We show that occupational licensing has significant negative effects on labor market fluidity defined as cross-occupation mobility. Using a balanced panel of workers constructed from the CPS and SIPP data, we analyze the link between occupational licensing and labor market outcomes. We find that workers with a government-issued occupational license experience churn rates significantly lower than those of non-licensed workers. Specifically, licensed workers are 24% less likely to switch occupations and 3% less likely to become unemployed in the following year. Moreover, occupational licensing represents barriers to entry for both non-employed workers and employed ones. The effect is more prominent for employed workers relative to those entering from nonemployment, because the opportunity cost of acquiring a license is much higher for employed individuals. Lastly, we find that average wage growth is higher for licensed workers than non-licensed workers, whether they stay in the same occupation in the next year or switch occupations. We find significant heterogeneity in the licensing effect across different occupation groups. These results hold across various data sources, time spans, and indicators of being licensed. Overall, licensing could account for almost 8% of the total decline in monthly occupational mobility over the past two decades.


The intrinsic thermoacoustic (ITA) feedbackloop constitutes a coupling between flow, flame and acoustics that does not involve the natural acoustic modes of the system. One recent study showed that ITA modes in annular combustors come in significant number and with the peculiar behavior of clusters, i.e. several modes with close frequencies. In the present work, an analytical model of a typical annular combustor is derived via Riemann invariants and Bloch theory. The resulting formulation describes the full annular system as a longitudinal combustor with an outlet reflection coefficient that depends on frequency and the azimuthal mode order. The model explains the underlying mechanism of the clustering phenomena and the structure of the clusters associated with ITA modes of different azimuthal orders. In addition, a phasor analysis is proposed, which encloses the conditions for which the 1D model remains valid when describing the thermoacoustic behavior of an annular combustor.


In recent years, energy policy has become an increasingly salient political issue in the United States. Rising gas prices, coupled with regional energy shortages and a growing recognition of the connection between U.S. energy supplies and national security, have led to calls for legislative action. Part of developing a national energy policy lies in understanding public opinion about existing energy sources, public support for various energy strategies, and what the public might be willing to do in order to conserve energy and reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil. In this review, we report trends in public opinion from 1974 through 2006 on traditional energy sources, alternative energy sources, and citizens' priorities on energy alternatives. The polls show that concern about the U.S. energy situation is as high now as it was during the nation's energy crises of the 1970s. While attitudes about traditional sources of energy are strongly influenced by current economic conditions, citizens are increasingly receptive to alternative sources of energy (e.g., nuclear energy). Citizens also support policy changes that involve the government encouraging conservation through energy efficient appliances, vehicles, and homes and offices. The public voices a growing frustration with President Bush's, and the Congress's, handling of the nation's energy problems, and they express a desire for leadership in finding long-term solutions to the nation's energy dilemmas.


Immigration policy and tradition dovetail in their impact on the social organization of immigrant communities, linking the material and non-material aspects of gender. I focus on Asian Indian Patels, who dominate the budget motel business in the United States. I conducted semi-structured interviews with Patel men, women, and teenagers. I stayed overnight in the motels to observe families at work. I was almost always invited to prepare and share a meal, so I observed families at home. My analysis is based on transcribed interviews with participants, fieldnotes, observations, community publications, and information from three key contacts. Most Patels enter the U.S. under family reunification rules in a chain migration. These rules do not recognize families as labor; therefore a majority of documented immigrants are exempt from labor certification. Traditions define Patel women as housewives. The nature of motel work allows women to contribute their labor full-time and still remain housewives: they are not recognized as workers. Community financing and family labor, both escapes from the market economy, allow for the economic success of Patels. When families take on subsequent links in the chain migration, they must meet the costs of migration for new immigrants, and maintain traditional gender hierarchy. When they are the last link in the chain, there is a challenge to this hierarchy. In the second generation, when they remain in the motel business, Patels maintain traditional gender hierarchy. When either partner is linked to the labor market, there is a challenge to traditional


Abstract

This article considers whether capital is a significant constraint on employment in Australia. We calculate the level of capital-constrained employment for seven sectors of the Australian economy. The calculations suggest that the manufacturing; transport, storage and communication; and recreation, personal and other services sectors have sufficient capital installed to increase employment. In two other sectors, mining and wholesale and retail trade, the potential for increases in employment through increased capital utilisation may be constrained by surplus labour (as of June 1993). While some sectors are capital constrained at the moment, we find that the investment requirements to increase employment in these sectors are not onerous. We also project investment requirements in each of the sectors for employment growth over the next five years. These projections suggest that a jump in investment followed by relatively modest growth is required to sustain growth in employment.


Extensive preclinical studies have validated nucleolin as a new therapeutic target in oncology. Confocal microscopy, immunohistochemistry, and cell fractionation studies have shown that this protein is highly overexpressed in the plasma membrane and cytoplasm of a wide variety of human hematological and solid tumor cells, but is usually undetectable on the cell surface or in the cytoplasm of the corresponding normal cells. We have utilized our licensed platform technology to generate a first-in-class panel of eight fully human monoclonal IgG1 antibodies (HuMAbs). These antibodies bind specifically to nucleolin on the tumor cell surface, which in turn elicits potent cytotoxicity to a variety of human tumor cell lines. One such example is CP101, which killed MV4-11 (AML), MCF-7 (breast), DU145 (prostate), PANC-1 and MIA PaCa-2 (pancreas) tumor cell lines with IC50 values ranging from (0.5-2.0 µg/ml; 3-12 nM) following exposure to the HuMAb for 96 hrs. These in vitro assays were performed in the absence of human complement and immune effector cells required for complement-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (CDCC) and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC), respectively. These results are consistent with published observations that anti-nucleolin HuMAbs can exploit the known shuttling function of cell surface nucleolin to gain intracellular access and induce direct tumor cytotoxicity. In contrast to its cytocidal effects on tumor cells, CP101 had no effect on the viability of either MCF-10A normal human breast epithelial cells or normal human CD19+ B cells, neither of which expresses nucleolin on the cell surface. In summary, the results suggest that anti-nucleolin HuMAbs are unique in that they can exert broad spectrum antitumor activity independently of the immune mechanism of CDCC and ADCC, while having no detectable effects on the viability of the corresponding normal cells. Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2012 Mar 31-Apr 4; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2012;72(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 4623. doi:1538-7445.AM2012-4623


The article presents features of the growing crisis process in the Russian economy and allocated symptoms of approximation a crisis in the economy. The following three factors considered as grounds for such conclusions. In particular, it was observed the slowdown of GDP, an increase with years the difference between GDP and the sum of the GRP of Russian regions. In addition, the growth of human potential has practically ceased. Collection of data by the most significant and well-informed literary sources was used. Survey of experts was conducted by importance of the factors in the list of thirty-five indicators. These data were used to extract the most influencing factors and assessment of their significance. The result revealed that corruption, inefficient public administration, crisis of the education system and monopolization of the economy turned a most important for inhibition the development the Russian economy.


The Democratic Republic of the Congo is presently confronted with the most severe crisis since its independence. It has been transformed into a battlefield where several African states and national armed movements are simultaneously fighting various wars. Confronted with this acute political emergency, the international community, which has a responsibility in promoting peace and security has given an ambiguous message. In the absence of a clear response, the Southern Africa Development Community played a leading role in the mediation process that ultimately led to the Lusaka Agreement of 10 July 1999. The agreement was, however, signed in a totally different context from the present one. Moreover, the primary objective of the Lusaka Agreement, to topple Laurent Désiré Kabila, has lost its relevance since his assassination and replacement by a (more Western friendly) government led by Joseph Kabila. With the Lusaka Agreement signed by most of the belligerents, the international community had a framework through which to channel its growing involvement. However, confronted by the signatories to the Lusaka Agreement who were not ready for peace and therefore continuously violated established rules of international law and found pretexts to not observe the agreement, the international community remained divided and unwilling to become more involved ‐ particularly in light of the Somalia and Rwanda debacles. In the absence of this commitment, however, the whole idea of African renaissance could be put in jeopardy.


Runtime compilation, due to its online nature, presents unique challenges and opportunities to compiler designers. Since compilation occurs during program execution, a just-in-time compiler (JIT) must be judicious in expending compilation time. The literature on traditional, offline compilers describes numerous program transformation techniques that strive to increase execution efficiency. However, while optimization passes for static compilers are well understood and have been thoroughly investigated, many such transformation algorithms cannot be implemented on a JIT environment due to compilation-time constraints. Further, offline algorithms are not designed to exploit information available to an online compiler at program execution time.
The thesis of the research presented in this document is that program optimization techniques designed for traditional, offline compilers can be profitably adapted for a runtime compiler by effectively respecting the constraints imposed on compilation time and by exploiting the opportunities available in a runtime compilation environment. To that end, the dissertation explores the complexity of implementing program transformations for a runtime compiler and redesigns two optimization techniques for a JIT: register allocation and loop unrolling. The two transformations present contrasting challenges when they are included in a runtime compiler. While several offline, heuristic allocation algorithms achieve impressive results, they consume large amounts of compilation-time that are typically unacceptable for a JIT. We describe the design of two allocation algorithms that reduce allocation time while preserving the advantages of strong techniques authored for offline compilers. An experimental evaluation of the new algorithms demonstrates their effectiveness on a runtime compilation environment.
While a runtime compiler is limited by the constraints imposed by its environment, compiling just prior to program invocation provides certain advantages over an offline compiler. In particular, it can examine information only available at program execution time. We describe the design of a lightweight runtime value-examining mechanism and a loop unrolling algorithm that work in tandem. Our experimental results indicate that the runtime unroller achieves significant improvements on floating point, scientific benchmarks.
In summary, thus, the research described in this dissertation demonstrates how compiler optimization algorithms can be effectively tailored for runtime compilation.


Distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS), a co-product of the dry-mill ethanol industry, are the dried residue that remains after the fermentation of corn (or other grains) mash by selected yeasts and enzymes to produce ethanol and carbon dioxide. The nutrient composition of DDGS varies depending on the source of grain and the methods used for ethanol and DDGS production. Generally, corn DDGS contains approximately 29% crude protein, 10% fat, 9% crude fiber and 5% ash. Based on the essential amino acid (EAA) composition, distillers grain products (DGP) from various grain sources are deficient in a few EAA for most fish species, notably in lysine and methionine but does not contain antinutritional factors found in most other plant protein sources. At present, DGP are mainly used in terrestrial animal feeds, and its use in fish feeds is limited. Optimum inclusion levels of DDGS in fish diets appeared to vary depending on the type of ingredient substituted and levels of other protein source, especially fish meal, present in the diets. However, results of previous research have shown that corn DDGS is a promising ingredient for aquaculture diets. A level of 20 to 40% DDGS has been successfully used in channel catfish and tilapia diets. In trout diets, a level of 15% has been suggested. However, inclusion levels of dietary DDGS can be increased by supplementation of limiting EAA such as lysine.


Background: Two randomized trials recently demonstrated that regional nodal irradiation (RNI) could reduce the risk of recurrence in early breast cancer; however, these trials were conducted in the pretrastuzumab era. Whether these results are applicable to human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)–positive breast cancer patients treated with anti-HER2-targeted therapy is unknown. Methods: This retrospective analysis was performed on patients with node-positive breast cancer who were enrolled in the Adjuvant Lapatinib and/or Trastuzumab Treatment Optimization phase III adjuvant trial and subjected to BCS. The primary objective of the present study was to examine the effect of RNI on disease-free survival (DFS). A multivariable cox regression analysis adjusted for number of positive lymph nodes, tumor size, grade, age, hormone receptors status, presence of macrometastatis, treatment arm, and chemotherapy timing was carried out to investigate the relationship between RNI and DFS. Results: One thousand six hundred sixty-four HER2-positive breast cancer patients were included, of whom 878 (52.8%) had received RNI to the axillary, supraclavicular, and/or internal mammary lymph nodes. Patients in the RNI group had higher nodal burden and more frequently had tumors larger than 2 cm. At a median follow-up of 4.5 years, DFS was 84.3% in the RNI group and 88.3% in the non-RNI group. No differences in regional recurrence (0.9 % vs 0.6 %) or in overall survival (93.6% vs 95.3%) were observed between the two groups. After adjustment in multivariable analysis, there was no statistically significant association between RNI and DFS (hazard ratio = 0.96, 95% confidence interval = 0.71 to 1.29). Conclusions: Our analysis did not demonstrate a DFS benefit of RNI in HER2-positive, node-positive patients treated with adjuvant HER2-targeted therapy. The benefit of RNI in HER2-positive breast cancer needs further testing within randomized clinical trials.


The tetrapyrrole biosynthesis pathway is a key part in chlorophyll production and is essential for plant survival. It involves numerous interacting compounds and, crucially, light. The understanding of the complex regulation processes involved has been the focus of extensive experimental research providing a large source of data. A particular set of data, concerned with the modelling described in this report, involves 24 hour timecourse data from seedlings exposed to constant light, following a three day period of growth from seed in darkness. This data includes the levels of key components such as chlorophyll, ATP, chlorophyllide and proto-chlorophyllide. Amongst the questions posed in the study-group were: i) Can the timecourse data be predicted by a model? ii) Can it predict the dierences in levels of various components in found mutant strains.

To address these questions, we present in this report a model consisting of a coupled system of nonlinear ODEs that describes a simplied version of the tetrapyrrole pathway based on mass action laws. Model simulations produced results that agree qualitatively well with most, but not all, of the available timecourse data obtained from wild-type and mutant strains. Nearly all of the model's parameters are not known, so the values used in these simulations are based on estimates of the relative timescales of the reactions. An attempt at improving these estimates using data tting techniques is also discussed.


Prof. Julia Erin Wood's course explores the relationships between the mid-twentieth century civil rights struggles in the United Sates, the Cold War, and international decolonization and liberation movements.


Sub-wavelength diameter holes in thin metal layers can exhibit remarkable optical features that make them highly suitable for (bio)sensing applications. Either as efficient light scattering centers for surface plasmon excitation or metal-clad optical waveguides, they are able to form strongly localized optical fields that can effectively interact with biomolecules and/or nanoparticles on the nanoscale. As the metal of choice, aluminum exhibits good optical and electrical properties, is easy to manufacture and process and, unlike gold and silver, its low cost makes it very promising for commercial applications. However, aluminum has been scarcely used for biosensing purposes due to corrosion and pitting issues. In this short review, we show our recent achievements on aluminum nanohole platforms for (bio)sensing. These include a method to circumvent aluminum degradation—which has been successfully applied to the demonstration of aluminum nanohole array (NHA) immunosensors based on both, glass and polycarbonate compact discs supports—the use of aluminum nanoholes operating as optical waveguides for synthesizing submicron-sized molecularly imprinted polymers by local photopolymerization, and a technique for fabricating transferable aluminum NHAs onto flexible pressure-sensitive adhesive tapes, which could facilitate the development of a wearable technology based on aluminum NHAs.


ABSTRACT: In this paper, the theoretical framework of the Structured Cam Clay (SCC) model is extended to describe the behaviour of cemented clay. An operative mean effective stress parameter for soils with cohesion/cementation is introduced to include the influence of cementation on the strength and the deformation of cohesive soils. For simplicity, the removal of cementation is assumed to take place during the process of the rearrangement of soil particles to form the final critical state of deformation. Based on experimental observation, a simple destructuring function is proposed for the removal of cementation structure; especially, for artificially strongly-cemented clays. The model is suitable for describing the behaviour of clays in reconstituted, naturally structured, and artificially cemented states under monotonic loading or with simple stress reversal. The revised model is then employed to simulate the behaviour of cemented clays with various degrees of cementation and confining stresses. It is seen that main features of the complicated behaviour of cemented clays can be represented reasonably well by the model. Some studies on model parameters are also presented.


The furniture industry makes a significant contribution to the Indonesian economy but is exposed to an intensifying competitive environment and to emerging shortages of raw material. These circumstances have prompted small furniture manufacturers in the district of Jepara to undertake several types of innovation. It appears that of all first ranked innovations, product innovation is the largest category. In the overall pattern of innovations, market innovation and logistics innovation are also important, a situation that can be explained by the typical character and current circumstances of the furniture industry in this area. The innovation process concerned mainly relies on traditional knowledge sources, namely in-house learning-by-doing and experimentation, and buyers (customers). However, the manufacturers show willingness to use other knowledge sources in the near future, particularly more formal and globally oriented ones, such as exhibitions, research institutions, and the Internet. What tends to hamper such progress is that the manufacturers' capability to access these knowledge sources is limited by financial obstacles and to a smaller extent by complexity and language obstacles. The paper concludes with a few policy recommendations and potential directions of future research. One of the policy recommendations aims at a combination of the traditional way of knowledge generation through in-house learning-by-doing and experimentation with knowledge from modern and formal sources.


This study aims at investigating the level of participation in flood control activities on the part of community members who live by the Ciliwung river bank. Since the river is quite a long one, it was decided to conduct this study in the area between Kalibata Bridge and Manggarai floodgate, about eight kilometers in length. The study was conducted between October to December 2011. The study focused on natural resources management. The first sub-focus is stakeholder participation, the second is flood control, and the third is the Ciliwung river bank area where recurrent flood occurs. The study questions whether there is community participation in flood control activities within the Ciliwung riverbank area. The paradigm is how the government, together with the community along the Ciliwung riverbank, demonstrate their concern for their environment that is reflected in their taking care of the environment such as preventing themselves from throwing garbage into the river so as not to flood every time it rains.This qualitative study is supported by data collected by means of observations, interviews, and documentation. Findings of the study show a high level of participation expressed in words by the community. Yet, they reported difficulties in putting this into action due to the slum area they are living in, unavailability of road access, and waste resulting from disposal activities of residents forced to use the river. It is therefore not surprising that the river is full of garbage and they experience floods during the rainy season. The government has not sufficiently persudaded the target community to participate in flood control activities. In interviews, the target community stated that they were ready not to throw garbage into the river provided that there is road access, garbage carts or trucks are available for


Exit Tax (known as expatriation in the U.S.) is a tax rule (and a tool) used by governments to prevent taxpayers from changing their country of domicile solely for tax benefits. A person is usually subject to taxation in his country of domicile on his worldwide income. Since there is a broad variety of tax systems in the world, in which some countries impose higher income tax rates on its residents and others impose lower rates or even no tax on certain classes of income, people might choose to change their country of domicile to a more favorable jurisdiction when they expect a big taxable gain.The Exit Tax applies to the person's entire assets appreciation without regard to the fact that some assets might not be sold yet, meaning the taxpayer has not realized the gain. In general, this imposition of tax applies when a country considers a change of residency to be a deemed assets sale - therefore, the government taxes notional transactions. The notional transactions are affective only in the country imposing and applying the Exit Tax. The new country of residency may choose to accept the outcome of the Exit Tax or not at its discretion. If it chooses to accept the Exit Tax imposed by the former country, it may, for example, step up the cost basis of the asset deemed sold for a future gain calculation. Exit Tax is a domestic rule promulgated by the domestic legislator which disregards any bilateral agreement that might be affected by the enactment of such a law. Tax treaties are agreements negotiated and signed by countries in order to provide countries useful tools to avoid double taxation and prevent tax evasion. After such an agreement is signed, countries should respect and obey its rules. However, countries currently still use the Exit Tax tool although the tool might override a tax treaty they are bound to respect. By using the Exit Tax tool, countries violate not only the tax treaty between them and the new residence country but also treaties signed with third party countries that have no relation to the taxpayer change in residency. These third party countries were not the abandoned or the absorbed country and nonetheless they are affected by the Exit Tax regime of the abandoned country.Since the Exit Tax is a domestic rule, I believe that the country adopting such a regime should provide assistance to the taxpayer to help them avoid potential double taxation. I believe that neither the responsibility to eliminate the potential double taxation nor that of implementing a remedial procedure should be borne by the new country of residence.


. Soil resource depletion and land degradation are key contributing factors to food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Novel conservation agriculture practices (CAP) encourage smallholder farmers to leave post-harvest residue in the field for the purpose of soil organic matter (SOM) restoration and soil water conservation. Many farmers understand the importance of crop residue retention for soil fertility. Due to resource limitations and everyday demands, retaining residues is often impossible because farmers remove crop residue primarily for household cooking and livestock feed (Kushwaha and Singh, 2005).


One method of reducing disease in crops is the dissemination of disease‐free planting material from a multiplication site to growers. This study assesses the validity and sustainability of this method for cassava brown streak disease, a threat to cassava crops across East Africa. Using mathematical modelling, the effects of different environmental and control conditions on pathogen spread were determined in a single‐field multiplication site. High disease pressure, through large vector populations and disease in the surrounding area, combined with poor roguing practice, resulted in unsuccessful disease suppression. However, fields may produce sufficiently clean material for replanting if these factors can be overcome. Assessing the sustainability of a low‐pressure system over multiple harvests, well‐managed fields were found to maintain low disease levels, although producing sufficient cuttings may prove challenging. Replanting fields from the previous harvest does not lead to degeneration of planting material, only cutting numbers, and the importation of new clean material is not necessarily required. It is recommended that multiplication sites are only established in areas of low disease pressure and vector population density, and the importance of training in field management is emphasized. Cultivars displaying strong foliar symptoms are to be encouraged, as these allow for effective roguing, resulting in negative selection against the disease and reducing its spread. Finally, efforts to increase plant multiplication rates, the number of cuttings that can be obtained from each plant, have a significant impact on the sustainability of sites, as this represents the primary limiting factor to success.


The purpose of this research was to examine the effects of a balanced, accelerated, and responsive literacy program on the reading growth of elementary school struggling readers. The participants in this study were 10 second-grade children identified as underachieving in reading who were enrolled in an elementary school summer program. This study was conducted as a formative experiment, an emerging research design in which quantitative and qualitative data are collected and analyzed in relation to an established pedagogical goal. An analysis of the data revealed that students grew in their word identification abilities, fluency, strategic comprehension abilities, perceptions of themselves as readers, attitudes toward reading, and instructional reading levels. The importance of educators implementing self-constructed balanced literacy programs was discussed. The accelerated progress of students was detailed, and the importance of implementing responsive reading programs was considered. Implications for future reading research and instruction were provided.


Marine Citizen Science is an area which is rapidly gaining interest, and it's easy to see why. Citizen Science is where scientists and the general public collaborate to co-generate greater knowledge and understanding of the natural world. For the marine environment, the applications are as varied as the ocean itself. Involving the general public in marine scientific research can bring the vast ocean closer to home, explaining its wonders and raising awareness of the challenges it faces, making Marine Citizen Science a powerful tool in striving for a truly ocean literate society. The wide variety of data amenable to Marine Citizen Science, along with advances in technology, also mean that there is a project for everyone. More than just as a means for education, Citizen Science is also a means to empowerment. Co-operation between science and society can enable the collection and analysis of data on much larger scales of time, space and sheer numbers than would be possible for science alone. This is turn can provide a concrete scientific basis of evidence which can inform and guide marine policy to truly make a difference.This policy brief answers the question "Why Marine Citizen Science?", and presents the wide scope of applications in marine science research. It also looks at future opportunities with regard to the use of technology, as well as highlighting the potential for Marine Citizen Science to be a tool for marine policy. It finishes by presenting recommendations going forward, as both short- and long-term action areas, to ensure that Marine Citizen Science can continue to progress in Europe.


Conformal transformations play a widespread role in gravity theories in regard to their cosmological and other implications. In the pure metric theory of gravity, conformal transformations change the frame to a new one wherein one obtains a conformal‐invariant scalar–tensor theory such that the scalar field, deriving from the conformal factor, is a ghost. In this work, conformal transformations and ghosts will be analyzed in the framework of the metric‐affine theory of gravity. Within this framework, metric and connection are independent variables, and, hence, transform independently under conformal transformations. It will be shown that, if affine connection is invariant under conformal transformations, then the scalar field of concern is a non‐ghost, non‐dynamical field. It is an auxiliary field at the classical level, and might develop a kinetic term at the quantum level. Alternatively, if connection transforms additively with a structure similar to yet more general than that of the Levi‐Civita connection, the resulting action describes the gravitational dynamics correctly, and, more importantly, the scalar field becomes a dynamical non‐ghost field. The equations of motion, for generic geometrical and matter‐sector variables, do not reduce connection to the Levi‐Civita connection, and, hence, independence of connection from metric is maintained. Therefore, metric‐affine gravity provides an arena in which ghosts arising from the conformal factor are avoided thanks to the independence of connection from the metric.


We investigate the effects of two reforms of temporary employment using panel data on Italian firms. We exploit variation in their implementation across regions and sectors for identification. Our results show that the reform of apprenticeship contracts increased job turnover and induced the substitution of external staff with firms' apprentices, with an overall productivity-enhancing effect. The reform of fixed-term contracts instead did not produce the intended results: it induced a substitution of temporary employees in favour of external staff and reduced capital intensity, generating productivity losses. We estimate substitution elasticities across various types of temporary contracts that are consistent with this interpretation.


OBJECTIVE
Pediatric breast masses are relatively rare and most are benign. Most are either secondary to normal developmental changes or neoplastic processes with a relatively benign behavior. To fully understand pediatric breast disease, it is important to have a firm comprehension of normal development and of the various tumors that can arise. Physical examination and targeted history (including family history) are key to appropriate patient management. When indicated, ultrasound is the imaging modality of choice. The purpose of this article is to review the benign breast conditions that arise as part of the spectrum of normal breast development, as well as the usually benign but neoplastic process that may develop within an otherwise normal breast. Rare primary carcinomas and metastatic lesions to the pediatric breast will also be addressed. The associated imaging findings will be reviewed, as well as treatment strategies for clinical management of the pediatric patient with signs or symptoms of breast disease.

CONCLUSION
The majority of breast abnormalities in the pediatric patient are benign, but malignancies do occur. Careful attention to patient presentation, history, and clinical findings will help guide appropriate imaging and therapeutic decisions.


Fixed income practitioners need to understand the conceptual frameworks of their field; to master its quantitative tool-kit; and to be well-versed in its cash-flow and pricing conventions. Fixed Income Securities, Third Edition by Bruce Tuckman and Angel Serrat is designed to balance these three objectives. The book presents theory without unnecessary abstraction; quantitative techniques with a minimum of mathematics; and conventions at a useful level of detail.

 The book begins with an overview of global fixed income markets and continues with the fundamentals, namely, arbitrage pricing, interest rates, risk metrics, and term structure models to price contingent claims. Subsequent chapters cover individual markets and securities: repo, rate and bond forwards and futures, interest rate and basis swaps, credit markets, fixed income options, and mortgage-backed-securities.

 Fixed Income Securities, Third Edition is full of examples, applications, and case studies. Practically every quantitative concept is illustrated through real market data. This practice-oriented approach makes the book particularly useful for the working professional.

 This third edition is a considerable revision and expansion of the second. Most examples have been updated. The chapters on fixed income options and mortgage-backed securities have been considerably expanded to include a broader range of securities and valuation methodologies. Also, three new chapters have been added: the global overview of fixed income markets; a chapter on corporate bonds and credit default swaps; and a chapter on discounting with bases, which is the foundation for the relatively recent practice of discounting swap cash flows with curves based on money market rates.


The report guides policymakers on how to promote energy-efficient electric motors in their respective national markets. The report is part of a series of U4E reports on five product groups. The other reports in the series cover air conditioners, distribution transformers, lighting, and residential refrigerators. An additional overarching report, "Policy Fundamentals Guide," provides crosscutting, general guidance critical to the establishment of a successful energy efficiency programme.


Traditionally, reliable multicast protocols are deterministic in nature. It is precisely this determinism that tends to become their limiting factor when aiming at reliability and scalability, particularly in highly dynamic networks, e.g., ad hoc networks. As probabilistic protocols, gossip-based multicast protocols, recently (re-)discovered in wired networks, appear to be a viable means to "fight fire with fire" by exploiting the nondeterministic nature of ad hoc networks. We present a protocol that is designed to meet a more practical specification of probabilistic reliability; this gossip-based multicast protocol, called route driven gossip (RDG), can be deployed on any basic on-demand routing protocol. RDG is custom-tailored to ad hoc networks, achieving a high level of reliability without relying on any inherent multicast primitive. We illustrate our RDG protocol by layering it on top of the "bare" DSR protocol. We prove the reliability and scalability of RDG through both analysis and simulation.


Optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions of discrete (and potentially continuous) design parameters is a ubiquitous problem in scientific and engineering applications. Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular, sample-efficient method that leverages a probabilistic surrogate model and an acquisition function (AF) to select promising designs to evaluate. However, maximizing the AF over mixed or high-cardinality discrete search spaces is challenging standard gradient-based methods cannot be used directly or evaluating the AF at every point in the search space would be computationally prohibitive. To address this issue, we propose using probabilistic reparameterization (PR). Instead of directly optimizing the AF over the search space containing discrete parameters, we instead maximize the expectation of the AF over a probability distribution defined by continuous parameters. We prove that under suitable reparameterizations, the BO policy that maximizes the probabilistic objective is the same as that which maximizes the AF, and therefore, PR enjoys the same regret bounds as the original BO policy using the underlying AF. Moreover, our approach provably converges to a stationary point of the probabilistic objective under gradient ascent using scalable, unbiased estimators of both the probabilistic objective and its gradient. Therefore, as the number of starting points and gradient steps increase, our approach will recover of a maximizer of the AF (an often-neglected requisite for commonly used BO regret bounds). We validate our approach empirically and demonstrate state-of-the-art optimization performance on a wide range of real-world applications. PR is complementary to (and benefits) recent work and naturally generalizes to settings with multiple objectives and black-box constraints.


The site-specific formation of an actin cytoskeleton is part of the morphogenesis of plant cells. The ARP2/3 complex and its activator, the SCAR/WAVE complex, induce actin polymerization. The SCAR/WAVE complex consists of the subunits SCAR, BRICK, NAP, PIR and ABIL. Vesicle transport and secretion are another aspect of morphogenesis. The Exocyst complex, which consists of the subunits Sec3, Sec5, Sec6, Sec8, Sec10, Sec15, Exo70 and Exo84, is involved in secretion through its role in exocytosis. Exocyst subunits of the complex from Arabidopsis thaliana also interact with subunits of SCAR/WAVE- and ARP2/3 complexes.
In contrast to ABI in metazoen, one result of this work showed that both the N-terminus and the C-terminus of ABIL3 interact with SCAR, NAP and PIR. In contrast to this, Exo70B2 only interacts with the C-terminus of ABIL3. Overexpression of the N-terminus of ABIL3 resulted in longer roots in Arabidopsis thaliana, as it is also known for a line of amiRNA ABIL3. The overexpression of a C-terminal fragment of Sec10 in Arabidopsis thaliana also showed longer roots. In contrast, the overexpression of the N-terminus caused shorter roots and reduced complexity of the pavement cells.
Pavement cells are model cells for cell morphology and were part of the analysis of Exocyst mutants. For the heterozygous exo84b-2-mutant a not yet described phenotype could be detected: In addition to a reduced complexity of the pavement cells, the mutant is also smaller and has shorter siliques with less seeds. A part of the seeds looks dessicated and shows no mucilage.
The analysis of sec6- and sec8-mutants in the vegetative stage is not possible because of the male gametophytic lethality. Therefore, introduced Sec6 of a homozygous rescued sec6-plant should be removed by using the Cre-recombinase of the Cre/Lox-system. For this purpose, the functionality of an inducible Cre-recombinase was demonstrated in this work by establishing a control: Overexpressed TRY in Col-0 leads to leaves with less trichomes. After induction of the Cre-recombinase TRY could be removed so that the plants showed the wild-type phenotype.
Regarding the functional link between the SCAR/WAVE and Exocyst complex it was shown that ABIL3 interacts via the C-terminus with Exo70B2 and overexpression of ABIL3- and Sec10-fragments led to changes in root length in Arabidopsis thaliana.


When the Supreme Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that states must provide same-sex couples with equal access to the legal institution of marriage, Chief Justice Roberts did not merely disagree with the majority's reasoning. Instead, employing a tactic more commonly associated with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the Chief Justice used his dissent to launch a broadside casting doubt on the decision's legitimacy. He accused the Court of "[s]tealing" the marriage issue from the people through "an act of will, not legal judgment," and he insisted that the majority's approach had "no basis in principle." In addition, Roberts raised concerns about the decision's impact on religious liberty, warning that it "[o]minously" failed to address the First Amendment's free exercise guarantee. The Chief Justice's harsh condemnation of the Obergefell decision has helped inspire calls for "constitutional resistance," and that resistance movement is now playing out simultaneously with efforts to exempt religious objectors from laws requiring equal treatment of same-sex couples. Those efforts have come to dominate the conversation about religious accommodation — a conversation that has become increasingly polarized in recent years. Against that background, this Article makes three arguments. Part I contends that the Chief Justice's dissent in Obergefell falls far short of substantiating his claim that the ruling "has no basis in the Constitution or this Court's precedent." Most critically, Roberts completely fails to engage the same-sex couples' strongest equal protection argument, which was endorsed by the Solicitor General, prevailed in several lower courts, and rested on well-established precedent. Moreover, the Chief Justice's claim that the Court has not previously interpreted the Constitution in ways that interfere with how marriage has been traditionally "defined" founders on the very definitional sources he cites. Part II contends that the full import of the Chief Justice's discussion of religious liberty in Obergefell has been underappreciated. By invoking the Free Exercise Clause to raise concerns about the conscience rights of those who object to same-sex marriage, Roberts implicitly calls into question the Court's landmark decision in Employment Division v. Smith. There is some irony to the Chief Justice doing so in a case where he is criticizing the majority for ignoring precedent, and a further irony in the fact that some of the most prominent supporters of the Chief's Obergefell opinion were once ardent defenders of Smith. But the more important point is that the longstanding effort to have the Court reconsider Smith may now have a very powerful new ally. Part III contends that the Court should reconsider Smith and restore some measure of constitutional protection against generally applicable laws that impose incidental burdens on religious practices. While powerful arguments have been made that judicially administered exemption regimes have proven unworkable and unprincipled in the past, those regimes have almost all utilized the language of strict scrutiny, and that language creates inevitable problems. Those problems need not attend a regime in which the Court applies only modestly heightened scrutiny to protect against incidental burdens on religion that the government could easily lift without compromising non-trivial state interests. Such an approach would guarantee a meaningful constitutional floor of religious exemption rights in situations that do not threaten the rights of third parties, and championing the restoration of such a floor has the potential to bring some unity of purpose to the conversation rather than more division along ideological and political lines.


Neural networks can represent and accurately reconstruct radiance fields for static 3D scenes (e.g., NeRF). Several works extend these to dynamic scenes captured with monocular video, with promising performance. However, the monocular setting is known to be an under-constrained problem, and so methods rely on data-driven priors for reconstructing dynamic content. We replace these priors with measurements from a time-of-flight (ToF) camera, and introduce a neural representation based on an image formation model for continuous-wave ToF cameras. Instead of working with processed depth maps, we model the raw ToF sensor measurements to improve reconstruction quality and avoid issues with low reflectance regions, multi-path interference, and a sensor's limited unambiguous depth range. We show that this approach improves robustness of dynamic scene reconstruction to erroneous calibration and large motions, and discuss the benefits and limitations of integrating RGB+ToF sensors that are now available on modern smartphones.


For many decades the only way to invest in volatility has been through trading options, futures, or variance swaps. But in recent years a number of volatility-related exchange traded Funds (ETFs) and Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs) have been launched which make volatility trading accessible to the retail investor and fund managers without the need to access futures markets. Our objective is to devise a trading strategy using them. We document where volatility returns come from, clearing up some misconception in the process. Then we illustrate five different strategies that will appeal to different investors. Four of the strategies are simple to describe and implement. All of the strategies have had extraordinary returns with high Sharpe Ratios and low correlation to the S&P5'08 in some cases negative correlation. The returns seems to be too good to be true – like picking up $100 bills in front of a steamroller – so we have a detailed discussion on the risks and the nature of the steamroller. We illustrate how these strategies can be incorporated into existing portfolios to reduce portfolio risk especially in times of crisis. They have positive exposure to the markets during good times and negative exposure during bad times. Unfortunately they do not always provide absolute returns and while reducing net portfolio drawdowns they can themselves have significant drawdowns. Still, we suggest that a traditional 60% equities, 40% bonds portfolio should be adjusted to 55% equities, 35% bonds, and 10% volatility.


An attendance tracking system is the easiest way to keep track the attendance of staffs within a company or an organization. Currently, attendance tracking systems are using biometrics, barcode, Bluetooth and manual methods. However in Bukit Beruang Askar Wataniah camp, they are still using manually in taking attendance which is inefficient. The reserve army needs to write their names, the time arrives and then sign the in a log book. This process is time consuming and it take time to enter their particular and other reserve army has to wait for their turn. Besides, the reserve army has another commitment because some of them work in other places and outside the camp area. Thus, it causes them to wrongly write the time in the log book. Therefore, in order to overcome these problems, image recognition project is conducted. It captures the serial number from the reserve army from identification card. In this project, the image processing is focusing on binarization technique to convert grayscale image to black and white image for further processing. The binarization is preserving edges and high-frequency parts of an image. The result from this project is 83.33% accuracy and the user will be able to reduce the reserve army time while taking attendance. It will also improve the efficiency of taking attendance with less error. In future, it can be enhance by generating the report based on the reserve army attendance information stored in excel.


We study the force exerted on two-level atoms by short, counterpropagating laser pulses. When the counterpropagating pulses overlap each other partially, multiphoton adiabatic processes are possible in several configurations, which amplify the force exerted on the atoms. We investigate the practical usefulness of such multiphoton adiabatic transitions for the manipulation of the atoms' mechanical state. In particular, we compare the efficiency of a pair of constant frequency, oppositely detuned laser pulses and that of a pair of frequency-chirped pulses. We also consider the case of prolonged exposure to a sequence of laser pulses for a duration that is comparable to or much larger than the spontaneous lifetime of the atoms. We use numerical methods to calculate the reduction of the force and the heating of the atomic ensemble when spontaneous emission cannot be neglected during the interaction. In addition, we derive simple approximate formulas for the force and the heating, and compare them to the numerical results.


OBJECTIVE. The objective of this study was to assess the safety of routine trivalent influenza vaccine (TIV) administration among healthy children 6 through 23 months of age, after the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendation. METHODS. The study was a retrospective case-control study of children receiving TIV in the first 2 seasons after the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendation. We assessed outcomes in the 42 days after vaccination in a population of 13383 children. Each case subject was matched, according to age and gender, with 3 control subjects. Hazard ratios were calculated with conditional logistic regression analysis. RESULTS. We found no statistically significantly elevated hazard ratios for the first TIV dose. An elevated risk of pharyngitis was found for children receiving a second TIV dose. No elevated risk of seizure was found. CONCLUSION. These results, for a population of healthy children, showed no medically significant adverse events related to TIV among children 6 to 23 months of age.


A simple method for optically measuring the thermal diffusivity of solids is demonstrated. The thermal displacement created on a substrate by a focused laser beam is determined from the divergence that it induces in a weak probe beam. The dynamics of the surface lens and the amplitude of the probe beam's divergence are then used to determine the thermal diffusivity of the substrate. Several materials that span a wide range of thermal properties are studied.


This paper asks about the production of religious community in modern society: How can the success of a strict Evangelical community in a secularized environment be explained? To find an answer to this question, an approach to emotion based on Randall Collins' interaction ritual chain theory is applied to data from participant observation in an Evangelical church in Switzerland. The weekly service as a highly orchestrated event characterized by a mutual focus and rhythmic entrainment imbues the communal symbols with emotions and plausibility. Through ritual interaction, three potentially disruptive communal tensions are transformed into solidarity: (1) highly transcendent theological concepts are translated into a simplified form which can be ritualized and gain immanence in the ritual actions of the participants; (2) the Evangelical emphasis on the individual and its religious decision on the semantic side are structurally transformed into the confirmation and reproduction of the community; (3) through the collectively shared emotions the potentially disruptive individual tendency towards immediate emotional gratification becomes aligned with the norms of the community.


This report provides an overview of Social Security financing and benefits under current law. Specifically, the report covers the origins and a brief history of the program; Social Security financing and the status of the trust funds; how Social Security benefits are computed; the types of Social Security benefits available to workers and their family members; the basic eligibility requirements for each type of benefit; the scheduled increase in the Social Security retirement age; and the federal income taxation of Social Security benefits.


Voters would be better off if they removed politicians offering low-quality government by pursuing populist policies and re-elected those who improved government quality with sustainable policies. In many political contexts, including those with free and fair elections, voters do the opposite. Low social trust can account for this paradox: voters must act collectively to shape political incentives, but low trust among voters is an obstacle to collective action. If every voter believes that fellow voters will accept particularistic benefits from poorly performing governments that keep them from voting against those governments, no voter has an incentive to select politicians who promise high-quality government. By the same logic, low social trust prevents voters from sanctioning politicians who renege on their promises. Frequent reneging on campaign promises, in turn, leads voters to hold low political trust. Low quality government, and in particular populism, emerge as optimal electoral strategies of political candidates in this environment. We analyze new survey data from 5,800 respondents in seven Latin American countries that provides support for a novel argument about populism and the quality of government: voters who express low trust are significantly more likely to prefer populist policies that reflect a low quality of government.


This Article analyzes the scope of Padilla v. Kentucky, concluding that its logic extends beyond deportation to many other severe and certain consequences of conviction that are imposed by operation of law rather than by the sentencing court.It proposes a set of reforms that would limit the disruptive effect of these so-called "collateral consequences" on the guilty plea process and make a defense lawyer's job easier. Part I describes a case currently pending in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that may yield some important clues about how broadly the Padilla doctrine will be applied to status-generated consequences other than deportation. At issue in Commonwealth v. Abraham is whether a retired public school teacher should have been warned by his lawyer that pleading guilty to a misdemeanor sex offense would result in the permanent forfeiture of his vested pension benefits. Part II looks at the collateral consequences doctrine as applied by the courts before Padilla to demonstrate its weakness in the Sixth Amendment context. It then examines the Padilla decision itself and its progeny to date and proposes a test for determining when a lawyer should be constitutionally required to notify a client about a particular legal consequence of conviction. It concludes that the pension forfeiture at issue in Abraham meets that test. Part III proposes three non-constitutional reforms to complete Padilla's unfinished business where the substance of plea agreements is concerned. The goal of these reforms is to minimize the extent to which harsh categorical sanctions destabilize the plea process on which the justice system has come to depend. Using principles set forth in the ABA Criminal Justice Standards, the Article recommends that jurisdictions should 1) compile and disseminate information about collateral sanctions; 2) eliminate those collateral sanctions that are disproportionately severe or bear only a tenuous relationship to the crime; and 3) provide timely and effective ways to avoid or mitigate the sanctions that remain. These reforms will not only shore up the plea system, they will propel a move away from a punitive model of collateral consequences that is frequently self-defeating and unfair to one that can be justified in both moral and utilitarian terms.


This paper investigates the effect of a change in informational environment of borrowers on the orga- nizational design of bank lending. We use micro-data from a large multinational bank and exploit the sudden introduction of a credit registry, an information-sharing mechanism across banks, for a subset of borrowers. Using within borrower and loan officer variation in a difference-in-difference empirical de- sign, we show that expansion of credit registry led to an improvement in allocation of credit to affected borrowers. There was a concurrent change in the organizational structure of the bank that involved a dramatic increase in delegation of lending decisions of affected borrowers to loan officers. We also find a significant expansion in scope of activities of loan officers who deal primarily with affected borrow- ers, as well as of their superiors. There is suggestive evidence that larger banks in the economy were better able to implement similar changes as our bank. We argue that these patterns can be understood within the framework of incentive-based and information cost processing theories. Our findings could help rationalize why improvements in the information environment of borrowers may be altering the landscape of lending by moving decisions outside the boundaries of financial intermediaries.


In the national airspace system, sectors get overloaded due to high traffic demand and inefficient airspace designs. Overloads can be eliminated in some cases by redesigning sector boundaries. This paper extends the Voronoi-based sector design method by automatically selecting the number of sectors, allowing three-dimensional partitions, and enforcing traffic pattern conformance. The method was used to design sectors at Fort-Worth and Indianapolis centers for current traffic scenarios. Results show that new designs can eliminate overloaded sectors, although not in all cases, reduce the number of necessary sectors, and conform to major traffic patterns. Overall, the new methodology produces enhanced and efficient sector designs.


This article was aimed to investigate the skin permeation, the antiinflammatory and analgesic effect of topical formulations containing Tenoxicam in a nanoemulsion form in drug concentration 0.5% and 1%. Skin permeation study was carried out using rat abdominal skin. Two tests were employed to evaluate the pharmacological effects included the Paw Oedema induced by Carrageenan injection and Hot plate test for anti-inflammatory and analgesic effect respectively. Finally, skin irritation test was performed to confirm the safety of both formulae. The obtained results suggested that Tenoxicam in lower concentration (0.5%) gives insignificantly greater cumulative % of in-vitro rat skin permeation (41.5%) than higher concentration (1% Tenoxicam releases 40.1%) in 24 hr, this confirm that Tenoxicam may possibly permeate through the human skin. The study also revealed that group 2 (animals treated with Tenoxicam nanoemulsion 0.5% in MC gel), group 3 (animals treated with 1% Tenoxicam nanoemulsion prepared in HPMC) and group 4 (animals treated with commercial analogue (Feldene® Gel) produced maximum percent oedema inhibition after 1 hr (70.95%, 78.74% and 72.94%) respectively and then continued significantly for 3 hrs. Also the same previous animal groups showed maximum increase in reaction time [analgesic effect] after 1.5 hr (18.7, 27.6 and 21 seconds) respectively. Skin irritation test suggested that both topical formulae were non-sensitizing and safe for human topical use. Finally it was concluded that formulae containing (oleic acid 10%; Tween 20 43.33%; PG 21.66% and water 25%) nanoemulsion equivalent to 0.5% Tenoxicam in MC gel base and 1% Tenoxicam in HPMC gel base possessed a good and an acceptable in-vitro skin permeation and pharmacological effects. ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY


Limiting the spread of contagious diseases can involve both government-managed and voluntary efforts. Governments have a number of policy options beyond direct intervention that can shape individuals' responses to a pandemic and its associated costs. During its first wave of COVID-19 cases, Singapore was among a few countries that attempted to adjust behavior through the public provision of detailed case information. Singapore's Ministry of Health maintained and shared precise, daily information detailing local travel behavior and residences of COVID-19 cases. We use this transparency policy along with device-level cellphone data to quantify how local and national COVID-19 case announcements trigger differential behavioral changes. We find evidence that individuals are three times more responsive to outbreaks in granularly defined locales. Conditional on keeping infection rates at a manageable level, the results suggest economic value in this type of transparency by mitigating precautionary activity reductions.


Users are interested in entity information and may use paradigms like publish/subscribe systems in Internet of Things (IoT), where entity-centric data comes from multiple sources. The IoT application demands contributed to the data integration and semantic interoperability need while maintaining high usability and low processing system resources usage. Existing approaches dealt with semantic interoperability by using/extending ontologies with strict schemata/semantics and difficult to be updated. Other approaches tackled high usability by providing sensor data abstractions that infer high-level knowledge, but they are either complex for real-time processing or have semantic/syntactic coupling making them nonflexible. Therefore, our key question is: can a dynamic entity summarization system that provides high-level abstractions while ensuring semantic/syntactic decoupling, and low use of processing system resources, be defined? In this article, we address this question by proposing the abstractive publish/subscribe summarization system that provides abstractive summaries of numerical IoT data for user-friendly subscriptions by using IoTSAX, an enhanced symbolic aggregate approximation (SAX) methodology for dynamic IoT environments, and approximate rule-based reasoning by using embedding models. Our results for two use cases, medicine and smart cities, show that although abstraction can be 2 to 3 times slower in latency, it achieves up to 98% reduction in the notifications' number. IoTSAX outperforms SAX in approximation error up to 2 to 3 times more and in compression space-saving percentage when data redundancy occurs, while it has a similar or better latency and throughput performance. Finally, concept hierarchy-based embedding models can achieve F-scores of up to 0.87 for approximate rule-based reasoning.


The paper analyzes the impact of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs, in conjunction with country-specific fundamentals and global factors, on the sovereign spreads in selected European emerging market economies (EMEs) from 2000 to 2016. For this purpose, we construct IMF indexes to capture the size of financial resources and the degree of implementation of IMF programs. Our sample is limited to countries belonging to the same region and having IMF programs and data on sovereign spreads over the same period. Our findings are unique in the current literature. They suggest that the size of financial resources and the degree of implementation of IMF programs matter for sovereign spreads, whereas the mere presence of IMF programs does not seem to affect them. Available IMF financial resources and a good implementation of IMF programs are associated with lower sovereign spreads in our panel. In addition, our results show that country-specific fundamentals and global factors remain the primary drivers of sovereign spreads.


I review the arguments for the importance of halo structure in driving galaxy evolution and coupling a galaxy to its environment. We begin with a general discussion of the key dynamics and examples of structure dominated by modes. We find that simulations with large numbers of particles (N ∼> 10 ) are required to resolve the dynamics. Finally, I will describe some new results which demonstrates that a disk bar can produce cores in a cuspy CDM dark-matter profile within a gigayear. An inner Lindblad-like resonance couples the rotating bar to halo orbits at all radii through the cusp, rapidly flattening it. This resonance disappears for profiles with cores and is responsible for a qualitative difference in bar-driven halo evolution with and without a cusp. Although the bar gives up the angular momentum in its pattern to make the core, the formation epoch is rich in accretion events to recreate or trigger a classic stellar bar. The evolution of the cuspy inner halo by the first-generation bar paves the way for a long-lived subsequent bar with low torque and a stable pattern speed.


The phenomenon of gender disparities gap at the secondary education level in Kenya presents challenges of achieving Sustainable Development Goals. By these goals, elimination of gender disparities in education is to be through the efforts of educational partners including Governments, Agencies, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) among others. The purpose of this study was to establish challenges in implementing NGO's gender parity strategies (GPS) in informal settlement secondary schools of Kibera, Kenya. The study was guided by Adams Stacy's equity theory and Herzberg's two-factor theory. The study utilized a mixed methods design. The study was carried out in the Kibera informal settlement of Nairobi County. The study targeted secondary schools managed by NGOs. Purposive sampling was utilized to select NGOs' mixed secondary schools while stratified and simple random sampling was used to select the respondents. Quantitative data was collected by use of questionnaire while qualitative data was gathered through interviews. Data analysis techniques included frequencies and percentages and qualitative comprised of categorization of themes. Data was presented in form of tables, charts, figures, and percentages. The study established that the challenges encountered in the implementation of genders parity strategies include: Lack of training for leaders on gender parity strategies; inadequate school facilities and child labour among others. This study recommended that the Kenyan government strengthens the affirmative action in the admission of girls into secondary schools and public universities and address poverty as a major cause of gender disparity in secondary education in informal settlements.


A bloom of the non-heterocystous diazotrophic cyanobacterium Trichodesmium ery- thraeum Ehrenberg is reported in the Canary Islands Archipelago during August of 2004, the warmest period of a meteorological series recorded by the National Institute of Meteorology (Spain) since 1912. Samples showed massive occurrences of T. erythraeum (1000 filaments ml -1 ) in different sectors of northern and southern waters off the central Canary Islands. Water analyses also showed a relatively low presence of dinoflagellates and diatoms. Quasi-true colour satellite images of dust storms, elevated sea surface temperature (the warmest satellite-derived record), chlorophyll a and geostrophic current fields showed satellite-derived optical positives of Trichodesmium in an African upwelling advective, jet-drifting westward current off the south Canary Islands. Analyses for cyan- otoxins using HPLC found microcystins, which was confirmed by immunoassay, at concentrations from 0.1 to 1.0 µg microcystin-LR equivalents (g -1 dry weight of bloom material). A T. erythraeum bloom such as that observed in August 2004 in the NW African Upwelling does not appear to have been recorded for the area previously. The bloom may have developed due to the exceptionally warm weather and/or to the massive dust storms from the Sahara Desert observed in the NE Atlantic in August 2004.


Nowadays, information technology (IT) represents a very important aspect in education as in every other area. As computer use is becoming widespread in education, its quality may be enhanced. The contribution of computers to tourism education could not be ignored. The Tourism industry, similarly to many countries, has a great contribution to the economic growth in Turkey. More specifically, for the deployment of young population, the importance of the tourism sector cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, the dynamic feature of the tourism sector and the fluctuation of demand cause high turnover speed employee results for corporations in this specific sector. Consequently, students graduated from tourism schools are not able to last long in the sector and they end up with abandoning the sector and prefer other businesses to work at. While the use of computers is becoming widespread and its importance is increasing in all sectors, it bears a significant importance for students who would work in the tourism sector. Consequently, the importance of computer-supported education is becoming crucial. Dokuz Eylül University is one of the most important Tourism schools in Turkey. Dokuz Eylül University is an educational institution that has a leading position in Turkey in the area of tourism management education with its experienced instructors tutoring in the Vocational School, undergraduate, graduate and doctorate courses. The students of tourism management should also be supported with the advances in computer technology in their profession. In this specific paper, the first chapter would involve a general aspect and presentation of the tourism education, which would be accomplished, followed by the existing different levels of the structure of tourism education in Turkey. The aim of this specific study would be to examine the students' perceptions regarding computer – based learning, as far as the education and training for the tourism industry is concerned. This research would represent students' perceptions of the two existing different classes, the tourism and the hotel management class. In conclusion, it could be said that the findings of this research, would be used in order to present some suggestions and crucial success factors regarding computerized education systems.


Bashkir employs the genitive strategy for predicative possessive construction ('he has a car' literally is 'his car exists'). However, in predicative possessive constructions the genitival possessor shows syntactic properties that are mostly indicative of its clause-level status. Some other uses with genitival possessors (as in e.g. 'his leg hurts') show mixed behaviour with respect to various constituency-related tests. The distribution of these properties directly reflects the degree of the relevance of the possessor. This semantics-to-syntax link is reminiscent of the external vs. internal possessor contrasts in other languages, although normally these contrasts are also manifested morphologically. The fact that constituency tests do not converge on identical results calls into question the applicability of the traditional notion of constituency to Bashkir possessive constructions.


Increase focus on policy-relevant research The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has proven its value as an institution for large-scale scientific collaboration to synthesize and assess large volumes of climate research for use by policy-makers, as well as for establishing credibility of findings among diverse national governments. But the IPCC has received considerable criticism of both its substance and process. The new IPCC leadership to be elected in October could help guide the IPCC to a clear, shared understanding of future objectives and could shape procedural reforms. We identify key opportunities for reform by addressing two related questions: Is the IPCC doing the right things? Is the IPCC doing things right?


The nose is the most prominent structure in human face, making it more susceptible to trauma which may reach 39% of all facial injuries. Although fracture nose is a common surgical problem, very few studies are conducted in Iraq on it. The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of local anesthesia in fracture nose manipulation and to assess the degree of patient's satisfaction from the functional and esthetic point of view. The majority of patients attended ENT department were males (68.5%) lying in the age group between 21 – 30 years and the reason for their injuries were assaults. Waiting for complete resolution of edema will result in less complications such as bleeding and pain sensation during fracture reduction. Fracture nose manipulation under local anesthesia gives high degree of satisfaction both for the functional (83.3%) and esthetic (88.9%) point of view, so this procedure can be recommended in ENT clinical practice in the view of these results as it is more safe, time saving and cost effective.


Recognition errors made by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems may not prevent the development of useful dialogue applications if the interpretation strategy has an introspection capability for evaluating the reliability of the results. This paper proposes an interpretation strategy which is particularly effective when applications are developed with a training corpus of moderate size. From the lattice of word hypotheses generated by an ASR system, a short list of conceptual structures is obtained with a set of finite state machines (FSM). Interpretation or a rejection decision is then performed by a tree-based strategy. The nodes of the tree correspond to elaboration-decision units containing a redundant set of classifiers. A decision tree based and two large margin classifiers are trained with a development set to become interpretation knowledge sources. Discriminative training of the classifiers selects linguistic and confidence-based features for contributing to a cooperative assessment of the reliability of an interpretation. Such an assessment leads to the definition of a limited number of reliability states. The probability that a proposed interpretation is correct is provided by its reliability state and transmitted to the dialogue manager. Experimental results are presented for a telephone service application


ABSTRACT Extreme precipitation from climate change may strain many existing stormwater systems. While studies have evaluated such effects on stormwater infrastructure, other sources of uncertainty not yet explored should also be considered. This paper presents an analysis of adaptation costs for new stormwater infrastructure to mitigate increases in design storm precipitation depth with climate change, including how economic and managerial uncertainty related to life cycle unit costs and knowledge of existing infrastructure affect costs. For case study areas in California, we quantify adaptation costs for new green infrastructure capacity by evaluating future design storms. Results indicate that design storm depths increase by an average of 28%, but lack of knowledge of the condition of existing infrastructure and life cycle unit costs result in wide cost ranges. The findings illustrate how climate change planning for stormwater should also consider economic and managerial uncertainty when estimating long-term adaptation costs.


We report a new design for a Faraday effect current sensor based on yttrium iron garnet that has substantially greater bandwidth than previous designs and is much easier to fabricate. The measured sensitivity is 0.7°/A, with a −3-dB bandwidth of 500 MHz, which gives an improvement in sensitivity–bandwidth product of approximately 45. A noise-equivalent current of 840 nA/Hz1/2 was measured at 1.8 kHz by difference-over-sum processing. The use of turning prisms with phase-preserving coatings greatly simplifies construction, improves electrical isolation, and increases sensitivity through proximity effects.


To properly design the microwave components such as transmission lines, filters, capacitors, inductors, and many others, it is important to know the characteristics of the construction materials at microwave frequencies. One of the most reliable techniques in material characterization at microwave frequencies is the coplaner coupled stripline resonator technique. This technique is an enhancement to the classical stripline resonator technique. In this technique, the measured resonance frequency and quality factor of the resonator are used to determine the complex permitivity. One of the main problems in this technique is the proper modeling of the coupling gaps. In this dissertation we will introduce an accurate model of the coupling gap, which will shows that the capacitive behavior of the gap is not pure capacitive as known before, but it turns into more complex one at higher frequencies depending on the dimensions of the gap primarily. The second main problem is the limitation in the frequency range for accurate measurements. At higher frequencies, the coupling reaches its peak value for a given stripline resulting in excessive loading to the resonator and thus a lowered Q value. In this frequency range, measurement of the dielectric properties looses its accuracy because the lowered Q values which means inaccuracies in determining the resonant frequencies as well as great error in determining the Q c and Q d terms. In this dissertation, attempts to remedy this problem by introducing two different approaches to get an improved design for the coplaner coupled stripline resonator are presented. The first approach to optimize the design of the coplaner coupled stripline resonator is based on optimizing the dimensions of the coplaner coupled stripline resonator three sections (coplaner, transition region, and the center stripline). In the second approach, a reactive stub (via) is introduced in the coupling gap between the coplaner line and the center stripline. The added stub is designed to improve the Q values of the structure resonances. Simulations of different designs of the coplaner coupled stripline resonator using different stub dimensions are presented. Advantages and disadvantages of these designs as well as the solution to their resonance frequency shift problems are discussed as well.


The aim of this study is to conduct an ex post analysis of the generalized implementation of drip irrigation in the last two decades in the Valencia Region (Spain). Due to the important role played by water users9 associations (WUAs) in this socio-technological change in the region, this research was based on 77 interviews with different WUAs that provided information prior and subsequent to modernization. Firstly, we review the published studies concerning the effects generated by this technological change and describe the drip irrigation promotion policies implemented by national and regional governments. Subsequently, we analyse the consequences for irrigation associations, including effects on water use and irrigation costs. The reduction of water withdrawals has been generally significant. This was possible because the regional contextual factors prevented, in most cases, crop intensification and areal expansion. Nevertheless, due to the enormous investment effort and the resulting maintenance costs, the technological change has increased irrigation costs, generating some uncertainties concerning the financial sustainability of some WUAs. In conclusion, a thorough assessment of contextual factors and accompanying measures such as technical assistance and monitoring appear to be indispensable to avoid unforeseen effects and to achieve the potential goals of conversion to drip technologies.


The sixteenth century was a period of crisis in the Catholic Church. Monastic reorganization was a major issue, and women were at the forefront of charting new directions in convent policy. The story of the Carmelite Reform has been told before, but never from the perspective of the women on the front lines. Nearly all accounts of the movement focus on Teresa de Avila, (1515-1582), and end with her death in 1582. Women Religious and Epistolary Exchange in the Carmelite Reform: The Disciples of Teresa de Avila carries the story beyond Teresa's death, showing how the next generation of Carmelite nuns struggled into the seventeenth century to continue her mission. It is unique in that it draws primarily from female-authored sources, in particular, the letters of three of Teresa's most dynamic disciples: María de San José, Ana de Jesús and Ana de San Bartolomé.


How to leverage the temporal dimension is a key question in video analysis. Recent works suggest an efficient approach to video feature learning, i.e., factorizing 3D convolutions into separate components respectively for spatial and temporal convolutions. The temporal convolution, however, comes with an implicit assumption – the feature maps across time steps are well aligned so that the features at the same locations can be aggregated. This assumption may be overly strong in practical applications, especially in action recognition where the motion serves as a crucial cue. In this work, we propose a new CNN architecture TrajectoryNet, which incorporates trajectory convolution, a new operation for integrating features along the temporal dimension, to replace the existing temporal convolution. This operation explicitly takes into account the changes in contents caused by deformation or motion, allowing the visual features to be aggregated along the the motion paths, trajectories. On two large-scale action recognition datasets, namely, Something-Something and Kinetics, the proposed network architecture achieves notable improvement over strong baselines.


The standard human-capital model is based on the assumption that the observed wage of an individual is equal to the monetary value of the individual net human-capital productivity, the so-called net potential wage. We argue that this assumption is rejected by the ECHP data for Belgium, Denmark and Finland. The empirical evidence supports a dynamic approach to the Mincer equation where no equality is imposed but an adjustment between observed and potential earnings is allowed to take place over time. Controlling for regressors' endogeneity, individual heterogeneity and time effects, we estimate a dynamic panel-data wage equation and provide measures of the speed of adjustment in Belgium, Denmark and Finland. Further, we elaborate on the implications of a dynamic approach to the Mincer equation for the computation of the return to schooling, including the implication that this return is not independent of labor-market experience, as suggested by Heckman et al. (2005) and Belzil (2007). Finally, we show that a dynamic wage equation can be seen as the solution of a simple wage-bargaining model and argue that a micro-founded model can fit the data better than a simple adjustment model but requires more theoretical assumptions.


New vertical steel storage tanks founded on a shallow foundation of a crushed rock ring are planned at the same location of former storage tanks. The dimensions, loads and foundation of the new tanks are identical to the old tanks which were erected 40 years ago and demolished a few years ago. Despite the fact that the new tanks are identical to the old tanks, the stability calculation for the foundation of the new storage tanks did not fulfill the requirements of the present Eurocode 7-1. To ensure sufficient stability, additional measures like soil improvement are necessary. This is due to the fact that safety levels have much increased in the last 40 years. In order to optimize the design, it was decided to recalculate the stability using the code for existing structures "NEN 8707", which is currently being developed. According to NEN 8707 it is allowed to use a lower value for the reliability index β for existing structures compared to new structures, because of proven strength. Thus, lower partial load and material factors can be applied. These calculations with the adjusted partial factors resulted in a sufficient overall safety factor for the ultimate limit state for the hydro-test phase and the operational phase. Thus, using NEN8707, the tanks can be built on a crushed rock ring foundation without an expensive soil improvement.


The Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) launched in February 2002 on-board the ENVISAT spacecraft is making global observations of top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiances. Aerosol optical properties are retrieved over land using Look-Up Table (LUT) based algorithm and surface reflectances in the blue and the red spectral regions. We compared instantaneous aerosol optical thicknesses retrieved by MERIS in the blue and the red at locations containing sites within the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET). Between 2002 and 2005, a set of 500 MERIS images were used in this study. The result shows that, over land, MERIS aerosol optical thicknesses are well retrieved in the blue and poorly retrieved in the red, leading to an underestimation of the Angstrom coefficient. Correlations are improved by applying a simple criterion to avoid scenes probably contaminated by thin clouds. To investigate the weakness of the MERIS algorithm, ground-based radiometer measurements have been used in order to retrieve new aerosol models, based on their Inherent Optical Properties (IOP). These new aerosol models slightly improve the correlation, but the main problem of the MERIS aerosol product over land can be attributed to the surface reflectance model in the red.


Introduction: Portulaca oleracea is a common plant used in south Indian culinary; recently there is increase in research publication on various biological activities of the medicinal herb. The safety of the medicinal herb well accounted by its widespread accepted use of natives yet scientific evaluation on the safety of the herb is not reported. Aim To scientifically evaluate the toxicity profile of the pet - ether extract of Portulaca oleracea by standardized methods. Method A 24hour acute toxicity study followed by 14 day sub-acute toxicity study with serum haematological, biochemical and histopathological analysis's is evaluated in rodents. Result No observable serious side effects are recorded in acute and sub acute toxicity study for 0.5gm/kg and 1gm/kg pet-ether extract of Portulaca oleracea. There are statistically significant rising (p<0.01) in hemoglobin by 13.25%, 15.42% and 15.04% in Portulaca oleracea 0.5gm, 1gm, and 2gm/kg body weight respectively when compared to control 10.56%. Portulaca oleracea 2gm/kg dose administration for 14 days has revealed oxalate crystal deposits in the kidney. CONCLUSION The pet –ether extracts of Portulaca oleracea 0.5gm, 1gm, and 2gm/kg exhibited zero mortality rates in both acute and sub-acute toxicity studies and found to increase haemoglobin, total cholesterol levels in serum which can be seriously evaluated for further research.


Indoor localisation is in demand for a variety of applications within the built environment. An overall solution based on a single technology has not yet been determined. The aim of this paper is to gain insight on Signal Strength monitoring by a special kind of WiFi Monitors in comparison to the commonly known fingerprinting method for the purpose of a 3D indoor navigation system. Ttwo different WiFi based localisation techniques are tested during the MSc Geomatics DaRen Syntheses Project in the Hubei Provincial Museum, China. The first method detects the beacon frames send by smartphones, laptops and other WiFi enabled devices in range using Libelium Meshlium Xtreme monitors. Their MAC addresses and the signal strength is measured by the Meshlium Xtreme and stored on an external database. We call this method WiFi monitoring. The second method a Wifi enabled device, like a smartphone, measures the signal strength of multiple Wifi Access Points in range to localise itself based on a previously created radio map. This method is known as WiFi fingerprinting. Both methods have some advantages and disadvantages. Advantages of the common way of WiFi fingerprinting are that the implementation costs are relatively low, because it is usually possible to use (a part of) the existing WiFi AP infrastructure. WiFi fingerprinting can reach a relatively high accuracy in the order of magnitude of meters. Finally, the location granularity can be adjusted to what is necessary for the purpose of the indoor localisation. This makes it employable for a wide range of purposes. The question remains how suitable these methods are for a 3D indoor navigation system for the Hubei provincial museum. One important aspect is the localisation-granularity necessary for the application. In a museum it is not necessary to know the exact X,Y position of a user (such high accuracy is unnecessary), more important is to know in which room the user is located so the information on exhibitions can be presented and the starting point of the navigation can be determined. Both methods can track the user and tell the room he or she is located at. Although WiFi smartphone monitoring may have a low update frequency it is still suitable for a navigation system for a museum since visitors usually spend more than a couple of minutes within a room.


Past research confirms that trade and human rights are inextricably linked by trade's effects on poverty, labor, women, indigenous populations, health, and the environment. We identified surprisingly direct linkages between these two vital policies in WTO agreements as well as that regional trade agreements add positive indirect contributions by to rules-based governance through their emphasis on transparency, accountability, and due process by governments, as well as timeliness, inclusive record keeping, and impartiality in the administrative decisional process. The present research examines a particular country and a single trade agreement, Peru and the trade agreement between Peru and the United States.Against the backdrop of Peru's large informal economy and its past reliance on the capital-intensive mineral and metal industries, the paper examines the potential effects of diversification of exports from increased foreign investment and continued access to the U.S. textile and apparel market. We address the Agreement's unique recognition of Peru's biodiversity and its inevitable connection to Peru's indigenous populations, in addition to the opportunities such recognition presents for cooperative efforts aimed at protecting the environment and preserving traditional knowledge while permitting research for lifesaving medicines. We look at the ability of the labor chapter of the Agreement to focus efforts of the Peruvian government to enforce fully its worker rights laws. We close with a look at infrastructural changes that Peru's Government may best undertake to magnify the Agreement's benefits. For example, efforts to strengthen the linkages between the knowledge centers and the potential knowledge users in the business community are necessary steps to take advantage of the new technologies so essential to solving the social and environmental challenges that Peru faces.


BACKGROUND
Non-motor symptoms (NMS) are common in late stage Parkinson's disease (PD), as the frequency and severity of most of these symptoms increase with advancing disease.

OBJECTIVE
To assess effect of dopaminergic therapy on NMS in late stage PD and to investigate relationships between dopaminergic effect on NMS and on motor function.

METHOD
Thirty PD patients in Hoehn and Yahr (HY) stages IV and V in "on" were included. Dopaminergic effect on non-motor symptomatology was assessed by the modified version of the Non-Motor Symptoms Scale (NMSS) in the "off" and the "on" state during a standardized L-dopa test, in parallel also assessing motor function.

RESULTS
NMS were common and many of the symptoms occurred in >80% of the individuals. The highest NMSS scores were seen within the NMSS domains 3: mood/apathy and 7: urinary in both the "off" and the "on" state. There was a statistically significant (p < 0.001) improvement in the modified NMSS total score (median) from 79 in "off" to 64 in "on". There were statistically significant differences between the "off" and the "on" state for domains 2: sleep/fatigue, 3: mood/apathy, 5: attention/memory, 6: gastrointestinal and 7: urinary. The differences in the NMSS score between the "off" and the "on" state were in general larger for motor responders than for motor non-responders. In motor non-responders, differences of the NMSS score between the "off" and the "on" state were found for the total score, domain 3: mood/apathy and its item 11-flat moods.

CONCLUSION
There is an effect of dopaminergic medication on NMS in late stage PD, to some extent also for those with a non-significant response on motor function during L-dopa test. It is therefore of importance to optimize dopaminergic therapy in order to give the most effective symptomatic treatment possible.