in Southern Africa. With the onset of the minerals revolution, US power expanded, and American capitalists and engineers with business interests in the mines pushed for an improved pass system to police African workers. Under apartheid, US corporations supplied the computer technology essential to apartheid governance and business enterprise. Finally, during the latter years of post-apartheid, Silicon Valley corporations, together with US surveillance agencies, began imposing surveillance capitalism on South African society. A new form of domination, digital colonialism, has emerged, vesting the United States with unprecedented control over South African affairs. To counter the force of digital colonialism, a new movement may emerge to push to redesign the digital ecosystem as a socialist commons based on open technology, socialist legal solutions, bottom-up democracy, and Internet decentralization.


Active database systems were introduced to extend the database functionality. As well as a repository of data, active database can detect the occurrence of events in a database system and react automatically to that event occurrence and execute certain actions either inside or outside the database. This behavior is specified by means of ECA (event-condition-action) rules, i.e., when an event has occurred, if the condition is evaluated to true, then an action is executed. The development of a set of ECA rules involve the knowledge of the database structure and the relationships that can exist among the ECA rules, which may produce an inconsistent state in the database. Therefore, it is so important to verify a rule set before its implementation in the active database, and one method to determine if a rule set will produce consistent states of the database is through the simulation of ECA rule firing. In this paper a simulator for active databases, named ECAPNSim, is described. ECAPNSim uses the definition of ECA rules like a structure of an extended Petri net model, the Conditional Colored Petri Net (CCPN). Conditional Colored Petri Net definition involves the knowledge and execution model, which describe the features that an active database system must have. Furthermore, in order to simulate the occurrence of database events, ECAPNSim has been enhanced with the addition of distribution functions for each place that denote events of the ECA rule set.


India's move to electrify every village and household in the country has been lauded as a success. Building on decades of targeted programmes and public investments by multiple governments, the country completed 100% village electrification in April 2018; a year after, it has electrified nearly all 'willing' households. Despite the time it took to get here, these achievements are important milestones in India's development trajectory. But does connecting households to the electric grid resolve the electricity access challenge? The answer depends on whether electrons flow through the wires and whether all consumers are served equally and adequately.


This article investigates the dynamics and politics of citizenship in Djibouti, where the issue of who qualifies as a citizen has long been controversial. While debates about citizenship and exclusion in Africa frequently centre on the legacies of colonialism and the incompleteness of the African state, this article attributes the problems of citizenship to the logic of sovereignty and the nature of the modern state. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the article shows how Djiboutian citizenship in both the colonial and post-colonial era can be seen as graduated, assigning some groups more rights and protection than others. For those near the bottom of this ladder, the rights of citizenship do not emanate solely from legal frameworks, but from incorporation into patron–client relationships. There is also a large population who are systematically denied citizenship, and who through various practices of exclusion are reduced to 'bare life' and statelessness. No official statistics exist to document their numbers, and the article draws on interviews to illustrate the problems faced by Djibouti's stateless population.


Simple Summary Disaster preparedness for companion animals has economic, social and welfare benefits, yet many countries continue to omit dogs and cats from their national and regional contingency planning. Responses therefore, are often chaotic, inefficient and uncoordinated, or absent altogether. Documented experiences in Chile contribute to the information supporting the inclusion of companion animals into locally relevant disaster plans. These plans serve to prepare communities and authorities, identify resources available, establish a chain of command, develop local priorities, and subsequently reduce the negative impacts on both human and animal communities. Abstract Large-scale disasters have immeasurable effects on human and animal communities. Evaluating and reporting on the response successes and difficulties encountered serves to improve existing preparedness documents and provide support to those in the process of developing plans. Although the majority of disasters occur in low and middle income nations, less than 1% of the disaster literature originates from these countries. This report describes a response to a disease outbreak in domestic dogs in Dichato, Chile following the 2010 earthquake/tsunami. With no national plan coordinating the companion animal response, there was a chaotic approach among animal welfare organizations towards rescue, diagnosis, treatment and record-keeping. Similar to the medical response following the 1985 earthquake near Santiago, we experienced problems within our own teams in maintenance of data integrity and protocol compliance. Loss of infrastructure added complications with transportation, communications and acquisition of supplies. Similar challenges likely occur in most disasters, but can be reduced through pro-active planning at national and local levels. There is sufficient information to support the human and animal welfare benefits of including companion animals in national planning, and lessons learned through this and other experiences can assist planners in the development of comprehensive and locally relevant contingency plans.


This essay takes a comparative look at the migrant experiences of Cuban Americans, e.g., those who arrived before 1980, those after 1980, and the second-generation Cuban Americans. It also takes a critical look at the various, often divergent, claims to Cuban national identity in the United States as well as the various ideological, political, economic, and social roots of these claims. It explores the mechanisms and evaluative criteria with which identity is expressed, and attempts to identify particular groups associated with one claim or another for illustrative purposes. The aim is to show the transformation of the conception of identity among members of the Cuban American community, the factors behind this transformation, and the underlying implications of this transformation on the dominant theories of assimilation, pluralism, and multiculturalism. Observations drawn from this study would necessarily be related—critically—to the larger theoretical literature on these themes in the United States, particularly on issues pertaining to immigration policies, socioeconomic adaptation, and political participation. The contributions of existing empirical and analytical studies on the Cuban American migrant community would be assessed and classified in terms of their respective theoretical and conceptual perspectives. Governmental sources would be used whenever appropriate, particularly statistical information and applicable laws and policies affecting the Cuban American community.


This report assesses the implementation of Smart Specialisation in Portugal, comparing the situation today with 2013. In that year a multi-level framework was designed that included a national and seven regional Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3). The role of regions in research and innovation policy was much less advanced in Portugal than other (Western) European countries, but a logical step to implement a concept that gives local actors a prominent role in strategy development through a process of entrepreneurial discovery. Smart Specialisation is a difficult concept to implement successfully because it crosses policy responsibilities and geographical levels. This report finds that a number of problems in the governance of S3 implementation accentuated these difficulties in Portugal: a governance structure that was never really activated; a policy mix constrained by the legal framework governing RI a basic form of monitoring that only analyses project alignment to priorities rather than the achievement of strategic objectives; a fragmented national strategic framework for RI and a lack of human resources to implement what is a challenging policy approach. The Portuguese regions did however learn from this first phase of Smart Specialisation and there have been some interesting and innovative attempts to instigate entrepreneurial discovery processes, work with other European regions and build capacity for managing innovation strategies. The report recommends that S3 in Portugal is fundamentally reset to embrace a more enterprise led model of innovation. This requires a much stronger governance framework including an active inter-ministerial committee led by the Ministry of Economy and a larger mandate for the National Innovation Agency. At regional level the S3 management teams need to be substantially reinforced and act more like development agencies than regional authorities, taking a pro-active approach to working with firms and monitoring the progress of their strategies. The National Innovation Agency should support the regional management teams in these tasks by enhancing their capabilities and facilitating inter-regional cooperation. The conclusion of this report is that these type of fundamental changes are important to set Portugal on the right track to fully benefit from Smart Specialisation post-2020.


China Cowboy tells the story of La La, a twelve-year-old Chinese girl from Hong Kong who is kidnapped and made into a sex slave by an American soybean farmer named Ren (pronounced "run," as in "run, La La! Run!"). But is she actually kidnapped, or is the kidnapping a ruse designed by La La herself to get her to the U.S., where she can become the next country superstar, her dream? Through the figure of La La, a tragic (child) victim/heroine not unlike the stars La La idolizes, Kim Gek Lin Short explores questions of agency and exploitation—emphasis on exploitation. Short is an elegant, entrancing writer, and her second book-length collection is both devastating and uncomfortably enjoyable. China Cowboy is a loosely constructed, fluid narrative, told via prose poetry that adopts the double tone of a tragicomedy: La La taking a carnivalesque romp through a sorrowful Patsy Cline album. It moves freely between the grotesque and the surreal, and reads simultaneously like a concept album and a biopic. This multilevel formal hybridity reflects and informs its investigation of La La's hybrid existence as a Chinese girl with American dreams, a hybridity that is also reflected in its design: the book's cover and section title pages are fashioned after film posters that mix the iconography of classic American Westerns and '70s-era Chinese martial arts films. China Cowboy's design speaks not only to the book's hybridity but also to its relationship to cinema. La La and Ren experience their relationship through various cinematic roles. At one point, Ren recites scenes from "that movie by Zhang Yimou" to La La, likely referring to the 1987 historical melodrama Hong Gao Liang (Red Sorghum), which involves the romance between a young girl and an older suitor. This recitation takes place in a poem with a title, "Butcher Holler," that invokes the childhood home of Loretta Lynn, who married 22-year-old "Doo" at the age of 15, a tumultuous relationship that is dramatized in the biopic Coal Miner's Daughter (1980). La La says: "In my sleep I am starring in Coal Miner's / Daughter. I am as convincing as Sissy Spacek except I am Chinese / and just can't help it. I can't." If these roles provide La La with ways of understanding her situation and the performances expected of her, they also fuel her fantasies of following her idols' paths from humble beginnings to fame and wealth. Her identifications with stars like Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline are frustrated by her ethnicity—"La La always wanted to be a cowgirl" but "COWGIRLS DON'T HAVE FLAT FACES," her mother insists. La La doesn't care: "When I get to America I can be anything I can be Patsy Cline I have her wrists." Used and exploited by Ren, she makes it to America—though this is questionable, as it's possible La La's fantasies have taken over as a form of dissociation. Within this abusive relationship, she does, in a sense, become Patsy (or at least the movie version), and ventriloquizes Cline's mournful songs of wretched love as a survival strategy. "La La": short for song, and short for Lolita. While China Cowboy is the story of La La, it is the story of all the other La Las, too, and the various frames that contain them. There are three La Las alluded to in the book, all of them the same/different. La La is not only the three La Las: she is also Patsy, Loretta, Jessica Lange as Patsy, Sissy Spacek as Loretta, Heidi (who has "more clothes than La / La but La La still has enough to be Heidi"), as well as Shirley Temple, yodeling at the empty sky. She is the child wife in Red Sorghum (1986/1987); she is Humbert Humbert's fetishized Lolita; and she is "not La La" at all. La La is both alive and dead—she tells the reader (whom she addresses as "y'all," serious about her country star stature), that in 1997, "I would've been 20." Her body's been found, but La La's still singing.


Studio-based art and design education provides high levels of individual attention but has been criticized for the high demands for space and staff time that it places on institutions. Furthermore, retention and attainment rates in art and design subjects demonstrate that not all students develop the supportive, individual relationships with their tutors that facilitate development as creative practitioners. This article reports a case study of an initiative to improve retention amongst first year students studying Art, Design and Architecture subjects, by utilizing recent graduates, employed as Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), to create a communications bridge between new students and their subject tutors. The project found that retention rates improved by 50% for these first-year students, who also reported that GTAs are welcoming, approachable, more accessible, and easier to talk to than academic staff. Tutors felt that communication with their students was enhanced by GTAs helping build clear narratives for each student. As the role of GTA becomes more established, further developments will include facilitating peer-to-peer collaboration in the studio through the harnessing and integration of peer mentors to more quickly foster a collaborative and supportive studio culture for new students.


In this paper, we discuss from an economic perspective two alternative views of restrictions of competition by sports associations. The horizontal approach views such restrictions as an agreement among the participants of a sports league with the sports association merely representing an organization executing the horizontal cooperation. In contrast, the vertical approach views the sports association as being a dominant upstream firm enjoying a monopoly position on the market stage for competition organizing services, an important input for the actual product – the sports game. Taking the recent financial fair play (FFP) initiative by UEFA (the Union of European Football Associations) as an example, we demonstrate that the different views lead to different assessments of restrictive effects and, thus, matter for competition policy decisions. The economic story of the potential restrictive effect of FFP on players' and player agents' income may fit more plausibly to the horizontal approach, whereas the potentially anticompetitive foreclosure and deterrence effects of FFP may be economically more soundly reasoned by taking the vertical view.


This investigation concerns feedback praise (person and process praise) and how it relates to implicit theories of intelligence (entity and incremental theories) among pre-service teachers. In the first study 176 pre-service teachers participated, while in the second study 151 of such teachers participated. Two new measures, one of feedback praise and the other of social comparison, were found to be reliable and valid. In the first study, process praise was predicted by the variable incremental theories of intelligence and person praise was predicted by the acceptance of stereotypes. However, these results suffered in the reliability analyses and, even if the models are significant, they should be rejected. The results of the second study are more reliable, with regression analyses showing that person praise can be predicted from the two predictor variables of entity theories of intelligence, and social comparison. Some positive effects of teacher education were found in the second part; for example, the preference for person praise was significantly lower in the last semester than in the first.


ABSTRACT Recent research has cast light on the variety of informal payments and practices that govern the day-to-day interactions between traders and customs agents at border posts in low-income countries. Building on this literature, this paper draws on survey and qualitative evidence in an effort to explore which groups are most advantaged and disadvantaged by the largely informal processes and norms governing cross-border trade. We find that variation in strategies and outcomes across traders can only be effectively understood with reference to the importance of norms, networks, power, and the logic of control.


The UN Economic Commission for Africa organized a conference in Abuja, Nigeria, last November to review the "Role of Women in Africa in the 1990s" as a follow-up of the "Arusha Strategies" of 1984. Among topics examined were harmful traditional practices, such as early marriage and pregnancy, female circumcision, nutritional taboos, inadequate child spacing and unprotected delivery, which are still found to be current realities in many African countries. These practices often inflict permanent physical, psychological, and emotional damage, even death, and little progress has been achieved in the abolition, the Declaration states. The lives of women in Africa are dominated by traditions. Certain attitudes, structures, and traditional practices, such as female circumcision and nutritional taboos that have harmful effects on the health of women and children, have rarely been officially surveyed. They have not been fully acknowledged by policy makers and opinion leaders, nor have effective steps to stop them been given precedence in health development planning. There is need for action at national as well as subregional and regional levels. Action at the national levels means that: national research institutes should undertake in-depth research on various traditional practices and their effects on women; functional literacy campaigns should sensitize parents and disseminate information on the harmful effects of circumcision, childhood marriage and early pregnancy; guidance and counseling should be provided to adolescent girls as well as to parents to make them understand the harmful physical, social, and mental effects of some traditional practices; religious leaders, traditional rulers, women's organizational, professional bodies and others should act as pressure groups in promoting efforts against harmful practices through traditional and modern means of communication, dissemination of information, and other appropriate ways of communication; and legislative and administrative measures to eradicate harmful practices should be introduced and implemented urgently and expeditiously. At the subregional and regional levels: established subregional and regional structures should give priority attention in their development programs to the issues of female circumcision and other harmful traditional practices; action should be taken to ensure that women's issues are addressed within national programs; and policies on data development by gender specifications should be advocated so as to make data more relevant and useful. [Full Text Modified]


The prediction of combined sewer overflow (CSO) operation in urban environments presents a challenging task for water utilities. The operation of CSOs (most often in heavy rainfall conditions) prevents houses and businesses from flooding. However, sometimes, CSOs do not operate as they should, potentially bringing environmental pollution risks. Therefore, CSOs should be appropriately managed by water utilities, highlighting the need for adapted decision support systems. This paper proposes an automated CSO predictive model construction methodology using field monitoring data, as a substitute for the commonly established hydrological-hydraulic modeling approach for time-series prediction of CSO statuses. It is a systematic methodology factoring in all monitored field variables to construct time-series dependencies for CSO statuses. The model construction process is largely automated with little human intervention, and the pertinent variables together with their associated time lags for every CSO are holistically and automatically generated. A fast least absolute shrinkage and selection operator solution generating scheme is proposed to expedite the model construction process, where matrix inversions are effectively eliminated. The whole algorithm works in a stepwise manner, invoking either an incremental or decremental movement for including or excluding one model regressor into, or from, the predictive model at every step. The computational complexity is thereby analyzed with the pseudo code provided. Actual experimental results from both single-step ahead (i.e., 15 min) and multistep ahead predictions are finally produced and analyzed on a U.K. pilot area with various types of monitoring data made available, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.


Surface water resources can be largely impacted by recurrent seasonal bloom phenomena of algae and cyanobacteria. Algal Organic Matter (AOM) generated presents different composition and properties from that of Natural Organic Matter (NOM). The objective of this work was thus to characterize AOM generated by an alga, Euglena gracilis, and a cyanobacteria, Microcystis aeruginosa, and to evaluate its impacts on NOM during and after eutrophication. The alga and the cyanobacteria were cultivated in laboratory experiments and the evolution of AOM characteristics during the different growth phases were assessed by organic matter fractionation according to hydrophobicity and Specific UV Absorbance (SUVA) determination. The AOM characteristics were then compared to those of NOM from both an eutrophic pond and a river. The AOM characteristics were both algal species and growth phase dependent. During lag and exponential phases, AOM was hydrophilic and mainly produced by metabolic activity. During stationary and decline phases, the percentages of hydrophobic and transphilic compounds progressively increased because of cell mortality. In natural water, the percentage of hydrophilic compounds reached 10–30% of the DOM. In this study this percentage reached more than 50% for AOM during the decline phase for both species and 45% for NOM of an eutrophic pond during summer, when phytoplanktonic contribution was maximum. The fractionation of OM according to hydrophobicity can thus be used to identify and differentiate the eutrophication origin of OM.


Current rectifying p–n junction devices are demonstrated from solution exfoliated two-dimensional (2D) molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), and excitonic effects are elucidated for solution dispersions of not only MoS2, but also another refractory 2D sulfide, tungsten disulfide (WS2). The excitonic enhancement effects are correlated to new solution chemistries using environmentally friendly terpineol. The role of sonication time and centrifugation are analyzed in the presence of terpineol with isopropyl alcohol and surfactant ethyl cellulose, where the red-shift in the excitonic peaks is correlated to the size distribution of the nanoparticles using optical interferometry. This was correlated to the data obtained using photoluminescence, Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and particle size analysis which also yielded results that were consistent with this finding. The terpineol dispersion exhibits the least red-shift of 5 meV from the top to the bottom of the vial, in contrast to non-terpineol dispersions where the red-shift is calculated to be as high as 90 meV, indicating terpineol's effectiveness in exfoliating a larger population of mono-to few-layer nanomembranes. Analysis of the optical absorption spectra allows for the extraction of the energy band gap for MoS2 and WS2. These results clearly show evidence of quantum confinement effects in solution dispersions of chemically exfoliated 2D MoS2 and WS2 which can be harnessed for a wide variety of optoelectronic devices that are amenable to scalable and high-throughput synthesis routes, using environmentally friendly solution chemistries.


Abstract Exoplanet transit events are attractive targets for the ultrahigh-resolution capabilities afforded by optical interferometers. The intersection of two developments in astronomy enable direct imaging of exoplanet transits: first, improvements in sensitivity and precision of interferometric instrumentation; and second, identification of ever-brighter host stars. Efforts are underway for the first direct high-precision detection of closure phase signatures with the CHARA Array and Navy Precision Optical Interferometer. When successful, these measurements will enable recovery of the transit position angle on the sky, along with characterization of other system parameters, such as stellar radius, planet radius, and other parameters of the transit event. This technique can directly determine the planet's radius independent of any outside observations, and appears able to improve substantially upon other determinations of that radius; it will be possible to extract wavelength dependence of that radius determination, for connection to characterization of planetary atmospheric composition & structure. Additional directly observed parameters - also not dependent on transit photometry or spectroscopy - include impact parameter, transit ingress time, and transit velocity.


Abstract. Secondary pollutants such as ozone, secondary inorganic aerosol, and secondary organic aerosol formed in the plumes of megacities can affect regional air quality. In the framework of the FP7/EU MEGAPOLI (Megacities: Emissions, urban, regional and Global Atmospheric POLlution and climate effects, and Integrated tools for assessment and mitigation) project, an intensive campaign was launched in the greater Paris region in July 2009. The major objective was to quantify different sources of organic aerosol (OA) within a megacity and in its plume. In this study, we use airborne measurements aboard the French ATR-42 aircraft to evaluate the regional chemistry-transport model CHIMERE within and downwind of the Paris region. Two mechanisms of secondary OA (SOA) formation are used, both including SOA formation from oxidation and chemical aging of primary semivolatile and intermediate volatility organic compounds (SI-SOA) in the volatility basis set (VBS) framework. As for SOA formed from traditional VOC (volatile organic compound) precursors (traditional SOA), one applies chemical aging in the VBS framework adopting different SOA yields for high- and low-NOx environments, while another applies a single-step oxidation scheme without chemical aging. Two emission inventories are used for discussion of emission uncertainties. The slopes of the airborne OA levels versus Ox (i.e., O3 + NO2) show SOA formation normalized with respect to photochemical activity and are used for specific evaluation of the OA scheme in the model. The simulated slopes were overestimated slightly by factors of 1.1, 1.7 and 1.3 with respect to those observed for the three airborne measurements, when the most realistic "high-NOx" yields for traditional SOA formation in the VBS scheme are used in the model. In addition, these slopes are relatively stable from one day to another, which suggests that they are characteristic for the given megacity plume environment. The configuration with increased primary organic aerosol (POA) emissions and with a single-step oxidation scheme of traditional SOA also agrees with the OA / Ox slopes (about ± 50 % with respect to the observed ones); however, it underestimates the background. Both configurations are coherent with observed OA plume buildup, but they show very different SI-SOA and traditional anthropogenic SOA (ASOA) contributions. It is hence concluded that available theoretical knowledge and available data in this study are not sufficient to discern the relative contributions of different types of anthropogenic SOA in the Paris pollution plume, while its sum is correctly simulated. Based on these simulations, for specific plumes, the anthropogenic OA buildup can reach between 8 and 10μg m−3. For the average of the month of July 2009, maximum OA increases due to emissions from the Paris agglomeration are noticed close to the agglomeration at various length scales: several tens (for primary OA) to hundreds (for SI-SOA and ASOA) of kilometers from the Paris agglomeration. In addition, BSOA (SOA formed from biogenic VOC precursors) is an important contributor to regional OA levels (inside and outside the Paris plume).


Abstract: What influences who seeks foreign language tutoring? Using expectancy value theory, the present study researches the characteristics of university foreign language students in the language classroom (n = 258) and seeking tutoring (n = 29). Students' performance and mastery goal orientations, achievement task values, self-efficacy for foreign language learning, and academic variables were assessed and compared across groups. Foreign language students seeking tutoring were characterized by higher mastery and performance goal orientations and lower overall grade point averages, than those classroom students not seeking tutoring. Additionally, the generally high scores of all students on the motivational variables suggest that pessimistic views of foreign language students' self-efficacy and motivation may be unwarranted. Keywords: foreign language tutoring, achievement motivation, university foreign language student characteristics Language: relevant to all languages Introduction Students in many university foreign language courses have access to many resources to help their language learning and acquisition. For instance, students might seek help from peers or the instructor, look for native-speaking conversation partners, find supplemental textbooks, or take advantage of individualized tutoring opportunities. Tutoring, in particular, has a strong track record in improving learning across a number of academic domains (Cohen, Kulik, & Kulik, 1982; Lepper, Aspinwall, Mumme, & Chabay, 1990; Merrill, Reiser, Ranney, & Trafton, 1992). While foreign language tutoring frequently is available in formal programs sponsored by schools and universities, in outside sessions with the teacher or a more proficient student, and through private sector, for-profit agencies, not all students take advantage of this resource. Furthermore, research on foreign language tutoring is scarce; we do not know, for instance, who chooses to attend tutoring sessions and why. To help lay the groundwork for understanding foreign language tutoring, the present study offers baseline data grounded in achievement motivation theory to describe academic and motivational characteristics of university foreign language students, including both those who seek out tutoring and those who do not. As Oxford and Shearin (1994) point out, understanding student motivation has practical implications for learners and their teachers and tutors: [M]otivation directly influences how often students use [foreign language] learning strategies, how much students interact with native speakers, how much input they receive in the language being learned (the target language), how well they do on curriculum-related achievement tests, how high their general proficiency level becomes, and how long they persevere and maintain [foreign language] skills after language study is over . . . Therefore, motivation is extremely important for [foreign language] learning, and it is crucial to understand what our students' motivations are. (p. 12) Awareness of students' motivational profiles may help teachers and tutors provide more appropriate recommendations and interventions to support student foreign language learning. How, then, do foreign language students who seek tutoring compare with those who may also need, but do not seek out, such help? It is tempting to assume that students investing the time and energy to participate in tutoring outside of class are just "more highly motivated" than those who do not. However, motivation does not seem to be a simple, one-sided construct that students "have" or "lack." As researchers such as Dornyei (2001b) have pointed out, "there has been a considerable diversity of theories and approaches in the study of the motivational determinants of second language acquisition and use" (p. 46). Using well-established motivational constructs which have not yet been applied to the foreign language domain can help extend and deepen our understanding of our students in increasingly sophisticated ways. …


Resiliency is a term used to describe personal or environmental characteristics
that foster a process of successful adjustment and transformation regardless of the risk
and hardship (Benard, 1995). Certain youth have been shown to be deficient in resiliency
based on the way particular factors impact their lives and their ability to successfully
cope with these factors (Long et al, 2006). Factors that can be instrumental in causing
youth to be deficient in resiliency are a lack of involvement in extracurricular activities,
disengagement from school, and harsh parenting styles (Greene & Conrad, 2001;
Demmert, 1994; Strand & Peacock, 2002; Borden, Perkins, Stone, & Villarruel, 2005;
Arrington & Wilson, 2000; Lafromboise, 1988). However, all youth can possess life
attributes that help them to become more resilient. Such attributes as high self-esteem,
adult involvement, feeling connected with school, involvement in community, strong
sense of identity, and religious faith are known as protective factors (HeavyRunner &
Morris, 1997; Garrett, 1995; Strand & Peacock, 2002; Garmezy, 1991; Blum & Rinehart,
1997; Ralabate & Klotz, 2007; Werner, 1989). When the protective factors outweigh the
risk factors youth are able to demonstrate resiliency. Furthermore, when youth are
exposed to certain external elements, such crime, substance abuse, and suicide (Greene
2001; Williams 2001), they tend to have more negative outcomes related to overall
resiliency.
A case study was conducted to assess the risk and protective factors present in the
lives of four middle grade charter school students. Observations, interviews, archival
records, and a formal resiliency scale were used and triangulated. This information was
then analyzed and coded to aid in discovering themes for factors related to resiliency. A
plan to increase each student's protective factors and decrease his or her risk factors was
developed and presented to the charter school.


The smart grid, by the integration of advanced control and optimization technologies, provides the traditional grid with an indisputable opportunity to deliver and utilize the electricity more efficiently. Building smart grid applications is a challenging task, which requires a formal modeling, integration, and validation framework for various smart grid domains. The design flow of such applications must adapt to the grid requirements and ensure the security of supply and demand. This dissertation, by proposing a formal framework for customers and operations domains in the smart grid, aims at delivering a smooth way for: i) formalizing their interactions and functionalities, ii) upgrading their components independently, and iii) evaluating their performance quantitatively and qualitatively. The framework follows an event-driven demand response program taking no historical data and forecasting service into account. A scalable neighborhood of prosumers (inside the customers domain), which are equipped with smart appliances, photovoltaics, and battery energy storage systems, are considered. They individually schedule their appliances and sell/purchase their surplus/demand to/from the grid with the purposes of maximizing their comfort and profit at each instant of time. To orchestrate such trade relations, a bilateral multi-issue negotiation approach between a virtual power plant (on behalf of prosumers) and an aggregator (inside the operations domain) in a non-cooperative environment is employed. The aggregator, with the objectives of maximizing its profit and minimizing the grid purchase, intends to match prosumers' supply with demand. As a result, this framework particularly addresses the challenges of: i) scalable and hierarchical load demand scheduling, and ii) the match between the large penetration of renewable energy sources being produced and consumed. It is comprised of two generic multi-objective mixed integer nonlinear programming models for prosumers and the aggregator. These models support different scheduling mechanisms and electricity consumption threshold policies. The effectiveness of the framework is evaluated through various case studies based on economic and environmental assessment metrics. An interactive web service for the framework has also been developed and demonstrated.


Spontaneous ad hoc networks are distinguished by rapid deployment for a specific purpose, with no forward planning or pre-design in their topology. Often these networks will spring up through necessity whenever a network is required urgently but briefly. This may be in a disaster recovery setting, military uses where often the network is unplanned but the devices are pre-installed with security settings, educational networks or networks created as a one-off for a meeting such as in a business organisation. Generally, wireless networks pose problems for forensic investigators because of the open nature of the medium, but if logging procedures and preplanned connections are in place, past messages, including nefarious activity can often be easily traced through normal forensic practices. However, the often urgent nature of the spontaneous ad hoc communication requirements of these networks leads to the acceptance onto the network of anyone with a wireless device. Additionally, the identity of the network members, their location and the numbers within the network are all unknown. With no centre of control of the network, such as a central server or wireless access point, the ability to forensically reconstruct the network topology and trace a malicious message or other inappropriate or criminal activity would seem impossible. This research aims to demonstrate that forensic reconstruction is possible in these types of networks and the current research provides initial results for how forensic investigators can best undertake these investigations.


We have previously shown that the yeast gene PUS1 codes for a tRNA:pseudouridine synthase and that recombinant Pus1p catalyzes, in an intron-dependent way, the formation of psi34 and psi36 in the anticodon loop of the yeast minor tRNA(Ile) in vitro (Simos G et al., 1996, EMBO J 15:2270-2284). Using a set of T7 transcripts of different tRNA genes, we now demonstrate that yeast pseudouridine synthase 1 catalyzes in vitro pseudouridine formation at positions 27 and/or 28 in several yeast cytoplasmic tRNAs and at position 35 in the intron-containing tRNA(Tyr) (anticodon GUA). Thus, Pus1p not only displays a broad specificity toward the RNA substrates, but is also capable of catalyzing the pseudouridine (psi) formation at distinct noncontiguous sites within the same tRNA molecule. The cell-free extract prepared from the yeast strain bearing disrupted gene PUS1 is unable to catalyze the formation of psi27, psi28, psi34, and psi36 in vitro, however, psi35 formation in the intron-containing tRNA(Tyr)(GUA) remains unaffected. Thus, in yeast, only one gene product accounts for tRNA pseudouridylation at positions 27, 28, 34, and 36, whereas for position 35 in tRNA(Tyr), another site-specific tRNA:pseudouridine synthase with overlapping specificity exists. Mapping of pseudouridine residues present in various tRNAs extracted from the PUS1-disrupted strain confirms the in vitro data obtained with the recombinant Pus1p. In addition, they suggest that Pus1p is implicated in modification at positions U26, U65, and U67 in vivo.


Doping of organic light-emitting devices using highly luminescent molecules is a well-established strategy to improve brightness, efficiency and lifetime or to adjust emission color and color purity. Laser dyes from the pyran-containing donor-acceptor family are particularly interesting for emission in the yellow and red spectral domain. In solution, these polar dyes show marked solvatochromic shifts in the absorption and emission. The fluorescence quantum efficiency also depends strongly on solvent polarity, which suggests the occurrence of twisted excited states. In thin solid films such as the ones used in the fabrication of organic light-emitting diodes, additional effects have to be considered. When pyran derivatives are used as doping molecules in a Tris(8-hydroxyquinolinato)aluminium (Alq3) host matrix, the emission color is highly dependent on doping concentration. This is attributed to polarization effects induced by the doping molecules themselves. For some pyran derivatives, such as 4-(dicyanomethylene)-2-methyl-6-{2[(4-diphenylamino) phenyl]ethenyl}-4H-pyran (DCM-TPA), the electroluminescence spectrum is not pure and shows a green Alq3 shoulder, even at high concentrations. We have shown that these effects depend on the position of the frontier orbital energy levels with respect to those of the host. Charge carrier trapping by the doping molecules influences the charge density distribution. At high current densities, this can lead to a shift of the recombination zone out of the doped region. To impede charge recombination processes taking place in the undoped host matrix, charge blocking layers efficiently confine the recombination zone and give rise to increased efficiency.


Title of Dissertation: Applications of Dweck's Model of Implicit Theories to Teachers' Self-Efficacy and Emotional Experiences Alexis Ymon Williams, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Directed By: Professor Kathryn R. Wentzel Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology The current study explored Dweck's (1999; Dweck & Leggett, 1988) model of implicit theories in the context of teaching in order to establish its usefulness for describing teachers' beliefs about students' ability and social behavior. Further it sought to explain the connections between teachers' implicit beliefs and their efficacy for instruction and classroom management, and their positive and negative emotional experiences. The factor structure of survey data for teachers in mid-Atlantic school districts was examined to test for classes reflecting implicit and entity beliefs, or beliefs that student attributes are malleable or fixed and unchangeable. Given that previous work in other populations has reflected important connections between individuals' implicit theories, their cognitive and emotional functioning, and their interactions with others, the current study explored whether implicit theories have similar implications for teaching. The categorical distinction between entity and incremental theories was not supported in the analyses. Further analyses were conducted using structural equation models for implicit theories, efficacy, and emotional outcomes, including symptoms of burnout. Implicit theories were associated with efficacy such that tendencies toward incremental beliefs correlated with higher efficacy in well-fitting models. Although implicit theories predicted emotional outcomes in some models such that incremental beliefs were associated with positive emotional outcomes, the effect of the implicit theory variable was not significant in models that included the efficacy variable. In these models, only efficacy was a significant predictor of emotions such that higher efficacy was associated with positive outcomes. Finally, the interaction between implicit theory and efficacy was not significant. These findings fail to support the theoretical connections between the two variables in the implicit theory framework, where low efficacy is expected to predict negative emotional outcomes in the presence of entity but not incremental theories. Instead, with respect to emotional outcomes, teaching self-efficacy appeared to be a more salient predictor than studentdirected implicit theories of teachers' emotional experiences overall.


The Data Protection Act 1984 is a major piece of leglislation enacted in the United Kingdom which seeks to control the storage, processing and disclosure of computer held personal data. The Act places certain obligations upon data users, gives certain rights to providers of personal data and sets up an official administrative framework to monitor compliance with the Act and to behave as arbitrator in case of dispute. The Act has considerable implications for the various parties concerned and did not reach the Statute Book without a great deal of debate and controversy.
Any consideration of the implications of the Act inevitably embraces the two disciplines of Law and Computing. Immediately the Act became law, a number of writings appeared which emenated from one or the other. This thesis examines the topic bearing both main contributors in mind. It is concerned firstly with the background to the subject of data privacy. Then, the history of the various attempts to achieve workable and acceptable legislation in the United Kingdom is considered. The provisions of the Act are examined and discussed critically and various problems identified.
The role of the Data User is discussed and special reference is made to the security measures made necessary by the Act. Final conclusions are that the issue of security is central to any discussion of data protection. Based upon an analysis of the available literature, the subject is fully investigated in order to identify the underlying problems of privacy and data protection. Relevant techniques and methods of providing security for personal data are identified. The provisions of the Act, being central to the whole purpose of this thesis, are carefully analysed. This leads to a recognition of certain deficiencies in the legislation and suggestions for improvement.


BACKGROUND
This study determined the optimally tolerated regimen (OTR) of oral lapatinib administered in combination with infusional 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), leucovorin and irinotecan (FOLFIRI) and assessed the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of the combination.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
Twenty-five patients were enrolled; 12 patients were treated at three dose levels to determine OTR; then 13 patients were treated at OTR to evaluate the pharmacokinetics of the combination.

RESULTS
The 2-weekly OTR comprised lapatinib 1250 mg/day with irinotecan 108 mg/m(2) (day 1) and leucovorin 200 mg/m(2), 5-FU bolus 240 mg/m(2) and 5-FU infusion 360 mg/m(2) (days 1 and 2); doses of 5-FU and irinotecan represent a 40% reduction in dose compared to conventional FOLFIRI. Dose-limiting toxicities were grade 3 diarrhoea and grade 4 neutropenia. Co-administration of lapatinib increased the area under the plasma concentration-time curve of SN-38, the active metabolite of irinotecan, by an average of 41%; no other pharmacokinetic interactions were observed. Of 19 patients evaluable for disease response assessment, four patients had partial response and nine patients had stable disease.

CONCLUSION
The combination of lapatinib and FOLFIRI is safe and demonstrates clinical activity; the documented PK interaction can effectively be compensated by lowering the doses of 5-FU and irinotecan. This regime may be further tested in a phase II trial.