Market-based measures of inflation expectations can be derived either from the difference between yields on nominal and inflation-linked government bonds or from inflation swap rates. These measures are important indicators of the outlook for inflation and are monitored regularly by the United Kingdom's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), alongside other measures of inflation expectations such as those based on surveys. However, the market rates we observe are not perfect measures of expected future inflation. Moreover, in the United Kingdom inflation-linked market instruments reference RPI inflation, whereas the MPC's target is CPI inflation of 2%. To better extract useful information about expectations for CPI inflation, we develop a no-arbitrage term structure model to decompose the forward inflation curve into: measures of CPI inflation expectations; the expected spread between expected RPI and CPI inflation (the RPI/CPI inflation 'wedge'); and estimates of risk premia. We then further decompose risk premia estimates into inflation risk premia and liquidity risk premia. We show that long-horizon expectations of CPI inflation, as implied by our model, fell in the 1990s after the introduction of inflation targeting and the creation of the MPC and have since remained fairly stable at around 2%. Our model also suggests that the large falls in measures of implied inflation based on index-linked gilts after the financial crisis were to a large extent the result of changes in liquidity premia in inflation-linked gilt prices.


If all goes according to plan, in a few months time I will be sitting in a brand new stadium, with 50 000 of my closest friends, making as much noise as possible to cheer Bafana Bafana on to victory in the Soccer World Cup final. Indeed some less patriotic sceptics would suggest that noise is Bafana Bafana's only chance of making the finals because, hopefully, all the other teams will be too busy complaining about the overwhelming blare of the vuvuzelas to focus on playing soccer.


An experiment was conducted to determine if dietary inclusion of distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS), soybean hulls, or soybean hulls sprayed with an egg-based, polyclonal antibody product would reduce the incidence or severity of infection, or both, in growing pigs after a Lawsonia intracellularis challenge. One hundred 17-d-old weaned pigs were blocked by sex, ancestry, and BW, and randomly allotted to 1 of 5 treatment groups: negative control, unchallenged, corn-soy diet; positive control, challenged, corn-soy diet; 20% DDGS diet (D), challenged; 5% soybean hulls diet (SH), challenged; and SH sprayed with a polyclonal antibody product diet, challenged. Challenged pigs were orally inoculated with 6.4 x 10(8) L. intracellularis organisms after a 4-wk prechallenge feeding period. On d 21 postchallenge, pigs were euthanized, lesions of intestinal mucosa were evaluated, and ileal tissue samples were analyzed by immunohistochemistry to determine the presence and proliferation rate of L. intracellularis. Challenging pigs with L. intracellularis reduced growth rate, feed intake, and efficiency of gain (P < 0.02) and increased the proportion of internal organ weights relative to BW (P < 0.01). Dietary treatment did not affect growth performance pre- or postchallenge (P > 0.10). Heart, empty stomach, and liver weights were similar among dietary treatments (P > 0.10). Weight of the large intestine as a percentage of BW was increased in D and SH pigs compared with positive control pigs (P < 0.05). Lesion length, prevalence, and severity, and fecal shedding of L. intracellularis were primarily unaffected by dietary treatment (P > 0.10), although ileal lesion length and severity observed tended to be greater in the SH sprayed with polyclonal antibody product diet vs. the D pigs (P < 0.10). Results from a previous study indicated that diet composition may affect length, severity, and prevalence of lesions caused by L. intracellularis in growing pigs subjected to a moderate challenge. However, beneficial results were not observed by feeding the dietary treatments used in this study.


Using two unusual surveys, this study analyzes participation in the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, comparing participants with revolution supporters, opponents, counter-revolutionaries, and the apathetic/inactive. As the analysis shows, most revolutionaries were weakly committed to the revolution's democratic master narrative, and the revolution's spectacular mobilizational success was largely due to its mobilization of cultural cleavages and symbolic capital to construct a negative coalition across diverse policy groupings. A contrast is drawn between urban civic revolutions like the Orange Revolution and protracted peasant revolutions. The strategies associated with these revolutionary models affect the roles of revolutionary organization and selective incentives and the character of revolutionary coalitions. As the comparison suggests, postrevolutionary instability may be built into urban civic revolutions due to their reliance on a rapidly convened negative coalition of hundreds of thousands, distinguished by fractured elites, lack of consensus over fundamental policy issues, and weak commitment to democratic ends.


With its widespread use across the country and increasing evidence of its effectiveness, the wraparound process has been accepted widely as a feasible alternative to restrictive residential treatments for children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders. Yet wraparound has been implemented and conceptualized in such a variety of ways that many have begun to question whether it truly is a single definable approach. Recently, a conceptual model for wraparound was offered that included ten essential elements as the key ingredients for this approach. Subsequently, the Wraparound Fidelity Index (WFI) was designed to measure the degree to which an intervention adheres to these ten elements. The purpose of the current study was to use data collected via the WFI to provide the first empirical test of wraparound's conceptual model. Programs providing wraparound to children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders and their families used the WFI to collect data from caregivers (n = 481), youths (n = 355; 11 to 19 years), and resource facilitators (n = 610). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test the fit of a series of structural models consistent with the proposed element model of wraparound. First, CFA models were examined separately for each of the elements. Second, CFA models that represent the full wraparound model were tested, separately for each of the three informants. And third, a multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analysis was conducted using a final CFA model including all elements (traits) and the three informants (methods). Findings supported the majority of elements and WFI items when tested separately at the first step. However, at the second step, only the youth model provided adequate fit to the data. Significant modification was necessary to yield admissible solutions for the caregiver and resource facilitator models. Finally, an inadmissible solution resulted when the three informants and revised model were tested in step three. Implications of the findings for the wraparound process, the WFI, and future research are discussed.


This paper highlights and critically analyses age and generation-related issues and their intersections with other social divisions in working life, and their importance for how work, careers, organisations and related work innovations are constructed. We draw mainly on qualitative data from nine case organisations in Finland and focus on the following questions: 1) What aspects of age and generational relations are articulated in the case organisations studied?; 2) How do age and age-generations intersect with other social divisions in workplaces? We work from the data in forming and recognising thematic groupings, and identify five main forms of discursive talk about age and generation: physical restrictions; retirement issues; age diversity as a strength; lack of a particular age group; along with silence on age or age as a non-issue. As such, the dynamics and intersections about and around age and generation in organisations are complex, multi-dimensional, and often contradictory and ambiguous. Building on an online survey (n = 122) and through interviews (n = 53) and qualitative fieldwork in nine organisations, we contribute to empirical, policy, intersectional, and theoretical areas and debates on age, generations and intersectionality at work, organisations and work innovation.


Background Deep-vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, collectively known as venous thromboembolism when clots are formed in the venous circulation, are common disorders that are often unprovoked (i.e. there is no obvious reason for the clot occurring). Some people, after having an unprovoked clot, are at a high risk of developing another, or at risk of developing a secondary clot, most importantly in the lungs. Furthermore, in the long term, some patients will develop circulation problems known as post-thrombotic syndrome. The aim of this programme was to improve the understanding of both the prevention and the treatment of thrombosis in people at the highest risk of recurrence. Objectives To clarify if it is possible to identify those people at the highest risk of having a recurrent venous thromboembolism, and if it is possible to prevent this happening by giving anticoagulation treatment for longer. To clarify if it is possible to identify those people at the highest risk of developing post-thrombotic syndrome. To document the current knowledge level about prevention and treatment of venous thromboembolism. To find what the barriers are to implementing measures to prevent venous thromboembolism. To find the most cost-effective means of treating venous thromboembolism. Design Mixed methods, comprising a randomised controlled trial, qualitative studies, cost-effectiveness analyses and questionnaire studies, including patient preferences. Setting UK general practices and hospitals, predominantly from the Midlands and Shropshire. Participants Adults attending participating anticoagulation clinics with a diagnosis of first unprovoked deep-vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism, and health-care professionals, patients and other stakeholders who were involved in the prevention and treatment of venous thromboembolism. Intervention Extended treatment with oral anticoagulation therapy (2 years) versus standard care (treatment with oral anticoagulation therapy for at least 3 months). Results Work package 1 demonstrated that extended anticoagulation for up to 2 years was clinically effective and cost-effective in reducing the incidence of recurrent venous thromboembolism, with a small increase in the risk of bleeding. There was no difference in post-thrombotic syndrome incidence or severity, or quality of life, between those undergoing the extended treatment and those receiving the standard care. Work package 2 identified five common themes with regard to the prevention of hospital-acquired thrombosis: communication, knowledge, role of primary care, education and training, and barriers to patient adherence. Work package 3 suggested that extended anticoagulation with novel oral anticoagulants was cost-effective only at the £20,000-per-quality-adjusted life-year level for a recurrence rate of between 17.5% and 22.5%, depending on drug acquisition costs, while identifying a strong patient preference for extended anticoagulation based on a fear of recurrent venous thromboembolism. Limitations The major limitation was the failure to reach the planned recruitment target for work package 1. Conclusions Extended anticoagulation with warfarin for a first unprovoked venous thromboembolism is clinically effective and cost-effective and is strongly preferred by patients to the alternative of not having treatment. There are significant barriers to the implementation of preventative measures for hospital-acquired thrombosis. Further research is required on identifying patients in whom it is safe to discontinue anticoagulation, and at what time point following a first unprovoked venous thromboembolism this should be done. Trial registration Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN73819751 and EudraCT 2101-022119-20. Funding This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Programme Grants for Applied Research programme and will be published in full in Programme Grants for Applied Research; Vol. 8, No. 5. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.


The need for accurate calculational tools for the determination of gamma heating in fast reactors has increased considerably in recent years following the planned modification of certain existing fast breeders into plutonium-burning configurations. The latter are characterized by a steel/sodium reflector (replacing the fertile blanket) and a large number of core diluting sodium/steel sub-assemblies, i.e. regions in which gammas account for about 90 % of total heating. In the current doctoral research, a new calculational scheme for the accurate determination of gamma heating in fast reactors has been implemented and its validation for Pu-burning configurations accomplished through comparisons with integral measurements in representative critical assemblies. The particularity of the new calculational methodology is that gamma production multiplicities for fission, capture and inelastic scattering are folded with the corresponding effective (self-shielded) neutron cross-sections and then summed up to yield the total gamma production matrices. This allows one to take advantage of the latest improvements in computing effective cross-sections at the cell level, in particular the consideration of spatially varying cross-sections in non-fuel regions such as reflectors. The new methodology requires gamma production multiplicities separately for fission, capture and inelastic scattering, and accordingly a special library containing these nuclear data was generated from the latest and most appropriate data evaluations, mainly JEF2.2 and ENDF/B-VI. Furthermore, the delayed emission through disintegration of fission and activation products was explicitly considered. In the course of creating the gamma production library, a careful check could be made on the quality of the basic data available. It was found that a major shortcoming in this context is the large uncertainty (  8 %) on the gamma production in fission, since total gamma fission emission values given by various authors differ significantly. The validation of the currently developed calculational tool was accomplished through comparisons with new gamma-heating measurements conducted in the framework of the CIRANO experimental programme at the MASURCA facility, as well as with reevaluated earlier measurements by Calamand et al. in the BALZAC1-DE1 configuration of the same facility. The latter had a steel/sodium (diluent) zone at the center of the core region. In the current CIRANO measurements, absolute gamma-heating rates were determined in PuO2/UO2 fueled cores surrounded by a steel/sodium reflector using TLD-700 thermoluminescent dosimeters. Thereby, a considerable effort was undertaken to minimize systematic errors in the measurements and to reduce the statistical uncertainty, in order to ensure a total experimental error smaller than the target accuracy for the gamma-heating calculations. To achieve this goal, a highly reproducible measuring procedure was established (statistical error < 2 %), individual TLD calibration was carried out in a consistent way with respect to the reactor measurements and the various correction factors (determined using the latest calculational methods and data) were investigated in detail. The correction most in doubt, viz. the cavity relation, was derived by applying both Burlin cavity theory and MCNP coupled photon-electron calculations, with TLD irradiations in various surroundings providing a check on the latter. The total experimental error (1 σ) on the TLD measurements has been estimated to be less than 6 %. The calculation/experiment (C/E) values determined from the analysis of the critical experiments are 0.90 for the PuO2/UO2 core region, 0.84 for the steel/sodium reflector and 0.89 for the steel/sodium diluent zone. The most plausible causes for the observed differences have been identified to be data related, viz. too low fission gamma energies and too low capture cross-sections for the structural elements. Thereby, the data for Pu239 and Fe56 are the most suspect, since the former nuclide is the dominant contributor to the gamma production in the core while the latter is that for the reflector and diluent regions. The transferability of the current validation findings to the SUPER-PHENIX power plant (in its planned modified form as Pu-burner) and the 1500 MWe CAPRA 4/94 reference design has been demonstrated by comparing the experimental configurations with the full-scale power reactors in a quantitative manner with respect to gamma-heating characteristics. With the transferability established, a set of correction factors (fpower=E/C) can be defined for application to calculational results. This enables the prediction of gamma heating in the various regions of the considered power reactors to within the current target accuracy of 7.5 %.


Objectives: Increasingly people are using the internet to find information about medical and educational issues and one of the simplest ways to obtain information is internet. Persian Cued Speech is a very new system to Iranian families with deaf child and the professionals and a few educators have enough knowledge about it, so the purpose of this study was to introduce Persian Cued Speech website to deaf educators and rehabilitation professionals and assess their views about the website and their accessibility to important information through its use. Method: The sample group was randomly selected from deaf educators and rehabilitation professionals working in different educational settings for deaf children in Tehran, our capital .They completed a questionnaire which was adopted from different website assessing questionnaires. Researchers also completed an interview with the sample group. Results: Our findings show that from the deaf educators and rehabilitation professionals point of view,the Persian Cued Speech website was a helpful and informing website . They also wanted more pictures and videos,bigger font sizes and more practical parts.So we decide to change some parts of the website to be more usable for them. Conclusion: Using informational websites can be a very helpful tool in the internet area. Helpful websites are those which are more accessible, readable and appropriately designed and are user-friendly.


The notion of "error" and "error rates" is central both to the Daubert opinion and to the recent National Academy of Sciences Report on the strengths and weaknesses of forensic science in the United States. As might be expected, the NAS Report does a better job of explaining the kinds of error it is concerned with than did the opinion in Daubert. However, to a greater or lesser degree, both fall short of a full consideration of the applicable concept of error, and so doing, they invite confusion about how inaccurate results in forensic science and criminal adjudication may occur, and who if anyone is to blame. This paper examines the notion of error as it might apply in these settings, with due regard to both the philosophical and scientific literature. It concludes that competing notions of normative and objective error have led to unnecessary miscommunication between practitioners of forensic disciplines and their critics, which has resulted in many forensic practitioners feeling unfairly criticized. This in turn has led some in the forensic science community, perhaps understandably, to resist changes in forensic practice that are necessary for the reduction of error in all its forms.


Part 3
On November 29 2013, the Constitutional Court (CC) delivered a landmark judgement in AllPay Consolidated Investment Holdings (Pty) Ltd and Others v Chief Executive Officer, South African Social Security Agency and Others 2014 (1) SA 604 (CC) (AllPay 1). In this case, the CC declared that the award of a tender to Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) to provide services for the payment of social grants over a period of five years for all nine provinces, was constitutionally invalid. The CC suspended the declaration of invalidity pending the determination of a just and equitable remedy. The CC ordered parties to furnish it with up-to-date factual information on affidavit before a further hearing was held, for the purposes of determining the appropriate remedy. The CC handed down a further judgement on April 17 2014 (AllPay 2), which set out the remedy. This article is the third article in a three-part series of articles which considers the implications of the AllPay judgement on government procurement contracts.


When discussing powering wireless sensor net- work nodes, there are a few major energy consumers: com- munications, microcontroller and the sensor. We propose a wireless sensor network platform architecture minimizing the energy consumption of sensing. The architecture proposed herein is based on a reactive approach to sensing. A number of possible hardware approaches are evaluated and compared. This comparison indicates that analog storage between the sensing element and the sensor electronics can be a feasible method for reducing the energy consumption of the system.


Problem-solving courts appear to achieve outcomes that are not common in mainstream courts. There are increasing calls for the adoption of more therapeutic and problem-solving practices by mainstream judges in civil and criminal courts in a number of jurisdictions, most notably in the United States and Australia. Currently, a judge who sets out to exercise a significant therapeutic function is likely to be doing so in a specialist court or jurisdiction, outside the mainstream court system, and arguably, outside the adversarial paradigm itself. To some extent, this work is tolerated but marginalised.However, do therapeutic and problem-solving functions have the potential to help define, rather than simply complement, the role of judicial officers? The core question addressed in this thesis is whether the judicial role could evolve to be not just less adversarial, but fundamentally non-adversarial. In other words, could we see — or are we seeing — a juristic paradigm shift not just in the colloquial, casual sense of the word, but in the strong, worldview changing sense meant by Thomas Kuhn?This thesis examines the current relationship between adversarialism and therapeutic jurisprudence in the context of Kuhn's conception of the transition from periods of 'normal science', through periods of anomaly and disciplinary crises to paradigm shifts. It considers whether therapeutic jurisprudence and adversarialism are incommensurable in the Kuhnian sense, and if so, what this means for the relationship between the two, and for the agenda to mainstream therapeutic jurisprudence.The thesis asserts that Kuhnian incommensurability is, in fact, a characteristic of the relationship between adversarialism and therapeutic jurisprudence, but that the possibility of a therapeutic paradigm shift in law can be reconciled with many adversarial and due process principles by relating this incommensurability to a broader disciplinary matrix.


The traditional approach to learning is to define the objectives (the gap between the knowledge a person has and the knowledge the person needs to perform the task), establish the regimen for practice, and provide feedback. Learning procedures and factual data is seen as adding more information and skills to the person's storehouse of knowledge. However, this storehouse metaphor is poorly suited for cognitive skill, and does not address the differing learning needs of novices and experts. Teaching cognitive skills requires the diagnosis of the problem in terms of flaws in existing mental models, not gaps in knowledge. It requires learning objectives that are linked to the person's current mental models. It requires practice regimens that may have to result in "unlearning" that enables the person to abandon the current, flawed mental models. It requires feedback that promotes sensemaking. We propose a Cognitive Transformation Theory to guide the development of cognitive skills. Finally, we present several strategies that might be useful in overcoming barriers to understanding and to revising mental models.


Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writings since the 1980s, by Janet Burstein. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 264 pp. $45.00. By now Irving Howe's dire prediction of the death of Jewish literature has undergone its own death. The outpouring of Jewish fiction in recent years has unquestionably proven Howe wrong. Janet Butstein's insightful and engaging new book, Telling the Little Secrets: American Jewish Writing since the 1980s, is yet another important undertaking in debunking Howe's premature epitaph for Jewish American fiction. Remarking on the proliferation of literature by American Jews throughout the past three decades, Burstein contextualizes this literary explosion as part of a more recent Jewish American impulse to reconnect with the Jewish legacy of exile and trauma. Identifying the manner in which contemporary culture responds to its losses, "reconstructs memory of the Jewish past. . . and moves on" is central to Burstein's project, and launches her exploration of what she calls the "new wave" of Jewish American writing and reconnecting with the past "without hope of reviving it" (pp. xiii, 6, 13). The term "new wave," however, which Burstein applies to Jewish American literature after 1980, unfairly ignores the nuanced differences of the past three decades of Jewish American writing - subtleties that have prompted some to break a century of Jewish American writing into four segments: immigrant, assimilationist, writing that returns to Jewish ritual and loss, and more recently writing that explores the experiences of new Jewish immigrants to America. While Burstein notes that the term was first used in 1995 by Andrew Furman and in 1997 by Morris Dickstein and Thane Rosenbaum in Tikkun to describe the work generated by Jewish American writers of the eighties and nineties, she seems to ignore the obvious: the "new wave" is no longer new. Much like the Jewish identity, it has "split at the root," to use Adrienne Rich's phrase, maturing into a thriving subgenre that has birthed a fourth wave of Jewish American writing with Russian immigrant authors including Gary Shteyngart and Laura Vapnyar, whose work looks more like the immigrant writing of Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth, with socialist undertones in place of an urge to retrieve the remnants of Jewish ritual-all of whom Burstein leaves out with the exception of a footnote on Shtyengart. Nonetheless, Burstein's sections on Thane Rosenbaum and Aryeh Lev Stollman are exceptionally well-written and offer carefully articulated analyses of both writers' work. Important is the concept of home as "the site of our most desperate struggles-a struggle first to receive nurture and care, then to achieve independence, and finally to assume tesponsibility." She notes that for Stollman's young Alexander (The Far Euphrates, 1998), distance and separation are "essential elements of what we imagine home to be" from the womb forward (p. 108). Though critical in nature, Burstein's writing is articulate and imaginative in many instances. Vibrant imagery and provocative metaphors flourish in her writing. In her vision of new Jewish American writing second-generation "survivors" "stand closer to that center of radical destruction-like the crater left by a bomb-in which our dead, and much of the culture they created, are lost" (p. 7); Philip Roth's work exposes the "fault lines along which individual character breaks down" (p. 15); a sense of self becomes "a grave in which the past lies buried" (p. 43); what is left after atrocity are "shining lethal shards" (p. 75); and Jewish losses become a"mirrored chamber in which contemporary experience identifies its precursors" (p. 177). But despite her noteworthy flair for insightful imagery, the project feels unfinished. For such an ambitious undertaking-the subtitle is, after all, "American Jewish Writings since the 1980s"-her treatment of recent Jewish American fiction is cursory at best, a marginal treatment of a burgeoning American literary phenomenon. …


Nepalese economy is dependent on a slow performing agriculture sector with the majority of the population relying on subsistence farming. A study was conducted to access the supply chain, present marketing situation of rice subsector in Dang district during May-September 2017. For this study, rice traders were grouped into 5 categories Producers, seed suppliers, millers & traders, Wholesalers, and retailers. For the study, 105 respondents were selected which includes 75 rice producers, 5 seed suppliers, 5 millers & traders, 5 wholesalers and 15 retailers. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect data. Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS) and Excel were used for data entry and analysis. The findings of the study revealed that about 94.70% of paddy farmers used improved seeds and only 5.30% farmers used hybrid seeds belongs to grain producers for only home consumption. Cooperatives were the major source of seed supplier for 90.90% of seed producers and 45.45% of marketed surplus grain producers and 57.14% of grain producers for only home consumption retained their own seeds for cultivation. The average benefit-cost (B: C) ratio of the paddy farmers was found to be 1.14:1 in the study area. Majority of the paddy selling farmers 87.88% sold their produce from the house and remaining 12.12% sold in the market. The market margin was higher in seeds supply chain NRs 27 per Kg and least was in grains supply chain NRs 25 per Kg. Similarly, producer share was higher in seeds supply chain (50.90%) and least was in grains supply chain, 44.44 percent.
Int. J. Appl. Sci. Biotechnol. Vol 6(4): 319-326


Teaching metacognitively, which involves teaching with metacognition and teaching for metacognition, is critical for learners of any age. With enables teachers to gain awareness about and control over how they think and teach, and to monitor, evaluate, and adjust their instructional practices in accordance with specific students, goals and contexts. For enables teachers to design instruction that will develop and activate their students' metacognition, enabling them to be aware of what they know and do not know, and take action to address flaws or gaps in what they know. Our research findings, based on empirical studies conducted in a variety of educational settings, have identified effective instructional practices for teaching metacognitively. This chapter focuses on practices that support the metacognition of learners engaged in disciplinary discussions. This emphasis addresses a significant void in the research literature which more commonly targets metacognition in learning generally or applied specifically to reading and writing.


In The Stranger, a novel by Albert Camus, and in "Funes the Memorious," a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the homodiegetic narrators have a significant effect on the referential aspect of their personal experiences. Chronologically these remembered experiences are positioned before the moment when they are narrated. The act of remembering is thus a form of subsequent narration. In both texts, memory is a project rather than an object because it is recounted and not found. In the sense that it is told, memory is necessarily a creative act and thus not faultless because the story of an experience is not the experience itself. The memories in The Stranger and in "Funes the Memorious" are not reconstituted but narrated. The peculiarity of the two texts lies in the fact that the narrators take an external position when describing their own past, emphasizing the imperfect aspect of the narrators' memory. With a narratological approach to the texts and a Sartrean interpretation of memory, I study the effects of focalization on the act of remembering. By explaining the relationship between focalization, memory and the narratee, I show that the act of remembering is not a repetition of past events or experiences but rather an inventive process that occurs always in the present. I argue that external focalization is a more authentic way to tell the story of a past experience because it emphasizes the fact that memory is always in the process of being made and therefore uncertain and incomplete even to the individual remembering.


This study highlights the methodological challenges inherent in reliably capturing meaningful sets of vocabulary for instructional focus. An analysis of a 3.1 million-word corpus of introductory psychology textbooks suggests that, while comparatively large, and, thus, presumably representative of the lexical variability in the target domain, this corpus was unable to capture a stable list of "important" words. Findings highlight an important issue requiring further investigation in corpus-based vocabulary research: the extent to which corpora – and the word lists based on them – reliably represent the lexical variability of their target domains. Keywords: Corpus representativeness; lexical diversity; word list reliability


Previous studies have proposed the first‐order reliability method (FORM) as an approach to quantitative stochastic analysis of subsurface transport. Most of these considered only simple analytical models of transport in homogeneous media. Studies that looked at more‐complex, heterogeneous systems found FORM to be computationally demanding and were inconclusive as to the accuracy of the method. Here we show that FORM is poorly suited for computing point concentration cumulative distribution functions (cdfs) except in the case of a constant or monotonically increasing solute source. FORM is better equipped to predict transport in terms of the cumulative mass flux across a control surface. As a demonstration, we use FORM to estimate the cumulative mass flux cdf in two‐dimensional, random porous media. Adjoint sensitivity theory is employed to minimize the computational burden. In addition, properties of the conductivity covariance and distribution are exploited to improve efficiency. FORM required eight times less CPU time than Monte Carlo simulation to generate the results presented. The accuracy of FORM is found to be minimally affected by the size of the initial solute body and the solute travel distance. However, the accuracy is significantly influenced by the degree of heterogeneity, providing an accurate estimate of the cdf when there is mild heterogeneity (σInK = 0.5) but a less accurate estimate when there is stronger heterogeneity (σ1nK = 1.0).


Forest degradation is broadly defined as a reduction in the capacity of a forest to produce ecosystem services such as carbon storage and wood products as a result of anthropogenic and environmental changes. The main causes of degradation include unsustainable logging, agriculture, invasive species, fire, fuelwood gathering, and livestock grazing. Forest degradation is widespread and has become an important consideration in global policy processes that deal with biodiversity, climate change, and forest management. There is, however, no generally recognized way to identify a degraded forest because perceptions of forest degradation vary depending on the cause, the particular goods or services of interest, and the temporal and spatial scales considered. Here, we suggest that there are types of forest degradation that produce a continuum of decline in provision of ecosystem services, from those in primary forests through various forms of managed forests to deforestation. Forest degradation must be measured against a desired baseline condition, and the types of degradation can be represented using five criteria that relate to the drivers of degradation, loss of ecosystem services and sustainable management, including: productivity, biodiversity, unusual disturbances, protective functions, and carbon storage. These criteria are not meant to be equivalent and some might be considered more important than others, depending on the local forest management objectives. We propose a minimum subset of seven indicators for the five criteria that should be assessed to determine forest degradation under a sustainable ecosystem management regime. The indicators can be remotely sensed (although improving calibration requires ground work) and aggregated from stand to management unit or landscape levels and ultimately to sub-national and national scales.


Abstract. We present an effort to validate a previously developed radiative transfer model, and an innovative Bayesian inversion method designed to retrieve the properties of slab-ice-covered surfaces. This retrieval method is adapted to satellite data, and is able to provide uncertainties on the results of the inversions. We focused on surfaces composed of a pure slab of water ice covering an optically thick layer of snow in this study. We sought to retrieve the roughness of the ice–air interface, the thickness of the slab layer and the mean grain diameter of the underlying snow. Numerical validations have been conducted on the method, and showed that if the thickness of the slab layer is above 5 mm and the noise on the signal is above 3 %, then it is not possible to invert the grain diameter of the snow. In contrast, the roughness and the thickness of the slab can be determined, even with high levels of noise up to 20 %. Experimental validations have been conducted on spectra collected from laboratory samples of water ice on snow using a spectro-radiogoniometer. The results are in agreement with the numerical validations, and show that a grain diameter can be correctly retrieved for low slab thicknesses, but not for bigger ones, and that the roughness and thickness are correctly inverted in every case.


Objective: In this study, the short term effects of Faradarmani -an Iranian complementary and alternative medicine which is based on the theory of "Consciousness Bond of the Parts"- is examined on the frequency and severity of Asthma attacks. Method: 84 Asthma patients (lottery) with less than one year since diagnosis were randomly selected and divided into two groups of 42 (control and test). Spirometry was taken from both groups. The control group continued their conventional medicine treatment without the intervention of the research group. In addition to routine medicine treatment, the test group was put through Faradarmani treatment. Spirometry was repeated at the end of each month. Length of this research project was three months. Collected data was analyzed after twelve weeks. Results: In the third month of treatment, total number of severe and medium cases had reached 4.8% (1.8-11.3) in test group and 11.9% (1.8-21.9) in control group. (21.3% decline in test, 14.3% decline in control group). The coefficient of decrease in the test group is 1.49. Decline of application of spray in the test group was 3.2 (2.18-4.19) times. Conclusion: Faradarmani had a considerable affect on the decline of the severity and frequency of Asthma attacks on patients.


The study assessed nature, causes of and responses to crimes across residential densities in Abeokuta North Local Government Area of Ogun State, Nigeria with a view to determining the impacts of vacant land on crime occurrence in the area. Random sampling was employed in hierarchical selection of 250 households across spatial levels with ratio 3:2:1 in high, medium and low residential densities respectively. Chi-Square was used to examine the difference between some vacant land's features and neighbourrhoods' susceptibility to victimization. Findings revealed that a parcel of vacant land was used for one or more criminal activities like illegal refuse dumping, rape, robbery, use of hard drugs, and hideouts for miscreants. Illegal dumping of refuse was most prevalent at aggregated level but was mostly concentrated in medium residential density. The major causes of crimes on vacant lands included bushy state of vacant lands, absence of precautionary measures and streetlight to illuminate areas in the night.  Insecure feelings of being the next victim were the main effect of crime. The use of warning signs, community surveillance, fencing and police patrol among others were identified as means of checking crimes perpetrated on vacant lands. Burglar proof was indicated by 48.4% of respondents to be mostly adopted security measure at homes, while Closed Circuit Television was the least adopted. There were significant differences between the 'size of vacant lands'; 'distance of vacant lands from homes' and households' susceptibility to criminal victimization' in the area. The study concluded that crime perpetrated on vacant lands in the study area varied spatially and had strong negative impacts on residents.


The rise of Web 2.0 has pushed the amateur to the forefront of public discourse, public policy and media scholarship. Typically non-salaried, non-specialist and untrained in media production, amateur producers are now seen as key drivers of the creative economy. But how do the activities of citizen journalists, fan fiction writers and bedroom musicians connect with longer traditions of extra-institutional media production? This edited collection provides a much-needed interdisciplinary contextualisation of amateur media before and after Web 2.0. Surveying the institutional, economic and legal construction of the amateur media producer via a series of case studies, it features contributions from experts in the fields of law, economics and media studies based in the UK, Europe and Singapore. Each section of the book contains a detailed case study on a selected topic, followed by two further pieces providing additional analysis and commentary. Using an extraordinary array of case studies and examples, from YouTube to online games, from subtitling communities to reality TV, the book is neither a celebration of amateur production nor a denunciation of the demise of professional media industries. Rather, this book presents a critical dialogue across law and the humanities, exploring the dynamic tensions and interdependencies between amateur and professional creative production. This book will appeal to both academics and students of intellectual property and media law, as well as to scholars and students of economics, media, cultural and internet studies.


This paper proposes the formalization and implementation of a novel class of constraints aimed at modeling problems related to placement of multi-body systems in the 3-dimensional space. Each multi-body is a system composed of body elements, connected by joint relationships and constrained by geometric properties. The emphasis of this investigation is the use of multi-body systems to model native conformations of protein structures--where each body represents an entity of the protein (e.g., an amino acid, a small peptide) and the geometric constraints are related to the spatial properties of the composing atoms. The paper explores the use of the proposed class of constraints to support a variety of different structural analysis of proteins, such as loop modeling and structure prediction.

The declarative nature of a constraint-based encoding provides elaboration tolerance and the ability to make use of any additional knowledge in the analysis studies. The filtering capabilities of the proposed constraints also allow to control the number of representative solutions that are withdrawn from the conformational space of the protein, by means of criteria driven by uniform distribution sampling principles. In this scenario it is possible to select the desired degree of precision and/or number of solutions. The filtering component automatically excludes configurations that violate the spatial and geometric properties of the composing multi-body system. The paper illustrates the implementation of a constraint solver based on the multi-body perspective and its empirical evaluation on protein structure analysis problems.


The Association for Information Systems (AIS) is the preeminent global professional association for academics in the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Throughout its more than 20-year history, AIS governance documents have included no guidance on matters related to national or international politics. However, recent events have challenged AIS to reconsider its responsibility as a political or moral advocate for its members and the discipline it serves. A panel at ECIS 2017 explored the ways in which AIS has inadvertently or intentionally entered the political fray and debated the benefits and drawbacks of taking on a more formal political position. This paper presents the positions that each panelist raised and summarizes the active discussion that followed. It concludes with a set of questions that constitute a "call to action" to the AIS council to enact a politically acceptable set of core values to benefit its members.


Wellness is a widely popular concept that is commonly applied to fitness and self-help products or services. Inference of personal wellness--related attributes, such as body mass index (BMI) category or disease tendency, as well as understanding of global dependencies between wellness attributes and users' behavior, is of crucial importance to various applications in personal and public wellness domains. At the same time, the emergence of social media platforms and wearable sensors makes it feasible to perform wellness profiling for users from multiple perspectives. However, research efforts on wellness profiling and integration of social media and sensor data are relatively sparse. This study represents one of the first attempts in this direction. Specifically, we infer personal wellness attributes by utilizing our proposed multisource multitask wellness profile learning framework—WellMTL—which can handle data incompleteness and perform wellness attributes inference from sensor and social media data simultaneously. To gain insights into the data at a global level, we also examine correlations between first-order data representations and personal wellness attributes. Our experimental results show that the integration of sensor data and multiple social media sources can substantially boost the performance of individual wellness profiling.


Aim: The purpose of this study was to investigate the pharmacokinetic properties and tissue biodistribution of naringenin nanosuspension (NAR-NS) with that of NAR solution (NAR-S) after oral administration. Materials and Methods: NAR is a major antioxidant flavonoid present in citrus fruits and herbs. It is an auspicious drug based on its good bioactivity, but the use of NAR is clinically hindered because of its poor solubility and bioavailability. Hence, it was formulated as a NS. A simple and rapid high-performance liquid chromatography method for the determination of NAR-S and NAR-NS present in plasma and tissue has been developed and validated. Biological samples were processed by simple protein precipitation. Results: NS formulation showed significantly improved solubility and oral bioavailability of NAR. Conclusion: Thus leads to a wider clinical application.


How young people perceive and respond to mental health difficulties will have implications for the health, wellbeing, shape of services and quality of life for their own and future generations. Understanding young people's views will be important in guiding the development of resources that support them in learning about and protecting their mental health.
The following pages present three papers which seek to facilitate a clearer understanding of what young people think and know about mental health difficulties. A review of the literature is presented in Paper 1 and indicates that this has been an under-researched area for many years. The existing literature presents an incomplete and varied account of the nature of young peoples' understanding of mental health difficulties. It indicates a need for further, high-quality research in this area to address these inconsistencies and consider the sources that might influence young people's perceptions.
Paper 2 details the empirical research that was undertaken in response to these gaps in the literature. Sixteen young people took part in a vignette-based qualitative study. Interview transcripts were analysed using Thematic Analysis. Three themes were identified: 'the experience of being unwell', 'empathy and stigma', and 'in search of truth', and two subthemes, 'cause and context' and 'helping and helplessness'. These themes are discussed in detail, and the clear strengths and gaps in young people's understanding are discussed. Implications for the development and delivery of mental health education initiatives are considered.
An executive summary of this research is presented in Paper 3. It includes recommendations to support schools and education providers in responding to recent developments in the UK which will ensure that every child is taught about mental health and wellbeing in school.


With 175 family businesses on the Fortune 500 list, from DuPont and Motorola to IBM, there is no doubt that family-run enterprises play an important role in global economic development. Their role is no less significant in China where, in keeping with the country's rapid economic growth, family businesses are emerging in increasing numbers. Unique characteristics, such as succession, management, staffing, family affairs, strategy planning and governance structure, set family businesses apart from other business types. As a result, they face particular challenges in survival and sustainability. In this book, three modern Chinese family businesses, including food and beverage company Yeo Hiap Seng, are studied to analyze the problems that family enterprises face. Other case studies include long-standing family businesses in Europe, America and Asia, such as Ford, Kikkoman and Samsung. This book also discusses the changing characteristics of Chinese family businesses, the pitfalls that such enterprises are likely to face, and how they can overcome these pitfalls and achieve sustainable development.


Abstract:We project the population of United States veterans between 2014 and 2024 using a cohort component population projection method that provides estimates by age, sex, race/ethnicity, service era and geographic location. We also analyzedistance of the projected veteran population to medical and health centers. Our research strategy integrates several methodological procedures, which can be applied to other subgroups of the American population in order to estimate future demographic trends at the local level. Baseline data for national projections came from the 2000 Census, which was the last census to collect information about veterans. We factored in estimates of mortality, adjusted for demographic characteristics, and added data from the U.S. Department of Defense on veterans entering the population after 2000. We estimated migration flows of veterans within the country using gravity models. Supplementary data came from American Community Surveys and accounted for a variety of factors, including age, sex, race/ethnicity, service era, population size of sending and receiving areas, and distance between areas. We project that the population of U.S. veterans will decrease by 19 percent over the next 10 years: from 21.6 million in 2014 to 17.5 million in 2024. The population will have a slightly higher proportion of older veterans. There will be modest changes in the demographic mix by sex and race/ethnicity. Between 2014 and 2024, the proportion of female veterans will increase 3 percentage points, from 8 to 11 percent. The share of non-Hispanic white males will decrease from 80 to 76 percent over the same period. The service era composition will change in the period. Veterans from the Vietnam conflict will decrease from 31 to 29 percent, while those from the Gulf War and Post-9/11 conflict will increase from 27 to 42 percent between 2014 and 2024. We estimate that, geographically, the veteran population will become more concentrated in urban areas, and the relative proportion of their population in the Ohio River Valley region will diminish.


An encapsulation device, designed on the basis of the laminar jet break-up technique, is characterized for cell immobilization with different types of alginate. The principle of operation of the completely sterilizable encapsulator, together with techniques for the continuous production of beads from 250 microm to 1 mm in diameter, with a size distribution below 5%, at a flow rate of 1-15 mL/min, is described. A modification of the device, to incorporate an electrostatic potential between the alginate droplets and an internal electrode, results in enhanced monodispersity with no adverse effects on cell viability. The maximum cell loading capacity of the beads strongly depends on the nozzle diameter as well as the cells used. For the yeast Phaffia rhodozyma, it is possible to generate 700 microm alginate beads with an initial cell concentration of 1 x 10(8) cells/mL of alginate whereas only 1 x 10(6) cells/ml could be entrapped within 400 microm beads. The alginate beads have been characterized with respect to mechanical resistance and size distribution immediately after production and as a function of storage conditions. The beads remain stable in the presence of acetic acid, hydrochloric acid, water, basic water, and sodium ions. The latter stability applies when the ratio of sodium: calcium ions is less than 1/5. Complexing agents such as sodium citrate result in the rapid solubilization of the beads due to calcium removal. The presence of cells does not affect the mechanical resistance of the beads. Finally, the mechanical resistance of alginate beads can be doubled by treatment with 5-10 kDa chitosan, resulting in reduced leaching of cells.


Prediction in environmental systems, such as hydrological streamflow prediction, is a challenging task. Although on a small scale, many of the physical processes are well described, accurate predictions of macroscopical (e.g. catchment scale) behavior with a bottom-up mechanistic approach often remains elusive. On the other hand, conceptual or purely statistical models fitted to data often perform surprisingly well for prediction. The data processing inequality, from the field of information theory, says that processing data with statistical procedures can only decrease, and not increase the information content of the data. This seems to contradict the intuition that our knowledge of physical processes should help in making informed predictions with simulation models fed by environmental data. In this paper, we propose a perspective from information theory and algorithmic information theory, to resolve this apparent contradiction and to shed light on where the information in environmental predictions originates from. Algorithmic information theory relates information content to description length and therefore enables an intuitive view of inference as a form of data compression, in which information in data is compactly represented by the patterns that can be discovered in it.


In this thesis, seismograms from eight Ocean Bottom Seismometers (OBS) have been processed, interpreted and used to obtain a 2D velocity model of a crustal transect across Storfjorden south of Svalbard through forward/inverse modelling. The aim of the study is to increase the understanding of an assumed Caledonian suture in the area, as well as recent earthquake activity. The modelling reveals a maximum Moho depth in the area predicted to be intersected by the suture. Together with a dipping down-to-west trend of the crust and mantle, this indicates the presence of an old subduction zone, supporting earlier research on the topic. From magnetic and gravitational maps of the area this suture seems to follow the trend of the Billefjorden Fault zone. Recent seismic activity in the area is for the most part gathered in a large southwestern and small north-eastern cluster. The clusters follow a SW-NE trend across Storfjorden along a proposed Tertiary shear zone and are located at the intersection between this and several major north-south oriented structures. These are mainly the suture and possible southward extensions of the Billefjorden Fault Zone and Lomfjorden Fault Zone in the south-west, and near the intersection with a possible southern extension of the Storfjorden Fault Zone in the north-east.


Behavioral Profiling The complexity of the brain makes it difficult to predict how a drug will affect behavior without direct testing in live animals. Rihel et al. (p. 348) developed a high-throughput assay to assess the effects of thousands of drugs on sleep/wake behaviors of zebrafish larvae. The data set reveals a broad conservation of zebrafish and mammalian sleep/wake pharmacology and identifies pathways that regulate sleep. Moreover, the biological targets of poorly characterized small molecules can be predicted by matching their behavioral profiles to those of well-known drugs. Thus, behavioral profiling in zebrafish offers a cost-effective way to characterize neuroactive drugs and to predict biological targets of novel compounds. The effects of most neuroactive drugs are conserved and can be detected by behavioral screening. A major obstacle for the discovery of psychoactive drugs is the inability to predict how small molecules will alter complex behaviors. We report the development and application of a high-throughput, quantitative screen for drugs that alter the behavior of larval zebrafish. We found that the multidimensional nature of observed phenotypes enabled the hierarchical clustering of molecules according to shared behaviors. Behavioral profiling revealed conserved functions of psychotropic molecules and predicted the mechanisms of action of poorly characterized compounds. In addition, behavioral profiling implicated new factors such as ether-a-go-go–related gene (ERG) potassium channels and immunomodulators in the control of rest and locomotor activity. These results demonstrate the power of high-throughput behavioral profiling in zebrafish to discover and characterize psychotropic drugs and to dissect the pharmacology of complex behaviors.


We introduce a hybrid method to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy by simultaneous measurements of responses of at least two detectors to antineutrino and neutrino fluxes from accretion and cooling phases of core-collapse supernovae. The (anti)neutrino-nucleus cross sections for 56Fe and 208Pb are calculated in the framework of the relativistic nuclear energy density functional and weak interaction Hamiltonian, while the cross sections for inelastic scattering on free protons p(ν̄e,e+)n are obtained using heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory. The modelling of (anti)neutrino fluxes emitted from a protoneutron star in a core-collapse supernova include collective and Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effects inside the exploding star. The particle emission rates from the elementary decay modes of the daughter nuclei are calculated for normal and inverted neutrino mass hierarchy. It is shown that simultaneous use of (anti)neutrino detectors with different target material allows to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy from the ratios of νe- and ν̄e-induced particle emissions. This hybrid method favors neutrinos from the supernova cooling phase and the implementation of detectors with heavier target nuclei (208Pb) for the neutrino sector, while for antineutrinos the use of free protons in mineral oil or water is the appropriate choice.


This work comprises a textbook and self-help guide to the study of the Maori language. It is also a complete grammar reference, covering parts of speech, the structure of each type of phrase and the combinations of phrases that form simple sentences. Each aspect of the grammar is discussed in a numbered section or subsection of the book and a combined vocabulary and index provides a reference system.


Background: Longitudinal monitoring studies of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in human populations are important to better understand changes with time and age, and for future predictions. Objectives: We sought to describe serum POP time trends on an individual level, investigate age–period–cohort effects, and compare predicted polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) concentrations to measured values. Methods: Serum was sampled in 1979, 1986, 1994, 2001, and 2007 from a cohort of 53 men in Northern Norway and analyzed for 41 POPs. Time period, age, and birth cohort effects were assessed by graphical analyses and mixed-effect models. We derived the predicted concentrations of four PCBs for each sampling year using the CoZMoMAN model. Results: The median decreases in summed serum POP concentrations (lipid-adjusted) in 1986, 1994, 2001, and 2007 relative to 1979 were –22%, –52%, –54%, and –68%, respectively. We observed substantial declines in all POP groups with the exception of chlordanes. Time period (reflected by sampling year) was the strongest descriptor of changes in PCB-153 concentrations. Predicted PCB-153 concentrations were consistent with measured concentrations in the study population. Conclusions: Our results suggest substantial intraindividual declines in serum concentrations of legacy POPs from 1979 to 2007 in men from Northern Norway. These changes are consistent with reduced environmental exposure during these 30 years and highlight the relation between historic emissions and POP concentrations measured in humans. Observed data and interpretations are supported by estimates from the CoZMoMAN emission-based model. A longitudinal decrease in concentrations with age was evident for all birth cohorts. Overall, our findings support the relevance of age–period–cohort effects to human biomonitoring of environmental contaminants. Citation: Nøst TH, Breivik K, Fuskevåg OM, Nieboer E, Odland JØ, Sandanger TM. 2013. Persistent organic pollutants in Norwegian men from 1979 to 2007: intraindividual changes, age–period–cohort effects, and model predictions. Environ Health Perspect 121:1292–1298; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1206317


The Internet of Things (IoT) has important applications in our daily lives including health and fitness tracking, environmental monitoring and transportation. However, sensor nodes in IoT suffer from the limited lifetime of batteries resulting from their finite energy availability. A promising solution is to harvest energy from environmental sources, such as solar, kinetic, thermal and radio frequency, for perpetual and continuous operation of IoT sensor nodes. In addition to energy generation, recently energy harvesters have been used for context detection, eliminating the need for additional activity sensors (e.g. accelerometers), saving space, cost, and energy consumption. Using energy harvesters for simultaneous sensing and energy harvesting enables energy positive sensing -- an important and emerging class of sensors, which harvest higher energy than required for signal acquisition and the additional energy can be used to power other components of the system. Although simultaneous sensing and energy harvesting is an important step forward towards autonomous self-powered sensor nodes, the energy and information availability can be still intermittent, unpredictable and temporally misaligned with various computational tasks on the sensor node. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on task scheduling algorithms for the emerging class of energy harvesting-based sensors (i.e., energy positive sensors) to achieve the sustainable operation of IoT. We discuss inherent differences between conventional sensing and energy positive sensing and provide an extensive critical analysis for devising new task scheduling algorithms incorporating this new class of sensors. Finally, we outline future research directions towards the implementation of autonomous and self-powered IoT.


The fertility of cows was affected by the diameter of ovulating follicle size of the native cows. The objective of the present study is to determine the ovulating follicle diameter and conception rate of native PESISIR cows. This study used the synchronization program of 29 cows in OVSYNCH protocol and 33 cows in Co-synch protocol of native PESISIR cows in parity-3 with a body condition score of 3.0. Ultrasonography examination was conducted at GnRH1, PGF2α, and GnRH2 of OVSYNCH and co-synch protocols 30 days after the breeding period to determine the follicular size and conception rate of local cows. The result shows that the diameter of the ovulating follicle is a small follicle category ranging from 6 to 11 mm. The proportion of medium category of follicle size (8- 9.5 mm) is 72.41 % for OVSYNCH protocol and 75.75 % for the co-synch protocol (P>0.05). The mean of ovulating follicle is 7.19 ± 1.69 mm for OVSYNCH protocol and 8.57 ± 1.61 mm for the co-synch protocol (P>0.05). The mean of conception rate is 72.00 % for OVSYNCH protocol and 68.44 % for the co-synch protocol (P.>0.05). The mean of progesterone concentration of ovsynch protocol is 6.76 ; 4,92; 5.44 and 9,56 ng/ml at GnRH-1; PGF2 alpha ; GnRH-2 injection and 30 d post- AI, respectively. In cosynch protocol progesterone concentrations are 6.36; 3.36; 1.92 and 7.84 ng/ml, at GnRH-1; PGF2 alpha; GnRH-2 and 30 d post-AI, respectively. This study concludes that follicle size is the key to determining the fertility of cows. The follicle diameter of local cows has a small category. Ovsynch and co-synch protocols have no significant effects (P>0.05)on both the ovulation and conception rates and the progesterone concentration of local PESISIR cows.


Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is caused by mutations in cytochrome P450 side chain cleavage enzyme (CYP11A1 and old name, SCC). Errors in cholesterol side chain cleavage by the mitochondrial resident CYP11A1 results in an inadequate amount of pregnenolone production. This study was performed to evaluate the cause of salt-losing crisis and possible adrenal failure in a pediatric patient whose mother had a history of two previous stillbirths and loss of another baby within a week of birth. CAH can appear in any population in any region of the world. The study was conducted at Memorial University Medical Center and Mercer University School of Medicine. The patient was admitted to Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic due to salt-losing crisis and possible adrenal failure. The patient had CAH, an autosomal recessive disease, due to a novel mutation in exon 5 of the CYP11A1 gene, which generated a truncated protein of 286 amino acids compared with wild-type protein that has 521 amino acids (W286X). Although unrelated, both parents are carriers. Mitochondrial protein import analysis of the mutant CYP11A1 in steroidogenic MA-10 cells showed that the protein is imported in a similar fashion as observed for the wild-type protein and was cleaved to a shorter fragment. However, mutant's activity was 10% of that obtained for the wild-type protein in non-steroidogenic COS-1 cells. In a patient of Mexican descent, a homozygous CYP11A1 mutation caused CAH, suggesting that this disease is not geographically restricted even in a homogeneous population. Learning points: Novel mutation in CYP11A1 causes CAH; This is a pure population from Central Mexico; Novel mutation created early truncated protein.


This historiography offers a critique of the common narrative of student affairs history by considering the ways in which the history of student affairs is mediated by those scholars writing the texts. Student affairs professionals and scholars are regularly engaged in reflection on current practices, trends, and concerns within the field; however, it is equally important to continue looking back into our professional history. In this paper, I employ a process of historiography to critique the way in which the history of student affairs is mediated by those scholars writing the texts. A historiography seeks to tell the history of a history--the history of the history of student affairs. This historiography first traces the historical development of the field as presented in commonly used student affairs textbooks covering major periods of the profession including student personnel, student development, and student learning. After providing a review of student affairs history as illustrated in professional texts, I then provide contextual research of the individual authors such as their educational pathways and employment credentials. Using a variety of critical theories, I interrogate the common narrative presented in student affairs history texts with intentional consideration to the scholars writing the texts.


Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has been evaluated as a tool for monitoring trace levels of helium in gas mixtures consisting mostly of hydrogen. Calibration data for helium in hydrogen was investigated at different helium concentration levels. At high concentrations of helium (>7.25%), the LIBS signal is quenched due to Penning ionization. The hydrogen alpha line (656.28 nm) was observed to broaden as the concentration of helium impurities in the hydrogen gas mixture increased. The helium line at 587.56 nm was selected as the analyte line for helium impurity detection. The effects of laser energy, the delay time between the laser pulse and data acquisition, and the gas pressure on the LIBS signal of helium were investigated to determine the optimum conditions for helium detection. The LIBS signal from the helium line at 587.56 nm shows good linear correlation with helium concentration for He concentrations below 1%. Thus, LIBS can be reliably used to detect the low levels of helium. The limit of detection for helium was found to be 78 ppm.


The "high occupational temperature health and productivity suppression" programme (Hothaps) is a multi-centre health research and prevention programme aimed at quantifying the extent to which working people are affected by, or adapt to, heat exposure while working, and how global heating during climate change may increase such effects. The programme will produce essential new evidence for local, national and global assessment of negative impacts of climate change that have largely been overlooked. It will also identify and evaluate preventive interventions in different social and economic settings. Hothaps includes studies in any part of the world where hourly heat exposure exceeds physiological stress limits that may affect workers. This usually happens at temperatures above 25°C, depending on humidity, wind movement and heat radiation. Working people in low and middle-income tropical countries are particularly vulnerable, because many of them are involved in heavy physical work, either outdoors in strong sunlight or indoors without effective cooling. If high work intensity is maintained in workplaces with high heat exposure, serious health effects can occur, including heat stroke and death. Depending on the type of occupation, the required work intensity, and the level of heat stress, working people have to slow down their work in order to reduce internal body heat production and the risk of heat stroke. Thus, unless preventive interventions are used to reduce the heat stress on workers, their individual health and productivity will be affected and economic output per work hour will be reduced. Heat also influences other daily physical activities, unrelated to work, in all age groups. Poorer people without access to household or workplace cooling devices are most likely to be affected. The Hothaps programme includes a pilot study, heat monitoring of selected workplaces, qualitative studies of perceived heat impacts and preventative interventions, quantitative studies of impacts on health and productivity, and assessments of local impacts of climate change taking into account different applications of preventative interventions. Fundraising for the global programme is in progress and has enabled local field studies to start in 2009. Local funding support is also of great value and is being sought by several interested scientific partners. The Hothaps team welcomes independent use of the study protocols, but would be grateful for information about any planned, ongoing or completed studies of this type. Coordinated implementation of the protocols in multi-centre studies is also welcome. Eventually, the results of the Hothaps field studies will be used in global assessments of climate change-induced heat exposure increase in workplaces and its impacts on occupational health and productivity. These results will also be of value for the next assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013.


Thirty states and the federal government compel DNA collection from juveniles based on a finding of juvenile delinquency. A main justification for doing so has been that it deters recidivism and promotes rehabilitation, furthering the goals of the juvenile court and consistent with the court's role as a "protecting parent." There is little empirical evidence, however, that compulsory DNA collection deters people from committing crimes or fosters their rehabilitation. Whatever specific deterrence DNA databasing may achieve is certainly diminished with respect to juveniles, who are less deterrable than adults. This undermines the best-interest rationale for collecting DNA from juveniles. Indeed, to the extent that criminal justice contact has a criminogenic effect on juveniles, DNA collection from juveniles could produce unintended, perverse consequences.Consistent with recent Supreme Court jurisprudence, this Article marshals scientific and psychosocial evidence regarding juveniles to outline a developmental critique of the best-interest justification for DNA collection from juveniles adjudicated delinquent. It also asserts that the basis for treating children differently from adults does not reside solely, or even predominantly, in science. The modern conception of childhood (as a separate, protected space for those whose development must be guarded and promoted) demands, even more powerfully, perhaps, than the findings of adolescent brain science, that we not subject juveniles to compulsory DNA collection for purposes of databasing. At the very least, the aggregate collection of genetic data from juveniles adjudicated delinquent cannot be justified as being in their best interests.


One trademark of the early-modern period is the tendency to base logic on theory of mind, but so far, this topic has not received close attention. The aim of this paper is to bring some attention to this neglected topic by examining the reference to Bacon in the first part of Gassendi's Syntagma Philosophicum. The summary of the Novum Organum Gassendi gives in the Syntagma shows that he is acquainted with Bacon's perspective on science and that he intends to make use of it to emphasize the epistemic necessity of logic. Not only does he use Bacon's theory of idols to reveal the lack of consistency in Descartes' approach to prejudice in the Meditationes, but Gassendi also uses materials from Bacon to define logic in terms of the shaping of intellectual materials which are naturally in disorder. This investigation helps show that building a logic in the 17th century meant setting up a technique which is distinctive because it is applied to an internal, rather than an external, object. Prior to gaining power over external nature, man needs to be able to make use of his intellectual capacities, that is, to have a control over his own nature.


NGOs headquartered in the North have been, for some time, prominent actors in attempts to address the poverty, lack of political representation, and labor exploitation that disproportionally affect women from the global South. Feminist NGOs and NGOs focusing on women's rights have been successful in attracting attention to their causes, but critics argue that the highly educated elites from the global North and South who run them fail to effectively question the power hierarchies in which they operate. In order to give depth to these criticisms, Sara de Jong interviewed women NGO workers in seven different European countries about their experiences and perspectives on working on gendered issues affecting women in the global South as well as migrant women in the global North. Complicit Sisters untangles and analyzes the complex tensions women NGO workers face and explores the ways in which they negotiate potential complicities in their work. Unlike other studies looking at development workers "on the ground," this book examines the women NGO workers in the global North who work to influence high level gender advocacy and policy, alongside women NGO workers supporting migrant women within the global North - a unique combination. Weighing the women's first-hand accounts against critiques arising from feminist theory, postcolonial theory, global civil society theory and critical development literature, de Jong brings to life the dilemmas of "doing good."


BACKGROUND
The aim of this study was an evaluation of the acute toxicity of single-fraction half-body irradiation (HBI).

MATERIAL/METHODS
The material comprised 92 patients. Upper, lower, and middle HBI (UHBI, LHBI, MHBI) were performed in 34, 49, and 9 cases, respectively, with 6 Gy delivered for UHBI, 8 Gy for LHBI, and 6 or 8 Gy for MHBI. The patients' weights were measured on the HBI day. Two weeks later their weights and blood parameters were checked and diarrhea, skin toxicity (scale: 0-4), and nausea and vomiting intensity (scale: 0-3) were evaluated using WHO Toxicity Criteria. Items of all the evaluated symptoms were summarized and the means of the sums were calculated.

RESULTS
Mean weight loss after HBI was 0.7 kg. One patient had grade 4 toxicity (thrombopenia). Grade 3 toxicity appeared in 9 cases (nausea and vomiting in 5, leukopenia in 1, and thrombopenia in 3). None had radiation pneumonitis. The means of the summarized items were 1.9 for UHBI than 1.4 for LHBI. The means of the summarized items were 1.6 for 8 Gy and 1.8 for 6 Gy. UHBI provoked a higher incidence and intensity of nausea and vomiting and LHBI caused a higher incidence and intensity of diarrhea. The remaining evaluated symptoms of toxicity were similar for irradiations of both halves of the body.

CONCLUSIONS
From these results one can conclude that single-dose (6-8 Gy) HBI is a safe treatment, causing a low percentage of low-level, patient-acceptable adverse radiation sequels.


The largest Kuiseb River floods initiate at the basin's semi‐arid headwater. Downstream, along the hyperarid Namib Desert, these floodwaters are feeding shallow alluvial aquifers, the only available water for human activity and for the natural ecology. Here, we characterize the largest floods and their changing frequency and magnitudes using palaeohydrological methods. Along 120 km of the rivers canyon 35 palaeoflood deposit sites were identified. At five of these sites we conducted stratigraphic and geochronological analyses and flood discharge estimations. The upper bound of the largest flood over the late Holocene is ∼1475 m3 s−1. Over the last 1300 years more than ten floods have exceeded 1250 m3 s−1. An additional 33 floods exceeded 400 m3 s−1. The last millennium was characterized by one large flood every 30–40 years during the periods 1250–1335, 1355–1565 and 1715 AD to the present. A slight increase in flood frequency (not magnitude) occurred during 1565–1715 AD (one large flood in ∼20 years) and during two short episodes, 1185–1205 and 1335–1355 AD (seven and four floods in 20 years, respectively). These episodes of increased flood frequency are associated with other proxy records of higher water availability in the Namib. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


New York State provides aid to local schools through a confusing maze of aid programs that are, according to many commentators, unfair to the neediest school districts, often defined as those with many students who are poor or otherwise "at risk." For example, New York City, which, by any measure, is one of the neediest districts, currently receives less aid per pupil than the average district in the state. On January 9, 2001, in the case of Campaign for Fiscal Equity vs. State of New York (719 N.Y.S2d 475, 150 Ed. Law Rep. 834), the New York State Supreme Court brought new salience to this issue. In a strongly worded opinion, Justice Leland DeGrasse ruled that the current educational aid system violates the state's constitutional requirement to provide a "sound basic education" and needs to be reformed. Among other things, Justice DeGrasse labeled the failure to account for the needs of at-risk students "one of the great failings of the State school financing system" and declared that "New York City does not receive State aid commensurate with the needs of its students." This policy brief proposes a new formula for distributing educational aid in New York State, a formula designed to direct aid to the districts that, through no fault of their own, are in the greatest need of assistance. High-need districts are those with high educational costs or low property wealth. This policy brief begins by explaining why the cost of education varies from one school district to the next. It then shows how variation in the cost of education across districts can be incorporated into a state education aid program that brings all districts up to some minimally adequate performance level. This approach is applied to New York State. Specifically, I propose a new education aid formula for Newe York State that would bring all the school districts up to an adequate performance defined with reference to the new Regents graduation standards. This policy brief also explores various ways to share the cost of this program between school districts and the state.


Bracketing paradoxes—constructions whose morphosyntactic and morpho-phonological structures appear to be irreconcilably at odds (e.g., unhappier)—are unanimously taken to point to truths about the derivational system that we have not yet grasped. Consider that the prefix un- must be structurally separate in some way from happier both for its own reasons (its [n] surprisingly does not assimilate in Place to a following consonant (e.g., u[n]popular)), and for reasons external to the prefix (the suffix -er must be insensitive to the presence of un-, as the comparative cannot attach to bases of three syllables or longer (e.g., *intelligenter)). But, un- must simultaneously be present in the derivation before -er is merged, so that unhappier can have the proper semantic reading ('more unhappy', and not 'not happier'). Bracketing paradoxes emerged as a problem for generative accounts of both morphosyntax and morphophonology only in the 1970s. With the rise of restrictions on and technology used to describe and represent the behavior of affixes (e.g., the Affix-Ordering Generalization, Lexical Phonology and Morphology, the Prosodic Hierarchy), morphosyntacticians and phonologists were confronted with this type of inconsistent derivation in many unrelated languages.


The deviation caused by acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF) diffraction in multispectral imaging is analyzed through derivation calculus of the deviation angle. The rotatory polarization of acousto-optic crystal is taken into account in this analysis. The relationships between the polar angle of the incident and the diffracted beams are acquired by using the momentum-matching condition. During the diffraction of the incident beams, far more deviations are induced.


The limited scholarship on late Ottoman nightlife focused mainly on street lighting and described it as a solution to the problem of darkness, the end of a dark age. However, as Wishnitzer shows in this article, the nightlife scene of the late nineteenth century did not develop linearly from darkened to illuminated nightlife; rather, the two modes of nocturnal leisure coexisted. Likewise, the new ways of "seeing through darkness" that were devised by the state developed alongside (rather than instead of) well-established patterns of communal surveillance. These patterns are evident in contemporary novels, which subjected nightlife to a literary "neighborhood gaze," exposing and shaming protagonists who violated public morality. In this way, novelists warned against what they perceived to be the perils of the new night and advised their readers how to navigate it—how to be in the modern night without jeopardizing the morality, productivity, and integrity of the individual and of the Ottoman nation as a whole.


This article examines the business model of free metropolitan newspapers in a cross-border context. Based on a series of interviews with economic agents and on a content analysis of articles and advertising inserts in three free dailies published in transfrontier metropolises, the analysis explores the ability of editing companies to profit from commercial revenues and resources located beyond the state border. The results indicate that this boundary is crossed to settle agreements between publishers at the international level. However, economic assets located beyond the state but within cross-border regions are rarely valuable. The lack of mobility of advertisers, readers/customers, and publishers in the functional urban areas determines the scale and limits of the free newspapers' commercial space.


This paper investigates the effect of aggregation in relation to the accuracy of television network rating forecasts. We compare the forecast accuracy of network ratings using population rating models, rating models for demographic/behavioural segments and individual viewing behaviour models. Models are fitted using neural networks, decision trees and regression. The most accurate forecasts are obtained by aggregating forecasts from segment rating models, with neural networks being used to fit these models. The resulting models allow for interactions between the variables and the non-linear carry-over effect is found to be the most important predictor of segment ratings, followed by time of day and then genre. The analysis differs from those of previous authors in several important respects. The AC Nielsen panel data considered stretches over 31 days, 24 hours per day, 60 minutes per hour, making it necessary for ratings to be appropriately transformed prior to the fitting of the rating models and for non-viewing time periods to be under-sampled when fitting the models for individual viewing. For the first time individual viewing within each 15 minute time period is defined by network choice and proportion of viewing time.


The relationship that Cuba has with the United States and global markets is shifting. This project will address the changing mindset of Cuban society in regards to the global markets and internal changes that have already drastically affected the island and will continue to do so. The structure of employment in Cuba has changed, allowing the private and self-employed sectors to grow, while attracting fewer and fewer state employees. Additional analysis of the changing economic system in Cuba shows the increase in foreign investment, both by states and private corporations. This increase affects both national sovereignty and the role of the Cuban state in enterprise, while its environmental and social impacts remain to be evaluated. I will investigate the values of Cuban society, which once tended to focus on social and economic rights, such as free, quality healthcare and education, and has since shifted to prioritize the tourist industry, foreign investment, and economic growth. I hypothesize that the increased engagement with global markets has the potential to bring explicit inequalities back into Cuban society, working in opposition to the founding ideals of the Cuban Revolution. This project will analyze how society will address and/or intervene against the inequality coming from the opening of the Cuban economic system to global markets. Degree Type Open Access Senior Honors Thesis Department Political Science First Advisor Dr. Richard Stahler-Sholk Second Advisor Jeffrey Bernstein


Abstract In this short communication, we report on dissolved organic and inorganic carbon concentrations from a summer stream monitoring campaign at the main hydrological catchment of the Tarfala Research Station in northern Sweden. Further, we place these unique high‐alpine observations in the context of a relevant subset of Sweden's national monitoring programme. Our analysis shows that while the monitoring programme (at least for total organic carbon) may have relatively good representativeness across a range of forest coverages, alpine/tundra environments are potentially underrepresented. As for dissolved inorganic carbon, there is currently no national monitoring in Sweden. Since the selection of stream water monitoring locations and monitored constituents at the national scale can be motivated by any number of goals (or limitations), monitoring at the Tarfala Research Station along with other research catchment sites across Fennoscandia becomes increasingly important and can offer potential complementary data necessary for improving process understanding. Research catchment sites (typically not included in national monitoring programmes) can help cover small‐scale landscape features and thus complement national monitoring thereby improving the ability to capture hot spots and hot moments of biogeochemical export. This provides a valuable baseline of current conditions in high‐alpine environments against which to gauge future changes in response to potential climatic and land cover shifts.


Retiming, algebraic and redundancy manipulation transformations are widely used in both the high level synthesis and the compilers fields. We present a new approach on how these powerful transformations can be applied to improve the performance of embedded systems, by optimizing their latency and throughput. A simple modification is sufficient to adapt both the Leiserson-Saxe retiming algorithm and the recently introduced ERB algorithm for the new task. We introduce a new negative retiming technique and the algorithm which coordinates this technique with both algebraic and redundancy manipulation techniques for latency optimization. The effectiveness of all discussed techniques is demonstrated on a set of "real-life" examples. Latency and throughput are improved by factors of 7.06 and 2.83 respectively, often with minimal or no additional hardware overhead.<<ETX>>


1. To investigate the effect of different intraluminal concentrations on the mutual inhibitive effect of glycine and glucose on their jejunal absorption rates, eighteen convalescent Zambian African patients who had no clinical evidence of intestinal disease or of malnutrition were given constant intrajejunal infusions with those solutes either together or alone. A double-lumen tube perfusion system was used, and three solutions containing (A) glycine, (B) glycine and glucose, and (C) glucose, all of which were rendered iso-osmotic with sodium chloride, were perfused in random order at 120 ml/min. The concentration of glycine in the perfusing fluid was either 10 or 20 mM, and that of glucose either 100,200 or 280 mM. By reference to polyethylene glycol 4000, the absorption rates of the solutes and water were calculated for a 30 cm jejunal segment. 2. At a glucose concentration of 200 or 280 m ~ , but not 100 m ~ , the mean rate of glycine absorption was decreased by approx. 30%. Glucose absorption rates were not significantly altered by glycine. 3. These observations, taken in conjunction with those from a previous investigation, are consistent with the view that there are two mechanisms for the jejunal absorption of glycine in man, one of which is inhibited by glucose at high intraluminal concentration.


PurposeThis is paper is concerned with the learning outcomes associated with connectivity through online networks, open online exchange and wider changes associated with contemporary information practices. The theme of connectivity is used here to capture both the detailed specificity of relations that define networks of learners and the ambient effect of wide accessibility to resources and people through open, online forums.Design/methodology/approachThe paper follows the idea of a network from the ground up, outlining the social network perspective as a way to consider the foundational bases of learning and networks, as well as the effect of ambient influence. The paper addresses the ways learning may be viewed as a social network relation, an interpersonal relationship and an outcome of interaction and connectivity, and how network connectivity can be used as input for design for learning.FindingsThe paper presents a range of perspectives and studies that view learning from a social network and connectivity perspective, emphasizing both the person-to-person connectivity of a learning tie and the impact of contemporary data and information sharing through the dynamics of open contributory practice.Practical implicationsThe outcome of connectivity in the service of learning is bound up with digital information practices, including individual practices of search, retrieval, participation, knowledge dissemination, knowledge construction and more. This paper provides a network perspective on learning relations that accommodates analysis in online and offline environments, but incorporates attention to the open, online retrieval and contributory practices that now influence learning practices and which may support design of new learning environments.Originality/valueThis paper offers insight into the way social networks and connectivity combine to show network relations, relationships, outcomes and design input at the actor, network and societal levels.


In this paper the focus is on breast cancer detection and imaging methods and we want to present a method that has low photon energy radiations. In addition, the results present the high accuracy of this method in comparison with other methods. In this way, THz imaging plays an important role on giving detailed outputs very fast with low risk for patient. Also we do not need to stain the specimen for example in IHC or H & E methods. In this paper it is proved that with no damage and burn in T-ray imaging due to low temperature gain in breast tissue, by using the tissue absorption coefficients, various areas of adipose, fiber and tumor is distinguished in breast specimen. Then normal and cancerous borders in tissue will be recognized because normal tissue contains high amount of adipose and fiber. In addition, by using image processing methods the type of tissues are determined and the mean percentage of them are calculated.


Let Over Lambda is one of the most hardcore computer programming books out there. Starting with the fundamentals, it describes the most advanced features of the most advanced language: Common Lisp. Only the top percentile of programmers use lisp and if you can understand this book you are in the top percentile of lisp programmers. If you are looking for a dry coding manual that re-hashes common-sense techniques in whatever langue du jour, this book is not for you. This book is about pushing the boundaries of what we know about programming. While this book teaches useful skills that can help solve your programming problems today and now, it has also been designed to be entertaining and inspiring. If you have ever wondered what lisp or even programming itself is really about, this is the book you have been looking for.


The legal aid system in Ontario is not working, particularly with respect to access to justice in civil matters. Financial eligibility requirements remain frozen at extremely low levels and have been steadily eroded by inflation, leaving increasing numbers of people ineligible for publicly paid legal assistance. The range of services covered prioritizes criminal and family law and, except for some legal aid clinics, does not extend to employment law, consumer law, and debtor/creditor law. Publicly funded legal assistance cannot meet many of the most pressing legal needs of middle income Ontarians. Moreover, private markets, as currently structured and regulated, have not bridged this gap in access. In this paper, we propose to grow Legal Aid Ontario into the middle class by grafting public legal expenses insurance on the existing program of publicly funded legal services for low income Ontarians.


The dynamics of inter-state relations and state sovereignty have been disturbed by late-20th century globalisation. Yet the literature on the international system, globalisation
and international political economy gives scant attention to the most vulnerable sovereign entities, the small and micro states. One significant exception has been the
Commonwealth, with its many small state members. Another is the area of financial crime, and the role of the offshore financial centre (OFC) within global finance. This thesis
analyses the efforts of several small Commonwealth states from the Caribbean to maintain their OFCs in the face of an OECD-directed campaign against tax competition. It
demonstrates both the contribution made to economic development by an OFC and the successful assertion of sovereignty achieved by these small states.
The case study focuses on Caribbean OFCs and the OECD campaign against harmful tax competition during 1998 - 2003. First, the argument that tax competition is a global problem is deconstructed. Three main points from the small states' response to the OECD position are explored, along with the OECD's rebuttal. Because the small states are individually at a disadvantage, the thesis provides an exposition of the collective response facilitated by the Commonwealth. The OFC is justified by its material
contribution to the small state economy. Specific contributions made to the economies of the Bahamas, Dominica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the Cayman Islands are demonstrated. The pivotal impact of U.S. policy on the OECD project and on Caribbean OFCs is explored. Yet while one effect was a decline in the number of registered offshore firms, the quantity of capital transiting the Caribbean increased. This study of small states and offshore finance re-affirms the continued relevance of the sovereign state as an actor in international society, but also illustrates the importance of issue-area and geographical context.