The UK educational system is currently under pressure from many quarters to increase its use of educational technology. Within this context, this thesis investigates the nature of a range of factors which influence teachers' use of computer assisted learning (CAL), focusing on biology teachers in Further Education (FE). The factors were identified from the literature, and include aspects such as resourcing, and the teachers' classroom practice and educational philosophies.

There were three main stages to the thesis research. The first stage involved a survey of 68 FE biology teachers. The second stage involved two interviews each with 20 of the survey respondents, producing approximately 80 hours of audiotape. The third stage involved a total of nine classroom observations with six of the interviewees, producing approximately nine hours of videotape and nine hours of audiotape.

The conclusions describe how the factors interacted to affect CAL use amongst the FE biology teachers. The findings stress the importance of teachers' development of classroom familiarity with computers; this development was encouraged by both current and previous exposure to the classroom practice of other computer-using teachers. The teachers involved in the study were generally positive about educational technology, but critical about many currently available biology programs; this critical perspective was particularly evident amongst the more student-centred teachers. The findings outline a list of criteria that the teachers appeared to consider when reviewing programs, and describe the relationship between the use of software and the teachers' classroom practice.

The conclusions outline the potential of a framework developed by Brown and McIntyre (1993) for future studies of how classroom practice affects, and is affected by, educational technology. The conclusions also make recommendations, based on the findings, to those responsible for FE policy and staff development about how they might help to increase teachers' use of CAL.


Abstract With the rapidly developing high-throughput sequencing technologies known as next generation sequencing or NGS, our approach to gene hunting and diagnosis has drastically changed. In <10 years, these technologies have moved from gene panel to whole genome sequencing and from an exclusively research context to clinical practice. Today, the limit is not the sequencing of one, many or all genes but rather the data analysis. Consequently, the challenge is to rapidly and efficiently identify disease-causing mutations within millions of variants. To do so, we developed the VarAFT software to annotate and pinpoint human disease-causing mutations through access to multiple layers of information. VarAFT was designed both for research and clinical contexts and is accessible to all scientists, regardless of bioinformatics training. Data from multiple samples may be combined to address all Mendelian inheritance modes, cancers or population genetics. Optimized filtration parameters can be stored and re-applied to large datasets. In addition to classical annotations from dbNSFP, VarAFT contains unique features at the disease (OMIM), phenotypic (HPO), gene (Gene Ontology, pathways) and variation levels (predictions from UMD-Predictor and Human Splicing Finder) that can be combined to optimally select candidate pathogenic mutations. VarAFT is freely available at: http://varaft.eu.


Collapsing thermal plumes were investigated through experimental and numerical simulations. Collapsing plumes are an uncommon fluid dynamical phenomenon, usually observed when the heat source is removed. A series of fluid dynamical experiments were conducted on thermal plumes at a variety of \nohyphens{temperature} and viscosity contrasts, in a cubic plexiglas tank of inner side dimension 26.5cm and no-slip sides. The fluid was heated by a small 2cm diameter heater. Experimental fluids included Lyle's Golden syrup and ADM's Liquidose 436 syrup, which have strongly temperature-dependent viscosities and high Prandtl numbers (10$^{3}$-10$^{5}$ at \nohyphens{experimental} conditions). Visualisation techniques included white light shadowgraphs and Stereoscopic \nohyphens{Particle} Image Velocimetry (SPIV) of the tank's central plane. Temperature \nohyphens{contrasts} ranged from 3-60$^{\circ}$C, and two differing forms of collapse were identified. At very low temperature differences \enquote{stalled} collapse was observed, where the plumes stall in the lower third of the tank before collapsing. At temperature differences between 7-23$^{\circ}$C normal plume evolution occurred, until \enquote{lenticular} collapse developed between midway and two-thirds of the distance from the base of the tank. The \enquote{lens shape} originated in the top of the head and was present throughout collapse. At temperatures above $\Delta$T=23$^{\circ}$C, the plumes followed the expected growth and shape and the head flattened out at the top of the tank. Thermal collapse remains difficult to explain given experimental conditions (continuous \nohyphens{heating}). Instead, it is possible that small density differences arising from crystallisation at ambient \nohyphens{temperatures} changes plume buoyancy and therefore induces \enquote{lenticular} collapse. The \nohyphens{evolution} of the refractive index of the syrup through time to ascertain this possibility was measured. \nohyphens{Additionally}, SPIV revealed the presence of a large, downwelling, low velocity mass in the tank that inhibited the growth of low temperature difference \enquote{stalled} collapse plumes. In the mantle it is likely that the \enquote{stalled} collapse plumes would be unable to be detected by tomography because they would be unable to traverse far from the thermal boundary layer and would collapse back to the base. This would mean that they would have little impact on redistributing material in the mantle. The plumes in this \enquote{stalled} collapse regime had rise times comparable to diffusion times, which is an additional reason for the collapse. The \enquote{lenticular} collapse in the mantle could cause depletion of a deep-source and redistribute the material in the region where the plume began to collapse with some material flowing back to the base of the mantle. Numerical simulations using Fluidity\footnote{Fluidity, is an adaptive mesh finite element package} were undertaken to explore the parameter range where the two collapse phenomena were observed experimentally. These simulated plumes did not show signs of collapse in the purely thermal simulation but at temperature differences up to 14$^{\circ}$C the plumes stalled and were unable to ascend to the top of the tank. The aspect ratio of the tank was changed to explore the effect this had on plume stalling. At increased tank height the plume ascended further in the tank whilst the conduit radius remained constant. However, the very low temperature difference plumes remained unable to reach the upper surface of the tank. In contrast, when the tank width was increased the plumes ascended a little further in the tank but stalled at an earlier time and the plume conduit width generally increased. This implied that the tank width was inhibiting the growth of the plume marginally. Therefore, changing the aspect ratio of the tank does not inhibit the stalling of the simulated plumes and is unlikely to be influencing the experimental plumes growth, stalling and collapse.


The objectives of this research are twofold. On the first hand, it aims to show the interest of Coordinated Atomic actions (CA actions) as a design concept and, on the other hand it explains how the formal language COOPNTWO can be used to express a CA action design. A real distributed application is developed according to a simple development life cycle: informal requirements, specification, design, implementation. The design phase is built according to the CA action concept. The COOPNTWO language is used to express the specification, and design phase. The implementation is made in Java based on a library of generic classes adapted to CA action concepts. The validation phase is briefly addressed, in order to demonstrate the extent to which the development methodology followed in this paper can be useful for proving properties.


Every living being is doomed to decay and die and decay some more. Death is inevitable, and the disposal of our dead is a fundamental global activity with the potential to have significant environmental impact. In the United States, the environmental toxicity of "traditional" modern burial is stark. A cosmeticized body is pumped with three gallons of embalming fluid (containing chemicals such as formaldehyde) that eventually leaches through metal and wood and into the ground. An estimated 5.3 million gallons of embalming chemicals are buried annually in what are essentially luxury landfill-slash-golf-courses, with landscaping and grass to maintain and mow, in coffins that are typically constructed of nonbiodegradable chipboard. And while cremation is a more environmentally friendly alternative, incineration cremation falls short of being labeled "green." Fire-based cremation utilizes significant resources and energy, attributable to the substantial quantity of fossil fuel required to burn human remains at 1,562° F (850° C) to reduce a corpse to ash. Pollutants are generated in doing so, including an average of 250,000 tons per year of carbon emissions and an estimated 320 to 6,000 pounds of mercury (from incineration of dental fillings) per year.

This tradition-steeped industry has projected domestic annual revenues of $68 billion (by 2023) and, interestingly, the industry has slowly started to "go green." Changing the way in which one is buried will not solve the problem of climate change, but it does respect the notion that one's last act on earth should not be to harm it. Industry norms are on the brink of disruption: the alt-death or death positive movement seeks to infuse the human experience back into death; there is capital investment into new innovative death service technologies, e.g. Funeralocity, WeCroak; and green death care tech startups are dramatically broadening available options for reintegrating human remains back into the environment in an eco-friendly manner. Unfortunately, a myriad of market failures and obstacles are impeding that disruption. This Article explores our modern disconnection from death, the transitioning of human remains in an environmentally friendly manner, the importance of pre-need or pre-death planning and prepayment to protect the grieving consumer, and the way in which tax incentives may be utilized to weave these ideas together in a cohesive plan for a green tax credit. A Pigouvian subsidy is proposed in the form of a refundable tax credit for qualified expenditures related to the nonrefundable prepayment of expenses arising from "sustainable disposition or transition of human remains."


A public garden is an institution using living plant collections for public service through botany and horticulture having a diversity of forms, functions, pwposes, services, and programs (Lighty, 1982). Every public garden must secure funding to cover annual operating expenses; therefore, the successful solicitation of these h d s is important to the continued existence and growth of a garden. This research focuses on four factors that have an effect on the successful solicitation of operating revenue in public gardens. These factors are: age (date of incorporation), membership activity, board involvement, and collaboration. Telephone interviews were conducted with twenty-six gardens responsible for raising over seventy percent of their annual operating budget from non-governmental sources. Some of these gardens mirror trends found in other nonprofit orgamzations, while others define new relationslups. M e r activity levels were determined for each factor, the results were tabulated statistically to define relationshps among factors. The gardens that have similar qualities are grouped together. Group and outlier analyses have been developed and included in the results. Relationships between the following factors emerged from chi-square contingency table comparisons: age and the percent membership dues contribute to the operating budget; collaboration and the percent membership dues contribute to the operating budget; age and the percent individual donations contribute to the operating budget; and collaboration and the percent individual donations contribute to the operating budget.


The rhetoric of revulsion has shaped French cultural modernity. This essay examines salient forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literary disgust, then turns to écœurement (heartsickness) as a contemporary case study. Écœurement is key to the work of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and the novelist and playwright Marie NDiaye. These thinkers embrace heartsickness as a state of exposure that unsettles discourses of philosophical mastery and practices of social refinement. The essay thus shows that the language of disgust is not necessarily reactionary and nostalgic—as has often been argued—but can enable new forms of collective resistance and attachment.


BACKGROUND
Abacavir hypersensitivity is strongly associated with the human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-B*5701 allele; however, the cost of routine high-resolution HLA typing before initiation of therapy remains prohibitive. We propose a simple approach to reduce B*5701-associated abacavir hypersensitivity based on the screening of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reverse transcriptase (RT) for a signature B*5701-associated cytotoxic T lymphocyte escape mutation at RT codon 245.

METHODS
The correlation between HLA-B*5701 and RT codon 245 variation was investigated in 392 HIV-infected, antiretroviral-naive adults who were initiating highly active antiretroviral therapy. The relationship between codon 245 variation and premature abacavir discontinuation was investigated in a larger cohort of treated individuals (n=982). Associations between HLA-B*5701 and codon 245 variants were determined using Fisher's exact test or the chi (2) test.

RESULTS
A very strong association between HLA-B*5701 and RT codon 245 variation was observed. Only 1 (4.2%) of 24 subjects with B*5701 harbored virus with the clade B "wild-type" amino acid 245V, compared with 278 (75.5%) of 368 who did not have B*5701 (P<.001). The sensitivity and specificity of codon 245 substitutions for predicting HLA-B*5701 were 96% and 75%, respectively, and the positive and negative predictive values were 20% and 99.6%, respectively. This association remained robust even after antiretroviral treatment was administered (negative predictive value, 100%; n=269). In abacavir-treated individuals (n=982), codon 245 substitutions were predictive of premature abacavir discontinuation (P=.02).

CONCLUSIONS
As HIV RT sequence is incidentally obtained as a part of routine drug-resistance testing, the examination of sequence variation at RT codon 245 could be adopted as a simple, low-cost screening method to identify individuals who could be safely treated with abacavir and/or who could benefit from HLA characterization.


The Scrum software development framework was designed for the hyperproductive state where productivity increases by 5-10 times over waterfall teams and many co-located teams have achieved this effect. In 2006, Xebia (The Netherlands) started localized projects with half Dutch and half Indian team members. After establishing a localized velocity of five times their waterfall competitors on the same project, they moved the Indian members of the team to India and showed stable velocity with fully distributed teams. The ability to achieve hyperproductivity with distributed, outsourced teams was shown to be a repeatable process and a fully distributed model is now the recommended standard when organizations have disciplined Scrum teams with full implementation of XP engineering practices inside the Scrum. Previous studies used overlapping time zones to ease communication and create a single distributed team. The goal of this report is to go one step further and show the same results with team members separated by the 12.5 hour time difference between India and San Francisco. If Scrum works without overlapping time zones then applying it to the mainstream offshoring practice in North America will be possible. In 2008, Xebia India started engagements with partners like TBD.com, a social networking site in San Francisco. TBD has an existing core team of developers doing Scrum with an established local velocity. Adding Xebia India developers to the San Francisco team with a Fully Distributed Scrum model achieved linear scalability with a globally distributed outsourced team.


A new way to combine two different polymerisation reactions, using a single catalyst, results in efficient block polymer synthesis. The selective polymerisation of mixtures of l-lactide-O-carboxyanhydride and cyclohexene oxide, using a di-zinc catalyst in a one-pot procedure, allows the preparation of poly(l-lactide-b-cyclohexene carbonate). The catalysis near quantitatively recycles the carbon dioxide released during polyester formation into the subsequent polycarbonate block, with an atom economy of up to of 91%.


Simply taking foreign language courses and being exposed to the language does not guarantee successful and positive learning experiences. When examining factors that influence foreign language learning, motivation should be considered. To extend current foreign language literature, this study integrated self-efficacy and Gardners' AMTB variables to the understanding of learner motivation and achievement. Participants were 249 undergraduate students learning Spanish, German, and French. Regression results suggested that self-efficacy, positive attitude, and anxiety were good predictors of language achievement. MANOVA results revealed that students' motivation levels differed significantly based on the following student differences: 1) group status (successful or unsuccessful test results), 2) self-efficacy, and 3) heritage connection to the language they were taking. The study provides interpretations and implications of the findings.


In recent years, the drive for ever increasing energy efficiency has intensified. The main driving forces behind this development are the increased innovation and adoption of mobile battery powered devices, increasing energy costs, environmental concerns, and strive for denser systems. This work is meant to serve as a foundation for exploration of energy conscious software. We present an overview of previous work and a background to energy concerns from a software perspective. In addition, we describe and test a few methods for decreasing energy consumption with emphasis on using software parallelism. The experiments are conducted using both a simulation environment and real hardware. Finally, a method for measuring energy consumption on a hardware platform is described. We conclude that energy conscious software is very dependent on what hardware energy saving features, such as frequency scaling and power management, are available. If the software has a lot of unnecessary, or overcomplicated, work, the energy consumption can be lowered to some extent by optimizing the software and reducing the overhead. If the hardware provides software-controllable energy features, the energy consumption can be lowered dramatically. For suitable workloads, using parallelism and multi-core technologies seem very promising for producing low power software. Realizing this potential requires a very flexible hardware platform. Most important is to have fine grained control over power management, and voltage and frequency scaling, preferably on a per core basis.


Domestic bond markets – by which I mean the markets for domestic debt securities issued by residents of a country in its own domestic currency – have experienced impressive growth since the late 1990s, especially in emerging market economies. Yet this growth has not been accompanied by a commensurate increase in market liquidity. Today I will first discuss some of the reasons for this lack of liquidity. Then I want to draw upon the recent experience of various countries to offer a few practical ideas for improving this situation. I shall conclude with some remarks about the Asian Bond Fund 2, which I see as an important recent initiative to reduce impediments and boost liquidity in the emerging domestic bond markets of Asia.


A probabilistic finite element analysis procedure for laminated composite shells has been developed. A total Lagrangian finite element formulation employing a degenerated 3-D laminated composite shell element with the full Green-Lagrange strains and first-order shear deformable kinematics forms an accurate modeling foundation. The first-order second-moment technique for probabilistic finite element analysis of random fields is employed and output is presented in the form of mean and variance of the structural response. The effects of material nonlinearity are included through the use of a rate-independent anisotropic plasticity formulation with the macroscopic point of view. Both ply-level material stiffnesses and micromechanics-level material stiffnesses can be selected as random fields, the latter by the use of a micromechanics model. Ply thicknesses and orientation angles are considered random, and the loading is deterministic. An example is given to quantify the effects of these random fields on the postbuckling analysis of a composite shell.


AIM
To evaluate the antiviral potency of a new anti-hepatitis C virus (HCV) antiviral agent targeting the cellular autophagy machinery.

METHODS
Non-infected liver slices, obtained from human liver resection and cut in 350 μm-thick slices (2.7 × 10(6) cells per slice) were infected with cell culture-grown HCV Con1b/C3 supernatant (multiplicity of infection = 0.1) cultivated for up to ten days. HCV infected slices were treated at day 4 post-infection with GNS-396 for 6 d at different concentrations. HCV replication was evaluated by strand-specific real-time quantitative reverse transcription - polymerase chain reaction. The infectivity titers of supernatants were evaluated by foci formation upon inoculation into naive Huh-7.5.1 cells. The cytotoxic effect of the drugs was evaluated by lactate dehydrogenase leakage assays.

RESULTS
The antiviral efficacy of a new antiviral drug, GNS-396, an autophagy inhibitor, on HCV infection of adult human liver slices was evidenced in a dose-dependent manner. At day 6 post-treatment, GNS-396 EC50 was 158 nmol/L without cytotoxic effect (compared to hydroxychloroquine EC50 = 1.17 μmol/L).

CONCLUSION
Our results demonstrated that our ex vivo model is efficient for evaluation the potency of autophagy inhibitors, in particular a new quinoline derivative GNS-396 as antiviral could inhibit HCV infection in a dose-dependent manner without cytotoxic effect.


ABSTRACT Although Bauxsol™ technology is gaining acceptance for treatment of acid rock drainage and industrial effluents, most leaching studies of spent reagent have used material that has been stored in well-oxygenated conditions for no more than a few weeks. Consequently, few long-term stability data are available to predict potential metal release under various geochemical conditions. This study investigates the simulated aging of a metal-laden Bauxsol™ reagent under oxic, anoxic and anoxic-reducing conditions. Long-term stability under oxic conditions was simulated by sealing samples in 50 ml centrifuge tubes with a small quantity of water (to facilitate metal transfer and mineral recrystallization reactions), and allowing the contents to age at 65°C over about 3 months. Anoxic conditions were maintained for 6 months in 200-l drums of seawater, using nitrogen to displace any dissolved oxygen; Eh remained between +50 and +100 mV and dissolved oxygen was maintained at <0.1 mg/l. Anoxic-reducing conditions were maintained for 6 months as for the anoxic drums with the addition of rotting oysters, mangrove forest sediment and a small quantity of Na2S; the dissolved oxygen content remained <0.1 mg/l, the dissolved sulphide content >0.3 mg/l and the water Eh less than −350 mV. The proportion of most metals extractable with pH 2.88 buffered acetic acid extractant (used to indicate relative leachability) decreased by between 25 and >75% during aging under all tested conditions (i.e. the longer the samples were left, the less metal could be extracted) although minor short-term (2–4 weeks) increases in metal mobility were detected with anoxic and anoxic-reducing samples. The data show that metals bound by Bauxsol™ reagents become increasingly resistant to leaching over time. The precipitation of insoluble sulphides, low solubility carbonates, hydroxycarbonates or hydroxysulphates, and solid-state diffusion process may explain the observed decreases. A measured increase of c. 16% in the mean volume of hematite crystallites over 3 months in oxic conditions also admits the possibility that metals may be incorporated as impurities in growing oxide and oxyhydroxide crystals.


Relatively "private" and relatively "public" aspects of language use, acquisition, and transmission come into question both in linguistic fieldwork and in language revitalization efforts. Sequestered dyadic fieldwork tends to encourage confidentiality, team-based or whole-community documentation may prevent self-censorship slippage, but neither approach resolves acute informed-consent dilemmas. The former approach may encourage the researcher's local-language acquisition, the latter require the researchers' use of a dominant-language lingua franca. School-based revitalization transposes intimate-setting minority languages into public settings where solidary dialect usages are replaced by codifications and coinages, perpetuating the isolation of residual speaker communities. Availability of school transmission risks further neglect of home transmission. Long-established closed-community use of a minority language may prevent recruitment of second-language learners. In the more extreme environments of language endangerment and loss, researcher involvement in attempted solutions for revitalization and transmission obstacles has contentiously but arguably importantly followed involvement in description and documentation. Keywords: Varieties of Welsh in the public and private spheres; fieldwork methodology and practice; second language learners in the context of language loss


AIMS AND OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study is to measure the initial pH of various commonly used beverages and to determine their ability to maintain a low pH by measuring their buffering capacities.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Twelve commercially available drinks were taken and divided into four groups (preserved fruit juices, tea, mineral water and carbonated drinks. Each group comprised of three drinks. Their initial pH were measured with pH meter and their buffering capacities were measured by adding 1M NaOH in the increments of 0.2 ml into 100 ml of each drink till the pH raised to 5.5 and 7 respectively.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
The volume of NaOH required to raise the pH to 5.5 and 7 were recorded in all the groups. This data was subjected to statistical analysis using Mann- Whitney tests.

RESULTS
Total titratable acidity measurement shows that among all the drinks, there was no significant difference between carbonated drinks and preserved fruit juices while a significant difference was present between carbonated drinks, preserved fruit juices and tea.

CONCLUSION
In this in vitro study, it was found that packaged apple juice had the most buffering capacity with maximum erosive potential whereas green tea had the least.


In "The Viral Storm" award-winning biologist Nathan Wolfe - known as 'the Indiana Jones of virus hunters' for his work in jungles and rain forests across the world - shows the threat of a global pandemic is greater than we have ever imagined. "The Viral Storm" examines how viruses like HIV, swine flu, and bird flu have almost wiped us out in the past - and may do so in the future. It explores why modern life makes us so vulnerable to global pandemics, and what new technologies can do to prevent them. Wolfe's provocative vision may leave you feeling distinctly uncomfortable - but it will reveal exactly what it is we are up against. Nathan Wolfe is the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University and Director of Global Viral Forecasting, a pandemic early warning system which monitors the spillover of novel infectious agents from animals into humans. Wolfe has been published in or profiled by "Nature", "Science", "The New York Times", "The New Yorker", "The Economist", "Forbes" and many others. Wolfe was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship in 1997 and was awarded the National Institutes of Health (NIH) International Research Scientist Development Award in 1999 and the prestigious NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2005. Reviews: "An excellent piece of scientific gothic, rich in descriptions of the threat we face from emerging viruses". ("Nature"). "Part autobiography, part warning ...enthralling". ("BBC Focus"). "Quietly terrifying...It's hard not to feel a bit feverish at times while reading". ("Boston Globe"). "Wolfe has an important story to tell and as a virologist at the forefront of pandemic forecasting, he is the perfect person to tell it. He explains the science clearly and never stoops to sensationalism - the evidence of our increasing vulnerability to pandemics speaks for itself". ("Guardian"). "The plague-ridden future imagined by this authoritative, measured, yet gripping book is extremely alarming". ("Sunday Times"). "Nathan Wolfe is saving the world from near-inevitable pandemic ...a kick-ass book". (Mary Roach, author of "Stiff"). "The world's most prominent virus hunter". ("New Yorker"). "A good place to start preparing for what might come". ("New Humanist").


An overview is presented of the development of design and technology teaching in secondary schools during the 1980s. In this decade, teachers were encouraged to involve pupils more in research and decision making activities which were increasingly identified as important educational elements of the discipline. Evidence from public examination work indicated that pupils were not engaged in these activities in very meaningful ways, particularly during practical project work. The author's own experience of teaching in schools indicated that resources and guidance to help develop research and decision-making skills in pupils were not readily available. Subsequently, when visiting schools as a teaching practice supervisor, it was noticeable that pupils appeared to be spending considerable time waiting for teaching assistance during project sessions. The aim of this study was to explore the feasibility of developing and using a microcomputer database as an alternative source of help for pupils when they needed to make routine decisions during their project work. A preliminary investigation was undertaken to ascertain the extent and type of pupils' questions to the teacher, and the nature of the difficulties which hinder pupils' progress when working on their design and technology projects. This was done using observation and interview techniques. To ensure that the microcomputer database reflected current school design and technology practice, information for its content was gathered from teachers using a survey questionnaire. Recognising time constraints, the content was confined to the practical activities highlighted as difficulties during the preliminary investigation and to the provision of routine information. After appraising a number of commercially available database and microviewdata packages, software was produced which incorporated aspects of database and microviewdata package design, yet operated on microcomputer equipment known to be available in schools. The software produced was trialled in schools. Its effectiveness and reliability were evaluated by the use of questionnaires distributed to pupils and teachers. Within the limitations of this feasibility study, it was concluded that, with an increase in content and refinement, the microcomputer database developed could provide a useful source of routine information to help pupils with design and technology research and decision-making processes, and enable teachers to manage project work sessions more effectively.


Abstract Background The TARGET (Treat Antibiotics Responsibly; Guidance, Education, Tools) Antibiotics Toolkit aims to improve antimicrobial prescribing in primary care through guidance, interactive workshops with action planning, patient facing educational and audit materials. Objective To explore GPs', nurses' and other stakeholders' views of TARGET. Design Mixed methods. Method In 2014, 40 UK GP staff and 13 stakeholders participated in interviews or focus groups. We analysed data using a thematic framework and normalization process theory (NPT). Results Two hundred and sixty-nine workshop participants completed evaluation forms, and 40 GP staff, 4 trainers and 9 relevant stakeholders participated in interviews (29) or focus groups (24). GP staffs were aware of the issues around antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and how it related to their prescribing. Most participants stated that TARGET as a whole was useful. Participants suggested the workshop needed less background on AMR, be centred around clinical cases and allow more action planning time. Participants particularly valued comparison of their practice antibiotic prescribing with others and the TARGET Treating Your Infection leaflet. The leaflet needed greater accessibility via GP computer systems. Due to time, cost, accessibility and competing priorities, many GP staff had not fully utilized all resources, especially the audit and educational materials. Conclusions We found evidence that the workshop is likely to be more acceptable and engaging if based around clinical scenarios, with less on AMR and more time on action planning. Greater promotion of TARGET, through Clinical Commissioning Group's (CCG's) and professional bodies, may improve uptake. Patient facing resources should be made accessible through computer shortcuts built into general practice software.


This research focuses on the determination of the factors that led to the failure of water management in the Copiapo Basin in Chile. Interestingly, the existence of full private ownership and free tradability of water rights has not prevented the overexploitation of groundwater resources. In the paper, firstly, water regulation and the role of the regulator in Chile are briefly discussed. Secondly, the evolution of water resources in the Copiapo region is characterized and analyzed, and the granting of water use rights in the basin in the last 30 years is concisely described. Thirdly, we examine and analyze prices and quantities traded in the water market of the Copiapo region. We will argue that this crisis is a consequence first of failure in regulatory implementation and second of an extremely rigid regulatory framework that leaves limited room for adjustment to changing conditions, especially regarding the emergence of new information concerning water availability. We believe this investigation is not only relevant for this case in particular, but also for other regions and countries where water markets are in place.


This article shares an innovative course design that incorporates cultural connections and comparisons, interpersonal communication, and a relaxing classroom environment to facilitate learning and language development. By using authentic texts as the medium for learning, it provides a case example of an upper-division curriculum that focused on cognitive skills, elicited conversational dialogues, exposed and promoted the use of different registers, and tapped students' existing schema around stimulating topics to foster engagement, reflection and enthusiasm. We advance that a curriculum that focuses on the affective domain over discrete academic or grammatical objectives can develop students' sense of linguistic creativity and language ownership, thus improving their confidence and level of competency in the target language.


We study the health effects of the spread of democratic institutions and the extension of voting rights in 15 European countries since the middle of the nineteenth century. We employ both cross country and cohort variation in heights and employ a new instrument for democracy and the extension of the franchise, the effect of decolonisation on democracy in the colonising country's democratisation to identify the causal effect of democracy on heights. We find robust evidence of a link between democratic quality and human stature. The results indicate that the transition to democracy increased average male heights by 0.7 to 1 cm, equivalent to a one-decade average increase in stature across cohorts. Including the extension of the franchise to women increases the effect on average stature to about 1.7cm. The effect is driven by both political participation and contestation in reducing inequality and expanding health insurance coverage.


Introduction
Economic, cultural and social changes are resulting in fierce competition among places (Kavaratzis, 2005). Moreover, places are striving to balance business provision by attracting new investments and retaining existing ones (Kotler et al., 1999; Kavaratzis, 2005). Several theories have been identified for place branding, especially within a retailing context. However, few studies exist which explore how places can be branded and marketed via partnerships with social enterprises, a gap that this research ultimately aims to fulfil.

Place Branding and Social Enterprises
Literature from human geography, branding, and marketing provide different arguments on the concept of 'place'. For example, Cresswell (2004) argues that places are created and that residents create place through the various activities they engage in. Cresswell and Hoskins (2008: 394) further argue that place is a 'lived concept' and therefore viewed as 'fundamental components of human activity' (Florek, 2011: 347). More recently, Warnaby and Medway (2013: 357) expand upon the socio-cultural dimension aspects of place and describe it as a 'socially constructed product developed and endlessly redefined and interpreted via spoken and written words'. This implies human actions possess creative abilities for their own place. The activity-based created place has been contested and criticised in human geography to have no defined boundaries (Agnew, 1987), thus proving to be a 'complex' and 'slippery' concept (Kavaratzis, 2005; Warnaby and Medway, 2013). Consequently, several dynamics have resulted from evaluating and improving certain geographical settings (see Agnew, 1987) and/or the collection of creative human activities (see Cresswell, 2004). Alongside these theoretical developments, there is potential for the creative entrepreneurship of social enterprises to be explored within places. Hotspots of social enterprise activities can be branded and marketed to build a positive image about their communal growth and development. Warnaby et al., (2004) propose partnerships between place administrators and retail associations in developing initiative-specific place branding initiatives. Trueman et al., (2001) also call for greater application of the corporate identity literature to place branding. Both of which have been successfully applied in various UK town centres, for example the 'I love MCR campaign' or 'Glasgow's Miles Better'. Perhaps we can have a similar successful application when it comes to social enterprise places?

Methodology
The study is dyadic in nature (i.e. social enterprises and local council administrators). Therefore, a two stage approach will be adopted. Firstly, a case study approach is adopted to explore the characteristics, enterprise activities and place-centered strategies of leading social enterprise places in the UK. It is the results of this case study that will form the main presentation of this paper. Stage two involves in-depth interviews with social enterprise owners and social enterprise place administrators from across the UK. This will be accompanied by a detailed ethnographic observation of operational activities.

Concluding Comments
Social enterprise places can be branded and marketed as place values are assessed by the worth of the place brand (Kavaratzis, 2004). Social enterprises appear to develop promotional activities in partnership with place administrators/stakeholders to communicate narratives around the enterprising nature of such places. Places are 'city of words' and 'city of stones' (Warnaby and Medway, 2013). Therefore, architecture plays a vital role in place banding and identity, however 'selling' narratives around images of social enterprise activities have to be constantly rewritten for marketing and branding purposes to develop place attachment (Cresswell, 2004; Jones, 2011). To fulfil such potential, social enterprises have to ensure their 'organising capacity' is developed to facilitate necessary mechanisms to support marketing planning and implementation (Van den Berg and Braun, 1999).


We give "hybrid" proofs of the q-binomial theorem and other identities. The proofs are "hybrid" in the sense that we use partition arguments to prove a restricted version of the theorem, and then use analytic methods (in the form of the Identity Theorem) to prove the full version. We prove three somewhat unusual summation formulae, and use these to give hybrid proofs of a number of identities due to Ramanujan. Finally, we use these new summation formulae to give new partition interpretations of the Rogers-Ramanujan identities and the Rogers-Selberg identities.


The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) and its two companion instruments (AMSU) and (HSB) are designed to provide, worldwide, atmospheric temperature and humidity profiles with radiosonde accuracy. The performance of AIRS since launch on Aqua has been exceptional indicating that it will meet or exceed its objectives.


The biggest corporate failure ever in British history occurred in 2008 with very little forewarning. The management of HBOS, a major national bank with a long history of prudence prior to the merger in 2001, were allowed to act incompetently. Auditors and regulators failed to act, ignoring a key senior whistleblower, and the 'competitive' stock market failed to spot management failure in time.

This book is the first academic study of this collapse, uncovering some surprising evidence on the power and politics of large financial institutions. It details the processes and degrees to which financial challenge and regulation are undermined by this power. The research exposes a pro-active process of regulatory risk management by these institutions; the ease with which auditors and regulators can be captured; and how politicians and investors can be all too happy to hop on the stock market and management spin ride – with other people's money. The study questions the ideology and politics which supported and encouraged the management hubris, raising profound questions about the 'politics' of the academic disciplines of banking, finance and accounting today, and the theories they underpin.

This account of management gone wrong is essential reading for students, researchers and professionals involved in banking, finance, credit infrastructure, economics and management studies.


Introduction About the Editors PART I ECONOMIC MICROSTRUCTURE THEORY 1 Algorithmic Trading: Issues and Preliminary Evidence Thierry Foucault 1.1 Introduction 1.2 What is algorithmic trading? 1.2.1 Definition and typology 1.2.2 Scope and profitability 1.3 Market structure and algorithmic trading 1.4 Costs and benefits of algorithmic trading 1.4.1 Algorithmic trading reduces search costs 1.4.2 Algorithmic trading has an ambiguous effect on adverse selection costs 1.4.3 Algorithmic trading and price discovery 1.4.4 Welfare effects 1.4.5 Algorithmic trading as a source of risk 1.5 Empirical evidence 1.5.1 Algorithmic trading and market liquidity 1.5.2 Algorithmic trading and volatility 1.5.3 Algorithmic trading and price discovery 1.5.4 Algorithmic trading and market stability 1.6 Conclusions Appendix Acknowledgment References 2 Order Choice and Information in Limit Order Markets 41 Ioanid Ro u 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Order choice with symmetric information 2.3 Order choice with asymmetric information 2.4 The information content of orders 2.5 Questions for future research References PART II HIGH FREQUENCY DATA MODELING 3 Some Recent Results on High Frequency Correlation Nicolas Huth and Frederic Abergel 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Data description 3.3 Multivariate event time 3.3.1 Univariate case 3.3.2 Multivariate case 3.3.3 Empirical results 3.4 High frequency lead/lag 3.4.1 The Hayashi-Yoshida cross-correlation function 3.4.2 Empirical results 3.5 Intraday seasonality of correlation 3.5.1 Empirical results 3.6 Conclusion Acknowledgment References 4 Statistical Inference for Volatility and Related Limit Theorems Nakahiro Yoshida 4.1 Introduction 4.2 QLA for an ergodic diffusion process 4.3 QLA for volatility in the finite time-horizon 4.4 Nonsynchronous covariance estimation 4.4.1 Consistent estimator 4.4.2 Functional limit theorem 4.4.3 Application of YUIMA 4.4.4 Lead-lag estimation 4.5 YUIMA II for statistical analysis and simulation for stochastic differential equations 4.6 Higher order asymptotics and finance 4.6.1 Martingale expansion 4.6.2 Small sigma expansion Acknowledgments References PART III MARKET IMPACT 5 Models for the Impact of All Order Book Events Zoltan Eisler, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, and Julien Kockelkoren 5.1 Introduction 5.2 A short summary of market order impact models 5.3 Many-event impact models 5.3.1 Notation and definitions 5.3.2 The transient impact model (TIM) 5.3.3 The history dependent impact model (HDIM) 5.4 Model calibration and empirical tests 5.4.1 Data 5.4.2 The case of large ticks 5.4.3 The case of small ticks 5.5 Conclusion Appendix Acknowledgments References 6 Limit Order Flow, Market Impact, and Optimal Order Sizes: Evidence from NASDAQ TotalView-ITCH Data Nikolaus Hautsch and Ruihong Huang 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Market environment and data 6.3 Major order flow and order book characteristics 6.4 An econometric model for the market impact of limit orders 6.4.1 A cointegrated VAR model for the limit order book 6.4.2 Estimating market impact 6.5 Market impact at NASDAQ 6.6 Optimal order size 6.7 Conclusions Acknowledgment References PART IV OPTIMAL TRADING Introduction: Trading and Market Micro-structure Charles-Albert Lehalle References 7 Collective Portfolio Optimization in Brokerage Data: The Role of Transaction Cost Structure Damien Challet and David Morton de Lachapelle 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Description of the data 7.3 Results 7.4 The influence of transaction costs on trading behaviour from optimal mean-variance portfolios 7.5 Discussion and outlook Acknowledgments References 8 Optimal Execution of Portfolio Transactions with Short-Term Alpha Adriana M. Criscuolo and Henri Waelbroeck 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Short-term alpha decay and hidden order arbitrage theory 8.3 Total cost definition and constraints 8.3.1 Equations without the risk term 8.3.2 Equations including risk without the alpha term 8.4 Total cost optimization 8.4.1 Results for lambda = 0 and the arbitrary alpha term 8.4.2 Risk-adjusted optimization 8.5 Conclusions 8.5.1 Main results in the absence of short-term alpha 8.5.2 Main results with short-term alpha 8.5.3 Institutional trading practices Proviso References Combined References Index


The West Cumbria Child Poverty Forum (WCCPF) exists to highlight and improve the plight of those children in our community who live with the harmful consequences of poverty. Chaired by Willie Slavin, WCCPF is an un-constituted group which is open to any organisation in the with an interest in a collaborative approach to making a real difference to the lives of children and young people in poverty.

Tackling the potentially devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of our most disadvantaged children and young people requires urgent attention. The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent societal impacts (such as lockdowns) have had an unimaginable and unprecedented impact around the globe. WCCPF will release a report that seeks to highlight the potential impact of the COVID-19 on children and young people in West Cumbria, particularly those in poverty or who are otherwise vulnerable. It also seeks to support those addressing the problem with the clearest possible picture of the emerging advice, information and data at both local and national level and makes recommendations to mitigate harm to the most vulnerable children and young people in West Cumbria.

WCCPF worked with the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) to bring together accounts provided by international literature and local experts in West Cumbria. The findings reveal concerns about the impact the lockdown measures will have on children's education. Many families in poverty face barriers to accessing the resources to facilitate a good quality education from the home, and children are missing the conversational component of face to face teaching. Lack of referrals to supportive services during lockdown has raised concerns about the emotional wellbeing, and in some cases, the physical safety of some vulnerable children and young people. The report also found that many families in West Cumbria were living on the edge with few resources before Covid-19 but the current crisis is revealing the extent of the hardship experienced. Families from disadvantaged households will suffer the most from the consequences of Covid-19, whilst many more families are likely to fall into poverty.

Services have been collaborating to best meet the needs of families experiencing hardship and the report sets out ways to build on this learning on how to develop innovative ways of addressing inequalities to build a stronger future for everyone.

Written between mid-March and mid-May, this report is only able to provide a snapshot of the actual and potential impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on children and young people in West Cumbria. However, we remain convinced that our report will make a valuable contribution in informing the recovery effort, which, according to economic and social science experts around the globe, will take some considerable time.


Background There is little systematic assessment of how total health expenditure is distributed across diseases and comorbidities. The objective of this study was to use statistical methods to disaggregate all publicly funded health expenditure by disease and comorbidities in order to answer three research questions: (1) What is health expenditure by disease phase for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in New Zealand? (2) Is the cost of having two NCDs more or less than that expected given the independent costs of each NCD? (3) How is total health spending disaggregated by NCDs across age and by sex? Methods and findings We used linked data for all adult New Zealanders for publicly funded events, including hospitalisation, outpatient, pharmaceutical, laboratory testing, and primary care from 1 July 2007 to 30 June 2014. These data include 18.9 million person-years and $26.4 billion in spending (US$ 2016). We used case definition algorithms to identify if a person had any of six NCDs (cancer, cardiovascular disease [CVD], diabetes, musculoskeletal, neurological, and a chronic lung/liver/kidney [LLK] disease). Indicator variables were used to identify the presence of any of the 15 possible comorbidity pairings of these six NCDs. Regression was used to estimate excess annual health expenditure per person. Cause deletion methods were used to estimate total population expenditure by disease. A majority (59%) of health expenditure was attributable to NCDs. Expenditure due to diseases was generally highest in the year of diagnosis and year of death. A person having two diseases simultaneously generally had greater health expenditure than the expected sum of having the diseases separately, for all 15 comorbidity pairs except the CVD-cancer pair. For example, a 60–64-year-old female with none of the six NCDs had $633 per annum expenditure. If she had both CVD and chronic LLK, additional expenditure for CVD separately was $6,443/$839/$9,225 for the first year of diagnosis/prevalent years/last year of life if dying of CVD; additional expenditure for chronic LLK separately was $6,443/$1,291/$9,051; and the additional comorbidity expenditure of having both CVD and LLK was $2,456 (95% confidence interval [CI] $2,238–$2,674). The pattern was similar for males (e.g., additional comorbidity expenditure for a 60–64-year-old male with CVD and chronic LLK was $2,498 [95% CI $2,264–$2,632]). In addition to this, the excess comorbidity costs for a person with two diseases was greater at younger ages, e.g., excess expenditure for 45–49-year-old males with CVD and chronic LLK was 10 times higher than for 75–79-year-old males and six times higher for females. At the population level, 23.8% of total health expenditure was attributable to higher costs of having one of the 15 comorbidity pairs over and above the six NCDs separately; of the remaining expenditure, CVD accounted for 18.7%, followed by musculoskeletal (16.2%), neurological (14.4%), cancer (14.1%), chronic LLK disease (7.4%), and diabetes (5.5%). Major limitations included incomplete linkage to all costed events (although these were largely non-NCD events) and missing private expenditure. Conclusions The costs of having two NCDs simultaneously is typically superadditive, and more so for younger adults. Neurological and musculoskeletal diseases contributed the largest health system costs, in accord with burden of disease studies finding that they contribute large morbidity. Just as burden of disease methodology has advanced the understanding of disease burden, there is a need to create disease-based costing studies that facilitate the disaggregation of health budgets at a national level.


Acquired resistance to endocrine therapy is responsible for half of the therapeutic failures in the treatment of breast cancer. Recent findings have implicated increased expression of the ETS transcription factor ELF5 as a potential modulator of estrogen action and driver of endocrine resistance, and here we provide the first insight into the mechanisms by which ELF5 modulates estrogen sensitivity. Using chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing we found that ELF5 binding overlapped with FOXA1 and ER at super enhancers, enhancers and promoters, and when elevated, caused FOXA1 and ER to bind to new regions of the genome, in a pattern that replicated the alterations to the ER/FOXA1 cistrome caused by the acquisition of resistance to endocrine therapy. RNA sequencing demonstrated that these changes altered estrogen-driven patterns of gene expression, the expression of ER transcription-complex members, and 6 genes known to be involved in driving the acquisition of endocrine resistance. Using rapid immunoprecipitation mass spectrometry of endogenous proteins, and proximity ligation assays, we found that ELF5 interacted physically with members of the ER transcription complex, such as DNA-PKcs. We found 2 cases of endocrine-resistant brain metastases where ELF5 levels were greatly increased and ELF5 patterns of gene expression were enriched, compared to the matched primary tumour. Thus ELF5 alters ER-driven gene expression by modulating the ER/FOXA1 cistrome, by interacting with it, and by modulating the expression of members of the ER transcriptional complex, providing multiple mechanisms by which ELF5 can drive endocrine resistance.


2011 became a year of revolt for the Middle East and north Africa as a series of popular uprisings toppled veteran strongmen that had ruled the regions for decades. The contentious mobilisations not only repudiated orthodox explanations for the resilience of Arab autocracy, but radically asserted the 'political imaginary' of a sovereign and united citizenry, so vigorously encapsulated in the popular slogan al-shab yurid isqat al-nizam (the people want to overthrow the system). In the Republic of Yemen, revolting citizens precipitated the resignation of perennial President Ali Abd Allah Salih and demanded a fundamental reconfiguration of the prevailing social contract into a modern civil state (al-dawla al-madaniya al-haditha). It is tempting to situate the root causes of these historic citizen revolts in the political inertia and moral bankruptcy of (neo)patrimonial Arab autocracies, their neoliberal economic policies, unemployment and social inequality, a youth bulge or new media technologies - all of which doubtlessly constituted crucial enabling factors.
For the historian, however, the story runs much deeper than such 'presentist' interpretations suggest. Adopting a dynamic, process-orientated approach, this doctoral dissertation examines why and how the revolutionary mobilisation in 2011 transpired in relation to Yemen's history of contentious politics. The narrative is built around the argument that the revolt was the result of three parallel, dynamic processes: the erratic and limited liberalisation process since Yemeni unification in 1990, the 'oligarchisation' of power sine the 1994 war, and the 'politics of calculated chaos' - a paradoxical propensity of the Salih regime to foster disorder and dissent in order to position itself as the defender of the republicanism and Yemeni unity. When regime changes in North Africa precipitated a shift in political opportunities, these processes culminated in the formation of a loose, temporary and heterogeneous opposition coalition that mounted a singular contentious challenge against the regime. Traditional powerbrokers, however, soon stifled the brief revolutionary moment as they politicised, co-opted and superseded the citizen movement.
Loosely inspired by the histoire de la long duree, the thesis contextualises the emergence and trajectory of the Yemeni citizen revolt in the political economy imperatives, deep-seated regional divisions and collective memories of past regimes and revolutions, such as the pre-Islamic South Arabian kingdomes, the millennial Zaydi Imamates or the twin revolutions of the 1960s. It thereby revels some striking historical parallels to earlier episodes of contention in terms of longstanding demands, ideas and repertoires, which continue to constitute frameworks of reference for contemporary contentious politics.


This article melds family history with History, tracing the lives of
my daughter's grandparents, Marcelle Libraty and Pinhas Cohen. Products of
the social mobility and integration offered by the Alliance israélite universelle,
they became schoolteachers in Morocco and opted for France after
independence. Currently in their eighties, Marcelle and Pinhas's lives are
connected to sweeping events in history: French colonialism, Vichy anti-
Semitism, Moroccan independence, Jewish emigration. Inspired by Ivan
Jablonka's L'Histoire des grandparents que je n'ai pas eus, I experiment as both
narrator of the past and participant in the family story, and demonstrate
new ways of writing history. This auto-historiographical project shows how
a family succeeds in preserving identities of origin and maintaining relationships
despite socio-political upheaval and global mobility.


Optimized operator splitting methods for numerical integration of the time domain Maxwell's equations in computational electromagnetics (CEM) are proposed for the first time. The methods are based on splitting the time domain evolution operator of Maxwell's equations into suboperators, and corresponding time coefficients are obtained by reducing the norm of truncation terms to a minimum. The general high-order staggered finite difference is introduced for discretizing the three-dimensional curl operator in the spatial domain. The detail of the schemes and explicit iterated formulas are also included. Furthermore, new high-order Padé approximations are adopted to improve the efficiency of the proposed methods. Theoretical proof of the stability is also included. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the schemes. It is found that the optimized schemes with coarse discretized grid and large Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) number can obtain satisfactory numerical results, which in turn proves to be a promising method, with advantages of high accuracy, low computational resources and facility of large domain and long-time simulation. In addition, due to the generality, our optimized schemes can be extended to other science and engineering areas directly.


RATIONALE & OBJECTIVE
Although socioeconomic status has been associated with chronic kidney disease (CKD), little is known about its relationship to residential neighborhood context.

STUDY DESIGN
Secondary analysis of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a prospective cohort study designed to investigate the development and progression of subclinical cardiovascular disease.

SETTING & PARTICIPANTS
6,814 men and women who were between 45 and 84 years of age and free of cardiovascular disease were recruited between 2000 and 2002 from Baltimore, MD; Chicago, IL; Forsyth County, NC; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; and St. Paul, MN.

EXPOSURES
A composite neighborhood problem score (calculated based on 7 participant-reported domains at study entry: adequacy of food sources, availability of parks/playground, noise, sidewalks, traffic, trash and litter, and violence) and a social cohesion score (calculated based on 5 participant-reported attributes of people in their neighborhood: close knit; get along; willing to help neighbors; trustworthy; and share values).

OUTCOMES
Estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR; calculated using the CKD-EPI [CKD Epidemiology Collaboration] creatinine-cystatin C equation) and an indicator of eGFR decline > 30% since study entry using follow-up eGFR quantified at 4 examinations: 2000 to 2002, 2004 to 2005, 2005 to 2007, and 2010 to 2011.

ANALYTICAL APPROACH
Associations between each neighborhood measure (in separate models) and eGFR decline > 30% from baseline and annualized eGFR change were estimated using Cox proportional hazards and linear mixed regression models, respectively, adjusting for potential confounders.

RESULTS
While neighborhood social context differs by race/ethnicity, neither neighborhood problems nor social cohesion was independently associated with eGFR decline after adjustment for confounders.

LIMITATIONS
Incomplete capture of the early stages of eGFR decline, reliance on observational data, limited variation in neighborhood measures, and the potential for residual confounding.

CONCLUSIONS
Although we showed no independent association between neighborhood context and eGFR decline, it is associated with many CKD risk factors and further work is needed to clarify whether it has an independent role in CKD.


State-of-the-art OLAP systems tend to use columnar data representations, as these are both suitable for analytics and amenable to compression. Local dictionary value encoding has been shown to achieve high compression rates for string columns while still allowing fast filtered scans. In this paper, we argue that the effectiveness and efficiency of local dictionary compression is limited by data repetition across file blocks and by dictionary look-ups inside each block during filtered scan execution. To address this problem, we introduce an adaptive compression technique that is based on differential dictionaries and targets both storage efficiency and query performance. The proposed scheme reduces dramatically the need to store repeated values across different file blocks and significantly accelerates read operations by reducing the time needed for dictionary look-ups. A preliminary set of experiments has given very promising results, showing that, in many cases, the proposed new dictionary compression scheme is much more efficient than existing techniques, occasionally up to an order of magnitude.


Raspberry-like magnetic nanoclusters are synthesized and subsequently self-assembled to form a bulk metamaterial exhibiting strong isotropic optical magnetism in visible light. The magnetic response of the nanoclusters (metamolecules) and of the final assembled material are measured by independent optical experiments. The validity of the effective permeability parameter is probed by spectroscopic ellipsometry at variable incidence. Numerical simulations confirm the measurements.


Diffuse reflectance and transmittance spectra collected in different scattering angle intervals have been analyzed in order to determine the interface roughness cross correlation of thin films. Different angle intervals correspond to different roughness length scales; the cross correlation as a function of length scale can hence be determined. Sputter deposited ZrO2 films were analyzed. The transition from correlated to uncorrelated film interfaces was found to occur at longer length scales, when the film thickness increased.


Unreported physical abuse in a community sample recruited in early childhood has long-term detrimental effects on education and economic stability, health, and criminal convictions into adulthood. BACKGROUND: Because most physical abuse goes unreported and researchers largely rely on retrospective reports of childhood abuse or prospective samples with substantiated maltreatment, long-term outcomes of physical abuse in US community samples are unknown. We hypothesized that early childhood physical abuse would prospectively predict adult outcomes in education and economic stability, physical health, mental health, substance use, and criminal behavior. METHODS: Researchers in two multisite studies recruited children at kindergarten entry and followed them into adulthood. Parents completed interviews about responses to the child's problem behaviors during the kindergarten interview. Interviewers rated the probability that the child was physically abused in the first 5 years of life. Adult outcomes were measured by using 23 indicators of education and economic stability, physical health, mental health, substance use, and criminal convictions reported by participants and their peers and in school and court records. RESULTS: Controlling for potential confounds, relative to participants who were not physically abused, adults who had been abused were more likely to have received special education services, repeated a grade, be receiving government assistance, score in the clinical range on externalizing or internalizing disorders, and have been convicted of a crime in the past year (3.20, 2.14, 2.00, 2.42, 2.10, and 2.61 times more likely, respectively) and reported levels of physical health that were 0.10 SDs lower. No differences were found in substance use. CONCLUSIONS: Unreported physical abuse in community samples has long-term detrimental effects into adulthood. Pediatricians should talk with parents about using only nonviolent discipline and support early interventions to prevent child abuse.


Undead Science examines the story of cold fusion, one of the most publicized scientific controversies of the late twentieth century. In 1989 two Utah-based "discoverers" claimed to have developed an electrochemical process that produced more energy than was required to initiate the process. Finding no other explanation, the researchers described their findings as some kind of nuclear reaction. If they were correct, an important new energy source would have been found. Objections surfaced quickly, and in the year that followed, hundreds of scientists worldwide attempted to reproduce these results. Most, though not all, failed, and the controversy became increasingly antagonistic. By 1990, general scientific opinion favored the skeptics and experimental work went into a steep decline. Nevertheless, many scientists continue to do research in what Bart Simon calls this "undead science," Simon argues that in spite of widespread skepticism in the scientific community, there has been a continued effort to make sense of the controversial phenomenon. Researchers in well-respected laboratories continue to produce new and rigorous work. In this manner, cold fusion research continues to exist long after the controversy has subsided, even though the existence of cold fusion is circumscribed by the widespread belief that the phenomenon is not real. The survival of cold fusion signals the need for a more complex understanding of the social dynamics of scientific knowledge making; the boundaries between experts, intermediaries, and the lay public; and the conceptualization of failure in the history of science and technology.


This article shows how to use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to provide "causal recipes" sufficient for profiling X-consumers accurately. X-consumers are the extremely-frequent (top 2 to 3%) users who typically consume 25% of a product category. The study extends Dik Twedt's "heavy-half" product users for building theory and strategies to nurture or control X-behavior. The study here applies QCA to offer configurations that are sufficient in identifying "whales" and "jumbo shrimps" among X-casino gamblers. The findings support the principle that not all X-consumers are alike. The theory and method are applicable for identifying the degree of consistency and coverage of alternative X-consumers among users of all product-service category and brands


Despite the regularities apparent in the cotext of phrasal chunks, it should be remembered that even 'so-called "fixed" phrases are not in fact fixed' (Sinclair 1996b: 30). One aspect of idiom fixity which is often overlooked is the idiom's colligational preference in terms of syntactic role and positioning. Most of the idioms included in this study have a marked preference for one particular syntactic role and one particular syntactic position, rarely (if ever) deviating from that preference. Yet in those cases when they are found in unusual forms or positions, that novelty attracts the reader's attention and interferes with the delexicalisation process typical of canonical instances. The first part of this chapter is dedicated to an investigation of this type of variation. Another way in which delexical meanings can be relexicalised is by making them more semantically transparent. By far the most common means of doing this is to pair an idiom or metaphorical collocation with unusual collocates, which blocks delexicalisation and relexicalises the phrase. Instead of co-occurring with one or two recurrent collocates, a much wider semantic preference is brought into play, and this can activate salient meanings within the idiom or collocation's constituents, or indeed allude to an image schema. How this works will be illustrated in a series of case studies; for now consider the difference of meaning conjured up by the usual collocates of red tape, i.e. cut and tie (up), compared to alternative collocates within the same semantic preferences, including hack, slash, hogtie, and strangle. The chapter ends with a case study illustrating how salient meanings can be resuscitated, sometimes through the smallest of changes.


Self-supervised learning (SSL) for rich speech representations has achieved empirical success in low-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and other speech processing tasks, which can mitigate the necessity of a large amount of transcribed speech and thus has driven a growing demand for on-device ASR and other speech processing. However, advanced speech SSL models have become increasingly large, which contradicts the limited on-device resources. This gap could be more severe in multilingual/multitask scenarios requiring simultaneously recognizing multiple languages or executing multiple speech processing tasks. Additionally, strongly overparameterized speech SSL models tend to suffer from overfitting when being finetuned on low-resource speech corpus. This work aims to enhance the practical usage of speech SSL models towards a win-win in both enhanced efficiency and alleviated overfitting via our proposed S$^3$-Router framework, which for the first time discovers that simply discarding no more than 10\% of model weights via only finetuning model connections of speech SSL models can achieve better accuracy over standard weight finetuning on downstream speech processing tasks. More importantly, S$^3$-Router can serve as an all-in-one technique to enable (1) a new finetuning scheme, (2) an efficient multilingual/multitask solution, (3) a state-of-the-art ASR pruning technique, and (4) a new tool to quantitatively analyze the learned speech representation. We believe S$^3$-Router has provided a new perspective for practical deployment of speech SSL models. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/S3-Router.


A 51-year-old man with a long history of alcohol abuse and heavy cigarette smoking presented to our hospital with worsening of a chronic cough, which had become productive of thick green sputum and was associated with posttussive emesis. He denied fevers and chills but had a recent and unintentional weight loss of about 5 kg. He had a history of squamous cell carcinoma of the right tonsil, which remained in remission for more than 4 years after chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and resection. There was no recent history of travel or any occupational exposures or known contacts with tuberculosis or animals (wild or domestic).


Part of the Law Commons Publication Information Michael M. O'Hear, A Review of Federal Sentencing Treatises and Periodicals, 11 Fed. Sent'g Rep. 69 (1998). © 1998 by the Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Vera Institute of Justice. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Vera Institute of Justice for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on Caliber (http://caliber.ucpress.net/) or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com.


Purpose
This study examined whether the language sample elicitation technique (i.e., storytelling and story-retelling tasks with pictorial support) affects lexical diversity (D), grammaticality (grammatical errors per communication unit [GE/CU]), sentence length (mean length of utterance in words [MLUw]), and sentence complexity (subordination index [SI]), which are commonly used indices for diagnosing primary language impairment in Spanish-English-speaking children in the United States.

Method
Twenty bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children with typical language development and 20 with primary language impairment participated in the study. Four analyses of variance were conducted to evaluate the effect of language elicitation technique and group on D, GE/CU, MLUw, and SI. Also, 2 discriminant analyses were conducted to assess which indices were more effective for story retelling and storytelling and their classification accuracy across elicitation techniques.

Results
D, MLUw, and SI were influenced by the type of elicitation technique, but GE/CU was not. The classification accuracy of language sample analysis was greater in story retelling than in storytelling, with GE/CU and D being useful indicators of language abilities in story retelling and GE/CU and SI in storytelling.

Conclusion
Two indices in language sample analysis may be sufficient for diagnosis in 4- to 5-year-old bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children.


Sympathetic system hyperactivity and depression are related to cardiac remodelling in Black men. We investigated whether sympathetic system hyperactivity and depressive symptoms are related to retinal vascular dysregulation. A total of 76 Black and 83 White men (23–68 years of age) from the SABPA study were included. Depressive symptoms, 24h pulse pressure (PP), fasting blood and 24-hour urinary catecholamine data were obtained. Retinal vascular calibre was quantified from digital photographs using standardized protocols. Black men demonstrated increased (p < 0.05) hyperpulsatile pressure (PP > 50 mmHg), hypertension (78.9 % vs 48.4%) and depression (34.2% vs. 13.3%) prevalence compared to White men. Despite lower epinephrine levels, epinephrine was associated with arteriolar narrowing and venular widening in the Black men [Adj R2 −0.37 (95% CI: −0.66, −0.09), p=0.013; Adj R2 0.35 (95% CI: 0.13, 0.57), p=0.003]. This might suggest ß-adrenergic hyporesponsivity to epinephrine, which was accompanied by hyperpulsatile blood pressure in the Black group. In the White group, depressive symptoms and norepinephrine were associated with retinal arteriolar narrowing. A profile of ß-adrenergic hyporesponsivity, indicative of a chronically challenged sympathetic system, was associated with retinal vascular remodelling in Black men. ß-adrenergic hyporesponsivity as a result of chronic stress emphasized central control of the brain on the circulatory system irrespective of the vascular bed.


As street-level bureaucrats, poll workers bear the primary responsibility for implementing voter identification requirements. Voter identification requirements are not implemented equally across groups of voters, and poll workers exercise substantial discretion in how they apply election law. In states with minimal and varying identification requirements, poll workers appear to treat especially minority voters differently, requesting more stringent voter identification. We explain why poll workers are different from other street-level bureaucrats and how traditional mechanisms of control have little impact on limiting poll-worker discretion. We test why many poll workers appear not to follow the law using a post-election survey of New Mexico poll workers. We find little evidence that race, training, or partisanship matters. Instead, poll worker attitudes toward photo-identification policies and their educational attainment influences implementation of voter-identification laws.


INTRODUCTION
Pharmacological and dietary measurements, as well as life style, to control risk factors are efficient procedures to prevent cerebrovascular diseases, though their implementation in the clinics seems not optimal.

AIM
To identify the fulfillment of preventive measurements on a sample of 6197 hospitalized stroke patients, attended by neurologists.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
Analysis of a secondary objective of the EPICES registry. Primary prevention was considered in patients without previous record of transitory ischemic attack, stroke, coronary diseases and/or peripheral arterial disease (n = 3977); secondary prevention was considered in patients with record of coronary and/or peripheral arterial disease, but without record of cerebrovascular disease (n = 1047); neurological secondary prevention was considered in patients with a record of transitory ischemic attack and/or stroke, independently of the presence of coronary and/or peripheral arterial disease (n = 1173).

RESULTS
Secondary prevention and neurological secondary prevention were more efficient than primary prevention (p = 0.028 and p < 0.0001, respectively). Control was higher in centers with some type of structure to assist stroke patients (p < 0.0001). Influence of age in the taking of therapeutic decisions followed a similar pattern in all three types of prevention, with a significant reduction on anticoagulation for patients older than 80 years.

CONCLUSION
The EPICES registry confirms the poor control of risk factors for cerebrovascular diseases. Globally it demonstrated that the objectives that imply the modification of lifestyle are fulfilled worse than pharmacological preventive measurements.


One of authors developed PM vernier motor which has high torque at very slow speed so that it can be used for socalled direct drive systems, and its construction, principle and control scheme were already presented. However, a rotary encoder having high resolution for detecting the rotor position was required in the control scheme, which is very expensive. So the authors developed a variable reluctance type N-speed synchro having large number for N, which is inexpensive because of its very simple construction. It consists of stator and rotor cores punched slots. However, nothing is put into the rotor slots, because both exciting and output windings are put into the stator slots.In the present paper, detailed explanation of construction and principle of the VR synchro is given at first and it is shown by the experimental result that three phase sinusoidal voltages of 32 cycle per revolution can be obtained. Then, it is described that demodulated output voltages of the VR N-speed synchro can be directly used for current phase commands of the PM vernier motor, which makes the control scheme very simple and inexpensive. The measured speed response characteristics for the four-quadrant drive showed very good performance.


It has recently been demonstrated that activity of the essential JIL-1 histone H3S10 kinase is a major regulator of chromatin structure and that it functions to maintain euchromatic domains while counteracting heterochromatization and gene silencing. In the absence of JIL-1 kinase activity, the major heterochromatin markers histone H3K9me2 and HP1 spread in tandem to ectopic locations on the chromosome arms. In this study, we show that the lethality as well as some of the chromosome morphology defects associated with the null JIL-1 phenotype to a large degree can be rescued by reducing the dose of the Su(var)3-9 gene. This effect was observed with three different alleles of Su(var)3-9, strongly suggesting it is specific to Su(var)3-9 and not to second site modifiers. This is in contrast to similar experiments performed with alleles of the Su(var)2-5 gene that codes for HP1 in Drosophila where no genetic interactions were detectable between JIL-1 and Su(var)2-5. Taken together, these findings indicate that while Su(var)3-9 histone methyltransferase activity is a major factor in the lethality and chromatin structure perturbations associated with loss of the JIL-1 histone H3S10 kinase, these effects are likely to be uncoupled from HP1.


This paper investigates how changes in trade linkages between China, Latin America, and the rest of the world have altered the transmission of international business cycles to Latin America. Evidence based on a GVAR model for five large Latin American economies shows that the long-term impact of a China GDP shock on the typical Latin American economy has increased by three times since the mid-1990s, while the long-term impact of a US GDP shock has halved, while the transmission of shocks to Latin America and the rest of emerging Asia GDP (excluding China and India) has not changed. These changes owe more changes in China's impact on Latin America's traditional and largest trading partners than to increased direct bilateral trade linkages boosted by the decade-long commodity price boom. These findings have important implications for both Latin America and the international business cycle.


This thesis looks into the development as well as changes of functions, activities and required qualifications in Call Centern as a segment of modern service economy.
With the help of an analytical frame is the range of variation represented and the company changes of Call Center in six selected economic sectors caught.
Modern services – often named as E-Business – form the overall framework, which comprises Call Center-concepts as part of new service conzepts. In this one can realize a connection with market environments and new services. More over it shows the possible causes of strategy in E-Business as well as the directions of development. Using the example of the region Duisburg this thesis shows the forms and shares of new occupation that will continue to exist in the processes of convergence from Call Center to E-Business.


The EU FP7 FET-Open project "Harvest4D: Harvesting Dynamic 3D Worlds from Commodity Sensor Clouds" deals with the acquisition, processing, and display of dynamic 3D data. Technological progress is offering us a wide-spread availability of sensing devices that deliver different data streams, which can be easily deployed in the real world and produce streams of sampled data with increased density and easier iteration of the sampling process. These data need to be processed and displayed in a new way. The Harvest4D project proposes a radical change in acquisition and processing technology: instead of a goal-driven acquisition that determines the devices and sensors, its methods let the sensors and resulting available data determine the acquisition process. A variety of challenging problems need to be solved: huge data amounts, different modalities, varying scales, dynamic, noisy and colorful data. This short contribution presents a selection of the many scientific results produced by Harvest4D. We will focus on those results that could bring a major impact to the Cultural Heritage domain, namely facilitating the acquisition of the sampled data or providing advanced visual analysis capabilities.


Context. According to a generally accepted paradigm, small intrinsic sizes of Compact Steep Spectrum (CSS) radio sources are a direct consequence of their youth, but in later stages of their evolution they are believed to become large-scale sources. However, this notion was established mainly for strong CSS sources. Aims. In this series of papers we test this paradigm on 60 weaker objects selected from the VLA FIRST survey. They have 5-GHz flux densities in the range 150 < S 5 GHz < 550 mJy and steep spectra in the range 0.365 ≤ ν ≤ 5 GHz. The present paper is focused on sources that fulfill the above criteria and have angular sizes in the range ∼0. �� 2–1 �� . Methods. Observations of 19 such sources were obtained using MERLIN in "snapshot" mode at 5 GHz. They are presented along with 1.7-GHz VLBA and 5-GHz EVN follow-up snapshot observations made for the majority of them. For one of the sources in this subsample, 1123+340, a full-track 5-GHz EVN observation was also carried out. Results. This study provides an important element to the standard theory of CSS sources, namely that in a number of them the activity of their host galaxies probably switched off quite recently and their further growth has been stopped because of that. In the case of 1123+340, the relic of a compact "dead source" is particularly well preserved by the presence of intracluster medium of the putative cluster of galaxies surrounding it. Conclusions. The observed overabundance of compact sources can readily be explained in the framework of the scenario of "premature" cessation of the activity of the host galaxy nucleus. It could also explain the relatively low radio flux densities of many such sources and, in a few cases, their peculiar, asymmetric morphologies. We propose a new interpretation of such asymmetries based on the light-travel time argument.


This dissertation collects three essays on the hedonic modelling of housing prices, location attributes and environmental amenities – or lack thereof. The first essay applies spatial econometric techniques to measure the impact of airport noise on the price of single-family homes in the Zurich Airport area. We exploit a large database of geo-referenced noise measurements to investigate the reaction of house prices to different noise metrics. The particular institutional setting of Zurich Airport, with a changing pattern of runway configurations allows to distinguish the impact of noise at different times of the day. The use of neighborhood fixed-effects is compared to the results given by a costlier modelling strategy involving a rich set of location descriptors. We document the impact of airport noise on housing prices. In the base model specification, the Noise Discount Index, i.e. the percentage depreciation per dB of aircraft noise, is 0:97%. Typical discounts are in the range of –2% to –8%. The results are similar to comparable Swiss and international studies on the impact of aircraft noise on residential property prices. From a methodological point of view, we show that accounting for the spatiality of the data has little effect on the results. In the second essay we estimate the willingness to pay for housing attributes of single-family home owners located in the greater Zurich area. A revealed-preferences approach is used, in which a structural hedonic model is identified and estimated. Our approach explicitly accounts for the heterogeneity of preferences of the owner-occupiers. Again, we use the GIS to match the data describing the housing characteristics and the attributes of the location to the socioeconomic traits of the owners. We perform a nonparametric estimation of the hedonic model that allows us to recover the preference parameters. We measure the impact of income differences on the willingness to pay for five major characteristics, i.e. travel time to the city center, size and age of the housing unit, lot size and proximity to a major environmental amenity, the Lake of Zurich. We show that the willingness to pay for the environmental amenity and for centrality is highly income elastic, while the demand for the lot size and for the house surface is not. We put the model in the context of the new urban economic literature which studies the importance of amenities for the location decision of households in cities. In the last part of the dissertation, we touch on another typical urban economics topic – the elasticity of substitution between capital and land. This concept is key in understanding some important phenomena like urban sprawl or urban density. Combining two new rich data sets on disaggregated land and house transactions, we propose one of the first estimates of this elasticity for a non-U.S. metropolitan region. For the region of Zurich we find an elasticity of substitution of 0:6 and an own-price elasticity of the demand for land of –0.5. These relatively low estimates imply that a policy aiming at restricting the supply of open spaces and limiting the availability of unimproved land may have a large impact on house prices. JEL-Classification: Q53, Q51, R31, L93, C21


ABSTRACT Recent studies suggest that new parties display new patterns of digital mobilization. We shed light on this debate: do new party supporters engage in online political activities to a greater extent during electoral campaigns? Do they share political images or quotes on social media, participate in political forums, or exchange political messages with their friends more often than supporters of traditional parties? No. Drawing on a post-electoral survey dataset in Spain, we find that offline extra-institutional political activities are key predictors of the level of online political engagement. Even in the context of a polarized electoral campaign and the emergence of new electoral forces such as Podemos, extra-institutional political participation drives digital activism to the detriment of institutional variables, such as turnout or partisan preferences. Thus, all parties depend on extra-institutional activists to boost their online campaigns. Since grassroots activists increasingly influence the communicative strategy of all political parties, we interpret this process within a long-term digital-based post-material transformation of the political culture, with major implications for partisan organization, mobilization, and polarization in many democracies. We contend that the overrepresentation of grassroots activists in producing and disseminating political content in social media may have favored an increase of the visibility and public support of political outsiders in several countries.


Across much of North America, the contact between Precambrian basement and Paleozoic strata is the Great Unconformity, a surface that represents a >0.4 b.y.-long hiatus. A digital elevation model (DEM) of this surface visually highlights regional-scale variability in the character of basement topography across the United States cratonic platform. Specifically, it delineates Phanerozoic tectonic domains, each characterized by a distinct structural wavelength (horizontal distance between adjacent highs) and/or structural amplitude (vertical distance between adjacent lows and highs). The largest domain, the Midcontinent domain, includes long-wavelength epeirogenic basins and domes, as well as fault-controlled steps. The pronounced change in land-surface elevation at the Rocky Mountain Front coincides with the western edge of the Midcontinent domain on the basement DEM. In the Rocky Mountain and Colorado Plateau domains, west of the Rocky Mountain Front, structural wavelength is significantly shorter and structural amplitude significantly higher than in the Midcontinent domain. The Bordering Basins domain outlines the southern and eastern edges of the Midcontinent domain. As emphasized by the basement DEM, several kilometers of structural relief occur across the boundary between these two domains, even though this boundary does not stand out on ground-surface topography. A plot of epicenters on the basement DEM supports models associating intraplate seismicity with the Midcontinent domain edge. Notably, certain changes in crustal thickness also coincide with distinct changes in basement depth.


This is a working paper on the use of gamification in law firms. This is based on my research during my fellowship at Stanford Law School. The paper examines the science behind the concept and references case studies from companies and organizations that have successfully used gamification and games. The author reviews a handful of law firms that are using gamification and provides the basics for setting up a team to implement a gamification project in a law firm. This research might be of interest to law firm CTOs, CIOs, Human Resources Directors, and other knowledge management and innovation leaders within a law firm.Gamification may be used by law firms for the following purposes: 1.Increased associate retention rates, 2. Efficient and effective training of new technologies and processes, including methods to improve associate recording of billable hours, 3.Human resources productivity, such as on-boarding new associates, training new hires, collecting associate reviews, etc., 4.Increased communication between members of the firm, 5.Encourage inter-generational mentorship, activities, 7.Desired use of firm resources, such as training and education, and 8.Encouragement for individual law firm members to innovate for the benefit of the firm.


Research in the natural sciences has tended to uncritically focus on providing technoscientific solutions to the problem of global food security, often in the form of genetically modified seeds. Yet the intended recipients of these seeds, often lower-caste women, have in some cases been vehement in their rejection of these solutions. Qualitative participatory approaches informed by feminist principles, as applied in this case study in Andhra Pradesh, India, can elucidate both the reasons for this rejection, and help to chart a more appropriate epistemological orientation for developing solutions based in community members' lives and needs. Such an approach can in turn give rise to new research questions and orientations to be taken up by technoscientific researchers wishing to approach collaborative solutions to global food security.


Soil maps are essential resources to soil scientists and researchers in any fields related to soils, land use, species conservation, hunger reduction, social development, etc. However, creating detailed soil maps is an expensive and time consuming task that most developing nations cannot afford. In recent years, there has been a significant shift towards digital representation of soil maps and environmental variables that has created the field of predictive soil mapping (PSM), where statistical analysis is used to create predictive models of soil properties. PSM requires less human intervention than traditional soil mapping techniques, and relies more on computers to create models and predict properties. However, because most of the research funds for soil research come from developed nations, the research in this field has mostly focused in temperate zones (where most developed nations are located). The areas of the world with more needs in terms of hunger and poverty are mostly located in the tropics, and require different statistical models because of the unique characteristics of their weather and environment. Through to the v-unit/TechBridgeWorld initiative at Carnegie Mellon we were able to work with a group of soil scientists from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and develop statistical soil models for Honduras. Thanks to this joint work, we were able to leverage the knowledge of the soil science and computer science communities, and create a model that matches or advances the state of the art for PSM.


Music Education in Your Hands is a textbook for the introductory course in Music Education. Written for future classroom music teachers, the book provides and overview of the music education system. Illuminating the many topics that music educators need to know, including technology, teaching methods, curricular evolution, legislation, and a range of societal needs from cultural diversity to evolving tastes in music. It encompasses a broad picture of the profession, and how the future of music education rests in the hands of today�s student teachers as they learn how to become advocates for music in our schools.


This paper presents a drowsiness detection for drivers. The drowsiness is detected by monitoring the eye state (open or close). Firstly, human face detection is performed using the Haar cascade method. Within the facial region, we can approximately determine the eye regions, further restricting the region of interest (ROI). We then locate a dark circular object using two vectors: one is distance vectors and the other gradient vectors. The cross-correlation between these two vectors should be maximized at the center of a dark circle. Experimental results show that the proposed method works well in both bright and dark conditions. The computation speed of the proposed method is fast enough to perform at a video rate.