Most image processing and visualization applications allow users to configure computation parameters and manipulate the resulting visualizations. SCIRun, VoIView, MeVisLab, and the Medical Interaction Toolkit (MITK) are four image processing and visualization frameworks that were built for these purposes. All frameworks are freely available and all allow the use of the ITK C++ library. In this paper, the benefits and limitations of each visualization framework are presented to aid both application developers and users in the decision of which framework may be best to use for their application. The analysis is based on more than 50 evaluation criteria, functionalities, and example applications. We report implementation times for various steps in the creation of a reference application in each of the compared frameworks. The data-flow programming frameworks, SCIRun and MeVisLab, were determined to be best for developing application prototypes, while VoIView was advantageous for nonautomatic end-user applications based on existing ITK functionalities, and MITK was preferable for automated end-user applications that might include new ITK classes specifically designed for the application


2631 Background: Response to immune checkpoint inhibitors has been associated with immune activation and mutational load within a tumor. Previous results in other tumors have implicated MHC II protein tumor cell expression as a response predictor to immune checkpoint inhibitors. In the I-SPY 2 TRIAL, the anti-PD1 therapeutic antibody pembrolizumab (P) was available to HER2-negative subtypes and graduated in both the HR+/HER2- and TNBC signatures. Pre-specified biomarker analysis was performed to test tumor MHC II expression as a predictor of response to P in the I-SPY 2 TRIAL based on its central role in tumor antigen presentation. Methods: 156 patients (P: 67, controls: 89) had RPPA and pCR data. RPPA-based quantitative data for pan-MHC II protein isotypes HLA-DR/DP/DQ/DX and HLA-DR protein isotype was obtained from LCM-enriched tumor epithelium, and protein levels were assessed for association with pCR in the P and control arms separately using the Wilcoxon Rank Sum test (p < 0.05). Analysis was also performed in the HR+ and HR- subgroups. Markers were analyzed individually; p-values are descriptive and were not corrected for multiple comparisons. Results: Across all P- treated patients, the HLA class II molecules –DR and -DR/DP/DQ/DX had a positive association with response to P (p = 0.014 and p = 0.001). Expression of HLA-DR/DP/DQ/DX also had a positive association with response to P in HR+ tumors. Neither of these associations were seen in the control arm samples. Conclusions: The observation of elevation of MHC II protein expression in HER2- responding patients treated with P suggests that activation of antigen peptide exchange facilitated by these molecules in T and B cells may enhance response to P treatment.


Multi-task learning seeks to improve the generalization performance of a learning task with the help of other related learning tasks. Among the multi-task learning methods proposed thus far, Bonilla et al.'s method (Bonilla et al., 2008) provides a novel multi-task extension of Gaussian process (GP) by using a task covariance matrix to model the relationships between tasks. However, learning the task covariance matrix directly has both computational and representational drawbacks. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian extension by modeling the task covariance matrix as a random matrix with an inverse-Wishart prior and integrating it out to achieve Bayesian model averaging. To make the computation feasible, we first give an alternative weight-space view of Bonilla et al.'s multi-task GP model and then integrate out the task covariance matrix in the model, leading to a multi-task generalized t process (MTGTP). For the likelihood, we use a generalized t noise model which, together with the generalized t process prior, brings about the robustness advantage as well as an analytical form for the marginal likelihood. In order to specify the inverse-Wishart prior, we use the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) statistic to estimate the parameter matrix of the inverse-Wishart prior. Moreover, we investigate some theoretical properties of MTGTP, such as its asymptotic analysis and learning curve. Comparative experimental studies on two common multi-task learning applications show very promising results. Appearing in Proceedings of the 13 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2010, Chia Laguna Resort, Sardinia, Italy. Volume 9 of JMLR: W&CP 9. Copyright 2010 by the authors.


The development of this second edition of these guidelines was in part a response to evidence of the widespread incorrect application of the categories to marine protected areas (MPAs). Marine management and sustainable fisheries management are critical elements of good oceans management, but are not the same as protected areas management, where the primary focus is conservation of nature. The primary purpose of these supplementary guidelines is to increase the accuracy and consistency of assignment and reporting of the IUCN categories when applied to marine and coastal protected areas. These supplementary marine guidelines are aimed at ensuring that the IUCN categories can be effectively applied to all types of MPAs as well as to any marine components of adjoining terrestrial protected areas, provided a site meets the IUCN definition of a protected area.


Abstract Addressing an artist's engagement with critique as embodied in an instance of a formalised research process, this text elaborates three distinct phases of association. First it looks at one particular theory of critique that informed the conception of an art-work. Then it looks at how the artwork put that theory into practice; how the theory was embodied, and finally, the issue of how the artwork inflects the theory, when that inflection may be seen as the action of critique — upon critique. Specifically, the understanding of 'critique' that this text elaborates (in the form of the report upon the theory for an artwork) is 'immanent critique'. Informed by Marxist theory, this aims to 'recognise and free the future from its distorted form in the present' — as defined by Walter Benjamin. (As such, its values are not transcendental, but found in experience or a 'work'.) It is Benjamin's discussion of the politics of immanent critique, and the tactics that those politics imply, that informs the artwork's theory more precisely. In particular, this article is concerned to assess how immanent critique is advanced by the semiotic method Benjamin proposed for the Arcades Project, and the role of the pseudonym, which he deployed too, in order to advance his critical objectives. Reviewing how these tactics for immanent critique were adopted by an artwork — The Faust Supplement 2002 — the article then turns to the question of how the actuality of practice adapted them. In mapping the gaps that open up between the 'theory' and 'the practice', the text proposes practice as a medium of critique in its double sense of acting for (a specified) critique and being critical (of that critique). It notes that the recognition of this mediation has been encouraged by the institution of 'research in art-practice'. The article concludes by proposing that 'critical practice' maybe re-signified to emphasise the criticality of practice — distinct from its deployment of the theories that inform it.


Florida R. and Mellander C. The geography of inequality: difference and determinants of wage and income inequality across US metros, Regional Studies. This paper examines the geographic variation in wage inequality and income inequality across US metros. The findings indicate that the two are quite different. Wage inequality is closely associated with skills, human capital, technology and metro size, in line with the literature, but these factors are only weakly associated with income inequality. Furthermore, wage inequality explains only 15% of income inequality across metros. Income inequality is more closely associated with unionization, race and poverty. No relationship is found between income inequality and average incomes and only a modest relationship between it and the percentage of high-income households.


To think about the experience that the user will have when interacting with a piece of software, is to begin to understand that, in the process of interaction, different factors influence: individual, social, contextual, cultural and those of the product in question. So, there is a need to have some strategy, technique, model or method that allows to systematically organize the tasks to help software developers and professionals from different disciplines to work together for the development of software interfaces. The objective of this paper is to provide software development companies with a quality model that serves as an instrument, guide or good practice that allows them to position themselves at a highly competitive level in the current market through production of quality software based on user experience. A quality model is proposed for which the structure of the International Standard ISO 13407:1999, the ISO 25000 standard and information collected from the software service industry of the region were taken into consideration.


The International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology (ISUOG) is a scientific organization that encourages sound clinical practice, and high-quality teaching and research related to diagnostic imaging in women's healthcare. The ISUOG Clinical Standards Committee (CSC) has a remit to develop Practice Guidelines and Consensus Statements that provide healthcare practitioners with a consensus-based approach. They are intended to reflect what is considered by ISUOG to be the best practice at the time at which they are issued. Although ISUOG has made every effort to ensure that Guidelines are accurate when issued, neither the Society nor any of its employees or members accepts any liability for the consequences of any inaccurate or misleading data, opinions or statements issued by the CSC. The ISUOG CSC documents are not intended to establish a legal standard of care because interpretation of the evidence that underpins the Guidelines may be influenced by individual circumstances, local protocol and available resources. Approved Guidelines can be distributed freely with the permission of ISUOG (firstname.lastname@example.com).


Entity Analysis with Weak Supervision: Typing, Linking, and Attribute Extraction Xiao Ling Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Daniel S. Weld Computer Science and Engineering With the advent of the Web, textual information has grown at an explosive rate. To digest this enormous amount of data, an automatic solution, Information Extraction (IE), has become necessary. Information extraction is a task of converting unstructured text strings into structured machine-readable data. The first key step of a general IE pipeline is often to analyze entities mentioned in the text before making holistic conclusions. To fully understand each entity, one needs to detect their mentions, categorize them into semantic types, connect them with their knowledge base entries, and identify their attributes as well as the relationships with others. In this dissertation, we first present the problem of fine-grained entity recognition. Unlike most traditional named entity recognition systems using a small set of entity classes, e.g., person, organization, location or miscellaneous, we define a novel set of over one hundred fine-grained entity types. In order to intelligently understand text and extract a wide range of information, it is useful to more precisely determine the semantic classes of entities mentioned in unstructured text. We formulate the recognition problem as multi-class, multi-label classification, describe an unsupervised method for collecting training data, and present the FIGER implementation. Next, we demonstrate that fine-grained entity types are closely connected with other entity analysis tasks. We describe an entity linking system whose prediction heavily relies on these types and present a simple yet effective implementation, called VINCULUM. An extensive evaluation on nine data sets, comparing VINCULUM with two state-of-the-art systems, elucidates key aspects of the system that include mention extraction, candidate generation, entity type prediction, entity coreference, and coherence. Finally, we describe an approach to acquire commonsense knowledge from a massive amount of text on the Web. In particular, a system called SIZEITALL is developed to extract numerical attribute values for various classes of entities. To resolve the ambiguity from the surface form text, we canonicalize the extractions with respect to WordNet senses and build a knowledge base on physical size for thousands of entity classes. Throughout all three entity analysis tasks, we show the feasibility of building sophisticated IE systems without a significant investment in human effort to create sufficient labeled data.


Municipal wastewater treatment plants are constantly forced to make improvements. The main objectives are to reduce energy consumption, to increase the treatment capacity and to improve the effluent water quality. Microsieves in combination with chemical pretreatment can potentially fulfil these objectives. In this work, experiments were mainly conducted at the large pilot scale, and supplementary experiments were conducted at the laboratory scale to establish criteria for chemically enhanced primary and tertiary treatment and microsieving. Full-scale follow-up experiments were also conducted at the first treatment plant in Scandinavia, utilizing coagulation/flocculation and disc filtration in advanced tertiary treatment. Microsieves constructed as disc or drum filters showed removal efficiencies for primary treatment in the range of 30-60% with sieve pore sizes of 30-100 µm without chemical pretreatment. By dosing with cationic polymers, a suspended solids removal > 80% was possible, and the effluent water quality generally contained approximately 20-50 mg SS/L; in addition, most of the particulate phosphorus and COD was also reduced. To further improve the removal to > 95%, dosing of the coagulant is necessary; then, effluent containing < 10 mg SS/L and 0.1-0.2 mg TP/L with mostly dissolved COD remaining was produced. Sieve pore sizes in the range of 30-100 µm had a minor influence on the removal with chemical pretreatment; however, the solids loading capacity differed. For chemically enhanced primary treatment and microsieving, common feedback PI automation with occasional support from the feed forward control can be used together with online turbidity measurements to control the removal of COD. A consistent effluent COD concentration could be maintained independent of the influent COD or flow variations. Phosphorus removal could be controlled by adjusting the coagulant dose in relation to the polymer dose. Pretreatment with chemically enhanced primary treatment and microsieving was also beneficial for the microfiltration of primary wastewater treatment. The effluent water quality from microfiltration was improved if pretreatment with polymer and coagulant prior to microsieving was conducted. Anionic polymers were the most applicable because they generated a high flux. During tertiary treatment, for the highest possible removal, a sieve with a pore size of 10 µm was needed. It is possible to consistently achieve < 0.1 mg/L for the effluent phosphorus concentration, but careful design of the dispersion/coagulation and flocculation stages is important, and control of the operation is necessary. Polymer addition is crucial for chemically enhanced treatment and microsieving. Polyacrylamide based synthetic anionic or cationic polymers with a high molecular weight and low-medium charge were shown to be suitable for both primary and tertiary treatment. A general polymer dose of 1-5 and 0.5-1.5 mg polymer/L can be expected for primary and tertiary treatment, respectively. Alternative starch based biopolymers were also applicable, but the required dose was higher. Both iron and aluminium coagulants were applicable, but aluminium based coagulants were shown to be an overall a better choice. During primary treatment, the coagulant dose was variable, depending on the demand. During tertiary treatment, a molar ratio of 5-7 mol Me3+/mol influent TP was sufficient to fulfil the effluent criteria. This corresponded to a dosing of approximately 1-4 mg Al3+/L for the ordinary secondary effluents. Screening of chemicals and doses was performed in the laboratory with modified jar tests. Comparable treatment results were achieved in the laboratory, at the pilot scale and at the full scale; however, the laboratory experiments overestimated the solids loading capacity.


It is recognised that looked after young people with a history of trauma, offending, emotional, behavioural and educational difficulties often face a high risk of social exclusion later in life. Against this background an innovative and intensive fostering service was developed by a large charitable organization. The intention was to provide community based foster care placements as an alternative to residential and secure accommodation and an external evaluation was commissioned. The thesis grew out of the main research evaluation. This small scale case study has the separate aim of exploring how far the provision of specialist foster care placements together with appropriate services can help young people to achieve stability. This question is considered through an analysis of the organisational relationships, the model for service delivery, the implementation of the key services and their impact on the service users. The methodology and research approach used questionnaires and in-depth recorded interviews. The study has been personalised by including the voices of the organisation's key stakeholders and service users. With the introduction of recent legislation that places an emphasis on inter-agency and multi-professional working, the thesis seeks to draw out lessons from the case study on the opportunities and constraints of joined-up service delivery. It also aims to inform current policy and practice which is now shifting towards the provision of specialist foster care, rather than residential care for difficult young people. The findings indicate that achieving integrated service delivery and multi-professional working is a complex task. The study has provided a broad understanding about all aspects of service delivery, together with the views of the service providers and the service users. Finally, the thesis makes recommendations for the improvement of inter-agency co-operation and front line service delivery to ensure that young people and their families receive the services they need.


The recording of data in multiple layers, rather than a single layer, permits a significant increase in the capacity of optical data storage devices. However, focusing to the different layers introduces different amounts of depth-dependent aberrations. Variable aberration correction is therefore necessary to maintain diffraction-limited operation. We demonstrate the use of adaptive optics to predict and correct these aberrations for both the recording and read-out of such media.


(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)As a church dynasty, the Archibald J. Careys (Sr. and Jr.) of Chicago are arguably as significant as the Adam Clayton Powells of New York and the King-Williams clan of Atlanta, but they have attracted far less scholarly attention. This book will go far to remedy that lack, in a treatment that illumines much about African American church life and its connections with politics over a period of more than a century.Dennis Dickerson is especially interested in the father's and son's use of the public square to benefit their African American constituents. He emphasizes various ideological sources for their do-good efforts: the eminently practical nature of Methodism from John Wesley onward, and the vision instilled by Social Gospel and black liberation theologies (although it was not, as the author states, Walter Rauschenbusch who pioneered the Social Gospel in New England during the 1870s; probably he means Washington Gladden). Still, the Carey's public square labors look quite secular, with only a slight religious and biblical patina distinguishing their rhetoric from that of a Thurgood Marshall. Dickerson asserts that their lives become more meaningful when we pay attention to their deeds as well as their words, in that Social Gospel, Wesleyan, and black liberationist tenets "become intrinsic to their public ministries and defined how they functioned in these roles" (12).A deeper look into Dickerson's narrative shows that this last assertion is only partially true. It would be a mistake to portray the Careys in too altruistic a light; they also engaged in "shameless self-promotion . . . [and] yearned for position and power even when it harmed their broader efforts to benefit the black population" (13). Their wealth had its privileges: Archibald Carey, Jr.'s friendship with New York Congressman and Baptist pastor Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. at one time featured Carey's suggestion that both men, together with their wives, should "run up to Martha's Vineyard for a while" (72). The world inhabited by the Careys thus would be illumined not only by histories of civil rights movements but also by histories of African American elites such as Lawrence Graham's Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class (New York: Harper Collins, 1999)--unfortunately, not in Dickerson's bibliography.Roughly one third of the book recounts the life of Archibald Carey Sr. (1868-1931), nurtured in the warm bosom of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Georgia, was on the leading edge of the Great Migration of African Americans to urban areas of the North, arriving in Chicago in 1898. Carey Sr. was elected a bishop in the AME Church in 1920. A loyal Republican and friend of Chicago Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson, Carey had considerable clout in the Windy City. He was involved in a number of reform and benevolent activities, including arguing for greater participation by women in the leadership of his denomination, and coordinating relief for African American victims of the 1927 Mississippi River flooding. …


The ethical consumer is one that has been receiving an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Research has pointed to the growing influence exerted by these consumers. Yet it has also been noted that there is a dichotomy between consumers oft stated pro-ethical attitudes and their less frequent pro-ethical purchase behaviour. Previous studies have been employed to try and understand this gap which is commonly referred to in the literature as the attitude- behaviour gap or the ethical-purchasing gap. There is a distinct lack of studies of into the 'gap' in the Irish context however. Past studies have also tended to focus exclusively on the environmental context of ethical consumption.

This study seeks to explore the mediating factors between consumers ethical consumption attitudes and actual ethical purchase behaviours in the Irish consumption context. A qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews is employed to offer insight and seek understanding of the complex factors that intervene between possessing a pro-ethical attitude and enacting this in the form of actual purchase behaviour.

Eight interviews were conducted and thematic analysis was used to identify salient themes. It was found that participants all displayed pro-ethical attitudes although variance in the strength of this was noted. It was also found that the focus of ethical concern tended to vary between participants. A noticeable theme was that to be ethical in one's purchase behaviour is difficult and requires commitment. The findings suggest that price, lack of information and lack of availability are the most common mediating factors that affect the translation of an ethical consumption attitude into actual ethical purchase behaviour. Other factors to emerge were consumer scepticism, time pressure and the influence of existing forces of habit. The conclusions section also makes some recommendations for future research.


Background: Extracorporeal Circulation (ECC) related pulmonary function injury plays an important role in the poor postoperative prognosis or even death in patients undergoing cardiac surgery.
Objective: To investigate whether perioperative administration of platelets can preserve pulmonary function or enhance the inflammatory response and vascular injury.
Methods: Rats were divided into four groups, PreH group, MH group, PostH group and MP group. Neutrophil elastase and Tumor Necrosis Factor-α (TNF-α) in rat plasma were detected by ELISA. Oxygenation index and lung water content were measured. Circulating endothelial cells were calculated by flow cytometry and lung tissue pathology was observed. Platelets in the level of systemic inflammatory response, levels of vascular endothelial injury, pulmonary edema and pulmonary function were evaluated.
Results: The level of TNF-α and neutrophil elastase in plasmas were significantly lower in the group that platelets administrated during extracorporeal circulation than that of other groups.
Conclusions: Platelets administrated during the extracorporeal circulation could achieve effect on lung protection and reduce the inflammatory response in plasma. Transfusion of platelets with normal function after rapid consumption might be able to reduce extracorporeal circulation related complications, providing a therapeutic strategy for organ protection during extracorporeal circulation.


The MySQL Phrasebook is a pocket guide that is jam-packed with useful and essential code "phrases" for the MySQL developer's everyday use. Packed with practical solutions for tasks that the MySQL developer must accomplish every day, it fills the need for a short, functional, to-the-point reference for MySQL. This is the guide to consult when you need an immediate, applicable solution to frequent tasks and code that is flexible and adaptable to your needs. Your time won't be wasted on more tutorials - it simply puts essential "phrases" at your fingertips that you can take with you everywhere.


In November 2005, the faculty of Macalester College voted to institute a graduation requirement in Quantitative Thinking (QT) that is truly interdisciplinary. It currently draws on courses from thirteen departments including Anthropology, Economics, Geography, Political Science, Theater, Mathematics, Environmental Science, and Geology. This article describes the process that led to the creation of this program. It explains how we were able to get broad buy-in at the beginning and the long process of trial and error—informed by formative assessment—that was needed to refine the initial vision and shape it into a viable program that would be accepted by most of our faculty. The article concludes with a description of the program as it now exists, a discussion of our ongoing assessment of the program and its effectiveness, and a discussion of the lessons we learned in the process.


A comprehensive metrics validation methodology is proposed that has six validity criteria, which support the quality functions assessment, control, and prediction, where quality functions are activities conducted by software organizations for the purpose of achieving project quality goals. Six criteria are defined and illustrated: association, consistency, discriminative power, tracking, predictability, and repeatability. The author shows that nonparametric statistical methods such as contingency tables play an important role in evaluating metrics against the validity criteria. Examples emphasizing the discriminative power validity criterion are presented. A metrics validation process is defined that integrates quality factors, metrics, and quality functions. >


Reward systems based on balanced scorecards typically connect pay to an index, i.e. a weighted sum of multiple performance measures. However, there is no formal incentive model that actually describe this kind of index contracts as an optimal solution. In this paper, we show that an index contract may indeed be optimal if performance measures are non-verifiable so that the contracting parties must rely on self-enforcement. Under standard assumptions, the optimal self-enforcing (relational) contract between a principal and a Multitasking agent is an index contract where the agent gets a bonus if a weighted sum of performance outcomes on the various tasks (the index) exceeds a hurdle. For a parametric (multinormal) specification, the efficiency of the contract improves with higher precision of the index measure, since this strengthens incentives. Correlations between measurements may for this reason be beneficial. For a similar reason, the principal may also want to include verifiable performance measures in the relational index contract in order to improve incentives.


The osmoregulation is one of the most important cell adaptation mechanisms occurred at beginning of drought. The inheritance of osmoregulation ability in durum wheat by using indirect method for trait measuring was studied. Five durum wheat genotypes with different level of tolerance to osmotic stress were included in diallel crossing scheme. Among the parents genotypes the old Bulgarian cultivar A-223 distinguishes with the lowest seedlings growth depression coeficient of 32,5 %, i.e. with best ability of osmotic regulation. The lowest osmotic regulation ability shows cultivar Gergana. The hybrid combinations including the most tolerant parent A-223 show the lowest coeficient of depression among the F hybrids. The conducted dialel analyses shows 1 the high significance of the effects of the general (GCA) and specific combinative ability (SCA) during the all 3 years of the investigation. The inheritance of high levels of osmoregulation is determinted by both the aditive and non-aditive gene effects. The non-aditive gene efects (SCA) strongly predominate over the aditive and have a significant role in the observed big heterozis effect. The significance of variances of both GCA and SCA requires the selection of single plants by investigated traits to be shifted in the later segregating progenies.


Casing pipes in oil well constructions may suddenly buckle inward as their inside and outside hydrostatic pressure difference increases. For the safety of construction workers and the steady development of oil industries, it is critically important to measure the stress state of a casing pipe. This study develops a rugged, real-time monitoring, and warning system that combines the distributed Brillouin Scattering Time Domain Reflectometry (BOTDR) and the discrete fiber Bragg grating (FBG) measurement. The BOTDR optical fiber sensors were embedded with no optical fiber splice joints in a fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) rebar and the FBG sensors were wrapped in epoxy resins and glass clothes, both installed during the segmental construction of casing pipes. In-situ tests indicate that the proposed sensing system and installation technique can survive the downhole driving process of casing pipes, withstand a harsh service environment, and remain in tact with the casing pipes for compatible strain measurements. The relative error of the measured strains between the distributed and discrete sensors is less than 12%. The FBG sensors successfully measured the maximum horizontal principal stress with a relative error of 6.7% in comparison with a cross multi-pole array acoustic instrument.


The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission has proven as valuable tool to observe hydrological mass variations, e.g., in the Amazon basin, groundwater depletion in Northwest India, inland glacier mass losses. The long time span of more than 10 years of GRACE observations now allows also the detection of smaller inter-annual mass variations. In our study, we address the permafrost-regime in Siberia, Russia. We use GRACE data to study water mass variations in the Lena basin between 2003 and 2011. The observed mass changes indicate long-term changes in the hydrological budget of the large Siberian watersheds. For selected lakes in the Lena basin, we employ satellite radar altimetry observations to estimate water storage changes related to lake level variations. Large parts of Siberia are covered by thousands of lakes. As consequence of a strong wetting trend in this region lake levels are rising. We compare the total mass variation derived from GRACE and the mass variations related to changes in lake level. The lake level changes can explain between 15% to 40% of the water storage changes observed by GRACE. Other potential reasons for water storage variations could be related to changes in lake surface extension, soil moisture changes, increase in sub-permafrost ground-water storage and talik formation.


We have derived masses and ages for 79 early-type galaxies (ETGs) in different environments at z ∼ 1.3 in the Lynx supercluster and in the GOODS/CDF-S field using multi-wavelength (0.6–4.5 μm; KPNO, Palomar, Keck, Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer) data sets. At this redshift the contribution of the thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) phase is important for ETGs, and the mass and age estimates depend on the choice of the stellar population model used in the spectral energy distribution fits. We describe in detail the differences among model predictions for a large range of galaxy ages, showing the dependence of these differences on age. Current models still yield large uncertainties. While recent models from Maraston and Charlot & Bruzual offer better modeling of the TP-AGB phase with respect to less recent Bruzual & Charlot models, their predictions do not often match. The modeling of this TP-AGB phase has a significant impact on the derived parameters for galaxies observed at high redshift. Some of our results do not depend on the choice of the model: for all models, the most massive galaxies are the oldest ones, independent of the environment. When using the Maraston and Charlot & Bruzual models, the mass distribution is similar in the clusters and in the groups, whereas in our field sample there is a deficit of massive (M ≳ 1011M☉) ETGs. According to those last models, ETGs belonging to the cluster environment host on average older stars with respect to group and field populations. This difference is less significant than the age difference in galaxies of different masses.


These remarkable documents of Greek social and cultural history include masterpieces of lively narrative and subtle argument prepared by such orators as Lysias, Antiphon, and Demosthenes. The fifteen cases presented represent the first recorded instances of the working of a democratic jury system under a definite code of law aimed at inexpensive and equal justice for all citizens. Issues examined include murder, assault, property damage, embezzlement, contested legacies, illegal marriage, slander, and civil rights. Also provided are comprehensive background chapters on the professions of law and rhetoric in ancient Athens and explanatory notes clarifying the course of each trial .


Behavioral policy to improve health and health care often relies on interventions, such as nudges, which target individual behaviors. But the most promising applications of behavioral insights in this area involve more far-reaching and systemic interventions. In this article, we propose a series of policies inspired by behavioral research that we believe offer the greatest potential for success. These include interventions to improve health-related behaviors, health insurance access, decisions about insurance plans, end-of-life care, and rates of medical (for example, organ and blood) donation. We conclude with a discussion of new technologies, such as electronic medical records and web- or mobile-based decision apps, which can enhance doctor and patient adherence to best medical practices. These technologies, however, also pose new challenges that can undermine the effectiveness of medical care delivery.


Purpose of review Pure autonomic failure (PAF) is a peripheral autonomic neurodegenerative disease caused by alpha-synuclein deposition that is predominantly confined to peripheral autonomic neurons. Patients present with insidious features of autonomic failure that have a chronic course. In this review, we highlight the features of PAF, the differentiating features from other autonomic neuropathies, the diagnostic tests, and the predictors for conversion to a central synucleinopathy. Recent findings Natural history studies have defined the predictors for and rate of conversion to a central alpha-synucleinopathy. Skin immunohistochemistry techniques and demonstration of length-dependent neuronal loss of both somatic and autonomic small fiber nerves, and intraneural phosphorylated synuclein deposition provide diagnostic biomarkers. In the future, diagnosis maybe supported by measuring cerebrospinal fluid alpha-synuclein oligomers using techniques, such as protein misfolding cyclic amplification assay and real-time quaking-induced conversion. Summary PAF is a sporadic peripheral autonomic neurodegenerative disease that belongs to the group of disorders known as alpha-synucleinopathies. Peripheral autonomic manifestations are similar to those seen in other autonomic neuropathies, particularly, diabetic autonomic neuropathy, amyloid polyneuropathy, and autoimmune autonomic neuropathies. Novel diagnostic procedures like skin immunohistochemistry for alpha-synuclein, and protein amplification techniques are being investigated to provide an earlier and more specific diagnosis. A substantial number of PAF patients' phenoconvert to a central alpha-synucleinopathy.


Despite the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in United States v. Booker, which enhanced the power of district court judges to sentence defendants below the range prescribed by the federal sentencing guidelines, the great majority of federal sentences continue to follow the guidelines' recommendations. As defendants have challenged these practices, one commonly litigated issue has been the question of whether district court judges are obligated to explain themselves when they reject a defendant's argument for a below-guidelines sentence. In the immediate aftermath of Booker, a handful of federal circuits adopted such an explanation requirement. Since 2005, however, the tide has turned, and the initial pro-explanation holdings have been undermined by later decisions. Against this backdrop, the present Article provides the first systematic account of the rise and fall of the explanation requirement for federal sentences, attributing the fall to the courts' framing of the issue as a generic judicial process question. The courts have not recognized important justifications for the explanation requirement that are specific to the federal sentencing context. For instance, the requirement likely helps to diminish the effect of subtle cognitive biases that result in district court judges giving too much weight to the federal sentencing guidelines relative to other statutory and constitutional considerations. Additionally, the requirement is supported by research on the psychological effects of procedural justice, which suggests that defendants who are treated fairly at sentencing will have more respect for law and legal authorities than defendants who are treated unfairly. In light of these and other sentencing-specific concerns, the Article concludes with a call for reconsideration of the recent decisions that have sapped the explanation requirement of its vitality.


The minimization of the length of syntactic dependencies is a well-established principle of word order and the basis of a mathematical theory of word order. Here we complete that theory from the perspective of information theory, adding a competing word order principle: the maximization of predictability of a target element. These two principles are in conflict: to maximize the predictability of the head, the head should appear last, which maximizes the costs with respect to dependency length minimization. The implications of such a broad theoretical framework to understand the optimality, diversity and evolution of the six possible orderings of subject, object and verb are reviewed.


Background and Hypothesis:
In the United States, heart failure (HF) affects an increasing 5.8 million people, with healthcare costs estimated at $31 billion (2012). Guideline Directed Medical Therapy (GDMT) is the primary method to standardize medical care of patients diagnosed with Heart Failure reduced Ejection Fraction (HFrEF). GDMT lowers mortality rates, decreases readmission, and decreases the cost, but the success of GDMT is limited by adherence. We hypothesize increased GDMT prescription through integration of a pharmacist will decrease readmissions and hospital costs.

Methods:
This mixed-methods study involved a literature review and retrospective chart review. Online databases (PubMed, Embase, and Ovid) were searched using keywords related to GDMT and economic outcomes. The research was refined using empirical research and grey literature focusing on healthcare costs and readmission rates.  The chart review is part of a larger study examining the impact of integrating a pharmacist into a cardiology center on GDMT prescription. Inpatient and outpatient charges data was analyzed to determine if integration of a pharmacist led to decreased healthcare costs. This project was supported by Parkview Health and received funding from ACC Accreditation Foundation Board.

Results:
The study is currently ongoing. 70 articles and abstracts were reviewed, and 10 articles fit the criteria focusing on GDMT, healthcare cost, or readmissions. Articles supported a correlation between decreased readmission and overall healthcare cost with compliance to GDMT. Literature also supports the addition of an intervention leading to decreased readmissions. Preliminary charges data analysis showed a decrease in cost by 46% in inpatients and 35% in outpatients after pharmacist intervention.

Conclusion:
We conclude GDMT is associated with decreased healthcare costs due to decreased readmissions. Although there are multiple confounding variables when evaluating the primary data, data showed a  correlation between adding intervention (i.e. pharmacist) and decreasing readmissions and overall healthcare costs. Further studies need to be conducted to show causation.


In this article I argue that the integration of biblical exegesis and metaphysical argumentation in Turretin's doctrine of God is due to his views in epistemology and semantics. Anyone reading Turretin's Locus de Deo will recognize that it is not limited to scriptural exegesis and exploration of biblical concepts. The biblical orientation is, of course, prominent, but in addition he combines it with logic and metaphysics. I argue that by adhering to an instrumental view of reason, and an analogical or partially univocal theory of theistic reference, he is able to construct a concept of God which draws first and foremost on the Christian canon and in addition on logic and metaphysics.


Global society is seriously threatened by the environmental impacts of human activities. Although the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been established to analyze biophysical aspects of global change, there is no equivalent effort to assess the role of individual behavior in creating those environmental threats. The authors of this
 Policy Forum
 propose the institution of a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior to establish serious dialogues about what can and should be done. It would draw heavily on social scientists and would engage groups of citizens globally in public forums to explore the moral elements and the consequences of choices about environmental change.


One in two Europeans is xenophobic and one in three is racist, according to a survey conducted by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). Following the riots in France, officials in Brussels had to concede that after 50 years of immigration policies the assimilation of immigrants has not been achieved. In recent years we have seen many manifestations of racial intolerance and violence at football matches, converted into stages for regional and identity conflicts. The impact of globalization on racism and xenophobia has generated international discourse concerning the need to integrate Peace Education in schools and communities around the globe. This paper examines the holistic education model, namely the holistic school-change model and experience of the American Peace Games Organization (Peace Games), an NGO that supports and inspires a new generation of educators, volunteers and activists in becoming peacemakers through curriculum, social action, service-learning activities and civic engagement. Subsequently, it identifies the role of public education as an incubator and laboratory for democracy, taking into account the first Peace Education Seminars recently held in Greece, where a core group of peacemakers—regional trainers from Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Bosnia— combined their experience and expertise. The purpose of the seminars, organized by Women's Initiative for Peace (WINPEACE), was to introduce the concept as well as the process of sensitizing key stakeholders and decision-makers on the importance of integrating Peace Education into the public school system and the surrounding community. This paper argues that Peace Education should be incorporated into future reforms, in educational policies and practices— integrated into all subjects, classrooms, schools and communities, and not only. Furthermore required is internationalinterdisciplinary research and collaborations with organizations and institutions— such as Peace Games, Olympism or Olympic Education (peace education) and the IOC as well as activities such as those of games and sports, specifically the power of play— in order to raise awareness concerning the core values of peace, i.e. promoting multiethnic understanding, respect for ethnic diversity, cross-cultural cooperation, gender equality, non-violent conflict resolution and democratic decision-making, while fostering intergenerational connections and intergenerational interactions. Ultimately, networking or partnerships between international organizations, institutions, universities and NGO's could prove invaluable, in view of today's increasing multi-ethnic diversity, multiculturalism and rising violence in public schools and sport arenas. Incontestably, the 'globalization of peace' through Peace Education requires allies and networks..


Grasping Schemer or Hostage to Fortune: The Life and Career of Stigand, last Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury Nancy Leigh Mitton Alex Woolf Stigand occupied a place in or near power for at least fifty years and yet has only been studied very peripherally and in reference to others. He has been vilified or lauded by historians ever since the Conquest. His wealth and methods of acquisition of wealth as well as his political activity have been used to paint him as an ambitious prelate interested only in power and motivated by greed. His unusual advancement to the see of Canterbury and apparent disregard for papal strictures caused him to be used as representative of all of the faults of the Anglo-Saxon Church. Other commentators took the opposite approach and portrayed him as a hero and patriot who resisted the Conqueror until he could no longer put off defeat. Neither of these interpretations is likely to be accurate and neither is wholly supported by the surviving evidence. Much of Stigand's early life is undocumented and must be inferred within reasonable limits. Most of the sources in which extensive comment about Stigand can be found are post-Conquest and contribute their own particular challenges to discovering the facts about a largely preConquest life. Based on monastic chronicles, Domesday Book, legal documents and the writings of Mediaeval historians and commentators, in order to define the context in which he lived and worked including the politics of the English church, the kingdom, the Apostolic See and his lay associates this study is an attempt to clarify the life and career of Stigand, the last and extremely controversial Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury.


The case histories of 27 children with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) who were followed up in the AIDS Program at the Children's Hospital of New Jersey, Newark, are reviewed. The mean and median age at PCP diagnosis were 10.8 and 7.7 months, respectively. All of the children had other clinical evidence of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus that was documented prior to the diagnosis of PCP or found at the time of PCP diagnosis. Most patients who presented to the hospital were acutely ill, and complications of treatment occurred in 70%. Overall, 89% of the patients died and 70% survived for less than 6 months after diagnosis of PCP. Median survival after the diagnosis of PCP was only 2.0 months and the median life span of children with PCP was only 14.4 months. Only 40% of children with PCP had CD4 lymphocyte counts at or below the threshold for institution of PCP prophylaxis in adults of 200 x 10(6) cells/L (200 cells/mm3).


The dropping of a water-filled latex balloon onto a flat, rigid surface is an experiment that is known and has been performed by many, but on which there is no existing published work. High-speed images taken of the process revealed a range of phenomena, many of which had not been previously observed. After release, a water-filled balloon accelerates down and impacts with the tank floor. Upon impact, the balloon deforms through the propagation of waves up the balloon from the impact point. If the balloon does not rupture during this deformation, it then bounces up off the surface, the whole process similar to that when a water droplet bounces on a hydrophobic surface. Often, however, the balloon ruptures. This occurs through the propagation of one or more cracks through the balloon, leading to the rapid retraction of the membrane over the water's surface, and consequent ejection of a fine spray of water droplets behind it. If there are any waves on the balloon at the moment of rupture, a larger-scale growth of the interfacial amplitude occurs, of the same wavelength as the preburst waves. Eventually, gravity dominates, as the water slumps down and spreads over the flat surface. In this thesis, the process described above is examined in detail, both experimentally and theoretically. To gain some insight into the behaviour of the latex balloons, their static and quasi-static behaviour is examined. A experimental method better than simply dropping the balloons was derived, permitting the accurate quantitative measurement of the process. In this new method, the balloons were held stationary, forced at a set frequency, then ruptured with a pin. The pre-burst waves are then shown to be accurately modelled by linear theory, with tension in the membrane acting much like a fluid surface tension. The behaviour of the rubber in retraction from large initial stretches is shown to be disperse, in contrast with that observed for retractions from small initial stretches, due to both non-linearity in the rubber and drag from the water on the strip. The spray ejected behind the rubber is explained as consequence of the inherent instability of the Gaussian velocity field in the wake. Finally, the late-time growth of the interfacial amplitude is examined, and argued to be closely-related to the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability. A model is then derived for the case of a balloon oscillated and burst with water both inside and outside, and is shown to be in approximate agreement with experiments.


BACKGROUND
Determining the human vitamin E [α-tocopherol (α-T)] requirement is difficult, and novel approaches to assess α-T absorption and trafficking are needed.

OBJECTIVE
We hypothesized that the dual-isotope technique, using 2 deuterium-labeled [intravenous (IV) d6- and oral d3-] α-T, would be effective in determining α-T fractional absorption. Further, defined liquid meal (DLM) fat or fasting would modulate α-T fractional absorption and lipoprotein transport.

METHODS
A 3-phase cr ossover design was used. At 0 h, participants received IV d6-α-T and consumed d3-α-T with a 600-kcal DLM (40% or 0% fat) followed by controlled meals or by the 0% fat DLM, a 12-h fast, and then controlled meals. Blood samples and fecal samples were collected at intervals and analyzed by LC-MS. Pharmacokinetic parameters were calculated from plasma tracer concentrations and enrichments. Fractional absorption was calculated from d3- to d6-α-T areas under the curve, from a novel mathematical model, and from the balance method (oral d3-α-T minus fecal d3-α-T excreted).

RESULTS
Estimated α-T fractional absorption during the 40% fat intervention was 55% ± 3% (mean ± SEM; n = 10), which was 9% less than during the 0% fat intervention (64% ± 3%, n = 10; P < 0.02). Fasting had no apparent effect (56% ± 3%, n = 7), except it slowed plasma oral d3-α-T appearance. Both balance data and model outcomes confirmed that the DLM fat did not potentiate d3-α-T absorption. During the IV emulsion clearance, HDL rapidly acquired d6-α-T (21 ± 2 nmol/L plasma per minute). During the first 8 h postdosing, triglyceride-rich lipoproteins (TRLs) were preferentially d3-α-T enriched relative to LDL or HDL, showing the TRL precursor role.

CONCLUSIONS
Quantitatively, α-T absorption is not limited by fat absence or by fasting. However, α-T leaves the intestine by a process that is prolonged during fasting and potentiated by eating, suggesting that α-T absorption is highly dependent on chylomicron assembly processes. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT00862433.


ABSTRACT Diversity of macrobenthic communities was studied from water bodies and streams of Spitsbergen, Svalbard archipelago, Norway. In total 162 quantitative samples from different regions of Spitsbergen were analysed in relation to environmental variables. Macrobenthic communities were found on all kinds of substrates (except for the periglacial zone), representing a wide range of biological communities: solid-bottom, soft-bottom, macrophytes and small brook associated. However, taxonomical structure is very simplified, with particular dominance of the Chironomidae family. Chironomid larvae dominated highly in diversity, abundance and biomass. Overall macrobenthic communities were characteristic, with remarkable dominance of one species and general omnipresent taxonomical scarcity (average 2.8 species per sample). In total we found 30 taxa. We distinguished 16 types of macrobenthis communities, with characteristic dominance of different taxa: chironomids (11 types), oligochaete Enchytraeidae family (3), caddisfly Apatania zonella (1) and gammarid amphipod Gammarus setosus (1). Regarding environmental variables, temperature and pH had the most significant influence on the abundance of macrobenthic organisms. It is hypothesized that the structural convergence of different types of communities is their common response to extreme high Arctic living conditions. On the other hand, different chironomids may dominate in the same habitats and water bodies. This gives the effect of lower average similarity of communities and high β-diversity.


In spite of the fact that solutions to Maxwell's equations in stratified isotropic optical media are well known, it appears that an explicit expression of the Poynting vector flux spatial evolution inside such a medium has not been derived so far. Based on exact electromagnetic field solutions in the transfer-matrix formalism, I derive such an expression and show that, due to the presence of counterpropagating waves in the medium, an additional contribution to the flux appears that exists only in optically absorbing layers and arises from the interference between these waves. Based on this theory, the concept of incremental absorption is introduced for the calculation of the light absorption profile along the stratification direction. As an illustration of this concept, absorption profiles in a Si-based thin-film tandem solar cell are predicted at typical wavelengths.


We present 49 new candidate debris disks that were detected around nearby stars with the Spitzer Space Telescope using the Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) at 24 μm (MIPS24) and 70 μm (MIPS70). The survey sample was composed of stars within 25 pc of the Sun that were not previously observed by any other MIPS survey. Only stars with V < 9 were selected, corresponding to spectral types earlier than M0. MIPS24 integration times were chosen to detect the stellar photosphere at 10σ levels or better. MIPS70 observations were designed to detect excess infrared emission from any star in the MIPS70 sample with a disk as luminous at that around ϵ Eridani. The resulting sample included over 436 nearby stars that were observed with both MIPS24 and MIPS70, plus an additional 198 observed only with MIPS24. Debris disk candidates were defined as targets where excess emission was detected at 3σ levels or greater, and the ratio of observed flux density to expected photosphere emission was three standard deviations or more above the mean value for the sample. The detection rate implied by the resulting 29 MIPS24 candidates is 4.6%. A detection rate of 4.8% is implied by 21 MIPS70 candidates. The distribution of spectral types for stars identified as candidates resembles that of the general sample and yields strong evidence that debris-disk occurrence does not decrease for K dwarfs. Modeling of non-uniform sensitivity in the sample is required to interpret quantitative estimates of the overall detection frequency and will be presented in a future work.


By the end of the first post-9/11 decade, the legal architecture associated with the U.S. government's use of military detention and lethal force in the counterterrorism setting had come to seem relatively stable, supported by a remarkable degree of cross-branch and cross-party consensus (manifested by legislation, judicial decisions, and consistency of policy across two very different presidential administrations). That stability is certain to collapse during the second post-9/11 decade, however, thanks to the rapid erosion of two factors that have played a critical role in generating the recent appearance of consensus: the existence of an undisputed armed conflict in Afghanistan as to which the law of armed conflict clearly applies, and the existence of a relatively-identifiable enemy in the form of the original al Qaeda organization. Several long-term trends contribute to the erosion of these stabilizing factors. Most obviously, the overt phase of the war in Afghanistan is ending. At the same time, the U.S. government for a host of reasons places ever more emphasis on what we might call the "shadow war" model (i.e., the use of low-visibility or even deniable means to capture, disrupt, or kill terrorism-related targets in an array of locations around the world). The original Al Qaeda organization, meanwhile, is undergoing an extraordinary process of simultaneous decimation, diffusion, and fragmentation, one upshot of which has been the proliferation of loosely-related regional groups that have varying degrees of connection to the remaining core al Qaeda leadership. These shifts in the strategic posture of both the United States and al Qaeda profoundly disrupt the stability of the current legal architecture upon which military detention and lethal force rest. Specifically, they make it far more difficult (though not impossible) to establish the relevance of the law of armed conflict to U.S. counterterrorism activities, and they raise exceedingly difficult questions regarding just whom these activities lawfully may be directed against. Critically, they also all but guarantee that a new wave of judicial intervention to consider just those questions will occur. Bearing that in mind, I conclude the paper by outlining steps that could be taken now to better align the legal architecture with the trends described above.


This book critically explores from a comparative international perspective the role medicine plays in constructing and managing natural and social risks, including those belonging to modern medical technology and expertise. Drawing together chapters written by professional practitioners and social scientists from the UK, South America, Australia and Europe, the book offers readers an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of how modern medicine has transformed our understanding of both ourselves and the world around us, but in so doing has arguably failed to fully recognize and account for, its unintended and negative effects. This is an essential read for social scientists, practitioners and policymakers who want to better understand how they can develop new ways of thinking about how modern medicine can promote social goods and enhance public health.


The collection, storage, processing, recombination, and (re)sale of consumers' data has grown tremendously. Consumer data is now usually maintained in on-line databases and collected without remuneration towards or even the informed consent of consumers. The mining of such consumer data raises a host of legal and economic issues. This paper considers the tradeoff between allocative efficiency from matching direct mail advertising with demographic niches versus consumer privacy; potential misuse or abuse of data mining, ranging from outright criminal theft to inaccurate or outdated records; piggy-backing of law enforcement agencies on privately created data mines; whether default rules about data mining effectively become mandatory; and finally, who does and should own such data as consumers' names, addresses, phone numbers and purchase histories. Traditional consumer protection law deals with such problems of fraudulent business practices as deceptive advertising and misrepresentation in product warranties. Such laws have the economics of information as their common intellectual basis. This paper applies psychological games and behavioral economics to investigate distinct justifications for and types of regulation of data mining. This paper also considers personhood and commodification perspectives critical of applying economic analysis to study legal rules and institutions, in particular, treating consumers' data as private property.


Classification of social media data is an important approach in understanding user behavior on the Web. Although information on social media can be of different modalities such as texts, images, audio or videos, traditional approaches in classification usually leverage only one prominent modality. Techniques that are able to leverage multiple modalities are often complex and susceptible to the absence of some modalities. In this paper, we present simple models that combine information from different modalities to classify social media content and are able to handle the above problems with existing techniques. Our models combine information from different modalities using a pooling layer and an auxiliary learning task is used to learn a common feature space. We demonstrate the performance of our models and their robustness to the missing of some modalities in the emotion classification domain. Our approaches, although being simple, can not only achieve significantly higher accuracies than traditional fusion approaches but also have comparable results when only one modality is available.


The tilted head race track coils of the EDIPO test facility are wound with cable-in-conduit conductors made by high current density Nb3Sn strands, Jc = 2400 A/mm2 at 12 T 4.2 K. Since the commissioning of the coils, frequent voltage spikes were observed at the quench detection taps during the low current range of operation, completely disappearing above 2 T. The large amplitude of some spikes triggered the quench detection system: the parameters for protection (voltage thresholds and validation time) had to be modified for the voltage pairs monitoring the windings. The occurrence of partial flux jumps in the high current density strands is known from former characterization. The fast data acquisition of the quench detection system, with 800 Hz sampling frequency, allows investigation of the dynamics and propagation of the voltage spikes in the various layers of the winding. From the collected data of several runs of operation, statistics of amplitude, initial location, propagation and reproducibility were drawn, looking also for correlation with the operation history, e.g., first cool-down, ramp up versus ramp down, ramp rate, etc. The energy released by the flux jumps is conservatively estimated by the time integration of the voltage spikes and discussed in terms of energy margin and heat removal rate in the layers. In conclusion, the limitation of the use of high current density Nb3Sn strands in high current conductors is discussed.


Much of the debate about assisted reproduction concerns genetic selection. All things considered, parents prefer superior children. Yet, while we worry about parents who want a "perfect" child, we do not consider the lengths parents go to ensure a child of "their own," who is more like them and less like others. This article asks whether we should consider the risks of attempting to engineer a child with "right" genetic connections. The regulation of assisted reproduction should be a dynamic process, where the answer to appropriate intervention depends on the regulatory process. Many people would not approve of surrogacy to create a child who is not genetically related to either intended mother or gestational carrier. Yet, the few states that address surrogacy are relatively restrictive. That the very idea of oversight of assisted reproduction is contested means it is difficult to predict regulatory oversight — or to minimize the risks of a technique without derailing new technologies. To date, assisted reproduction has come through a decentralized system in which professional norms offer a limited bulwark against unacceptable practices, but often after, rather than before, the risks in new procedures become apparent. This article reviews existing processes, examine new innovations, and argues that the fundamental choice is between discouraging particular technologies altogether or allowing them to develop with minimal oversight. Certain procedures, such as cloning, may be so intrinsically dangerous that bans may be justified. Once the safety of other techniques has been established, however, the only approach that keeps the techniques available may be professional norms designed to guide a decentralized, market driven process. The result will be a system that, while it takes great pains to police safety, is unlikely to be able to deal with motive in satisfactory ways.


Background Anemia has a myriad of causes and its prevalence is growing. Anemia is associated with increased all-cause hospitalization and mortality in community-dwelling individuals above age 65 years. Our aim was to determine the prevalence and severity of anemia in adult patients in our primary care office and to determine the relationship between anemia and medical comorbidities. Methods Electronic medical records of 499 adult patients in our suburban internal medicine office were reviewed who had had at least one hemoglobin value and did not undergo moderate to high-risk surgery in the preceding 30 days. Results About one-fifth (21.1%) of the patients had anemia. The mean age of patients with anemia was 62.6 years. Among all patients with anemia, 20.3% were males and 79.6% were females. Of these patients, 60.1% had mild anemia (hemoglobin 11 - 12.9 g/dL) and 39.8% had moderate anemia (hemoglobin 8 - 10.9 g/dL). For every year of increase in age, there was 1.8% increased odds of having anemia. African-American race had 5.2 times greater odds of having anemia than the Caucasian race. Hispanic race had 3.2 times greater odds of having anemia compared to the Caucasian race. Patients with anemia had a greater average number of comorbidities compared to patients without anemia (1.74 and 0.96, respectively; P < 0.05). There was a statistically greater percentage of patients with essential hypertension, hypothyroidism, chronic kidney disease, malignancy, rheumatologic disease, congestive heart failure, and coronary artery disease in the anemic population as compared to the non-anemic population. Of the patients, 41% with mild anemia and 62% with moderate anemia underwent additional diagnostic studies. Of the patients, 14.8% had resolution of anemia without therapy in 1 year, 15.7% were on iron replacement therapy, and 6.5% were on cobalamin therapy. No specific etiology of anemia was found in 24% of patients. Conclusion A higher prevalence of anemia was associated with advancing age, African-American and Hispanic ethnicity, and comorbidities, such as essential hypertension, hypothyroidism, chronic kidney disease, malignancy, rheumatologic disease, congestive heart failure, and coronary artery disease. It is important to be aware of the demographic factors and their relationship to anemia in primary care.


In 1992 Rundell and Stock wrote an extended three-part article on the "corpus revolution", in which they describe the rise of corpora and their impact on lexicography. Rundell (2008) revisited the topic and focused on the arrival of the web, which triggered a second stage in the corpus revolution. The purpose of my presentation is to look at some aspects of the current lexicographic scene and assess whether the corpus revolution has really fulfilled its promise. I will show that, while this is largely true of monolingual learners' dictionaries (especially in the case of English), the situation is much less favourable when it comes to general bilingual dictionaries, a particularly worrying fact given that bilingual dictionaries have been proved to be learners' favourite reference tool. The lack of representative translation corpora is partly responsible for this failure to keep pace. However, I will show that the judicious use of currently available monolingual and bilingual corpus resources, limited though they may be, can already bring about substantial improvements to bilingual dictionaries, in particular to one of their weakest aspects: their phraseological coverage. I will also highlight the value of adding learner corpus data to the lexicographer's monolingual and bilingual corpus base and illustrate the benefit with the Louvain English for Academic Purposes Dictionary, a customisable web-based tool designed to help non-native speakers of English write academic texts.


The proposed project takes origin from a cooperation initiative named NEWCOM++ among
research groups to develop 3G wireless mobile system. This work, in particular, tries to focuse on
the communication errors arising on a message signal characterized by working under WiMAX
802.16e standard. It will be shown how this last wireless generation protocol needs a specific
flexible instrumentation and why an LDPC error correction code suitable in order to respect the
quality restrictions. A chapter will be dedicated to describe, not from a mathematical point of view,
the LDPC algorithm theory and how it can be graphically represented to better organize the
decodification process.
The main objective of this work is to validate the PHAL-concept when addressing a
complex and computationally intensive design like the LDPC encoder/decoder. The expected results
should be both conceptual; identifying the lacks on the PHAL concept when addressing a real
problem; and second to determine the overhead introduced by PHAL in the implementation of a
LDPC decoder.
The mission is to build a NoC (Network on Chip) able to perform the same task of a general
purpose processor, but in less time and with better efficiency, in terms of component flexibility and
throughput. The single element of the network is a basic processor element (PE) formed by the
union of two separated components: a special purpose processor ASIP, the responsible of the input
data LDPC decoding, and the router component PHAL, checking incoming data packets and
scanning the temporization of tasks execution.
Supported by a specific programming tool, the ASIP has been completely designed, from the
architecture resources to the instruction set, through a language like C. Realized in this SystemC
code and converted in VHDL language, it's been synthesized as to fit onto an FPGA of the Xilinx
Virtex-5 family. Although the main purpose regards the making of an application as flexible as
possible, a WiMAX-orientated LDPC implemented on a FPGA saves space and resources, choosing
the one that best suits the project synthesis. This is because encoders and decoders will have to find
room in the communication tools (e.g. modems) as best as possible.
The whole network scenary has been mounted through a Linux application, acting as a
master element. The entire environment will require the use of VPI libraries and components able to
manage the communication protocols and interfacing mechanisms.


3 p. ; Document filed in Pueblo of Sandia v. Babbitt, et al. in United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.


"A rural ecologist, an urban drifter and a diasporic optimist examine the invisible layers underneath, the lost spaces on the edge and the forgotten places in between." Lubaina Himid.

Curated by Lubaina Himid, winner of the 2017 Turner Prize, Invisible Narratives explores the work of three artists, Rebecca Chesney, Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska-Beavan, who consider the poetic investigation of place, space and time, through painting, sound installation and place-based research.

All three artists use their work to uncover the hidden narratives of place; is it possible to remember an apparently unknown history? Each artist has made new work for the show.

Magda Stawarska-Beavan is showing several pieces, including Translating the City, a sound piece featuring the interwoven voices of two women, Ekin Sanac (from Istanbul) and Lubaina Himid, who were asked to listen to a sound composition created from recordings captured by Stawarska-Beavan in Istanbul. She will also be showing three silkscreen prints from the series To Follow (2018) along with two new paintings on paper in a conversation between Casablanca and Berlin about loss and neglect.
 "I have worked on several projects, including the listening to and recording of unknown cities from a very personal viewpoint using binaural microphones. Often, with those past projects, I let the city lead me through its structure, but it was always my innate curiosity which consciously and sometimes subconsciously controlled my movements."


This proposal proposes a DC/DC Buck Boost converter which has been used as a smooth starter for a DC Permanent Magnet Motor. In the existing system the DC/DC Buck Converter is used which provide the output less than the input Signal. Using buck converter it is difficult to increase the value of the input signal. Hence DC/DC Buck- Boost Converter used from which it is possible to get both the increased and decreased output from the given input. Previously pulse width modulation signals with respective to motor voltage is used. However they produce variations in the voltage and current of the motor. The above problem is overcome by using DC/DC Power converter. The proposed system with reduction in size, reduced ripples and increase in speed makes the system to operate at both low and high power applications. The proposed system results in higher efficiency, reduces the ripple content and the stress. The results are validated through MATLAB/Simulink and real time implementation.


What can the history of a nation's football reveal about that nation's wider political and socio-cultural identity? How can the study of local football culture help us to understand the powerful international forces at play within the modern game? Based on long-term and detailed ethnographic research, this book uses Malta as a critical case study to explore the dynamics of contemporary football. Situated on the fringes of the EU, and with an appalling record in international competition, the Maltese are nevertheless fanatical about the game. This book examines Maltese football in the context of the island's unique politics, culture and national identity, shedding light upon both Maltese society and on broader processes, both local and global, within the international game. The book explores a range of key issues in contemporary football, such as: the dynamics of international player migration football corruption and ethics the politics of sponsorship and TV deals the global appeal of footballing "brands" such as Manchester United, Juventus and Bayern Munich. This book is essential reading for students and researchers working in Sports Studies, Sociology of Sport, Football, Globalisation, Politics and Ethnic Studies.


Graph processing is typically considered to be a memory-bound rather than compute-bound problem. One common line of thought is that more available memory bandwidth corresponds to better graph processing performance. However, in this work we show that this is not necessarily the case. We demonstrate that the key factor in the utilization of the memory system for graph algorithms is not the raw bandwidth, or even latency of memory requests, but instead is the number of memory channels available to handle small data transfers with low locality. Using several widely used graph frameworks, including Gunrock (on the GPU) and GAPBS & Ligra (for CPUs), we characterize two very distinct memory hierarchies with respect to key graph analytics kernels. Our results show that the differences in peak bandwidths of several of the latest Pascal-generation GPU memory subsystems aren't reflected in the performance of various analytics. Furthermore, our experiments on CPU and Xeon Phi systems show that the number of memory channels utilized can be a decisive factor in performance across several different applications. For CPU systems with smaller thread counts, the memory channels can be underutilized while systems with high thread counts can oversaturate the memory subsystem, which leads to limited performance. Lastly, we model the performance of including more channels with narrower access widths than those found in existing memory subsystems, and we analyze the trade-offs in terms of the two most prominent types of memory accesses found in graph algorithms, streaming and random accesses.


Glutathione therapy was used for 2 months in a placebo-controlled double-blind cross-over trial of 20 infertile patients with dyspermia associated with unilateral varicocele (VAR) or germ-free genital tract inflammation (INF). The patients received either glutathione (group 1) or placebo (group 2) for 2 months, then they crossed over to the alternative treatment for a further 2 months. The patients were randomly and blindly assigned to treatment (one i.m. injection every other day of either 600 mg glutathione or an equal volume of a placebo preparation). The standard semen analysis and the computer-assisted sperm motility analyses were carried out before treatment and during the trial. Statistical cross-over analysis, case-control study and treatment efficacy test were carried out on groups 1 and 2 and differences in the effects of therapy between VAR and INF patients with varicocele or inflammation were tested. Glutathione therapy demonstrated a statistically significant positive effect on sperm motility, in particular on the percentage of forward motility, the kinetic parameters of the computerized analysis and on sperm morphology. The findings of this study indicate that glutathione therapy could represent a possible therapeutical tool for both of the selected andrological pathologies.


A search for new resonances decaying into a pair of jets is reported using the dataset of proton-proton collisions recorded at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider between 2015 and 2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb$^{-1}$. The distribution of the invariant mass of the two leading jets is examined for local excesses above a data-derived estimate of the Standard Model background. In addition to an inclusive dijet search, events with jets identified as containing $b$-hadrons are examined specifically. No significant excess of events above the smoothly falling background spectra is observed. The results are used to set cross-section upper limits at 95% confidence level on a range of new physics scenarios. Model-independent limits on Gaussian-shaped signals are also reported. The analysis looking at jets containing $b$-hadrons benefits from improvements in the jet flavour identification at high transverse momentum, which increases its sensitivity relative to the previous analysis beyond that expected from the higher integrated luminosity.


If the universe is infinite now it has always been infinite. This is the opinion of many astronomers today as can be concluded from the following series of interviews, but the opinions differ much more than I had expected. Many astronomers do not have a clear opinion on this matter. Others have a clear opinion, but very different from the majority. Detailed arguments by two experts on general relativity are also included. Observations show that the universe is flat, i.e. the curvature is zero within the small uncertainty of measurements. This implies an infinite universe, though most probably we will never know that for certain. For comparison with the recent interviews, opinions during the past 2300 years since Aristotle about the universe being finite or infinite have been collected from literature, and it appears that the scientists often had quite definite opinions. \c{opyright} Anita Publications. All rights reserved.


Consider the conditional covering problem on an undirected graph, where each node represents a site that must be covered by a facility, and facilities may only be established at these nodes. Each facility can cover all sites that lie within some common covering radius, except the site at which it is located. Although this problem is difficult to solve on general graphs, there exist special structures on which the problem is easily solvable. In this paper, we consider the special case in which the graph is a simple path. For the case in which facility location costs do not vary based on the site, we derive characteristics of the problem that lead to a linear‐time shortest path algorithm for solving the problem. When the facility location costs vary according to the site, we provide a more complex, but still polynomial‐time, dynamic programming algorithm to find the optimal solution. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2005.


Biodiversity loss is a major global issue of increasing significance to the public, politicians and businesses. A key contributory solution, as advocated by the UN Convention of Biological Diversity and Millenium Ecosystem Assessment is to change the way people and businesses behave towards the environment through introducing "economic incentives for biodiversity" (EIBs). These EIBs begin to reflect the true value of the environment, and are now being adopted worldwide with significant implications for businesses.
The overall objective of this series of four articles is to explore the literature relevant to the extent to which the development of economic incentives for biodiversity is likely to be an opportunity or risk for extractive and water companies over the next five to 10 years.
The first article began the investigation by outlining the links between business and biodiversity. The second article explained what economic incentives for biodiversity are.This brief third article indicates some of the associated implications of climate change.


The UX domain has so far been strongly associated with software development. However, its methods are finding their way into
domains like Product and Service Design. Product Designers now need competencies far beyond classical form-giving. The objective of this
paper is to show Product Designers which design dimensions they need to attend to when designing for UX. The paper gives an overview of
design dimensions that potentially impact how users' experience products. These dimensions are brought together from theories of
Cognitive Science, models of Human-Computer Interaction and findings from Design Research. They are presented under four categories:
dimensions of human perception, dimensions of products, dimensions of the context of use and the temporal dimension. In the final part, the
identified dimensions are connected into a schema, illustrating their interplay and therefore the journey of UX between a user and a product,
in a certain context over a certain time.


We introduce in this work Object Distribution System, a distributed system based on distribution models used in everyday life (e.g. food distribution chains, newspapers, etc.). This system is designed to scale correctly in a wide area network, using weak consistency replication mechanisms. It is formed by two independent virtual networks on top of Internet, one for replicating objects and the other one to build distribution chains to be used by the first network. As in Internet some sites often become inaccessible due to latency, partitions and flashcrowd, objects in our system are accessed locally and updated off-line. It also provides methods for the classification of objects. This allows selective distribution, and provides order in the chaos that reigns nowadays in Internet. Distribution chains are build dynamically to provide end users with the objects they want to consume, while making good use of available resources.


Abstract: This critical review sommarizes the basics of biomineralization of tooth enamel and scrutinizes attempts to replicate this intricate biological process in vitro. Special emphasis is given to the author's results, obtained during studies on the formation of enamel by biomimetic means. Fundamental insights found regarding the latter process are presented. Some paradigmatically accepted aspects of the mechanism of amelogenesis, that is, biomineralization of enamel, are challenged. Amelogenin, the major protein of the developing enamel matrix, is thus claimed to be a mineralization inductor, rather than an inhibitor, presumably acting as a channel between the ionic growth units in the protein matrix and the uniaxially growing crystals of apatite. The role of water and other minor constituents of enamel is questioned, as well as the biologically active morphology of amelogenin aggregates and the reliability of recombinant proteins in studying amelogenesis in vitro. Appropriate crystal growth rates, the Ostwald–Lussac law, Tomes' process and mineralization of dentin present other aspects of amelogenesis discussed here. It is also claimed that three fundamental facets of amelogenesis ought to be coordinated in parallel for successful biomimetic replication of the given process in the laboratory: protein assembly, proteolytic digestion and crystal growth.


In this thesis intersubband relaxation of electrons in quantum wells is theoretically investigated. Firstly, the in-plane kinetic energy, and also well width dependences of electron intra- or intersubband scattering rates (or times), associated by longitudinal optical (LO) phonon emission in a semiconductor single quantum well (SQW) structure are presented. Semi-analytic calculations are carried out for a GaAs/AlO. 3GaO. 7As SQW structure. The results show that the scattering rates (both for intra- and intersubband scattering) weakly depend on in-plane kinetic energy of the electron. Further- more, the resulting calculations of well width dependence show that intrasubband scattering times gradually increase with well width contrasting with the intersubband scattering times which display a monotonic decrease. A theoretical study of the condition to achieve inverted population in a semiconductor double quantum well (DQW) structure is also presented. The LO-phonon assisted tunneling rates, based on the Fr6hlich interaction and Fermi's golden rule, has been performed for a GaAs/Alo. 3Gao. 7As DQW structure. The calculated results show that the tunneling rates monotonically decrease with the energy difference El- El and strongly depend on the magnitude of the transfer integral M. This work has been extended to calculate the electron transport and its kinetics, due to various types of scattering and tunneling mechanisms in a triple barrier resonant tunneling structure (TBRTS). A system of coupled kinetic equations that describe the nonequilibrium electrons in the structure has been solved analytically to obtain sub- band distribution functions and gain spectra. Finally, the concept of sequential tunneling has been introduced to explain an in- plane magnetic field dependence of resonant tunneling in a TBRTS. Typical current- voltage characteristics and derivatives for the TBRTS with particular design parameters have been calculated. It is found in the second derivative of the current that the resonance between El and Ej is manifested as a visible feature in the background of a wide E2 resonance. This feature has a sharp local maximum in the absence of applied magnetic field, and becomes flattened with increasing magnetic field in agreement with experiments.


We show that receiving an allowance (pocket money) between age 8 and 12 increases financial confidence in adulthood. We measure the level of confidence using the self-reported financial knowledge. We carry out the analysis by using a Dutch survey conducted in 2015. We estimate causal effects by controlling for parental attitudes and using a "within family" fixed effect.


Background— In patients with sarcoidosis, sudden death is a leading cause of mortality, which may represent unrecognized cardiac involvement. Delayed-enhancement cardiovascular magnetic resonance (DE-CMR) can detect minute amounts of myocardial damage. We sought to compare DE-CMR with standard clinical evaluation for the identification of cardiac involvement. Methods and Results— Eighty-one consecutive patients with biopsy-proven extracardiac sarcoidosis were prospectively recruited for a parallel and masked comparison of cardiac involvement between (1) DE-CMR and (2) standard clinical evaluation with the use of consensus criteria (modified Japanese Ministry of Health [JMH] guidelines). Standard evaluation included 12-lead ECG and at least 1 dedicated non-CMR cardiac study (echocardiography, radionuclide scintigraphy, or cardiac catheterization). Patients were followed for 21±8 months for major adverse events (death, defibrillator shock, or pacemaker requirement). Patients were predominantly middle-aged (46±11 years), female (62%), and black (73%) and had chronic sarcoidosis (median, 7 years) and preserved left ventricular ejection fraction (median, 56%). DE-CMR identified cardiac involvement in 21 patients (26%) and JMH criteria in 10 (12%, 8 overlapping), a >2-fold higher rate for DE-CMR (P=0.005). All patients with myocardial damage on DE-CMR had coronary disease excluded by x-ray angiography. Pathology evaluation in 15 patients (19%) identified 4 with cardiac sarcoidosis; all 4 were positive by DE-CMR, whereas 2 were JMH positive. On follow-up, 8 had adverse events, including 5 cardiac deaths. Patients with myocardial damage on DE-CMR had a 9-fold higher rate of adverse events and an 11.5-fold higher rate of cardiac death than patients without damage. Conclusions— In patients with sarcoidosis, DE-CMR is more than twice as sensitive for cardiac involvement as current consensus criteria. Myocardial damage detected by DE-CMR appears to be associated with future adverse events including cardiac death, but events were few, and this needs confirmation in a larger cohort.


People in neighborhoods across the world, come up with creative ways to satisfy their daily needs through sharing and collaboration, by creating alternative solutions that are resourceful and socially engaging. These creative communities based on sharing, provide local solutionsthrough a more substantial use of human, environmental, and economic resources. Since the mid-2000s, sharing and collaborative practices have received increased attentionmainly because of socio-economic rapid changes within cities and the wider use of online services. This thesis recognizes sharing culture as a potential pathway towards more inclusive and environmentally sustainable societies and identifies three main lines of inquiry based on research areas that necessitate further investigation. The first line of inquiry relates to the semantics and value of sharing culture. The rise of sharing economy has led to an ideologicalcontestation over the meaning of sharing, placing under the same umbrella contradicting practices and thus demanding further examination. The second line of inquiry aims toinvestigate how sharing practices emerge and evolve over time, what challenges they face,and identify transitional pathways towards sharing culture. Finally, and most importantly, the third line of inquiry seeks to identify spatial patterns of sharing culture. Within the fields of sharing culture, collaboration, and urban commons, the relationship between space and sharing practices within urban contexts has been studied from sociological, political, andgeographical perspectives. Nevertheless, there is room for further investigation from an architectural and urban design perspective, on how sharing practices emerge in urban neighborhoods and how space influences them. Specifically, this thesis aims to uncover spatial patterns on three distinct spatial scales: building, threshold, and urban. On the building scale, spatial patterns are explored regarding the relationship between the practices and the spaces they occupy; on the threshold scale, spatial patterns that relate to the interaction between the practice and the broader community; while on the urban scale, patterns of urbandynamics, land use, exposure, and local networks are investigated regarding the practices' locale. Along these three lines of inquiry, this dissertation offers four main contributions. The first one is a theoretical framework of sharing culture identifying: a taxonomy of how it can embedin everyday life, the value it brings to both communities and individuals, and the ways that sharing practices can amplify their impact by scaling-from-within. This framework wasdeveloped through a semi-systematic literature review on sharing, combined with findings from fieldwork, and by using Max-Neef 's model of human needs' satisfaction.The second contribution is building an interdisciplinary research framework to study sharing culture and reveal its spatial patterns through a situated approach, which synthesizes methods from social sciences and theories of practice, architecture, urban design and planning.Specifically, the research framework proposes a combination of qualitative analysis of participants interviews and online documents, with observations, architectural drawings, and extensive cartography to study spatial conditions across all three scales. The third contribution is the application of the interdisciplinary research framework onsharing culture practices in London, UK, and Athens, Greece, resulting in four in-depth case studies with thick description and spatial findings across all three scales: building, threshold, and urban. The findings from the case studies are further substantiated by additional literature review on theories of social change, transition design, and sharing practices to create the fourth and last contribution of this thesis: a series of actionable spatial patterns. The spatial patterns of sharing culture showcase – both in a descriptive and propositional manner – spatial conditions that enable sharing culture. They aim to prompt designers and communities to view sharing practices through a spatial lens and help them leverage space as a catalyst for sharing culture.


2015 was an exciting year for us. After two years of review we are now off, or better in, the ground. The project, both content wise as organisational and financial, is challenging, but to our view, good progress has been made. We may now claim that FGI is a concept known by our key-stakeholders and that in-field activities are happening. In 2015 the main emphasis was on the implementation of the case studies for proof of principle in Uganda, Ethiopia and Burundi. This succeeded in Ethiopia, is well on its way in Burundi and will be further elaborated in Uganda. Case studies are based on existing projects (host projects) to which supplemental activities are added in line with the FGI process components. This way of working gives the case studies a head start once the host projects are identified and mutual agreement is found. However, the process prior to this phase is sometimes complex and time taking and consequently the development of the case studies is in different phases in the respective countries. In this reporting period work plans were approved for 2 case studies in Ethiopia. In Burundi, a larger newly developed project and an existing WOTRO-ARF project are considered part of FGI. For Uganda, the identification of appropriate new host projects is ongoing while here also one WOTRO-ARF project is considered a case study for FGI. Substantial progress was made on the thematic areas knowledge management and stakeholder networks for which more than 90% of the targets of the M&E guidelines was achieved.


Most Christians inIndonesia, when asked about the term "school" or "Sunday school", they always think that those terms are addressed to children's education. Even the term "Adult Sunday School", which is a very familiar sound in the ears of Christians inAmerica, is not heard of among the churches inIndonesia. Why? According to the Christians inIndonesia, Sunday School is always intended for children. It is also carried in general education. That is why the term education is always directed to the education of the children or young persons rather than to adult education. It is time that theological schools inIndonesiaunderstand the importance of andragogy for adult Christian education. InIndonesia, adults do not like the idea of Sunday school or school because they think Sunday school or school is for children and it is beneath their dignity.  However, utilizing the andragogical methods described in this paper, adult can learn in a dignified manner.  Instead of being lectured what to know as children would be, adults should realize that each one is an integral part of the learning process. Through respectful participation, each adult can learn through discovery as well as contribute insight to others.