In 1988, Frederick Schauer advanced the proposition that formalism was really about power. Requiring a formal approach to the interpretation of a given text vests more power in the creator of that text than does an approach that gives the later decision maker more interpretive latitude. In the context of contract law, Schauer's observation means that a formalist approach to interpreting a contract will shift power from those who interpret it to those who created it. A strict approach to the parol evidence rule, a recognition of the "plain meaning rule," or severe restrictions on the use of trade usage, course of dealing, or course of performance in contract interpretation shifts power from the interpreting agents (usually the courts) to the parties who made the contract. Several commentators have called for a more formal regime for contract interpretation in business contracts. Such a change from the status quo, it is urged, will result in a more efficient commercial system. But lacking is persuasive empirical evidence that commercial actors actually want such an approach in a broad range of contracts, that such an approach will "cause" people to take more care in making or reading contracts, or that a more formal approach result in decisions that better resemble what the parties actually intended. Moreover, a vast number of "commercial contracts" are, in fact, adhesion contracts where one party drafts the agreement on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The dynamics of assent in such contracts differ very little from what we find in "consumer contracts." Bringing a more formal interpretative regime to these contracts will change nothing except to vest yet more power in the drafters. After considering the state of the empirical evidence for a more formal approach to interpretation, the article considers how such an approach would actually work within Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code. The article concludes by arguing that the case for requiring more formality in contract interpretation has not been made, that such a move could well be counterproductive, and that a regime of greater formalism may even endanger the system of voluntary compliance with contract obligations that is so essential to modern commercial life.


1.5mm–Ni55Mn23Ga22 ferromagnetic thin films were deposited onto silicon substrates and silicon single beam cantilever using radio-frequency magnetron sputtering. As-deposited sample and heat-treated thin films were studied on their silicon substrates and peeled off to determine the influence of the stress. Post-heat treatment process allows at the films to achieve the shape memory effect (SME). Vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) and deflection measurement of the sample annealed at 873 K during 36 ks exhibit ferromagnetic martensitic structure with a typical SME response to the magnetic field induced strains which match the values of the bulk material.


Within Food R&D scientists, chefs and engineers aim to develop natural fruit and vegetable based soups with optimal flavour, texture, appearance and health benefits whilst maintaining product safety. The colour and appearance has a major influence on the perceived quality (e.g. nutrition and freshness). This paper describes a method for the determination of the colour of soups containing vegetable particles. Digital images were made under controlled lighting using a DigiEye imaging system. It allows documenting the appearance by making colorimetrically accurate images which are suitable for the measurement of colour uniformity, size and shape. The uniformity of the light under diffuse and directional illumination was investigated using different targets and soup samples. For accurate colour analysis the images have to be corrected for non-uniform illumination and the colour has to be measured at a fixed location outside the centre of the lighting cabinet. Directional illumination (angled light with additional mirrors) was used to introduce gloss resulting in images matching the actual appearance of soups and vegetable particles very closely. Imaging glossy soups under diffuse illumination resulted in dull images with dark spots. No significant difference was found between the colours of soups analysed under diffuse or directional illumination. Under directional illumination a better repeatability was observed. Additionally, for 36 different soups, the measured results from the DigiEye system were compared to two different colorimeters (0 o /45 o and diffuse/0 o geometry). Linear relations were found between the CIE Lab values measured by the DigiEye system and those measured by two different colorimeters. Best correlations were obtained between DigiEye and 0 o /45 o colorimeter (r 2 =0.980-0.996). The short term precision of the DigiEye system is somewhat better than those of the colorimeter.


An investigation of the emulsion polymerisation of styrene in an isothermal continuous flow stirred reactor has been carried out. The important phenomena of sustainable oscillations and large conversion overshoot after start-up have been studied. Experimental studies have shown that conversion, number of polymer particles, molecular weights, and all other related properties often oscillate widely with time, and a steady state was not always
achieved. The effect of start-up procedures in continuous emulsion polymerisation reactors have not previously beer. investigated in detail.
Different start-up procedures were studied to determine their effect on the behaviour of the reactor. The effects of the initial concentration of soap and initiator, and the initial reaction
temperatures have been studied experimentally in relation to the mean residence time of the reactor. Changes in start-up procedures were found to have a significant effect not only on the transients before a steady state, but also on the ultimate state achieved. Evidence was obtained supporting the theory that monomer
droplets can be a locus of initiation and propagation in emulsion polymerisation of styrene in a CFSR at high level of conversion. Two possible mechanisms have been proposed to explain the phenomena of the high levels of conversion in the CFSR. Special reactor design was used to minimize aeration and to allow the variation of the average residence time without varying the
pump settings.


A series of poly(styrene-co-divinylbenzene)/silver nanoparticle (P(St-DVB)/AgNP) composite microspheres with tunable porosity were synthesized by seed swelling polymerization in one pot using linear polystyrene seeds as templates and nanosized organic soluble AgNPs as the silver source. The polymerization of styrene and divinylbenzene took place inside the seed particles and AgNPs were dispersed directly into the mixture of styrene and divinylbenzene during the polymerization. The morphology properties of P(St-DVB)/AgNPs microspheres were characterized by optical microscope, scanning electronmicroscope (SEM) and nitrogen adsorption/desorption. The influencing parameters on the morphology of the microspheres, including feed ratio of styrene (monomer) and divinylbenzene (crosslinker), addictive amount of AgNPs and the variety of the porogens were systematically investigated. The porosity of the composite microspheres could be tuned from nonporous to mesoporous and to macroporous by control over these parameters. Meanwhile, AgNPs loading dispersity of the composite microspheres was characterized by transmission electron microscope (TEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), SEM and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). TEM, EDS and SEM results demonstrated that the AgNPs had been loaded both inside and on the surface of the microspheres. The sizes of the loaded AgNPs were influenced by the addictive amount of AgNPs and the kinds of porogens used in the polymerization. Moreover, compared to the P(St-DVB) microspheres, the Ag-loading composite microspheres synthesized in this paper exhibited excellent catalytic activity and reusability in the degradation of methylene blue in the presence of NaBH4.


Ascariasis is a common worm infestation in developing and under-developed countries. It is caused by the ingestion of food contaminated with Ascaris eggs from faeces and is more common in places with poor sanitation. Almost 25% of the world population is infested by Ascaris lumbricoides. Although ascariasis is a chronic disease, it can present as acute abdomen rarely. The wandering nature of Ascaris in and out of the bowel causes various abdominal complications such as intestinal obstruction, perforation, biliary ascariasis, pancreatic ascariasis, liver abscess, appendicitis, and Meckel's diverticulitis. Intestinal obstruction is the most common complication seen in children and is usually due to mechanical bowel obstruction, volvulus or intussusception. Mechanical obstruction by a bolus of worms is the most common cause of bowel obstruction. Perforation of bowel is rarely reported and it usually occurs in the diseased segment of bowel or following trauma. Perforation of an ileal volvulus secondary to ascariasis has been reported rarely. We present a 4-year-old boy who presented to the emergency room with features of bowel perforation and sepsis, after unsuccessful management for intestinal obstruction in another hospital. On laparotomy, the small bowel was teaming with Ascaris worms. Ileum showed a volvulus with closed loop obstruction and perforation. Peritoneal lavage with resection and ileostomy was done, which was closed at a later date. Anti-helminthic agents were started postoperatively and the boy recovered uneventfully.


In the present study, the potential locations for constructing different water‐harvesting structures in a semi‐arid watershed located at Goparajpalli, in southern India, were derived using GIS in three stages. The locations were first identified based on land use land cover, land slope, rainfall characteristics, soil texture and soil depth. Then a number of structures and suitable semi‐arid rainfed regions have limitations in their runoff potential availability; these locations were further optimized based on the runoff available after in situ water conservation and storage in existing water‐harvesting structures. The surplus runoff volume available in a normal year after storage was estimated to be 870 000 m3. Suitable locations for 25 rock fill dams (RFD), 74 farm ponds and 5 check dams were identified. These derived sites were validated by exporting to Google Earth and investigated for their suitability with ground truth information. At present, the number of structures existing is more than the optimum number of structures derived, but they have less storage capacity. Hence those structures such as farm ponds located at potential sites are recommended for desiltation and renovation by increasing their size along with lining so that they can be utilized for rainwater harvesting and supplementary irrigation. This methodology for identification of potential locations for water‐harvesting structures is less time‐consuming, more precise and can be utilized for the planning of large catchments to improve the water availability and productivity. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Significance The technology for generating tactile feedback on a touchscreen via electroadhesion is already available—and straightforward to implement—but the knowledge on human skin contact mechanics is limited. To better understand the contact mechanism between the finger pad and touchscreen under electroadhesion, we investigated the sliding friction as a function of normal force and voltage using (i) a mean field theory based on multiscale contact mechanics, (ii) a full-scale computational contact mechanics study, and (iii) experiments performed on a custom-made tribometer. We show that the real contact area and the electroadhesion force depend strongly on the skin surface roughness and on the nature of the touchscreen coating. Thus, by reducing the effective thickness of the latter, the human tactile sensing can be drastically enhanced. The understanding and control of human skin contact against technological substrates is the key aspect behind the design of several electromechanical devices. Among these, surface haptic displays that modulate the friction between the human finger and touch surface are emerging as user interfaces. One such modulation can be achieved by applying an alternating voltage to the conducting layer of a capacitive touchscreen to control electroadhesion between its surface and the finger pad. However, the nature of the contact interactions between the fingertip and the touchscreen under electroadhesion and the effects of confined material properties, such as layering and inelastic deformation of the stratum corneum, on the friction force are not completely understood yet. Here, we use a mean field theory based on multiscale contact mechanics to investigate the effect of electroadhesion on sliding friction and the dependency of the finger–touchscreen interaction on the applied voltage and other physical parameters. We present experimental results on how the friction between a finger and a touchscreen depends on the electrostatic attraction between them. The proposed model is successfully validated against full-scale (but computationally demanding) contact mechanics simulations and the experimental data. Our study shows that electroadhesion causes an increase in the real contact area at the microscopic level, leading to an increase in the electrovibrating tangential frictional force. We find that it should be possible to further augment the friction force, and thus the human tactile sensing, by using a thinner insulating film on the touchscreen than used in current devices.


Two major features of Earth's geochemical evolution include (1) the extraction of continental crust from the mantle to produce a depleted upper mantle, and (2) the onset of plate tectonics and shallow melting of the upper mantle to produce oceanic crust (mid-ocean-ridge basalt, MORB). Prior studies have suggested that continental crust extraction and/or plate tectonics began prior to 4 Ga or were not initiated until as late as the Neoproterozoic. Earth's geological record is very incomplete prior to ca. 3 Ga, and the limited terrains available for study have left the nature of the earliest tectonics and crustal compositions unresolved. Here we show that a meteor impact at 3.24 Ga excavated basaltic crust and depleted mantle material. We use high field strength elements and other immobile elements to model the composition of the target rock and meteor and compare it to analyses of spherules condensed from the vaporized meteor and impact target rock. This provides insight into otherwise unpreserved Archean crust. A simple mixture of 15% CV group carbonaceous chondrite, 65% ocean basalt, and 20% depleted MORB mantle (DMM) fully replicates the field results. A significant proportion of this basalt is MORB like, distinctly different from the tholeiitic rocks that dominate in Archean greenstone belts, and consistent with seafloor spreading. The presence of DMM implies that a significant volume of continental crust was extracted before 3.24 Ga. However, no granite or tonalite-trondhjemite-granodiorite can be incorporated into the model and replicate field results, consistent with the lack of any observed shocked zircons in any of the Paleoarchean impact layers to date.


A novel class of optical waveguides with a box-shaped cross section consisting of a low-index inner material surrounded by a thin high-index coating layer is presented. This original multilayered structure widens the traditional concept of index contrast for dielectric waveguides toward a more general concept of effective index contrast, which can be artificially tailored over a continuous range by properly choosing the thickness of the outer high-index layers. An electromagnetic analysis is reported, which shows that the transverse electric and transverse magnetic modes are spatially confined in different regions of the cross section and exhibit an almost 90°C rotational symmetry. Such unusual field distribution is demonstrated to open the way to new intriguing properties with respect to conventional waveguides. Design criteria are provided into details, which mainly focus on the polarization dependence of the waveguide on geometrical parameters. The possibility of achieving single-mode waveguides with either zero or high birefringence is discussed, and the bending capabilities are compared to conventional waveguides. The feasibility of the proposed waveguide is demonstrated by the realization of prototypal samples that are fabricated by using the emerging CMOS- compatible Si3N4-SiO2 TriPleX technology. An exhaustive experimental characterization is reported, which shows propagation loss as low as state-of-the-art low-index-contrast waveguides (< 0.1 dB/cm) together with enhanced flexibility in the optimization of polarization sensitivity and confirms the high potentialities of the proposed waveguides for large-scale integrated optics.


We introduce a new Macaulay2 package, Nauty, which gives access to powerful methods on graphs provided by the software nauty by Brendan McKay. The primary motivation for accessing nauty is to determine if two graphs are isomorphic. We also implement methods to generate families of graphs restricted in various ways using tools provided with the software nauty.


This Article assigns a redistributive role to the legal rules of trusts and estates. Unlike business law, trusts and estates has lagged in articulating a comprehensive theory on inequality. Consequently, income inequality is compounded intergenerationally as wealth inequality, with dire consequences for economic productivity and social stability. To move the discourse on wealth inequality, this Article explores the divergent approaches toward inequality in business law and trusts and estates.
Additionally, this Article recasts trusts and estates' legal rules as wealth transfer mechanisms. Four categories of rules are implicated: (1) rules that interact with the tax system, (2) rules that govern relations between beneficiaries and creditors, (3) rules that govern relations between beneficiaries and trustees, and (4) rules that govern relations among beneficiaries.
More broadly, this Article contributes to three lines of scholarly debates. The first revolves around the propriety of drawing analogies between trust law and the law of enterprise organization. The second is whether legal rules or the tax system better effectuates redistribution. The third is whether legal rules should reflect our notions of fairness or welfare.


Ice hockey, as a sport,
has received praise for its efforts to promote the inclusion of gay and
bisexual men, and more recently, lesbian and bisexual women and transgender
people (Heraux 2019). The sport also pioneered the 'pride game' concept (also
sometimes called pride nights), which are regularly scheduled, rainbow-themed
games held to promote the inclusion of LGBT people in sport. Despite these
efforts, the lack of openly gay male professional hockey players and evidence
that homophobic language remains common in the sport suggests approaches being
used may need to be reconsidered. This paper examines if pride games, which
have been adopted globally, are an effective way to drive change to homophobic
language. This research responds to the
need for pragmatic, evidence-based intervention approaches that can be used to
reduce harm to LGBT people from homophobic behaviour in sport.


Food security is one of the major concerns of people living in sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, cereal banks have become a widespread and popular response to the problem. This book presents, in the form of a story, some of the main questions and issues surrounding the setting up and running of a cereal bank. It includes, in the annexes, case studies of real cereal banks and information about such practical problems as price setting and simple accounting methods. It is intended for development workers who are interested in the contribution that cereal banks can make to village-level food security, and for communities which wish to take control of their own food supply and lessen their dependence on the uncertainties of the market. It has been produced by the Arid Lands Information Network (ALIN) in response to requests for information from ALIN members, and it is on their experience that much of it is based.


Bernard Mac Laverty's beautifully turned stories are full of humour, terse realism and moments of touching or shocking surprise. Nelson plays truant and sees something he wishes he hadn't in the title story, "A Time to Dance". In "Phonefun Limited", Sadie and Agnes, retired prostitutes hit upon an inventive new way of making someone happy with a phone call, while in "My Dear Palestrina'", a remarkable music teacher initiates her pupil into the mysteries of art and maturity.


The frequent use of antibiotics, and the ensuing increase in bacterial resistance, has caused much concern in the medical community in recent years. This study examines antibiotic prescribing from various perspectives, utilising prescribing information from several sources including market research databases, a provincial prescription drug plan, hospital records and patient-specific information obtained through chart review. Overall quantities and types of antibiotics prescribed have been studied at a national level comparing both Canada and the USA. at a provincial level using prescription claims data for specific facets of the Newfoundland population, at the community practice level utilising chart review of a representative sample of patients in the communities of St. John's and Mount Pearl, Newfoundland and at the hospital level using chart review. -- Examination of national prescribing databases and the Newfoundland provincial database has demonstrated similar prescribing trends. Amoxicillin was the most commonly used antibiotic, penicillins accounted for the greatest proportion of total antibiotic prescriptions, a decrease in the amount of penicillins used was noted, and an increase in macrolide use was seen across all three longitudinal databases. The cross- sectional study of community practices in St. John's demonstrated that amoxicillin was the most frequently used antibiotic, and the proportions of total antibiotic use comprised by each antibiotic drug class were similar to those seen in Canada. -- The Ontario Anti-infective Guidelines for Community-acquired Infections' was chosen as the tool for measuring prescription appropriateness in community practice. When the physicians' diagnoses were assumed to be correct, 59% of prescriptions were appropriate. Using a criteria-based decision tree to predict etiology, 88% of respiratory tract infections were likely to be viral, while the physicians thought that only 44% were viral. The treatment recommendations outlined by the Canadian Community Acquired Pneumonia Consensus Conference Group2 were used to assess appropriateness of antibiotic treatment in patients admitted to hospital with community acquired pneumonia. Sixty five percent of initial antibiotics and 59% of secondary oral antibiotics were appropriate. However prescribing guideline adherence was much lower for patients with less severe community-acquired pneumonia. -- To decrease inappropriate and excessive antibiotic use, it is necessary to first determine the nature of antibiotic prescribing. The results from this analysis allow for specific problematic areas in antibiotic prescribing to be identified. From this, interventions to improve prescribing behaviours can be implemented.


This Article explores different ways to effectively discourage the crime of alcohol impaired driving. Part I analyzes the trend of utilizing preventive educational measures to counteract societal acceptance of this crime and the shortcomings of relying exclusively on this measure. Part II discusses OUI prevention based on deterrence and the use of stricter penalties, such as mandatory jail sentences, to stop alcohol impaired drivers. This section explores whether the trend of increasing the severity of the punishment for OUI offenses is effective in stopping the crime. This section also discusses the shortcomings of OUI legislation that make deterrence of OUI difficult. Part III explores ways to combat the problem of OUI, including implementing uniform Dram Shop Laws, providing law enforcement with adequate funding to facilitate the apprehension of OUI violators, decriminalizing first offense OUI, and combining preventive societal measures with legal means aimed at increasing the likelihood of arrest and the certainty of conviction. Ultimately, to properly address this issue, the target of awareness campaigns must shift away from the general public and focus on alcohol serving institutions.


To acquire benefits from technology in education, due consideration must be given to attitude of teachers which plays an important role in guiding and predicting future successful use of technology in the classroom. With the feminization in the teaching fraternity and the studies reporting gender specific perception towards usefulness of technology and ease of use, the present study was, therefore, undertaken to examine the attitude of teachers towards use of technology in teaching with a gender perspective. A survey was conducted on 482 secondary school teachers from India, using Attitude towards Information Technology scale. The attitude of the respondents were assessed in terms of four dimensions; namely significance in life, usefulness for students, productivity for teaching, and teacher's interest and acceptance. The quantitative data were analyzed using appropriate statistical techniques like t-test and ANOVA. Findings suggest that with regard to different factors viz., training, location of schools, medium of instruction and marital status, no gender specific differences in attitude towards information technology was found. Based on these results, it can be concluded that the effective use of technology in classrooms should be expected from all teachers irrespective of their gender.


In recent years, learning-based methods have become the dominant approach to solving computer vision tasks. A major reason for this development is their automatic adaptation to the particularities of the task at hand by learning a model of the problem from (training) data. This approach assumes that the training data closely resemble the data encountered during testing. Successfully applying a learning-based algorithm in a wide range of real-world scenarios thus requires collecting a large set of training data, which models the complex phenomena encountered in the real world and covers rare, but critical edge cases. For many tasks in computer vision, however, the human effort required severely limits the scale and diversity of datasets. A promising approach to reducing the human effort involved is data synthesis, by which considerable parts of the collection and annotation process can be automated. Employing synthetic data, however, poses unique challenges: first, synthesis is only as useful as methods are able to capitalize on virtually infinite amounts of data and arbitrary precision. Second, synthetic data must be sufficiently realistic for being useful in real-world scenarios. However, modeling real world phenomena within the synthesis can be even more laborious than collection and annotation of real datasets in the first place.
In this dissertation, we address these challenges in two ways: first, we propose to adapt data-driven methods to take advantage of the unique features of synthetic data. Specifically, we develop a method that reconstructs the surface of objects from a single view in uncalibrated illumination conditions. The method estimates illumination conditions and synthesizes suitable training data at test time, enabling reconstructions at unprecedented detail. Furthermore, we develop a memory-efficient approach for the reconstruction of complete 3D shapes from a single view. This way, we leverage the high precision available through 3D CAD models and obtain more accurate and detailed reconstructions than previous approaches.
Second, we propose to tap into computer games for creating ground truth for a variety of visual perception tasks. Open world computer games mimic the real world and feature a large diversity paired with high realism. Since source code is not available for commercial games, we devise a technique to intercept the rendering pipeline during game play and use the rendering resources for identifying objects in rendered images. As there is only limited semantic information available at the level of interception and manual association of resources with semantic classes is still necessary, we develop a method to speed up the annotation dramatically by recognizing shared resources and automatically propagating annotations across the dataset. Leveraging the geometric information available through the rendering process, we further collect ground truth for optical flow, visual odometry, and 3D scene layout. The synthesis of data from computer games reduces the human annotation effort significantly and allows creating synthetic datasets that model the real world at unprecedented scale. The ground truth for multiple visual perception tasks enables deeper analysis of current methods and the development of novel approaches that reason about multiple tasks holistically. For both the adaptation of data-driven methods as well as the datasets derived from computer games, we demonstrate significant performance improvements through quantitative and qualitative evaluations.


Description: Over the years, companies have developed independent systems for managing process safety, environment, health, safety, and quality. Many aspects of these management systems are similar. Integrating EHS management systems can yield economies and improved system effectiveness. This book explains how integration reduces cost of delivery through a reduction in the number of management program steps and avoidance of redundancy; how it results in more effective programs, since the best practices can be combined into a single process; and how this integration brings a faster, and more cost effective response to new demands.


Given the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system, steps have been taken to enhance the cultural relevance of sentencing, assessment and treatment. Specifically, changes to legislation and sentencing (e.g., s. 718.2 [e] of the Criminal Code, introduction of conditional sentence orders), as well as operational changes (e.g., creation of culturally-relevant programming), were introduced to address over-representation. More recently, the question of whether commonly-used risk assessments contain cultural-bias when applied to Indigenous peoples has been argued before the Supreme Court (i.e., Ewert v. Canada, 2018). To better understand the potential impacts of these legislative and operational changes, and seek to better understand the potentially unique causes of criminal behaviour for Indigenous peoples, three studies were conducted. Study 1 examined the application of conditional sentence orders (CSOs) with a sample of Indigenous offenders (n = 749) compared to Caucasian offenders (n = 1,625). It was found that Indigenous individuals received shorter CSOs and had a higher likelihood of being convicted of breach. However, no differences regarding the number and type of optional supervision conditions were found between groups, after controlling for individual-level factors (e.g., risk level, severity of offence). Study 2 identified and examined culturally-relevant risk/need factors with an Indigenous Advisory Group (N = 51). The process of co-development and thematic analysis resulted in the Culturally-Relevant Factors Questionnaire, consisting of 12 themes (e.g. residential school experience, stability of upbringing, experience of discrimination, extreme poverty). The questionnaire was administered to a sample (N = 36) of Indigenous males on community supervision. Lastly, Study 3 consisted of a meta-analysis examining the effectiveness of culturally-relevant correctional programming with Indigenous offenders. Results based on seven studies (N = 1,731) indicated that Indigenous offenders who participate in these programs have significantly lower odds of recidivism (odds ratio = 0.72) compared to Indigenous offenders who participate in generic programs. The implications of the three studies lend support to increasing the cultural relevance of sentencing, assessment, and programming. Furthermore, they highlight the need to better understand potentially unique or salient factors that can enhance the effectiveness of strategies for Indigenous peoples in the criminal justice system.


Scientometrics is a quantitative evaluation of scientific and technological activities. The main objective is to point the number of methodologies used in scientific studies or even the structure of several research centers. This type of metric study belongs to the area of sociology of scientific knowledge. It covers quantitative analyzes of scientific activities through the use of mathematical and statistical techniques for the development of the study. A literature review was conducted using the Genetics and Molecular Research (GMR) database. GMR is a fully electronic journal available at no cost to readers through the Internet at http://www.geneticsmr.org. We performed a quantitative analysis regarding genetic polymorphisms on the GMR scientific production between 2009 and 2013. We used the keywords polymorphism AND genetics OR molecular marker in order to conduct the literature survey. We found 423 articles related to genetic polymorphism and 87% were original articles. Six countries account for about 89% of publications and China is responsible for 56% of all publications. Moreover, the number of papers grew each year, from 3.8% in 2009 up to 35.5% in 2013. The organisms most studied in those articles were humans (61.2%). Techniques such as sequencing, RFLP (Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism), SSCP (single-strand conformational polymorphism), RAPD (random amplified polymorfic DNA) and Multiplex were used, and these methods and their validation are efficient in the study of gene polymorphisms. Moreover, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is the technique most used in the field of genetic polymorphisms (74%).


Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) with two chain lengths (MW: ca. 5000, and ca. 20 000 g mol ) was synthesized by reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization, using 2-dodecylsulfanylthiocarbonylsulfanyl-2-methyl propionic acid as the chain transfer agent. The derivatization of terminal dodecyl groups to maleimide groups was performed through the reduction of terminal trithiocarbonate moieties. These polymers were grafted onto aminopropyl silica using an activated ester–amine coupling method. Five types of polymer modified silica beads were prepared, i.e., long chain length, short chain length, and mixed chain length functionalized with a dodecyl terminal group, and long chain length and short chain length with a maleimide terminal group. The surface properties of the modified polymer silica beads were evaluated by employing them as the stationary phase in HPLC setups and examining the temperature-dependent elution profiles of five steroids. The retention factor of steroids became smaller when the terminal dodecyl group was substituted with a maleimide group. A hydrophobic dodecyl moiety on the outermost surface strongly affected the retention of steroids, and the retention factor of steroids on short chains was larger than that on long chains below the lower critical solution temperature. These results indicate that the chain length and terminal functional group on the outermost surface of the polymer have a critical effect on the characteristics of polymer modified silica bead interfaces.


Today authentication and authorization are addressed in an incoherent, and often site-specific, fashion on the Internet and the Web specifically. This situation stems from many factors including the evolution, design, implementation, and deployment history of HTTP and HTTP-based systems in particular, and Internet protocols in general. Kerberos is a widely-implemented and widely-deployed authentication substrate with a long history in various communities and vendor products. Organizations that currently use Kerberos as a key element of their infrastructure wish to take advantage of its unique benefits while moving to Web-based systems, but have had limited success in doing so. The authors of this paper have drawn upon their combined experience with supporting large Kerberos deployments, writing and developing web-based identity protocols, and integrating heterogeneous authentication services in order to produce this paper. Thus the views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the MIT Kerberos Consortium or its members. In this paper we outline the evolution of Web Identity and Services and describe the issues surrounding this complex landscape. These issues are captured within a set of more specific requirements that are deemed necessary to satisfy the relevant stakeholders; these requirements are then framed within the context of some general use cases. We then propose and describe a number of activities that leverage Kerberos to realize these improvements, and present an overall strategy and architectural model for working towards a more cohesive and widely deployed Kerberos-based Web authentication infrastructure. Authors (alphabetical): Jeff Hodges Josh Howlett Leif Johansson RL "Bob" Morgan Copyright Notice, © 2008 by the MIT Kerberos Consortium. Page 1 of 42


: The term "Artificial Human Optimization" was first coined by the corresponding author of this work in December 2016 when he published a paper titled "Entrepreneur : Artificial Human Optimization" at Transactions on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (TMLAI) Volume 4, No 6 (December 2016). According to that paper published in 2016, Artificial Human Optimization Field is defined as the collection of all those optimization algorithms which were proposed based on Artificial Humans. In real world we (Humans) solve the problems. In the same way Artificial Humans imitate real Humans in the search space and solve the optimization problems. In Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) the basic entities in the solution space are Artificial Birds where as in Artificial Human Optimization the basic entities in search space are Artificial Humans. Each Artificial Human corresponds to a point in the solution space. Ten Artificial Human Optimization methods titled "Human Bhagavad Gita Particle Swarm Optimization (HBGPSO)", "Human Poverty Particle Swarm Optimization (HPPSO)", "Human Dedication Particle Swarm Optimization (HuDePSO)", "Human Selection Particle Swarm Optimization (HuSePSO)", "Human Safety Particle Swarm Optimization (HuSaPSO)", "Human Kindness Particle Swarm Optimization (HKPSO)", "Human Relaxation Particle Swarm Optimization (HRPSO)", "Multiple Strategy Human Particle Swarm Optimization (MSHPSO)", "Human Thinking Particle Swarm Optimization (HTPSO)", "Human Disease Particle Swarm Optimization (HDPSO)" are applied on various benchmark functions and results obtained are shown in this work.


We present two sample-efficient differentially private mean estimators for $d$-dimensional (sub)Gaussian distributions with unknown covariance. Informally, given $n \gtrsim d/\alpha^2$ samples from such a distribution with mean $\mu$ and covariance $\Sigma$, our estimators output $\tilde\mu$ such that $\| \tilde\mu - \mu \|_{\Sigma} \leq \alpha$, where $\| \cdot \|_{\Sigma}$ is the Mahalanobis distance. All previous estimators with the same guarantee either require strong a priori bounds on the covariance matrix or require $\Omega(d^{3/2})$ samples. Each of our estimators is based on a simple, general approach to designing differentially private mechanisms, but with novel technical steps to make the estimator private and sample-efficient. Our first estimator samples a point with approximately maximum Tukey depth using the exponential mechanism, but restricted to the set of points of large Tukey depth. Proving that this mechanism is private requires a novel analysis. Our second estimator perturbs the empirical mean of the data set with noise calibrated to the empirical covariance, without releasing the covariance itself. Its sample complexity guarantees hold more generally for subgaussian distributions, albeit with a slightly worse dependence on the privacy parameter. For both estimators, careful preprocessing of the data is required to satisfy differential privacy.


This dissertation details the initial stages of archaeological research on Isla Cedros, Baja California Norte, and addresses hypotheses regarding the nature of island societies, their relationship to neighboring mainland populations, and the degree to which near- continent islands can be described as 'insular,' or isolated and economically self-sufficient. The research combines ethnohistoric documents and previous archaeological and ethnographic research along the Pacific coast of North America to provide the comparative backdrop for the history of Isla Cedros. The discovery of two sites with basal strata dated by AMS to over 10,000 rcybp confirms that the earliest occupation of Isla Cedros occurred during the terminal Pleistocene, i.e., before 12,000 cal BP. The importance of this discovery for understanding the peopling of the New World is remarkable and will contribute greatly to the active dialogue on the topic. Village sites larger than any previously expected for central Baja California also contribute to shattering notions of the peninsula as being occupied by small, mobile bands of foragers. These villages provide an opportunity to examine of the development and elaboration of social structures among Pacific coast hunter- gatherers. Sophisticated technologies for exploiting marine resources also have been identified and examined. In contrast to the Channel Islands to the north, no craft specialized industry for the production of durable exchange goods has been identified. This demonstrates that the availability of natural resources is an insufficient catalyst for the emergence of such a socio- economic structure. Instead, the creation, elaboration, and maintenance of social networks are seen as both prerequisite to, and structurally supportive of systems of regional exchange, interaction, and risk sharing. In conceptual terms, the concept of sustained broad spectrum exploitation Chapter 3) provides an alternative explanation for broad-based adaptations. It is possible that an SBSE strategy on Isla Cedros is not only an adaptation to a very rich and diverse environment (Chapter 1), but also a response to the lack of robust economic buffering mechanisms or safety valves for 'excess' population. Placing Isla Cedros within a comparative framework not only fills gaps in our knowledge of historical processes, but begins to build meaningful links of cultural heritage between Baja California, Alta California, and other regions overlooked due to modern political boundaries.


The case of the Somali shilling defies the historical view that sovereign powers (i.e., legal tender status, public receivability) are necessary to explain the acceptance of fiat money at a positive value. Following the Somali state's collapse in 1991, irredeemable paper shillings have continued to circulate at a positive value. Acceptance under statelessness is explained by a history that made continued acceptance a focal point among self-fulfilling strategies. Our explanation is consistent with an extended Kiyotaki-Wright model of fiat money. Although sovereign power may be necessary to launch a fiat money in practice, we maintain that it is not necessary for its survival.


Public open spaces around and within urban areas have been increasingly developed due to greater population pressures. My paper investigates if land around public open spaces is likely to get developed faster since households are attracted to the recreation value as well as the environmental amenities of the public open space. There has been inadequate attention in the literature to the influence of the different sources of value of open space on housing prices. While views of open space are certainly an important source of value to households, public open space is also valued because households enjoy recreation at the open space. Adopting the monocentric city model, simulations examine how the different sources of value of public open space influence the developed area, rent gradient and the development density of an urban area. The monocentric city model has residents competing for housing around a single central business district (CBD) while developers choose the density of development from the expected prices of the homes at that location in the city. Simulations of the closed city model result in equilibrium rent gradients for land and the housing, a utility level, and a city boundary. By referencing the monocentric city model with two-dimensional coordinates, Wu and Plantinga (2003) are able to more spatially explicitly examine the influence of amenities on the equilibrium state of the city. Amenities are shown to generate leap-frog development, influence the developed area of the city, the population density, rent gradients and location of different income groups. Although different shapes and areas of amenities are examined in their paper, there is no investigation of the proper proximity of these amenities to each other. Several small amenities dispersed far apart from each other in the city may result in less total amount of developed land than if there is only a single large amenity. Another reason that the proximity of amenities to each other matters is that the net benefits from recreation are influenced by the spatial arrangement of the amenities. Consumer´s surplus from recreation trips to the amenity is the net benefit of the amenity, with the price of a recreation trip including the travel cost to the amenity. The travel costs from recreation at amenities depend on how widely dispersed the amenities are in the city. While several amenities located widely throughout a city lower the travel costs of recreation, the city tends to diffuse more too resulting in a larger developed area. On the other hand, a single centrally located amenity contracts the city resulting in a smaller developed area although the travel costs of recreation rise slightly. Simulations from the model collect information on the aggregate amount of recreation trips, recreational net benefits, and the developed area. More localized benefits of amenities like nice views and cleaner air have a stronger influence on housing prices and development densities than the less localized benefits of amenities like recreation. If the travel costs for recreation are low, then only the localized benefits of amenities influence housing prices and development densities. However, if the demand for recreation and the travel costs to reach the amenity is high, the benefits of recreation have the potential to influence the housing prices and development densities in that area of the city. There are several potential solutions to the problem of recreation benefits of the amenities leading to the unwanted development of natural or agricultural land. The simplest solution is to regulate that no recreation take place at the amenity. Of course, the nice views and cleaner air may still draw development outward, and the enforcement of no recreation is necessary. Rather than prohibit recreation, raising user fees at recreation sites is a way to generate revenue for the city while simultaneously restraining sprawl. If the cost of travel to a recreation site is high, development is more likely near the site since households want the benefit of a trip without the high cost of travel to the site. If roads to the recreation site are improved to reduce the cost of travel, households will prefer to locate close to the central business district rather than the recreation site to reduce the cost of their daily commutes.


Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model which enables developers to focus more on business logic rather than on infrastructure or maintenance of servers. This new paradigm has become a source of attraction for developers and organizations alike as it does not only reduce but simply eliminates the overhead of scaling, provisioning and infrastructure altogether. Given the novelty of the phenomenon, this paper is meant to study the phenomenon in a systematic way in order to define the core components of serverless computing, its benefits, challenges and what lies in the foreseen future of the serverless concept. To this end, authors conducted a multivocal literature review in order to better comprehend the state-of-art on serverless computing. The study shows that serverless computing is a solution that allows users to create functions that intercept and operate on data flows in a scalable manner without the need to manage a server, although presents several challenges.


Over the past fifty years the Supreme Court has been repeatedly asked to address the constitutionality of civil commitment laws, including laws specifically targeting sexually violent predators (SVPs). The SVP laws have withstood challenge, in each instance redeemed by their putative civil purpose. Today, however, roughly 13 years after the first modern SVP law was enacted by the State of Washington, serious concern exists over whether the laws are fulfilling their civil purpose, or are merely serving as vehicles for impermissible preventive detention. This Article addresses this question, in the process exploring the viability of the major remaining constitutional basis to challenge the laws: that police power commitment authority entails a strong, enforceable right to treatment, indeed, effective treatment, designed to achieve material progress toward community re-entry. Our argument takes on the conventional judicial wisdom that discounts the right to treatment for the dangerous mentally disordered. Tying together thirty years of the Court's cases, we establish that without treatment progress, involuntary civil commitment, although perhaps legitimate ab initio, can over time become unconstitutional punishment. To ensure that this principle is honored, we devise an analytic framework that is sensitive to the deference properly owed states in the operation of their SVP regimes, yet fulfills the imperative that courts carefully scrutinize state deprivations of liberty on the cusp of the shadowy civil-criminal divide. The Article begins by discussing Seling v. Young, in which the Supreme Court turned back a right-to-treatment claim for habeas relief. Noting that Young was an ex post facto/double jeopardy case, the Article turns to the Court's substantive due process jurisprudence. We argue that there are limits to the hands-off deference that courts often express regarding treatment claims. The right to treatment is often thought of in monolithic terms. We argue that the constitutional right to treatment has several distinct analytic branches. Treatment must be a purpose of commitment if it is to retain its civil cast. However, for a variety of reasons, the Constitution does not impose a treatment-amenability standard as a pre-condition for police power commitment. Further, the details of treatment are properly left to the discretion of state professionals. Nonetheless, the duration of confinement must be related to its treatment purpose. This principle suggests the invalidity of commitments whose duration is excessive in relation to a treatment purpose. In a series of cases, the Court has insisted that commitments, even those valid ab initio, must end when their constitutional underpinnings disappear. We argue that this principle requires release if effective treatment has not been provided within a reasonable period.


The efficiency of the wind power conversions systems can be greatly improved using an appropriate control algorithm. In this work, a sliding mode control for variable speed wind turbine that incorporates a doubly fed induction generator is described. The electrical system incorporates a wound rotor induction machine with back-to-back three phase power converter bridges between its rotor and the grid. In the presented design the so-called vector control theory is applied, in order to simplify the electrical equations. The proposed control scheme uses stator flux-oriented vector control for the rotor side converter bridge control and grid voltage vector control for the grid side converter bridge control. The stability analysis of the proposed sliding mode controller under disturbances and parameter uncertainties is provided using the Lyapunov stability theory. Finally simulated results show, on the one hand, that the proposed controller provides high-performance dynamic characteristics, and on the other hand, that this scheme is robust with respect to the uncertainties that usually appear in the real systems.


The diversification return is known to explain a significant portion of portfolio growth rates. Separately, results from backtesting have created significant interest in smart beta portfolio strategies. Extant research shows that smart beta strategies outperform the passive value-weighted benchmark because of their implicit risk factor tilts, such as value and size. This article reexamines the performance of a subset of smart beta strategies, known as fundamental indexing, focusing on the diversification return. The authors demonstrate that the outperformance of these strategies is completely explained by the diversification returns embedded in the portfolio rebalancing inherent in all such strategies. Efficient factor tilts explain none of the outperformance. TOPICS: Factors, risk premia, factor-based models, performance measurement Key Findings • The article confirms past results that fundamental indexes outperform the market-cap-weighted index. • Importantly, the article shows that all outperformance is due to the diversification return of Fernholz and Shay and Booth and Fama. • Standard explanations for outperformance (factor tilts) do not appear to hold up in factor models after accounting for the diversification return.


It is hornbook law that the United States is not currently a party to any treaty governing the enforcement of foreign judgments. At least, it was hornbook law until 1993. In that year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit adopted a novel interpretation of a provision in a bilateral treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation ("FCN treaty") between the United States and Greece that transformed the treaty into a de facto judgments treaty. Two years later, in 1995, the Third Circuit adopted the same interpretation of an identical clause in the United States–Korea FCN treaty. Each of these courts subsequently reaffirmed its respective interpretation of the provision in question, the Eleventh Circuit in 2006 and the Third Circuit in 2011. In theory, these decisions could usher in a new era of judgments-recognition law in the United States. Indeed, a number of scholars have cited these decisions to argue that the United States is a party to a handful of treaties relating to the enforcement of foreign judgments. In practice, however, this new era is unlikely to dawn for one simple reason: the treaty interpretations adopted by the Third and Eleventh Circuits are objectively incorrect. This brief Essay explains how and why the Third and Eleventh Circuits went astray. It first discusses the general goal of the treaty provision at issue. It then explains how the Third and Eleventh Circuits have interpreted this provision. Finally, this Essay shows why this interpretation is irreconcilable with the text of the treaties.


Same As It Ever Was Nitrogen constitutes approximately 78% by volume of Earth's atmosphere and is a key component in its chemical and physical characteristics. It is not clear whether N2 has been so abundant throughout Earth's geological history. Marty et al. (p. 101, published online 19 September) analyzed the isotopic compositions of nitrogen and argon from fluid inclusions trapped in hydrothermal quartz formed 3 to 3.5 billion years ago. The partial pressure and isotopic composition of atmospheric N2 were similar to today's. Thus, other factors are needed to explain why liquid water existed on Earth's surface despite the Sun being 30% less luminous. Earth's Archean atmosphere contained roughly as much nitrogen between 3.0 and 3.5 billion years ago as it does today. Understanding the atmosphere's composition during the Archean eon is fundamental to unraveling ancient environmental conditions. We show from the analysis of nitrogen and argon isotopes in fluid inclusions trapped in 3.0- to 3.5-billion-year-old hydrothermal quartz that the partial pressure of N2 of the Archean atmosphere was lower than 1.1 bar, possibly as low as 0.5 bar, and had a nitrogen isotopic composition comparable to the present-day one. These results imply that dinitrogen did not play a significant role in the thermal budget of the ancient Earth and that the Archean partial pressure of CO2 was probably lower than 0.7 bar.


In operational hydrology, estimation of the predictive uncertainty of hydrological models used for flood modelling is essential for risk-based decision making for flood warning and emergency management. In the literature, there exists a variety of methods analysing and predicting uncertainty. However, studies devoted to comparing the performance of the methods in predicting uncertainty are limited. This paper focuses on the methods predicting model residual uncertainty that differ in methodological complexity: quantile regression (QR) and UNcertainty Estimation based on local Errors and Clustering (UNEEC). The comparison of the methods is aimed at investigating how well a simpler method using fewer input data performs over a more complex method with more predictors. We test these two methods on several catchments from the UK that vary in hydrological characteristics and the models used. Special attention is given to the methods' performance under different hydrological conditions. Furthermore, normality of model residuals in data clusters (identified by UNEEC) is analysed. It is found that basin lag time and forecast lead time have a large impact on the quantification of uncertainty and the presence of normality in model residuals' distribution. In general, it can be said that both methods give similar results. At the same time, it is also shown that the UNEEC method provides better performance than QR for small catchments with the changing hydrological dynamics, i.e. rapid response catchments. It is recommended that more case studies of catchments of distinct hydrologic behaviour, with diverse climatic conditions, and having various hydrological features, be considered.


This article attempts to bridge two discourses — corporate governance and contract governance. Regarding the latter, a group of scholars has recently set out to develop a more comprehensive research agenda to explore the governance dimensions of contractual relations, highlighting the potential of contract theory to develop a more encompassing theory of social and economic transactions. While a renewed interest in the contribution of economic theory for a concept of contract governance drives one dimension of this research, another part of this undertaking has been to move contract theory closer to theories of social organization. Here, these scholars emphasize the "social" or "public" nature of contracts to return to a critical reflection on the classical model of one-off, spot contracts for an exchange of goods or services. The inspiration for this enterprise comes from corporate governance debates over the last two decades, which focused on competing claims of "convergence" versus "divergence" as part of an ambitious investigation into universal standards, the "end of history," and the underlying "varieties of capitalism." Meanwhile, the fundamental transformation of the state, which domestically and transnationally forms the background of the growing prominence of contract as a governance tool, must be seen as the other dimension of a renewed interest in "governing contracts." This article places the corporation at the intersection of these contentions by drawing out the promise of rereading the nexus-of-contract model of the corporation from the perspective of relational contract theory.


Waternet, the water cycle company of Amsterdam and surrounding areas, uses the life cycle assessment (LCA) method to evaluate the environmental impact of investment decisions and to determine the potential reduction of direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of different alternatives. This approach enables Waternet to fulfil its corporate objective to improve sustainability and to become climate neutral by 2020. Three example studies that give a good overview of the use of LCAs at Waternet and problems encountered are discussed: phosphate removal and recovery from wastewater, pH correction of drinking water with carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and materials for drinking water distribution pipes. The environmental impact assessments were performed in SimaPro 7 using the ReCiPe method and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Global Warming Potential (IPCC GWP) 100a method. The Ecoinvent 2.0 and 2.2 databases were used for the material and process data. From the examples described, it can be concluded that only the phosphate removal case had a significant effect on the climate footprint. The article discusses applications and limitations of the LCA technique. The most important limitation is that the impact of water consumption and the possible impact of effluent compounds to surface water are not considered within the used methods.


Introduction Basic textbooks that attempt to discuss and analyse subjects with particular reference to Nigerian circumstances and relevant judicial opinions are adjudged to be very useful for law teaching and learning in Nigeria (Jegede, 1981). In recent times, serious concern is being expressed about the acute shortage of essential law textbooks in University libraries and the adverse effects that the problem may be having on legal education and the practice of the profession. With the present gross under-funding of most universities, most law faculties do not seem capable of meeting the approved minimum standards with respect to physical and library facilities. In particular, the scourge of inadequate funding for university library acquisitions continues to pose serious challenges to collection development librarians and the various universities offering the law degree programme. Thus, law report, journals, basic textbooks and other reading materials are inadequate and outdated. Consequently, the legal profession and most especially legal education processes in Nigeria have been hard hit by inadequate funding. Most law facilities do not seem capable of meeting the approved minimum stands with respect to physical and library facilities. In particular, the present gross under-funding of universities has affected the ability of librarians to acquire relevant textbooks for students' use. In a related development, the high cost of books has not helped matters. Panella (1990) pointed to the rising law library costs and stated that they increased at a higher rate than those of other general and special libraries due to the nature of legal research tools. It may thus be presumed that no other library would require the kind of investment on local and foreign publications as the law library. The high cost of books has affected the ability of libraries to acquire relevant textbooks for students' use. It has also contributed to the reduction in students' purchase of relevant textbooks, thereby affecting the growth of distribution points for locally published law textbooks and by implication the tertiary book market. Lawal (1989) identified other factors generally affecting acquisition from the Nigerian book market and these include; lack of bibliographic control, lack of promotional activities for published titles, insufficient distribution outlets and difficult payment terms on the part of publishers and booksellers. Previous studies on book situations in Nigeria have explored indigenous publishers' contributions to general book provision (Apeji, 1997) and some have emphasized on issues and problems generally affecting the production and distribution of essential tertiary books (Bankole, 1985; Okekwe, 1995). Only very few studies have connected book production to library acquisition and use (Fasanya, 1978; Omadibi, 2000 and Nwagwu, 2001), although the more libraries they are, the wider and the more stable the book market. In Nigeria, the purported radical increase in law students' enrolments in recent times, and the problem of acute shortage of essential basic law textbooks have brought the book needs of students into a sharper focus by the purported. The study raised the question; can variation law book production be accounted for by library provision use? The study assessed Indigenous law Textbook Publishing (ILTP) in Nigeria during the period 1960-1999 and related library acquisition of published titles, law student's textbook utilization and Indigenous Law Textbook Publishing (ILTP) in selected Federal Universities in Nigeria. It was anticipated that study results would provide an empirical basis for determining the extent of the Nigerian book market for locally published law textbook The specific research questions are the following: * What is the book output of Indigenous Law Textbook Publishing Firms? * What are the attributes of the indigenous law textbook collection of selected Federal University Libraries? …


Background: Intraoperative hypotension following spinal anaesthesia for Caesarean section is associated with maternal morbidity and mortality. Because of inconsistent definitions the reported incidence of hypotension varies between 7% and 74%, making it almost impossible to set standard targets. Developing and adopting a clinically significant threshold for intraoperative hypotension will allow for benchmarking, comparison between studies, and consistency in guidelines and recommendations. Methods: Common definitions for spinal hypotension were first identified from a recent systematic review of the literature and a consensus statement on spinal hypotension. These definitions were applied to haemodynamic data taken from a prospective interventional obstetric spinal hypotension study conducted at Edendale Hospital, to determine the incidence of hypotension when applying these different thresholds. Finally, a definition was proposed based on these incidences and a review of the relevant literature. Results: Fifteen different definitions were identified. These were then applied to the study population with a resultant incidence of hypotension ranging from 15.8% to 91.4%. Based on a literature review of obstetric and other relevant perioperative and critical care medicine, targeting a mean arterial pressure > 70 mmHg and systolic blood pressure > 100 mmHg is recommended, and it is proposed that the lowest absolute values at which vasopressor therapy should be initiated are a mean arterial blood pressure < 65 mmHg or systolic blood pressure < 90 mmHg. Optimally, practitioners should maintain systolic blood pressure at greater than 90% of the baseline pre-spinal anaesthesia value. Conclusion: This study confirmed a wide variation in the incidence of obstetric spinal hypotension in a South African setting, depending on the definition used. An absolute threshold for intervention with vasopressor and an optimal target relative to baseline blood pressure are suggested. Further work is required to establish the effect of the adherence to these recommendations on important maternal and foetal outcomes.


Energy is a critical resource in the design of wireless networks since wireless devices are usually powered by batteries. Battery capacity is finite and the progress of battery technology is very slow, with capacity expected to make little improvement in the near future. Under these conditions, many techniques for conserving power have been proposed to increase battery life.
In this dissertation we consider two approaches to conserving the energy consumed by a wireless network interface. One technique is to use power saving mode, which allows a node to power off its wireless network interface (or enter a doze state) to reduce energy consumption. The other is to use a technique that suitably varies transmission power to reduce energy consumption. These two techniques are closely related to the MAC (Medium Access Control) layer.
With respect to power saving mode, we study IEEE 802.11 PSM (Power Saving Mechanism) and propose a scheme that improves its energy efficiency. We also investigate the interaction between power saving mode and TCP (Transport Control Protocol). As a second approach to conserving energy, we investigate a simple power control protocol, called BASIC, which uses the maximum transmission power for RTS-CTS and the minimum necessary power for DATA-ACK. We identify the deficiency of BASIC, which increases collisions and degrades network throughput, and propose a power control protocol that addresses these problems and achieves energy savings. Since energy conservation is not an issue limited to one layer of the protocol stack, we study a cross layer design that combines power control at the MAC layer and power aware routing at the network layer. One power-aware routing metric is minimizing the aggregate transmission power on a path from source to destination. This metric has been used along with BASIC-like power control under the assumption that it can save energy, which we show to be false. Also, we show that the power aware routing metric leads to a lower throughput. We show that using the shortest number of hops in conjunction with BASIC-like power control conserves more energy than power aware routing with BASIC-like power control.


LL-37 is a broad-spectrum human antimicrobial peptide in the cathelicidin family. Potency assays in the form of minimal inhibitory concentration and vesicle leakage indicate that the single-tryptophan mutants, F6W and F17W, are as effective at killing bacteria and disrupting membranes as the native, tryptophan-free LL-37 peptide. Steady-state fluorescence and UV resonance Raman spectroscopy of F6W and F17W reveal molecular details of these tryptophan residues. The local environment polarity, hydrogen bond strength of the indole N-H moiety, and rotational freedom decrease for both F6W and F17W in the presence of carbonate ions relative to in pure distilled water; these results are consistent with burial of the hydrophobic region of alpha-helical LL-37 in oligomeric cores induced in the presence of carbonate ions. Differences in the spectroscopic properties of the carbonate-induced alpha-helical forms of F6W and F17W reflect the presence of a local lysine residue near F6W that makes the microenvironment of F6W more polar than that of F17W. In the presence of lipid vesicles, the mutants undergo additional loss of environment polarity, hydrogen bond strength, and rotational freedom. Quenching experiments utilizing brominated lipids reveal that the tryptophan residues in both mutants are essentially equidistant from the bilayer center and that bromines closer to the bilayer center, in the 9,10 positions, quench fluorescence more efficiently than those closer to the headgroups (6,7 positions). These results support carpeting or toroidal pore mechanisms of membrane disruption by LL-37 and demonstrate that the combination of tryptophan mutants and sensitive spectroscopic tools may provide important molecular clues about antimicrobial action.


Aim To determine whether an intervention designed to enhance research capacity among commissioners in the area of ethnicity and health was feasible and impactful, and to identify programme elements that might usefully be replicated elsewhere. Background How healthcare commissioners should be equipped to understand and address multiethnic needs has received little attention to-date. Being able to mobilise and apply evidence is a central element of the commissioning process that requires development. Researching ethnicity and health is widely recognised as challenging and several prior interventions have aimed to enhance competence in this area. These have, however, predominantly taken place in North America and have not been evaluated in detail. Methods An innovative research capacity development programme was delivered to public health staff within a large healthcare commissioning organisation in England. Evaluation methodology drew on 'pluralistic' evaluation principles and included formative and summative elements. Participant evaluation forms gave immediate feedback during the programme. Participants also provided feedback at two weeks and 12 months after the programme ended. In addition, one participant and one facilitator provided reflective accounts of the programme's strengths and weaknesses, and programme impact was traced through ongoing partnership work. Findings The programme was well received and had a tangible impact on knowledge, confidence and practice for most participants. Factors important to success included: embedding learning within the participants' work context; ensuring a balance between theory and practical tips to enhance confidence; and having sustained interaction between trainers and participants. Despite positive signs, the challenging nature of the topic was highlighted, as were wider structural and cultural factors that impede progress in this area. Although it is unrealistic to expect such programmes to have a major impact on commissioning practices, they may well make an important contribution to raising the confidence and competence of staff to undertake work in this area.


The purpose of studying pancreatic β-cells in nonhuman species is to learn how to protect and regenerate the supply of residual endogenous β-cells in the face of the immunologic attack of type 1 diabetes, and the glucolipotoxic, inflammatory, endoplasmic reticulum- and oxidative stress–inducing environment of type 2 diabetes. β-Cell replication was unimaginable 20 years ago, when many believed that β-cells were irrevocably, terminally differentiated or senescent, and could never reenter the cell cycle. Enormous progress has been made over the past two decades. There are now many, many agonists that induce β-cells to replicate and expand. The agonists have included nutrients, growth factors, intracellular signaling molecules, small molecules discovered in high-throughput screens, proteins discovered in similar screens, or transgenic mouse models. Examples of these agonists are shown in Table 1, some of which are derived from work in the author's group. Importantly, most of the β-cell replication and expansion resulting from these agonists has been observed in β-cells from mice, rats, pigs, and zebra fish. Surprisingly few induce human β-cells to replicate at therapeutically meaningful rates. Demonstration of human β-cell replication is an unspoken "elephant in the room" that is avoided in most reports.

View this table:

Table 1
Example of small molecules, growth factors, hormones, and nutrients that induce robust β-cell replication in rodents, but not in adult humans

One recent case in point is a report by Yi et al. (1) that attracted considerable attention both in the diabetes research community and in the lay media. Very briefly, Yi et al. described a novel …


Written for beginning students, this self-contained text introduces the Latin language through the basics of English grammar. The book is arranged into twenty units, each of which includes grammatical concepts, exercises, and vocabulary. After the basic grammatical forms are presented, each further unit contains several original passages by various Latin authors. A listing of English words derived from the vocabulary in these units is included. The final section contains two lengthy excerpts for translation, one prose and the other poetry. A full list of paradigms as well as Latin-to-English and English-to-Latin dictionaries are included. An excellent introductory text for students of Latin.


While most transcriptome analyses in high-throughput clinical studies focus on gene level expression, the existence of alternative isoforms of gene transcripts is a major source of the diversity in the biological functionalities of the human genome. It is, therefore, essential to annotate isoforms of gene transcripts for genome-wide transcriptome studies. Recently developed mRNA sequencing technology presents an unprecedented opportunity to discover new forms of transcripts, and at the same time brings bioinformatic challenges due to its short read length and incomplete coverage for the transcripts. In this work, we proposed a computational approach to reconstruct new mRNA transcripts from short sequencing reads with reference information of known transcripts in existing databases. The prior knowledge helped to define exon boundaries and fill in the transcript regions not covered by sequencing data. This approach was demonstrated using a deep sequencing data set of human muscle tissue with transcript annotations in RefSeq as prior knowledge. We identified 2,973 junctions, 7,471 exons, and 7,571 transcripts not previously annotated in RefSeq. 73% of these new transcripts found supports from UCSC Known Genes, Ensembl or EST transcript annotations. In addition, the reconstructed transcripts were much longer than those from de novo approaches that assume no prior knowledge. These previously un-annotated transcripts can be integrated with known transcript annotations to improve both the design of microarrays and the follow-up analyses of isoform expression. The overall results demonstrated that incorporating transcript annotations from genomic databases significantly helps the reconstruction of novel transcripts from short sequencing reads for transcriptome research.


In recent years, the scanning of real-world physical objects using 3d acquisition devices has become an everyday task. Such 3d scanners output a set of three-dimensional points, called point cloud, sampling the surface of an object. These samples are typically subject to imperfections like noise, holes and outliers. In computer graphics, the field of surface reconstruction is concerned with the problem of converting this raw point data to a clean, more usable and visualizable representation. Some of the developed techniques aim at directly rendering a closed surface from such a point cloud, but also require certain precomputations to produce images of high quality. The ever-increasing acquisition rates and data throughputs of even low-cost scanner hardware have recently made it possible to capture dynamic and animated objects in real time. These high-speed acquisition capabilities call for new high-performance reconstruction algorithms that are able to keep up with these acquisition rates and allow an instant high-quality visualization of the real-time captured data. In this thesis, we pick up on this problem and develop various techniques that allow a fast processing and visualization of such raw, unstructured and potentially dynamic point clouds, which might be streamed to our computer at real-time rates from any possible source. In the course of our work, we investigate probabilistic methods that allow achieving a significant acceleration of state-of-the-art point-based operators, and use statistical models of 3d point sets to develop a fast technique for probabilistic surface reconstruction and representation. We develop a GPU point-rendering framework that performs any reconstruction computations required for a high-quality visualization instantly, i.e., on the fly at render time, and only on a necessary minimal subset of the data, i.e., the points visible on the screen. To this end, the first part of this thesis addresses a basic problem common to almost any surface-reconstruction technique, which is the fast and efficient search for spatial neighbors in an unstructured and unordered large collection of points. Knowing about a point's nearest neighbors is an essential prerequisite for establishing local connectivity, assessing the shape of the surrounding surface, and applying filter operations for improving the quality of the geometric data and thus the resulting surface. In the second part, we improve on this direct reconstruction and rendering technique and present a more elaborate method that allows working at arbitrary reconstruction bandwidths, improves on the temporal stability of the rendered image, and produces a surface rendering of increased smoothness. In the third part, we focus on the problem of noise and outliers in the input data, and introduce a novel technique that allows for a fast feature-preserving resampling of unstructured dynamic point sets at render time. To this end, we describe the point cloud by a sparse probabilistic Gaussian mixture model, which allows for a much more compact representation and thus much faster operations on the spatial data. We will show that this technique significantly improves on the speed and even on the accuracy and quality of a feature-preserving point-set resampling operator. Based on the observed computational benefits of this probabilistic model, the final part of this thesis investigates a new way of defining a smooth and continuous surface solely based on a sparse Gaussian mixture. We will develop an entirely probabilistic reconstruction pipeline, and show that we can describe a feature-rich surface in a highly memory-efficient way while obtaining a reconstruction performance that can compete and even improve on the state of the art.


Governor Franklin's
Board
system
which
of Education
of primary
was to remain
Abstract
Regulations of 1839 established a
to organise and manage a public
education in Tasmania, a system
almost the sole concern of the
Board and its successor, the Education Department,
until the introduction of a secondary system in 1913.
Primary education is the subject-matter of this
dissertation and the years from 1839 to 1913 its timespan.
The Board came into being largely as a consequence of
the inability of the religious denominations to
provide schools and teachers for the increasing child
population of a colony strongly influenced, in the
early decades of the period, by convicts and the
convict system. Conflict developed between the State
and the denominations and the Church of England in
particular. The two opposing views concerning the
nature of education and its control and management
were resolved in favour of the State after a short
though, at times, intense dispute.
The Board of Education enjoyed an administrative and
executive freedom of a kind unknown to other
departments of government. With the resolution of the
Church-State conflict behind it, the granting of self government
and the creation of a reformed Board
allowed its members to build bureaucratic machinery
for the creation and administration of policy and the
conduct of its day-to-day operations. In these matters
the influence of the Inspectors was crucial to the
Board's efficiency. With the need to make few
references to Parliament or the Tasmanian people, the
Inspectors developed a curriculum and a system for the
examination of the children, inspection of schools and the recruitment, examination,
promotion of teachers.
classification and
In the making of these changes the teachers had no
part. The local boards were assigned responsibilities
of a petty nature, though their importance to the
maintenance of the education system was considerable.
From participation in the affairs of their schools,
discussion of the quality of the teaching, teaching
methods and the framing of curriculum the parents
were, by law, virtually excluded. This bureaucratic
system was well in place before public concern over
its exclusiveness manifested itself. The dissolution
of the Board and its replacement by an Education
Department in 1886, which was made responsible to a
Minister and Parliament, did very little to disturb
the workings of the bureaucracy and its structure, in
its more important aspects, was left almost untouched.
A chronic problem for the bureaucracy was the low rate
of school attendance. The law concerning compulsory
attendance and its enforcement by local boards and
officials and the attitudes of parents to the
attendance of the children and towards education are
discussed at length.
A discussion of the curriculum provides the means for
an examination of teaching methods, the quality of the
teaching, and the experience of children in the
classroom and at school. The kinds of education given
by the private venture schools, the sustained
critic ism made of them by Education Department
Directors and Inspectors and the experience of the
children in attendance at them offers an opportunity
to discuss an alternative form of education about
which little is known.This dissertation attempts
powerful bureaucracy and
formation and development
practice.
to develop discussion of a
its influence on the
of educational ideas and


There is evidence that health care professionals grieve after the death of a child (Papadatou et al., 2002; Plante and Cyr, 2011; Hollingsworth et al., 2017); however, there is limited data about the impact of a child's death on children's nursing students during their brief and varied placements undertaken as part of their course (Carson, 2010). There are many opportunities for universities and placement providers to educate and support these student nurses to prepare them for this experience to develop their resilience and to enable them to become caring, compassionate and courageous practitioners. Debriefing is an intervention that is recommended after a death in practice to enable practitioners to deal with their emotions and to learn from experience to improve practice (Keene et al., 2010; Huggard, 2013; Widdas et al., 2013; Goodrich et al., 2015): it is also suggested that it is an integral part of the nurse education curriculum (National League for Nursing, 2015). This presentation will examine the many meanings of debriefing, its different purposes and outcomes and evidence and debates about its effectiveness (Kinchin, 2007; Sawyer, Loren and Halamek, 2016). The implications for using debriefing to support and educate children's nursing students about death related situations in practice will be presented e.g. formal approaches, informal approaches (Maloney, 2012; Huggard, 2013) and its fundamental role in simulated learning (Decker et al., 2013).

References

Carson, S. (2010) Do student nurses within an undergraduate child health programme feel that the curriculum prepares them to deal with the death of a child? Journal of Child Health Care. 14 (4), pp. 367-374.

Decker, S., Fey, M., Sideras, S., Caballero, S., Rockstraw, L, R., Boese, T., Franklin, A, E., Gloe, D., Lioce, L., Sando, C, R., Meakim, C. and Borum, J, C. (2013) Standards of Best Practice: Simulation Standard VI: The Debriefing Process, Clinical Simulation in Learning, 9(65), pp. S26-S29.

Goodrich, J., Harrison, T., Cornwell, J., Cooper, M. and Richardson, H. (2015) Resilience A framework supporting hospice staff to flourish in stressful times. London: Hospice UK.

Hollingsworth, C, E., Wesley, C., Huckridge, J., Finn, G, M. and Griksaitis, M, J. (2017) Impact of Child Death on Paediatric Trainees, Archives of Disease in Childhood [Published Online First: 18 August 2017]. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2017-313544

Huggard, J. (2013) Debriefing: a valuable component of staff support, International Journal of Palliative Nursing, 19(5) pp.212-214.

Keene, E, A., Hutton, N., Hall, B. and Rushton, C. (2010) Bereavement debriefing sessions: an intervention to support health care professionals in managing their grief after the death of a patient, Pediatric Nursing, 36(4), pp.185-189.

Kinchin, D. (2007) A guide to psychological debriefing: managing emotional decompression and post-traumatic stress disorder. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Maloney, C. (2012) Critical incident stress debriefing and pediatric nurses: an approach to support the work environment and mitigate negative consequences, Pediatric Nursing, 38 (2), pp.110 – 113.

National League for Nursing (2015) Debriefing across the curriculum. Available at: http://www.nln.org/docs/default-source/about/nln-vision-series-%28position-statements%29/nln-vision-debriefing-across-the-curriculum.pdf?sfvrsn=0 (Accessed: 1 March 2018).

Papadatou, D., Bellali, T., Papazoglou, I., and Petraki, D. (2002) Greek nurse and physician grief as a result of caring for children dying of cancer. Pediatric Nursing. 28 (4), pp. 345-353.

Plante, J. and Cyr, C. (2011) Health Care Professionals' Grief after the Death of a Child, Paediatrics and Child Health, 16(4), pp. 213-216.

Sawyer, T., Loren, D. and Halamek, L, P. (2016) Post-event debriefings during neonatal care: why are we not doing them, how can we start? Journal of Perinatology, 36, pp.415-419.

Widdas, D., McNamara, K. and Edwards, F. (2013) (3rd Ed.) A Core Care Pathway for Children with Life-limiting and Life-threatening Conditions. Bristol: Together for Short Lives.


We investigate the intensity dependent spatial drift of two-color plasma based terahertz (THz) sources. A simple scheme that uses an off-axis parabolic mirror is presented to overcome this shifting. In addition, the THz energy and electric field measurements are related via the real time images of the THz spot size.


Advanced schools of literary research today concur in their disapproval of unscaffolded interpretations of texts that "overhear" the presumed self-communing voices of authors in their solitude. Choosing from among the many antihermeneutic arguments, this essay responds in the main to the "historical poetics" of Virginia Jackson's Dickinson's Misery, with its reconsideration of the lyric poem and its place in the canon and reading practices of modern criticism. Neither direct interpretation of a text that lacks focus on its modes of circulation and transmission nor indeed any sort of interpretation at all has been a constant in the history of criticism. Interpretation has coincided only with periods in which literature as "secular scripture" was considered at once culturally important and difficult to understand—and not even always then, as modernist texts aimed to constitute their own interpretations. If poetry is understood as statement embedded in language, and if it is still both important and difficult, perhaps we can reserve a place for interpretations that are not wholly dependent on the mediatic circumstances of which Jackson and others have taught us to be more fully aware.


Let us all take a moment to talk, once again, about this new coronavirus pandemic that the world has been facing since November 2019 and about its global response. After a short period marked by the pandemic underestimation risk by most governments, the Western world went nuts and overreacted, most probably so as not to be accused of inaction. In many cases, the overall benefits of the chosen policies were not sufficiently questioned, which resulted in many side effects on global health .The medical motto "primum non nocere", a moral principle everyone should at least consider following, was evidently not taken into account. It has been overlooked, and the virus has become an obsession, to the extent that nearly everything else, even the most valuable things in life, is still now under appreciated if not simply ignored. This review highlighted facts against this simplistic, one-dimensional view.


In answer to public concerns, "Microbial Food Safety in Animal Agriculture: Current Topics" provides timely information on this area of increasing importance, giving a broad overview of pre-harvest microbial food safety. Written by specialists from around the world, this essential reference focuses on research in the areas of antimicrobial resistance, risk assessment, microbial detection methods and diagnostics, and emerging diseases. Coverage provides balanced overviews of Federal, industry, and academic perspectives on key issues in food safety. Specific organisms explored in depth include: "Salmonella"spp., "Campylobacter"spp., "Escherichia coli" 0157: H7, and "Listeria monocytogene." No other single source offers current information and detailed references on issues in pre-harvest food safety in production animal agriculture. Veterinarians, researchers, and food safety professionals in academia, government agencies, and food animal production industries will discover this resource crucial to defensive awareness.


Effective long‐term operation of soil vapor extraction (SVE) systems for cleanup of vadose‐zone sources requires consideration of the likelihood that remediation activities over time will alter the subsurface distribution and configuration of contaminants. A method is demonstrated for locating and characterizing the distribution and nature of persistent volatile organic contaminant (VOC) sources in the vadose zone. The method consists of three components: analysis of existing site and SVE‐operations data, vapor‐phase cyclic contaminant mass‐discharge testing, and short‐term vapor‐phase contaminant mass‐discharge tests conducted in series at multiple locations. Results obtained from the method were used to characterize overall source zone mass‐transfer limitations, source‐strength reductions, potential changes in source‐zone architecture, and the spatial variability and extent of the persistent source(s) for the Department of Energy's Hanford site. The results confirmed a heterogeneous distribution of contaminant mass discharge throughout the vadose zone. Analyses of the mass‐discharge profiles indicate that the remaining contaminant source is coincident with a lower‐permeability unit at the site. Such measurements of source strength and size as obtained herein are needed to determine the impacts of vadose‐zone sources on groundwater contamination and vapor intrusion, and can support evaluation and optimization of the performance of SVE operations.


This study was designed to examine the in vitro antioxidant and antimicrobial activities and to characterize the polyphenolic composition of the ethanolic extracts of Hyssopus officinalis, Ocimum basilicum and Teucrium chamaedrys. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the major phenolic compounds were conducted using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS). The total polyphenols, caffeic acid derivatives and flavonoids content was spectrophotometrically determined. The phenolic profile showed the presence of phenolic acid derivatives (caftaric, gentisic, caffeic, p-coumaric, chlorogenic and ferulic acids), flavonoid glycosides (rutin, isoquercitrin and quercitrin) and free flavonoid aglycons (luteolin, quercetin), in different concentrations. DPPH radical scavenging assay, Trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (TEAC) method, hemoglobin ascorbate peroxidase activity inhibition (HAPX) assay, and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) radicals detection were employed, revealing several aspects of the antioxidant activities of these species. The antimicrobial tests were performed using the disk diffusion assay. These extracts contained a large amount of the polyphenolic compounds (77.72, 175.57, and 243.65 mg/g, respectively), and they showed a good antioxidant activity, as witnessed by a number of methods. T. chamaedrys had a high antimicrobial activity. Besides their antioxidant activity, the antimicrobial effect of these extracts confirms the biological activities of these herbal medicinal products.


Summarypaper gives a phenomenological account of depression and mania in terms of body, space, temporality and intersubjectivity. While the lived body is normally embedded into the world and mediates our relations to others, depression interrupts this embodied contact to the world. Local or general oppression condenses the fluid lived body to a solid, heavy "corporeal body". Instead of expressing the self, the body is now turned into a barrier to all impulses directed to the environment. This impairs the patient's interaction and affective attunement with others, resulting in a general sense of detachment, separation or even segregation. Depression is then further interpreted as the result of a desynchronisation, i.e. an uncoupling in the temporal relation between the patient and his social environment. This concept leads to some suggestions regarding a "resynchronisation therapy" for affective disorders. Conversely, mania is phenomenologically described as a centrifugal dispersion of the lived body, characterised by a general lightness, expansion and disinhibition. In the temporal dimension, the manic desynchronisation from the environment manifests itself in a lack of rhythmicity and constant acceleration of lived time.


Damages for Psychiatric Injuries offers a critique of liability for psychiatric injury in Australia and England. Author Des Butler examines current day understandings of psychiatric medicine, evaluates the legitimacy of past and current approaches to limiting liability, and examines the policy considerations which promote such limits. Butler also analyses the recommendations of the 2002 Ipp Panel's Review of Negligence in Australia and resulting legislation. Succinct and readable, the book sets out a preferred approach to dealing with claims for psychiatric injuries, which recognises the scientific advances of recent times and reflects good legal reasoning.


We show that under arguably plausible assumptions regarding the DNA exoneration process, in expectation, the ratio of DNA exoneration rates across races among defendants convicted for the same crime in the same state provides an upper bound on the ratio of wrongful conviction rates across races among these defendants. Our estimates of this statistic reveal that among those sentenced to incarceration for rape in the United States between 1983 and 1997, the wrongful conviction rate among white defendants was less than two-thirds of what it was for black defendants. Our results with respect to murder are inconclusive.