[Extract] The development of an extensive surface root mat is one of the major mechanisms that enhances nutrient conservation in tropical rain forest, particularly in ecosystems growing on nutrient-poor, heavily leached soils (Jordan & Herrera 1981, Cuevas & Medina 1988). In these root mats, it is the fine unsuberized roots that are primarily responsible for the retention of nutrients (Edwards & Grubb 1982, Gower 1987, Berish & Ewe1 1988). The level of development of these fine root mats has been found to be very variable within the tropics, with the biomass of roots <5-mm diameter in the top 40 cm of soil ranging from 1.1 t/ha to 123.4 t/ha (Sanford 1985, Gower 1987, Cavelier 1992).

According to the source-sink theory of resource allocation, based on theorem three of Bloom et al. (1985), trees growing on infertile sites should allocate a greater proportion of their resources into fine root production than those growing on fertile sites, as this "investment" in nutrient acquisition should increase growth and/or reproduction. Vitousek and Sanford (1 986) found that the available data suggested that the biomass of functionally active roots was substantially greater on infertile sites. Soil nitrogen has been suggested as the major factor governing belowground carbon allocation in temperate forest ecosystems
(Grier et al. 1981, Aber et al. 1985, Nadelhoffer et al. 1985); however, there is conflicting evidence of the role nitrogen plays in influencing fine root biomass in tropical rain forest. A nutrient amendment study in a tropical rain forest in Hawaii found that nitrogen addition resulted in a significant reduction in fine root biomass (Gower & Vitousek 1989). In contrast, the availability of nitrogen was not a significant factor influencing fine root biomass at two sites in Costa Rica (Gower 1987). At these sites, the availabilities of phosphorus and calcium were suggested to be the major factors influencing fine root biomass (Gower 1987). The aims of this study were to document the variation in fine root biomass in soils of differing fertility and to investigate the relationship between fine root biomass and soil nitrogen and available phosphorus in north Queensland tropical rain forests.


Nasal intermittent positive pressure ventilation (NIPPV) provides effective ventilatory support in patients with nocturnal hypoventilation. Nasal pressure support ventilation (NPSV), which only provides ventilation in response to patient triggering, may also be effective, simpler, and cheaper, but has not been evaluated. NIPPV and NPSV were compared in 12 patients with nocturnal hypoventilation, requiring domiciliary ventilatory support. The patients were studied on three consecutive nights, in random order: a control night without ventilation and a night on each mode of ventilatory support using the bilevel positive airway pressure (BiPAP) ventilator. Both NIPPV and NPSV significantly increased mean arterial oxygen saturation (SaO2) compared to the control night (NIPPV mean increase 4.1%; 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.2 to 6.1, NPSV 4.4%; CI 2.1 to 6.6) with no significant difference between the two modes. The percentage of the study night spent below 90% SaO2 was significantly reduced by both ventilator modes compared to the control night (median reduction on NIPPV 37%; CI -54 to -10, reduction on NPSV 31%; CI -53 to -9, with no significant difference between NPSV and NIPPV. NPSV was as effective as NIPPV in patients with nocturnal hypoventilation, which suggests that these patients are able to trigger the ventilator adequately. The lower cost of NPSV will make it accessible to more patients with chronic lung disease.


ABSTRACT Popular interest in crime is substantial and longstanding, driving the development of crime-based dark tourism attractions. The appeal of these sites can partly be explained through the understanding of functions of transgression as tours provide their audiences with infotainment. These representations of crime both reflect and shape social and cultural perceptions of the nature of offending and victimization. There is, however, a significant gap in relation to the discussion of these crime-based dark tourism activities with almost no engagement with gender at these sites. To fill this gap, this paper presents a conceptual discussion on tourism to sites of female criminal activity, drawing parallels to similar male crime locations. Examination of online advertising for murder walking tours in the UK reveals gendered power dynamics wherein traditional, western gender roles are enforced through the removal of agency from women who engage in more violent crimes while simultaneously fetishizing women as victims of violence, especially sexual. This is evident in the absence of female serial killers within organized dark tours, which often focus specifically on this sexual violence. Thus, the tourist activities that revolve around dark heritage sites, especially those that deal with violent criminal activity, reinforce gendered stereotypes around 'acceptable' transgression.


The health-promoting properties of whole grain oat have made it a desirable ingredient for use in breads. However, the absence of gluten-forming proteins and high fibre content pose technological challenges with respect to product texture. Fundamental understanding about the role of oat components on the structure formation of dough and bread is needed to facilitate the development of new healthy variants of oat breads with consumer appealing properties. A concept was created for using whole grain oat flour as a base in an oat-wheat bread with high -glucan content and good textural and sensory quality. Ingredient and process parameters for optimised texture and taste of the oat-wheat bread were established without extensive degradation of -glucan. The potential of bioprocessing methods, such as the use of sourdough and enzymes, to modify the chemical and rheological properties of oat doughs, and to improve the texture and flavour of oat breads were also investigated. The maximal specific volume 3.6 (cm/g), minimal instrumental hardness (0.1 kg after 2 h, and 0.3 kg after 72 h storage), and optimised sensory properties were attained for an oat-wheat bread by adding 15.2 g gluten and 91.5 g water/100 g flour to the dough, which was proofed at 40 °C for 75 min and baked at 210 °C. The optimized recipe and processing parameters provided the baking conditions for preparing an oat-wheat bread containing 51% oat by weight of flour mixture with good taste and structure as well as long shelf life. The use of an optimized wheat sourdough process in the production of oatwheat bread provided a feasible method of producing a new type of bread with high -glucan content. The optimal sourdough conditions for enhanced crumb texture and flavour of the bread were achieved by a small addition of wheat sourdough (10 g/100 g dough) which had been fermented at 40 °C for 20 hours. The use of optimized sourdough resulted in a bread with similar specific volume and staling rate as the corresponding straight dough bread. The use of wheat sourdough did not affect the content or molecular weight of -glucan as compared to straight dough bread. The amount of -glucan in both breads was 1.5±0.1 g/100 g fresh weight. This means that a portion (2 slices, á 34 g) of the bread contained 1.0 g -glucan, which is the amount required for a cholesterol-lowering health claim in the EU. The molecular weight of the -glucan was reduced from 1.0 million in the oat flour to 0.55 million in both breads, showing that a slight degradation of -glucan occurred during the bread-making phase. This was most likely due to the endogenous -glucanase activity present in the wheat flour. The potential of cross-linking enzymes, such as laccase (LAC) and tyrosinase (TYR), to modify oat macropolymers during oat bread making was studied either alone or together with xylanase (XYL). TYR was more effective than LAC in improving the specific volume and reducing the firmnesss of the gluten-free oat bread, especially in combination with XYL. The degradation of arabinoxylan by XYL together with slight degradation of -glucan by -glucanase side activity in LAC preparation was suggested to improve the specific volume of whole grain oat, gluten-free oat, and oat-wheat breads, and the softness of fresh oat-wheat bread. The polymerization of oat globulins by TYR together with degradation of arabinoxylan by XYL was suggested to be the main contributors to improved volume and softness of gluten-free oat bread. In conclusion, the flavour and texture of oat bread was found to be effectively modified with the sourdough and enzyme bioprocessing treatments employed. Sourdough improved the intensity of flavour without excess acidity or pungency. Wheat sourdough did not reduce the content or molecular weight of -glucan in oat-wheat bread. Use of LAC and XYL was most effective in improving the texture of oat-wheat bread. It was shown in this work that TYR efficiently cross-linked oat globulins, which was suggested to improve the textural properties of gluten-free oat bread.


ABSTRACT With reference to the 2014 Umbrella Movement and Hong Kong's uncertain fate come 2047, I ask how one un-imagines the cultural future of inhabiting the locality. As people take prompts from the present predicament to cope with real possibilities about the future, they realize that a strong embodiment of local consciousness permeates the sociocultural space. I discuss how such engagement takes place through cinematic experience, and examine tactics of the spectator's critique centring around the erosion of hope at the core of everyday, intellectual and affective imagination. I trace the ways in which postcolonial subjects engage with hope and with the shock of hopelessness in a lived social imaginary. Examining in detail three differently representative recent films, namely, The Midnight After (2014. Dir. Fruit Chan, The Midnight After Film and One Ninety Films), Overheard 3 (2014. Dir. Alex Mak and Felix Chong, Sil-Metropole, Bona Film and Pop Movies) and Ten Years (2015. Dir. K. L. Ng ('Local Egg', Boon-deh dan), J. Au ('Dialect', Fong-yin), K. Chow ('Self-Immolator', Jee-fun jeh), F. P. Wong ('Season of the End', Dong sim), and Z. Kwok ('Extras', Fau gua), Ten Years Studio), I depict the modes in popular imagination that invoke people's engagement with the 'local', albeit in its affective state. Accordingly, in the context of 'externalized' social realities, I identify three interlocking modes of cultural engagement, which I characterize as figurative, performative and prefigurative, respectively. In their 'future' imaginary, I look for ordinary people's ways to face the absurdity of the status quo and the performativity of local struggles with the self.


We define two levels of uncertainties for each agent. First is the uncertainty associated with in-group members' opinion (Uin), and second is the uncertainty associated with out-group agents' opinion (Uout) where Uin ≥ Uout. In each interaction encounters, the agents follow the same steps as 2D BC model except that if they are from the same group, they use their in-group uncertainty (Uin) to update their opinion (i.e. attraction, rejection, or ignorance). Similarly, if two agents are from different groups, they use their out-group uncertainty (Uout) for opinion updating purpose.


Oculocutaneous albinism (OCA) type 4 is a newly identified human autosomal recessive hypopigmentary disorder that disrupts pigmentation in the skin, hair and eyes. Three other forms of OCA have been previously characterized, each resulting from the aberrant processing and/or sorting of tyrosinase, the enzyme critical to pigment production in mammals. The disruption of tyrosinase trafficking occurs at the level of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in OCA1 and OCA3, but at the post-Golgi level in OCA2. The gene responsible for OCA4 is the human homologue of the mouse underwhite (uw) gene, which encodes the membrane-associated transporter protein (MATP). To characterize OCA4, we investigated the processing and sorting of melanogenic proteins in primary melanocytes derived from uw/uw mice and from wild-type mice. OCA4 melanocytes were found to be constantly secreted into the medium dark vesicles that contain tyrosinase and two other melanogenic enzymes, Tyrp1 (tyrosinase-related protein 1) and Dct (DOPAchrome tautomerase); this secretory process is not seen in wild-type melanocytes. Although tyrosinase was synthesized at comparable rates in wild-type and in uw-mutant melanocytes, tyrosinase activity in uw-mutant melanocytes was only about 20% of that found in wild-type melanocytes, and was enriched only about threefold in melanosomes compared with the ninefold enrichment in wild-type melanocytes. OCA4 melanocytes showed a marked difference from wild-type melanocytes in that tyrosinase was abnormally secreted from the cells, a process similar to that seen in OCA2 melanocytes, which results from a mutation of the pink-eyed dilution (P) gene. The P protein and MATP have 12 transmembrane regions and are predicted to function as transporters. Ultrastructural analysis shows that the vesicles secreted from OCA4 melanocytes are mostly early stage melanosomes. Taken together, our results show that in OCA4 melanocytes, tyrosinase processing and intracellular trafficking to the melanosome is disrupted and the enzyme is abnormally secreted from the cells in immature melanosomes, which disrupts the normal maturation process of those organelles. This mechanism explains the hypopigmentary phenotype of these cells and provides new insights into the involvement of transporters in the normal physiology of melanocytes.


This volume considers the task of changing society's assumptions about women, analyses ways to challenge our culture's tradition, and explores ways in which we can live together in the modern world. A variety of issues, from reproduction to war, are discussed from an array of perspectives, including womanist and ecofeminist. The book is ideal for feminist theology and feminist ethics classes, and is sure to become an instant classic. The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works in the field.


A discriminative large margin classifier based approach to anaphora resolution for neuroscience abstracts is presented. The system employs both syntactic and semantic features. A support vector machine based word sense disambiguation method combining evidence from three methods, that use WordNet and Wikipedia, is also introduced and used for semantic features. The support vector machine anaphora resolution classifier with probabilistic outputs achieved almost four-fold improvement in accuracy over the baseline method.


Representing the complex data in a concise and accurate way is a special stage in data mining methodology. Redundant and noisy data affects generalization power of any classification algorithm, undermines the results of any clustering algorithm and finally encumbers the monitoring of large dynamic systems. This work provides several efficient approaches to all aforementioned sides of the analysis. We established, that notable difference can be made, if the results from the theory of ensembles of random matrices are employed.
Particularly important result of our study is a discovered family of methods based on projecting the data set on different subsets of the correlation spectrum. Generally, we start with traditional correlation matrix of a given data set. We perform singular value decomposition, and establish boundaries between essential and unimportant eigen-components of the spectrum. Then, depending on the nature of the problem at hand we either use former or later part for the projection purpose.
Projecting the spectrum of interest is a common technique in linear and non-linear spectral methods such as Principal Component Analysis, Independent Component Analysis and Kernel Principal Component Analysis. Usually the part of the spectrum to project is defined by the amount of variance of overall data or feature space in non-linear case. The applicability of these spectral methods is limited by the assumption that larger variance has important dynamics, i.e. if the data has a high signal-to-noise ratio. If it is true, projection of principal components targets two problems in data mining, reduction in the number of features and selection of more important features.
Our methodology does not make an assumption of high signal-to-noise ratio, instead, using the rigorous instruments of Random Matrix Theory (RNIT) it identifies the presence of noise and establishes its boundaries. The knowledge of the structure of the spectrum gives us possibility to make more insightful projections. For instance, in the application to router network traffic, the reconstruction error procedure for anomaly detection is based on the projection of noisy part of the spectrum. Whereas, in bioinformatics application of clustering the different types of leukemia, implicit denoising of the correlation matrix is achieved by decomposing the spectrum to random and non-random parts.
For temporal high dimensional data, spectrum and eigenvectors of its correlation matrix is another representation of the data. Thus, eigenvalues, components of the eigenvectors, inverse participation ratio of eigenvector components and other operators of eigen analysis are spectral features of dynamic system. In our work we proposed to extract spectral features using the RMT. We demonstrated that with extracted spectral features we can monitor the changing dynamics of network traffic. Experimenting with the delayed correlation matrices of network traffic and extracting its spectral features, we visualized the delayed processes in the system.
We demonstrated in our work that broad range of applications in feature extraction can benefit from the novel RMT based approach to the spectral representation of the data.


This paper is an elaboration of my previous paper published in Philosophy, 'Making Sense of retributivism,' which was a criticism of John Rawls' attempt in 'Two Concepts of Rules' to develop a rule utilitarian theory of punishment wherein utilitarianism is best construed as a justificatory basis for the institution of punishment and retributivism is best construed as serving as a justificatory basis for particular forms of punishment. I challenge this claim, arguing that retributivism must and can provide a justification both for the institution of punishment and for particular forms of punishment. In the end, I develop an analysis of the nature of desert as responsibility and proportionality. This notion of desert makes the best sense of retributivism.


Research within the H2020 PROGRESSIVE project (http://platform.progressivestandards.org/) has identified good practices in user co-production strategies and methodologies. Early findings from research in the PROGRESSIVE project were shared with relevant stakeholders outside the consortium for consultation and review. The outcomes of that initial investigation highlighted the need to focus on the objectives, processes, and methods used in user and older people co-production. This guide adapts these insights and makes them relevant specifically for standardisation in ICT for active and healthy ageing. This guide was approved by representatives of the PROGRESSIVE project on 22 February 2018. The consortium has requested comments from interested stakeholders in an enquiry from 1 March to 30 April 2018. The PROGRESSIVE guide was approved on 5 June 2018.<br>


Abstract Increase in migration around the world has put a focus on the role language plays in the construction of knowledge across school subjects, as attention to language can support diverse learners in subject area learning. Drawing on the notions of register and grammatical metaphor from systemic functional linguistics, this article shows how nouns are powerful resources for knowledge construction and presentation that vary in the ways they are drawn on in different disciplines for functional purposes. In addition, it shows how developmentally, children move from elaboration and expansion of the noun group toward abstraction and grammatical metaphor through nominalization. Examples from language arts, science, and history/social studies illustrate the roles nouns, noun groups, and nominalization play in constructing knowledge at different age levels and in different subject areas. Implications for pedagogy are drawn.


Abstract To investigate the regional thermobaric structure of the diamondiferous Kokchetav ultrahigh‐pressure and high‐pressure (UHP–HP) massif and adjacent units, eclogite and other metabasites in the Kulet and Saldat–Kol regions, northern Kazakhstan, were examined. The UHP–HP massif is subdivided into four units, bounded by subhorizontal faults. Unit I is situated at the lowest level of the massif and consists of garnet–amphibolite and acidic gneiss with minor pelitic schist and orthogneiss. Unit II, which structurally overlies Unit I, is composed mainly of pelitic schist and gneiss, and whiteschist locally with abundant eclogite blocks. The primary minerals observed in Kulet and Saldat–Kol eclogites are omphacite, sodic augite, garnet, quartz, rutile and minor barroisite, hornblende, zoisite, clinozoisite and phengite. Rare kyanite occurs as inclusions in garnet. Coesite inclusions occur in garnet porphyroblasts in whiteschist from Kulet, which are closely associated with eclogite masses. Unit III consists of alternating orthogneiss and amphibolite with local eclogite masses. The structurally highest unit, Unit IV, is composed of quartzitic schist with minor pelitic, calcareous, and basic schist intercalations. Mineral assemblages and compositions, and occurrences of polymorphs of SiO2 (quartz or coesite) in metabasites and associated rocks in the Kulet and Saldat–Kol regions indicate that the metamorphic grades correspond to epidote–amphibolite, through high‐pressure amphibolite and quartz–eclogite, to coesite–eclogite facies conditions. Based on estimations by several geothermobarometers, eclogite from Unit II yielded the highest peak pressure and temperature conditions in the UHP–HP massif, with metamorphic pressure and temperature decreasing towards the upper and lower structural units. The observed thermobaric structure is subhorizontal. The UHP–HP massif is overlain by a weakly metamorphosed unit to the north and is underlain by the low‐pressure Daulet Suite to the south; boundaries are subhorizontal faults. There is a distinct pressure gap across these boundaries. These suggest that the highest grade unit, Unit II, has been selectively extruded from the greatest depths within the UHP–HP unit during the exhumation process, and that all of the UHP–HP unit has been tectonically intruded and juxtaposed into the adjacent lower grade units at shallower depths of about 10 km.


Many employers link wages at the firm's establishments outside of the home region to the level at headquarters. Multinationals that anchor-to-the headquarters also transmit wage changes arising from shocks to minimum wages and exchange rates in the home country/state to their foreign establishments. Such multinationals fire more low-skill workers and hire fewer new workers abroad after a permanent (minimum wage-induced) foreign establishment wage increase originating in shocks to headquarter wages, but not after a temporary (exchange rate-induced) one. We show this using data on 1,060 multinationals' establishments across the world and in employee-level data on the same employers' establishments in Brazil.


The birth of eight children to Nadya Suleman led to an outcry over the common practice in assisted reproduction of transferring multiple embryos to a woman during in vitro fertilization (IVF). The practice can increase the chances of a live birth, but greatly raises the likelihood of multiple births, with their substantial health risks to mother and children and substantial health care costs to society. Professional guidelines, as well as laws in other countries, place limits on the acceptable number of embryos transferred in IVF. This paper considers the problems with multiple embryo transfers and the experience in other countries with statutory limits. After reviewing the reasons why women might prefer multiple embryo transfers, including the desire to maximize their likelihood of having a child and the desire to minimize their costs for IVF, this paper recommends legal restrictions on multiple embryo transfers in the United States, together with insurance coverage for the costs of IVF.


This article argues that the latest Defence White Paper White Paper provides no insights into how to integrate cyber power into national strategy, set any real strategic direction for an improved whole-of-nation effort. Abstract The 2013 Defence White Paper includes security against major cyber attacks on Australia as an element of our 'defence of Australia' national strategic interest. It devotes a separate section to cyber in its strategic outlook. While the White Paper makes heartening comment about the need to integrate cyber power into national strategy, it provides no insights into how this might be achieved, nor does it set any real strategic direction for an improved whole-of-nation effort. It does not attempt to identify any cyber objectives that should underpin Australia's national security strategy. Australia needs to develop a current baseline cyber posture, derive a consolidated view of all requirements and gaps, and develop future remediation and implementation plans in an integrated fashion. Without this, cyber capability gaps across the Australian Government will continue to hinder the agencies' ability to plan for and conduct effective operations. Accordingly, this article calls for a comprehensive capabilities-based assessment, a national cyber capability plan, and an implementation plan (with specific actions and implementation responsibilities, timeframes, and performance measures) and a funding strategy for addressing any gaps resulting from the assessment. It also calls for a clearer articulation of operational planning considerations, including dealing with the conflation of electronic warfare and cyber warfare, and the use of uninhabited aerial vehicles for improved intelligence collection and network penetration.


As technology enters the nanometer territory, the antenna effect plays an important role in determining the yield and reliability of a VLSI circuit. Diode insertion and jumper insertion are the most effective techniques to fix the antenna effect. However, due to the increasing design complexity and the limited routing resource, applying diode or jumper insertion alone cannot achieve a high antenna fixing rate. In this paper, we give a polynomial-time antenna violation detection/fixing algorithm by simultaneous diode/jumper insertion with minimum cost, based on a minimum-cost network-flow formulation. Experimental results show that our algorithm consistently achieves much higher antenna fixing rates than the state-of-the-art jumper insertion and diode insertion algorithms alone


Abstract: This article offers the first comprehensive history of the development of mandatory disclosure rules for the cost of consumer credit. In contrast to prior studies, which begin with the creation of federal disclosure rules in 1968, this story starts with state-level laws that were drafted before World War I. By looking back over a longer time period, it reveals the challenges involved in defining "truth" in lending, and how the perceived purpose of a regulatory technique like mandatory disclosure may change over time. Although the modern APR disclosure metric has come to seem natural and inevitable, history shows that lenders and policymakers once hotly debated the design of disclosure rules, with each faction claiming the mantle of "truth." Moreover, policymakers did not always view disclosure as a means to increase price competition, obviating the need for direct price controls. Disclosure was once a complement to usury laws, rather than a substitute.


Until the early to mid-1970s, social scientists in the fields of population and development were largely going their own ways. Demographers relied almost exclusively on demographic transition theory as their para digm for understanding the role of development in population change and fertility decline. Conversely, most development economists and other specialists were certainly aware of the constraints placed upon development objectives by population growth. However, the main de velopment theories paid little attention to population and the implica tions of population growth for development. Indeed it was not until after the World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974 that the interaction of population and development became a serious and pur posive theme for social scientific study. Accordingly, since about the mid-1970s, an extensive literature in the field of population and develop ment has been generated. And in 1975, under the auspices of The Popu lation Council, the journal Population and Development Review was found ed, a journal which in the past decade has developed into the premier publication in the world for work in this area. But our understanding of development as it refers to change in Third World countries remained fragmented. Moreover, our understanding of the linkages and interac tions between population and development was very limited. It is in this regard that Ozzie Simmons's Perspectives on Development and Population Growth in the Third World will certainly have an impact."


A total of 58 patients with ischemic heart disease and angina of effort (FC II) (mean age 55.6 years) participating in the study were diagnosed to have erective dysfunction (ED) of a mild (35%), moderate (57%) and severe degree (8%). All the patients were randomized into two groups. Group 1 (n=21, mean age 56.4 years) received standard cardiotropic therapy (nitrates, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors on demand, diuretics, antioxidants) and placebo. Group 2 (n=37, mean age 54.3 years) received the same standard cardiotropic therapy plus impase (1 tablet each other day for 3 months). The results of the trial show that impase addition to cardiotropic therapy raised exercise tolerance, diminished the number of anginal attacks in mild and moderate exercise, enhanced coronary microcirculatory blood flow, increased reserve circulation index by 34%, improved metabolism of vascular endothelium in the whole body. Impase acts pathogenetically in endothelial insufficiency. Prevention of endothelial dysfunction by impase allows both to stop progression of cardiovascular disease and to prevent erectile dysfunction.


We present and analyse an extensive dataset of the superluminous supernova (SLSN) LSQ14mo (z = 0.256), consisting of a multi-colour light curve from −30 d to +70 d in the rest-frame (relative to maximum light) and a series of six spectra from PESSTO covering −7 d to +50 d. This is among the densest spectroscopic coverage, and best-constrained rising light curve, for a fast-declining hydrogen-poor SLSN. The bolometric light curve can be reproduced with a millisecond magnetar model with ~ 4 M⊙ ejecta mass, and the temperature and velocity evolution is also suggestive of a magnetar as the power source. Spectral modelling indicates that the SN ejected ~ 6 M⊙ of CO-rich material with a kinetic energy of ~7 × 1051 erg, and suggests a partially thermalised additional source of luminosity between −2 d and +22 d. This may be due to interaction with a shell of material originating from pre-explosion mass loss. We further present a detailed analysis of the host galaxy system of LSQ14mo. PESSTO and GROND imaging show three spatially resolved bright regions, and we used the VLT and FORS2 to obtain a deep (five-hour exposure) spectra of the SN position and the three star-forming regions, which are at a similar redshift. The FORS2 spectrum at + 300 days shows no trace of SN emission lines and we place limits on the strength of [O i] from comparisons with other Ic supernovae. The deep spectra provides a unique chance to investigate spatial variations in the host star-formation activity and metallicity. The specific star-formation rate is similar in all three components,as is the presence of a young stellar population. However, the position of LSQ14mo exhibits a lower metallicity, with 12 + log (O/H) = 8.2 in both the R23 and N2 scales (corresponding to ~0.3 Z⊙ ). We propose that the three bright regions in the host system are interacting, which could induce gas flows triggering star formation in low-metallicity regions.


Titanium dioxide is a cheap, chemically stable and non-toxic material. However its electrical properties are unstable and it is a modest semiconductor and a mediocre insulator. For several applications it would be interesting to make it either more insulating or more conducting. The goal of this work was to modify the electrical properties of nano-crystalline TiO2 thin films deposited by reactive sputtering and to understand the mechanism leading to these modifications. The principal factors that influence the electrical conductivity are on the one hand the concentration and nature of the chemical impurities incorporated in TiO2, and on the other hand the morphology of the thin films. The study was split into two parts. The fist part describes the modifications of the sputtered material obtained by chemical doping of the TiO2 thin films. Niobium, cerium, iron, and fluorine were incorporated successfully in TiO2. The second part describes the modifications obtained by modifying the reactive gas used during the sputtering process: thus oxygen was substituted with water vapor. Several analysis techniques have been used to characterize the TiO2 thin films. They are essentially divided in four categories. The chemical analyses included electron probe microanalyses, x-ray photoemission spectroscopy, and secondary ion mass spectrometry. The structure and morphology analyses of thin films were carried out with x-ray diffraction and atomic force microscopy. The electrical properties in dc or ac mode were measured between room temperature and 350°C. Finally optical transmission provided information on the electronic states and morphology of the thin films. With an appropriate choice of impurities, titanium dioxide can be made more insulating (TiO2:Ce), more conducting with an n-type electrical conductivity (TiO2:Nb) or p-type electrical conductivity (TiO2:Fe). Chemical doping is also the cause of important structure and morphology changes, for example it can force the transformation from the anatase to the rutile structure. It is shown in particular that dopant atoms generate defects such as oxygen vacancies. These defects impede the variation of the electrical conductivity produced by the impurities, thus, in spite of dopant concentration in the percent range, the variation of the electrical conductivity is an increase or a decrease of three order of magnitude at most when compared with undoped TiO2. Thin films deposited with water vapor as the reactive gas present an increase in the electrical conductivity by height order of magnitude compared to samples prepared with oxygen in similar conditions. No atom other than titanium or oxygen could be detected in the thin films in significant concentration. The dramatic conductivity increase is due to the injection inside TiO2 grains of electrons donated by unsaturated titanium atoms lying on the grain surface. A nanometric grain size is a requirement to make such high doping levels possible. Depending on the impurities or reactive gas selected, titanium dioxide can be made either into a good insulator with a high breakdown field and a high permittivity or into a reasonably conducting, transparent film. The electrical conductivity of the samples prepared for this study cover the range from 10-10 to 103 S m-1.


The majority of road accidents can be prevented by passive and active safety
designs and systems present in today's modem passenger car and by road
infrastructure improvements. However, large part of the accident risk depends on
the driver status and vigilance, no matter how well the car is equipped and how
safe the roads are. It is believed that an underestimated 20% of accidents are due
to lack of sleep, inattentiveness and lack of vigilance, which can be summarized
under impaired driving.
In this study, a driver vigilance monitoring system is developed and its
performance is tested applying signal processing, computer vision, and artificial
intelligence state-of-the-art methods. [Continues.]


Many municipalities express a wish to use digital technologies to achieve environmental aims. However, there is still a need for a better understanding of how this should practically be done, both among municipalities and among ICT developers. We have used workshops and literature studies to formulate technological abilities of digitalization. We use two EU directives that are relevant for municipal environmental goals and combine the activities that these directives indicate with technological abilities of digitalization, in order to formulate practical implementations of digital technology to help these activities and reach the directives' goals. We suggest that this method can be used for any municipal goal, as follows: (1) Identify the objective (in our case set by the EU-directives); (2) Identify what activities these points will require or generate; (3a) From a municipal viewpoint: Based on the results of 1 and 2, formulate and structure ideas of how digitalization can support the objectives and how those ideas can be implemented; (3b) From a provider's viewpoint: Investigate what digital solutions supporting 1 and 2 exist, or how existing services can be tweaked to support the objectives and explore how new digital solutions supporting 1 and 2 can be developed.


The main theme of the thesis is to analyse the social and political consequences of central government involvement and recent Land Reform in a village in central Iraq. In the first place, it examines the historical background to contemporary political change. Over the past fifty years, there has been considerable political and economic change at both the national and local level. After the registration of the tribal lands in the names of the shaikhs and important landlords, which took place in the 1930's, the political policies of various governments during the period of the Monarchy (1921-1958) became explicitly pro-landlord, thus establishing a form of indirect rule in the countryside. However, after the Revolution of 1958 and the assumption of power by the Ba'thists, some ten years later, there occurred a marked shift in the power structure. These post-Revolutionary governments initiated new policies of direct intervention in the rural areas, through Land Reform programmes and increased political and economic control. Since 1968, the Ba'th Party has assumed a major role in encouraging and controlling various forms of peasant participation in both the political and economic life of the village. The thesis analyses the processes by which the village chosen for detailed study became more integrated into the wider political structure. The study shows how the shaikhs and landlords, who once constituted the political and economic elite, have, in the course of increased external control and the introduction of new economic incentives, begun to lose their basis of prestige and socio-political status. These changes led to the emergence of a much more open field of competition between the new peasant and Party- based leaders and the older pillars of village society. They also reinforced the fragmentation of tribal and lineage organisation leading to the development of smaller kinship groups and to new forms of political alliance and ideology.


Amaranth grain, a gluten-free grain was milled to flour and differentially sieved to coarse and fine fractions. The whole flour and fractions thereof were analyzed for the nutrient composition, antinutrients, total and bioaccessible minerals, fatty acids, and amino acid profile and functional properties of flours. Results indicated that the fine fraction representing 44% of the whole amaranth flour contained higher protein (19.7%), fat (8.54%), minerals (3.46%) and dietary fibre content (20.09%) as well as a higher overall amino acid profile with lysine as its major essential amino acid. Linoleic acid (44.8%) in fine flour whereas oleic (29.4%) and palmitic acid (29.6%) in coarse flour was the predominant fatty acid found in amaranth flour fractions. Minerals were variedly distributed in analyzed fractions as iron was found majorly in fine flour and calcium in coarse flour. A similar trend in mineral bioaccessibility was observed. The in vitro protein digestibility of amaranth flour samples ranged from 59.8-72.5%. Functional properties revealed that higher values of water and oil absorption capacity were characterized in the coarse fraction, while whole flour showed higher foaming capacity and stability. Thus, differentially sieved flour fractions of amaranth grain showed a wide distribution of nutrients and in particular, the finer fraction was nutrient-dense. It was found to be an excellent source of nutrients and could be incorporated as a functional ingredient in the development of nutrient-rich products.


The Advanced Concrete Pavement Technology (ACPT) Program is an integrated, national effort to improve the long-term performance and cost-effectiveness of the Nation's concrete highways. Managed by the Federal Highway Administration through partnerships with State highway agencies, industry, and academia, the goals of the ACPT Program are to reduce congestion, improve safety, lower costs, improve performance, and foster innovation. The ACPT Program was developed to identify, refine, and deliver for implementation the available technologies from all sources that can enhance the design, construction, repair, and rehabilitation of the Nation's concrete highways. This report documents the availability of advanced concrete pavement technology products that show a high potential for improving the performance of concrete pavements through improved design, material selection, construction practices, testing procedures, and repair and rehabilitation techniques. These technologies also include concrete overlays for rehabilitation of existing concrete and asphalt pavements. The ACPT products for technology transfer, as documented in this report, are the result of research and development projects with various sponsors, both domestic and international.


This book presents Paul Tillich at his very best--brief, clear, stimulating, provocative. Speaking with understanding and force, he makes a basic analysis of love, power, and justice, all concepts fundamental in the mutual relations of people, of social groups, and of humankind to God. His concern is to penetrate to the essential, or ontological foundation of the meaning of each of these words and thus save them from the vague talk, idealism, cynicism, and sentimentality with which they are usually treated. The basic unity of love, power, and justice is affirmed and described in terms that are fresh and compelling.


In this paper, we propose a citywide and real-time model for estimating the travel time of any path (represented as a sequence of connected road segments) in real time in a city, based on the GPS trajectories of vehicles received in current time slots and over a period of history as well as map data sources. Though this is a strategically important task in many traffic monitoring and routing systems, the problem has not been well solved yet given the following three challenges. The first is the data sparsity problem, i.e., many road segments may not be traveled by any GPS-equipped vehicles in present time slot. In most cases, we cannot find a trajectory exactly traversing a query path either. Second, for the fragment of a path with trajectories, they are multiple ways of using (or combining) the trajectories to estimate the corresponding travel time. Finding an optimal combination is a challenging problem, subject to a tradeoff between the length of a path and the number of trajectories traversing the path (i.e., support). Third, we need to instantly answer users' queries which may occur in any part of a given city. This calls for an efficient, scalable and effective solution that can enable a citywide and real-time travel time estimation. To address these challenges, we model different drivers' travel times on different road segments in different time slots with a three dimension tensor. Combined with geospatial, temporal and historical contexts learned from trajectories and map data, we fill in the tensor's missing values through a context-aware tensor decomposition approach. We then devise and prove an object function to model the aforementioned tradeoff, with which we find the most optimal concatenation of trajectories for an estimate through a dynamic programming solution. In addition, we propose using frequent trajectory patterns (mined from historical trajectories) to scale down the candidates of concatenation and a suffix-tree-based index to manage the trajectories received in the present time slot. We evaluate our method based on extensive experiments, using GPS trajectories generated by more than 32,000 taxis over a period of two months. The results demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of our method beyond baseline approaches.


A sociologist's encounters with a retired executive living alone with Alzheimer's disease reveal gaps in the U.S. healthcare system. These gaps emerge during eight ethnographic interviews and participant observation between 2014 and 2017 with Ms. Judith Banks, 79. Ms. Banks' perspective offers an inside-view of the challenges of living alone with cognitive impairment. Receiving a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was "brutal" for her and the support to continue living in the community almost non-existent. Gaps in the U.S. healthcare system further emerge from the contrast between Ms. Banks' case study and the examination of the Danish system of care for non-institutionalized persons with dementia. Given that one third of people with dementia live alone in the U.S. and that they are likely to experience poorer health outcomes than counterparts living with others, it is critical to ensure that they receive appropriate health services upon diagnosis of cognitive impairment.


Abstract : This special report is the third in a series by the Software Engineering Institute focusing on the practical application of the Security Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE) process. In this report, a student team presents their results of working with three clients over the course of a semester. Each client was developing a large-scale software application and worked with the students to generate security requirements. The students main contribution to the SQUARE process was to determine how existing software requirements-elicitation techniques could be applied to software security requirements (as opposed to end-user requirements). With each client, the students implemented a different structured requirements-elicitation technique: Issue- Based Information Systems with an information technology firm, Joint Application Development (JAD) with the Delta client, and the Accelerated Requirements Method (ARM) with the Beta client. The ARM technique, which is a variant of JAD, held the most promise for inclusion in future applications of SQUARE. In addition to an analysis of the three elicitation techniques, the student team also generated feedback and recommendations on different steps of the SQUARE process, such as requirements prioritization and inspection. They found the Analytic Hierarchy Process to be highly useful for prioritizing requirements quickly; however, they did not find a requirements inspection technique that was well suited for any of the clients.


In 1979, during a routine bridge inspection, a fatigue crack was discovered in the top flange plate of one tie girder in a tied arch bridge crossing the Mississippi River. Metallographic analysis indicated a banding or segregation problem in the middle of the plate, where the carbon content was twice what it should have been. Based on this and results of ultrasonic testing, which revealed that the banding occurred in 24-ft lengths, it was decided to close the bridge and replace the defective steel. The steel used in the construction of this bridge was specified as ASTM A441, commonly used in structural applications. Testing showed an increase in hardness and weight percent carbon and manganese in the banded region. Further testing revealed that the area containing the segregation and coarse grain structure had a lower than expected toughness and a transition temperature 90 deg F higher than specified by the ASTM standards. The fatigue crack growth rate through this area was much faster than expected. All of these property changes resulted from increased carbon levels, higher yield strength, and larger than normal grain size.


The GPS systems are today's most well-known location tracking systems. Well these systems are not capable of pinpointing exact locations or locations of an entity within a building or on a particular floor or room. So here we propose a smart object tracking system that allows tracking location of objects, goods, personnel within a building or any facility. Our proposed system makes use of RF technology along with IOT to achieve this system. The system has the capability to pinpoint the location of any entity to exact room it is currently located in. The system uses mini RF circuits to be used as tracking devices. We use tracking microcontroller based circuits to track those RF circuits. The tracker circuits are battery powered circuits to be mounted on objects/entities. The monitoring circuits are to be placed in individual rooms. Now as soon as any tracker objects enter any room the tracker circuits come in 2-3 meters range of the monitoring circuit for that room. The monitoring system now transmits the location of that tracker circuit to the online system. We here use IOT Gecko to handle the IOT tracking part. The transmitted data is now displayed by IOT Gecko to pinpoint which room a particular object/entity is located in.


This paper presents a 16 MHz frequency reference that exploits the well-defined thermal diffusivity of IC-grade silicon. After a room temperature trim, its absolute inaccuracy is ±0.1% from -55°C to 125°C (24 samples), while its cycle-to-cycle jitter is less than 45 ps (rms) at a power dissipation of 2.1 mW from a 1.8 V supply. The reference occupies 0.5 mm2 in a 0.16 μ m standard CMOS process. Compared to a previous design in an older 0.7 μm CMOS process, it achieves 10× higher frequency, 7× less jitter, 3.7× less power, and 12x less chip area, while maintaining the same level of accuracy.


Religiosity is well documented as a coping resource that protects against the effects of discrimination on distress, but little is known about the utility of religious minorities' religiosity. This study investigates if religious resources buffer the effect of discrimination on distress for Arab Americans and if that relationship differs based on religious minority status. Following the contours of the stress process model, I leverage data from the 2003 Detroit Arab American Survey (DAAS; N = 977) to test the relationship between distress, discrimination, and three measures of religiosity: frequency of religious service attendance, God salience, and salient religious practices. The results indicate that for the overall sample, only salient religious practices buffered discrimination. However, when religious affiliation was taken into account, the results indicate that both God salience and salient religious practices significantly buffer discrimination for Muslim respondents only. I conclude with theoretical contributions, study limitations, and future research avenues.


In order to determine whether tolerance developed to the behavioral effects of phencyclidine, pigeons were trained to respond under a multiple fixed-ratio 30, fixed-interval 600-sec schedule of food presentation. When rates and patterns of responding reached stability, dose-response curves for phencyclidine (0.1-10 mumol/kg i.m.), ketamine (3-56 mumol/kg i.m.) and pentobarbital (1-75 mumol/kg i.m.) were determined. Phencyclidine, ketamine and pentobarbital all decreased fixed-ratio 30 responding in a dose-related manner and increased fixed-internal 600-sec. responding at immediate doses. At higher doses, pentobarbital decreased responding. High doses of phencyclidine and ketamine suppressed responding in the early portions of the session, but when responding returned, it returned at a high rate. After 35 daily injections of phencyclidine (3 mumol/kg/day i.m.), dose-response curves were redetermined for all three drugs. A tolerance was observed for moderate doses of phencyclidine, and a moderate cross-tolerance was observed to ketamine. No tolerance was observed for the total suppression of responding produced by high doses of phencyclidine and ketamine early in the test sessions. No cross-tolerance to pentobarbital was observed. After 215 days of daily phencyclidine administration, no withdrawal signs were observed upon the discontinuation of daily injections.


1. The responses of spinothalamic tract cells in the lumbosacral spinal cords of anesthetized monkeys were examined following electrical stimulation of the sural nerve or the application of noxious thermal and mechanical stimuli to the skin on the lateral aspect of the foot. 2. The spinothalamic tract neurons were classified as wide dynamic range (WDR), high-threshold (HT), or low-threshold (LT) cells on the basis of their responses to mechanical stimuli. 3. All of the WDR and HT spinothalamic tract cells tested responded to volleys in A- and C-fibers. However, strong C-fiber responses were more common in HT than in WDR cells. 4. The responses atributed to C-fibers were graded with the size of the C-fiber volley. The latencies of the responses attributed to C-fibers indicated that the fastest afferents involved had a mean conduction velocity of 0.9 m/s. The responses remained after anodal blockade of conduction in A-fibers. 5. Temporal summation of the responses of spinothalamic tract cells was demonstrated both to brief trains of stimuli at 33 Hz and to single stimuli repeated at 1- to 2-s intervals. The latter phenomenon is often called "windup." 6. The responses of several spinothalamic tract cells to noxious heat pulses could still be elicited during anodal blockade of conduction in A-fibers. Similarly, it was possible to demonstrate an excitatory action of noxious mechanical stimuli despite interference with conduction in A-fibers by anodal current. 7. The cells investigated were located either in the marginal zone or in the layers of the dorsal horn equivalent to Rexed's laminae IV-VI in the cat. The cells were generally activated antidromically from the caudal part of the ventral posterior lateral nucleus of the thalamus.


The thesis aims to examine the impact of introduction of Cloud Computing on Venture Capital (VC) financing in the United States. In the first part we review features of Cloud Computing and their impact on startup costs in context of VC. In this thesis we consider Amazon Web Services (AWS), introduced in 2006, a pioneer of widely accessible Cloud Computing. In the second part we quantify the cost reduction associated with utilization of AWS against owning IT infrastructure. Results show 529 fold decrease in startup costs in 3-month time frame. In the third part we analyze the impact of introduction of AWS on seed and later-stage investments in context of selected macroeconomic and technological factors. We perform analysis on a comperhensive dataset from National Venture Capital Association using Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to account for a change in lagged values of dependent and independent variables. Main finding of our analysis suggests that seed investments are significantly influenced by the introduction of AWS and subsequent drop in startup costs. Specifically, the decline in cost of startup induced 29.67% increase in seed investments. Further findings indicate insignificant relationship between seed investments and macroeconomic factors. Moreover, according to our results, later-stage investments show no significant relationship with introduction of AWS and associated cost reduction. The outcome of the thesis is that introduction of AWS and subsequent startup cost reduction in 2006 significantly increased seed investments but did not influence later-stage investments. Moreover, seed investments are not significantly affected by macroeconomic factors. JEL Classification G24, M13, M15, O31,


Researchers have found an astonishing diversity in conflict management patterns among nonhuman primates. By using the comparative method to study different social organizations, we may understand the processes underlying conflict management and, subsequently, the evolutionary determinants of social organizations. Typically, researchers resort to using ecological factors to explain patterns of competition and dominance (van Schaik 1989). Complex organizations, however, are systems of interrelated patterns. We should ask to what extent connections between patterns might act as constraints at the evolutionary level (Thierry 1997). In other words, are the social organizations that animals produce to cope with environmental constraints limitless in their form, or are social organizations limited to finite sets of forms by structural constraints that define the possibilities open to them? In the latter case, social traits would evolve as sets of covariant traits, and we should find them together in "packages." That traits of organisms covary through evolution is an empirical finding. A number of morphological and life history traits are linked by allometric relations, but whether social traits can be similarly correlated in nonhuman primates is more problematic (Harvey et al. 1987; Martins 1996). Although social groups are interconnected wholes that may display some autonomy, they have no central unit directing behavior or homeostasis. Producers of social organizations are individuals, and these individuals are autonomous reproductive agents who follow their own strategies. It may be held that organizational features are constrained only by conditions of external requirements. On the other hand, it is also possible that C H A P T E R 6


Achieving environmental benefits is often a primary motivation for integrating renewable energy into the grid. The magnitude of generation from a solar power project is influenced by the solar resource quality, but locations with high insolation do not necessarily yield the greatest emission reduction benefits. This study simulates the power system response to 10 identical solar projects in different regions across the United States, selected to represent a wide range of solar resource quality and power grid configurations. The power grid mix is often a key determinant in offsetting CO2 , SO2 , and NOx emissions, illustrating how lower‐quality solar resources can be more effective than sunnier sites at emissions mitigation when one considers characteristics of the power grid. The analysis shows a strong relationship between emissions mitigation and the share of offset generation that is coal‐fired. The strongest correlation is shown for CO2 ; the presence or absence of emissions control equipment and the sulfur content of the coal complicates the relationship of SO2 and NOx . The emissions intensity of offset generation is insensitive to whether the solar project is fixed tilt or single‐axis tracking. When seeking to mitigate power sector emissions, the impacts of solar design considerations on the temporal profile of generation are less important than the overall amount of generation and the location of interconnection. Public policies that target only the magnitude of generation from renewables (e.g., many Renewable Portfolio Standards) or the installed cost (e.g., the Investment Tax Credit) will likely lead to suboptimal emissions mitigation. WIREs Energy Environ 2017, 6:e249. doi: 10.1002/wene.249


The effective nonlinear coefficient and temperature acceptance bandwidth of three Lu and Sc co-doped GdCa(4)O(BO(3))(3) type nonlinear crystals were measured. NCPM for SHG in to the blue-UV spectral region can be obtained by controlling the co-dopant concentration. Measurements were based on intra-cavity SHG of a CW Ti:Sapphire laser, and the effective nonlinear coefficients were found to be in the range of 0.5 to 0.6 pm/V for the three crystals used. The FWHM temperature acceptance bandwidth was measured to be more than 35 degrees C using a 6 mm long Gd(0.871)Lu(0.129)Ca(4)O(BO(3))(3) crystal. A maximum of 115 mW at 407.3 nm in a single direction was measured using a 6.5 mm long Gd0.96Sc0.04Ca(4)O(BO(3))(3) crystal.


In recent decades, alternatives to traditional coal and
fossil fuels were utilized to reduce carbon emissions. Among these
alternatives, natural gas is a cleaner fuel and is abundant globally. Shale
gas, a form of natural gas that also contains light alkanes (C2-C4), is
presently being employed to produce olefins, which can be upgraded to higher
molecular weight hydrocarbons. This thesis describes efforts to develop new
catalytic materials and characterizations for the conversion of shale gas to
fuels.

In the first half, silica supported Pt-Cr alloys containing
varying compositions of Pt and Pt3Cr were used for propane
dehydrogenation at 550°C. Although a change in selective performance was
observed on catalysts with varying promoter compositions, the average
nano-particle structures determined by in situ, synchrotron x-ray
absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and x-ray diffraction (XRD) were identical.
Further, this work presents a method for the characterization of the catalytic
surface by these methods to understand its relationship with olefin selectivity.
From this, we can gain an atomically precise control of new alloys
compositions with tunable surface structures.

Once formed by dehydrogenation, the intermediate olefins are
converted to fuel-range hydrocarbons. In the second half, previously unknown
single site, main group Zn2+ and Ga3+ catalysts are shown
to be effective for oligomerization and the resulting products follow a Schutlz
Flory distribution. Mechanistic studies suggest these catalysts form metal
hydride and metal alkyl reaction intermediates and are active for olefin
insertion and b-H elimination elementary steps,
typical for the homogeneous, Cossee-Arlman oligomerization mechanism. Evidence
of metal hydride and metal alkyl species were observed by XAS, Fourier
transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and H2/D2 isotope
exchange. Understanding the reaction intermediates and elementary steps is
critical for identifying novel oligomerization catalysts with tunable product
selectivity for targeted applications. Through
controlled synthesis and atomic level in situ characterizations, new
catalysts compositions can be developed with high control over the resulting
performance. An atomically precise control of the catalyst structure and
understanding how it evolves under reaction conditions can help shed light on
the fundamental principles required for rational catalyst design.


Young children spend a substantial part of their waking time in preschools. It is therefore important to reduce the load of hazardous semivolatile organic compounds (SVOCs) in the preschools' indoor environment. The presence and levels of five SVOC groups were evaluated (1) in a newly built preschool, (2) before and after renovation of a preschool, and (3) in a preschool where SVOC-containing articles were removed. The new building and the renovation were performed using construction materials that were approved with respect to content of restricted chemicals. SVOC substance groups were measured in indoor air and settled dust and included phthalates and alternative plasticizers, organophosphate esters (OPEs), brominated flame retardants, and bisphenols. The most abundant substance groups in both indoor air and dust were phthalates and alternative plasticizers and OPEs. SVOC concentrations were lower or of the same order of magnitude as those reported in comparable studies. The relative Cumulative Hazard Quotient (HQcum ) was used to assess the effects of the different reduction measures on children's SVOC exposure from indoor air and dust in the preschools. HQcum values were low (1.0-6.1%) in all three preschools and decreased further after renovation and article substitution. The SVOCs concentrations decreased significantly more in the preschool renovated with the approved building materials than in the preschool where the SVOC-containing articles were removed.


© 2016 The Author(s). Open Access terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) apply. The license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, on the condition that users give exact credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if they made any changes.


The aim of this study is to examine customers' satisfaction with the level of service in Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos, Nigeria; so as to identify the service attributes requiring managerial attention in the airport. The study evaluated twenty eight service attributes in order to assess passengers' expectations and satisfaction. Survey was conducted and four hundred copies of questionnaire were administered to the study population. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, GAP analysis and t-test statistics. The results revealed that the twenty eight service attributes showed a significant difference (significant level ≤ 0.05) between male and female respondents' perceptions. Although, the expectations of these service attributes were high yet their satisfaction level was low. This suggests that customers' satisfaction with Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos decreased. Thus, the service attributes that are of high expectation to passengers using the airport but performing poorly with low satisfaction level include "Speed of bags delivery service", "Flight are screens", "Comfort of waiting" and "Phone/Internet/IT facilities." The aforementioned service attributes are those that require managerial attention in the airport. Hence, major improvement is needed here so as to enhance customers' satisfaction.


We report on the measurement of the instantaneous Kerr nonlinearity and the retarded alignment of air molecules CO2, N2, and O2 triggered by an intense, lambda-cubic terahertz pulse, a diffraction- and transform-limited single-cycle pulse. The strong-field, impulsive low-frequency excitation (3.9 THz) leads to field-free alignment dynamics of these molecules thanks to the terahertz-induced transient dipole moments in the otherwise non-polar molecules. The strong coupling to the terahertz electric transient results in the excitation of coherent large amplitude long-living rotational states at room temperature and ambient pressure. Beyond fundamental investigations of nonlinear properties in gases, our results suggest a route towards field-free molecular alignment at laser intensity well below the ionization threshold.


The empirical finding suggested by Mansor and Lim (1992) is that approximately 75% of the analysts used to be speculators. Many investors in Malaysia want capital gain rather than dividends and for some investors focusing solely on dividend is not desirable. Norhayati (2005) found that about three quarter of the firms listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE) paid stable dividends which indicates the Gordon's Model is relevant in appraising stock prices. However, due to arguments among analysts the model is considered irrelevant and the focus has been on the Earnings Multiplier Approach. The Earnings Multiplier Approach is more intuitive model which is less sophisticated, less formal, and easy to use. Shamsher, Annuar, and Chotigeat (1998) suggested that about 84% of the analysts prefer to use the Earnings Multiplier Approach in valuing the share prices.

It is interesting to investigate whether the Gordon's Dividend Valuation Model and the Earnings Multiplier Approach are relevant in appraising the firm's value on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (Bursa Malaysia). Thus, this paper tests the Gordon's Dividend Valuation Model developed by Gordon (1956) and the Earnings Multiplier approach developed by Basu (1977) to appraise the stock value of selected component stocks of the KLSE.

The objective of this study is to evaluate whether share prices on the main board follow the valuation models of Gordon's Model or that of Earning Multiplier approach using data stretching from periods before, during and after the financial crisis of 1997. This study also extends the earlier work of Annuar and Shamsher (1993) by incorporating the analysis to include three different economic situations. We believe this is one of the earliest studies employing multi-companies pooled time series panel data approach. In addition, the study also employs the normal traditional cross section analysis for comparison purposes and completion of analysis. This study also conducts appropriate test refinements on risk adjusted market model by employing Dimson-Fowler Rorke (1983) for non-synchronous trading bias. Furthermore, this study consults the analysis on CAPM-DFR and book value (ROE) for the purpose of making comparisons. The findings suggest that the CAPM –DFR is an appropriate tool to measure the discount measured for Gordon's Model while the Book Value (ROE) is deemed to support the Earnings Multiplier Approach.

Based upon cross sectional analysis, the evidence seems to support both Gordon's Dividend Valuation Model and Earnings Multiplier Approach depending on the economic conditions. Gordon's Dividend Valuation Model is applicable only for the period during an economic crisis as documented by Mansor and Lim (1992). The Earning Multiplier Approach (Value of Stock) is relevant for the period before economic crisis and overall market. Using multi-companies pooled time series panel data approach, the general result suggests that the Gordon's Dividend Valuation Model is more superior especially during the economic crisis. However, the low and high ranks of dividends and earnings analyses seem to support both Gordon's Dividend Valuation Model and Earnings Multiplier Approach. Thus, we conclude that both models are practical enough in appraising stock value during the economic crisis though Gordon's Dividend Valuation Model exhibits more superiority based upon cross sectional results.


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How do attitudes and social affiliations coevolve? A long stream of research has focused on the relationship between attitudes and social affiliations. However, in most of this research the causal relationship between views and affiliations is difficult to discern definitively: Do people influence each other's views so that they converge over time or do they primarily affiliate (by choice or happenstance) with those of similar views? Here we use longitudinal attitudinal and whole network data collected at critical times (notably, at the inception of the system) to identify robustly the determinants of attitudes and affiliations. We find significant conformity tendencies: Individuals shift their political views toward the political views of their associates. This conformity is driven by social ties rather than task ties. We also find that political views are notably unimportant as a driver for the formation of relationships.

http://polisci.osu.edu/sites/polisci.osu.edu/files/_the coevolution of networks and political attitudes_.pdf


This paper provides an up-to-date overview of the gradual development of differentiated integration and the ensuing changes in the nature of European integration. It considers the dynamics of deepening and widening of the EU and proposes the metaphor of a 'European Onion' that is designed to capture the bigger picture. Further, this paper expands upon the centripetal effects of differentiated integration and shows its potential to generate more cooperative public opinion in future enlargement rounds. Finally a state of play in European integration theory is offered that incorporates differentiated integration.


One of the least understood issues in language evolution is how hominins were able to ground and establish a shared lexicon. Recently, researchers have explored this issue using a variety of computational models, whose results have suggested that a shared lexicon could have emerged spontaneously through a process of self-organisation. However, these models have used psychologically unrecognised concept representations and an oversimplified environment. In this dissertation, I present a new computational model in an attempt to address these problems. Agents' category representations are inspired by prototype theory, having central members and graded membership. The environment consists of an infinite number of objects, and has a probabilistic structure which can be easily manipulated through model parameters. Despite the relatively complex model, simulation results are generally in line with previous ones and add further support to the self-organisation hypothesis. In addition, the speed and level of lexical convergence depend on the world structure, confirming that this is an aspect of past models which has seen too little attention. Future work should investigate the vast parameter space in further detail, and extend the simulations in various new directions.


Food allergy is an important public health problem that affects adults and children and has been increasing in incidence. Despite the risk of severe allergic reactions and even death, there is still no certain treatment for food allergy at the moment. Moreover, the diagnosis of food allergy may be problematic as well, given that non-allergic food reactions, such as food intolerances and intoxications, are frequently confused with food allergy. Gastrointestinal system symptoms e.g. vomiting and diarrhea in consequence of food allergy include a spectrum of disorders such as proctocolitis and enterocolitis that result from adverse immunologic responses to dietary antigens. Cutaneous reactions to foods are some of the most common presentations of food allergy and include IgE-mediated (urticaria), cell-mediated (contact dermatitis), and mixed IgE/cellmediated reactions (atopic dermatitis). Food-induced respiratory system manifestations such as asthma and Heiner's syndrome are also discussed in this review. Although any food might cause systemic symptoms such as anaphylaxis, the most commonly implicated foods in fatal cases are peanut, tree nuts, shellfish, and fish. (Asthma Allergy Immunol 2014;12:70-82)


One of the most efficient methods to solve L2-regularized primal problems, such as logistic regression and linear support vector machine (SVM) classification, is the widely used trust region Newton algorithm, TRON. While TRON has recently been shown to enjoy substantial speedups on shared-memory multi-core systems, exploiting graphical processing units (GPUs) to speed up the method is significantly more difficult, owing to the highly complex and heavily sequential nature of the algorithm. In this work, we show that using judicious GPU-optimization principles, TRON training time for different losses and feature representations may be drastically reduced. For sparse feature sets, we show that using GPUs to train logistic regression classifiers in LIBLINEAR is up to an order-of-magnitude faster than solely using multithreading. For dense feature sets--which impose far more stringent memory constraints--we show that GPUs substantially reduce the lengthy SVM learning times required for state-of-the-art proteomics analysis, leading to dramatic improvements over recently proposed speedups. Furthermore, we show how GPU speedups may be mixed with multithreading to enable such speedups when the dataset is too large for GPU memory requirements; on a massive dense proteomics dataset of nearly a quarter-billion data instances, these mixed-architecture speedups reduce SVM analysis time from over half a week to less than a single day while using limited GPU memory.


Abstract In this essay, I review a 2019 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo entitled When Saying Is Doing, which featured work by Angelica Mesiti, a contemporary Australian artist who works on questions of performance, immigration, and non-verbal communication in multi-screen moving image installations. On the contemporary global stage, if we do not share the same linguistic community or communities, how is human interrelatedness expressed through other forms of ordinary language, where "language" is now considered not as speech but rather as human expressiveness in its most diverse and complex manifestations? What happens when shared language is neither "speech" nor conversation in the linguistic sense? Needed here is a newly imagined vision of the communicability of human community that I refer to as "neighboring." Putting Mesiti's work in productive dialogue with Stanley Cavell and other critics, I examine how skeptical problems of isolation, privacy, and unknownness are potentially addressed and responded to in contemporary art.


Diesel vehicles are a major form of transportation, especially in developing countries. Recent concerns over the environment, increasing fuel prices and the scarcity of its supply have promoted interest in the development of alternative sources of petroleum fuels. In this investigation, castor oil methyl ester was prepared by transesterification using potassium hydroxide (KOH) as a catalyst and tested in a four-stroke, single-cylinder compression ignition engine. The test was carried out at a constant speed of 1500 rpm at different loads. The results show that with an increasing biodiesel percentage, the carbon monoxide (CO) emission level decreases. The reduction of the CO in B05, B10 and B20 averaged 13.75%, 25.02% and 28.79%, respectively, compared to diesel (B0). The emission results of the comparative test indicated that CO, oxygen (O2) and smoke density emissions are found to be lower when the engine is fuelled with B05, B10 and B20 as compared to B0, while carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) with B05, B10 and B20 are found to increase marginally.


The actions of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with such issues as development, human rights, and the protection of the environment voicing concerns to public authorities raises the questions: Do these newly mobilised societal actors influence EU trade policy outcomes? We answer in the negative, arguing that such groups, which have diffuse costs and benefits from trade policies, do not dispose of resources with which they can threaten or enhance political actors' chances of re-election or re-appointment. A survey of NGOs and business groups as well as two in-depth case studies on the negotiations concerning the EU's Economic Partnership Agreements and the EU's policy on access to medicines in developing countries support our reasoning. The analysis shows that although NGOs have gained access to policy-makers, they have largely failed to shift policy outcomes in their favour.


This thesis represents a contribution to the empirical literature on the relation between technological progress and development. In its first chapter, the functional form properties of the relationship between national aggregate R&D expenditure and innovation outputs are investigated. A non-parametric estimation of such relationship demonstrates the existence of important non-linearities. Firstly, a critical mass effect is represented by a delayed onset of positive returns to R&D spending. Secondly, diminishing returns to the accumulation of R&D are uncovered. A disaggregation of R&D by funding source reveals that it is the privately funded R&D component the driving force behind such pattern. The second chapter investigates the channels through which institutional and macroeconomic instability hinder innovative investment undertakings financed by the domestic private sector. The analysis is based on a sample of 44 countries representing all levels of development and considers a number of instability dimensions. The results suggest a negative impact of real, monetary and political instability on the aggregate level of national R&D financed by the business sector. Thus, they highlight the desirability of stable macro-institutional environments in preventing avoidance or abandonment of private innovation undertakings.The third chapter investigates the impact of institutional and macroeconomic instability on the skill premium, in a 69-country panel. The results suggest a negative effect of both types of instability on the skill premium, defined as the ratio of unskilled to skilled wages. An interpretation of such findings in light of the results of chapter two indicates that low skilled wages are associated with lagging R&D investment, as a result of reduced skilled labour productivity and less demand for skilled workers. These findings stress again the importance of stable environments, as a way of preventing the shrinkage of the skill premium, and, thereby, sub-optimal human capital accumulation or brain drain.Overall, the thesis provides empirical evidence regarding the accumulation path of technological development, and how such accumulation may be disrupted in the presence of economic instability.


Julie Bornstein, senior vice president of Sephora Direct, is seeking to double her budget for social media and other digital marketing initiatives for 2011. A number of digital efforts implemented in the past two years seem to be bearing fruit, and there is a desire to intensify Sephora's social media, online video, and mobile presence. Bornstein must justify the need for the additional funding, determine how best to allocate the money across the various platforms, and establish effective ways to measure return on investment (ROI) for digital marketing spending . She must also take into account that the funding requested will likely come at the expense of Sephora's traditional marketing programs. Importantly, Bornstein needs to begin thinking about a cohesive long-term strategy that clearly identifies the role digital platforms play and how they help Sephora maintain its leadership position in the prestige beauty care space. The constant emergence of new players, such as Groupon and Shop Socially, the growing power of social media platforms such as Facebook, and the way consumer behavior and user generated content are rapidly evolving in a digital era, make her task all the more challenging.Learning Objective: To explore considerations in developing a digital/social-media marketing strategy and justifying its components.


This paper uses the integral Rayleigh–Sommerfeld transformation of the first type and an expansion in plane waves to investigate the nonparaxial phenomena that appear when optical elements are combined (using the lensacon as an example) even with a low numerical aperture. The contribution of various components of the vector field when high-aperture optical elements are used in tandem was also taken into account. Based on our studies, it is shown that, in the case of radial polarization, supplementing a lens with an axicon makes it possible to substantially strengthen the contribution of the longitudinal component and to overcome the diffraction limit in the overall intensity by a method that is an alternative to using an annular stop.


Domain localization used in data assimilation allows computationally simplerand faster algorithms, particularly on parallel computers. Domain localizationis widely used in combination with the ensemble based Kalman Filter algorithmsthat use the analysis error covariance matrix for calculation of the gain insteadof the forecast error covariance matrix. However, since the assimilations areperformed independently on each local subdomain, smoothness of the analysisfields across the subdomain boundaries becomes an issue of concern. In order to address the problem of smoothness, we modifed the algorithm by using oneach subdomain observations from an area larger than the subdomain and theSchur product with an submatrix of isotropic matrix. On a simple example wedemonstrate that such a modification can produce results comparable to thoseproduced using direct forecast error localization.


HIV criminalization is difficult to justify on the grounds advanced for it: public health and moral retribution. This Article engages with a third, underexamined rationale for HIV criminalization: sexual autonomy. Nondisclosure prosecutions purport to ensure "informed consent" to sex. However, almost all other forms of sexual deception — including deceptions that may jeopardize the partner's health — are lawful; rape law expressly accommodates an expectation that men may lie to get sex from women. Neither public health nor retributive considerations adequately justifies singling out HIV from other, permitted forms of sexual deception. Moreover, most HIV transmission and nondisclosure takes place between men, but a large majority of prosecutions involve men accused of nondisclosing to women. The arbitrary inclusions and exclusions of HIV criminal laws, their inconsistency with their ostensible rationales, and the striking disparities in HIV prosecutions all tend to raise suspicion that discriminatory impulses may be at work. Our laws tend to frame HIV as a crime that matters most when it disrupts expectations that non-drug-injecting heterosexuals should be immune to anxiety about HIV. These laws situate HIV as fairly benign when contained within stigmatized populations such as gay men, intravenous drug users, Africans and sex workers. When HIV-positive people transgress these boundaries and cause heterosexual men and women to worry about HIV, though, this transgression is often punished as a crime, even when the behavior poses no transmission risk. HIV laws and their implementation raise concern that discriminatory fallacies about race, gender and sexuality may shape perceptions of whether, when and why HIV is a crime.


Cold 87Rb atom's loading in an integrating sphere with diffuse
 light is analyzed theoretically and experimentally. The experimental results show
 that diffuse light cooling has the greatest efficiency to cool the most atoms when
 the red detuning between the frequencies of cooling light and atom transition is
 about 3.3\Γ (Γ is the natural linewidth, 6.065 MHz). Theoretical analysis
 using rate equation and numerical calculations on the cold atom number and loading
 time agree with the experimental results. This integrating sphere cooling would be a
 novel method for cooling atoms and lead to a new and robust cold atom source for
 atomic clock.


Thee propeller flap has become a versatile and important component in our reconstructive algorithm following complex lower limb trauma. First described by Hyakusoku in 1991, it has since been adapted and modified by Hallock and Teo. This article outlines our experience specifically with perforator pedicled propeller flaps (as per the Tokyo consensus) for traumatic defects of the leg. In this procedure, the reconstructive surgeon skeletonises a single perforator and rotates the skin island on its axis between 90° and 180° to close the defect.The minor blade of the propeller may be designed to close the donor defect completely for the 180° version. The propeller flap has the advantages of local flaps (reliability, contour, texture, 'like-with-like') with additional versatility of design and donor site management, and requires minimal expertise and operative time.


Objective Endovascular techniques are providing options to surgical/percutaneous cell transplantation methods. Some cells, e.g. insulin producing cells, are not suitable for intra-luminal transplantation and for such cells, other options must be found. We have constructed a "nanocatheter" with a penetrating tip for vessel perforation, thereby creating a working channel for parenchymal access by endovascular technique. To finish the procedure safely, the distal tip is detached to provide a securing plug in the vessel wall defect. Materials and Methods We have performed interventions with full clinical integration in the superior mesenteric artery (SMA), the subclavian artery and the external carotid artery in rabbits. No hemorrhagic- or thromboembolic events occurred during the procedure. Stenosis formation and distal embolisation were analyzed by angiography and macroscopic inspection during autopsy at five, 30 and 80 days. All animals and implanted devices were also evaluated by micro-dissections and histochemical analysis. Results In this study we show safety data on the trans-vessel wall technique by behavioral, angiographical and histological analysis. No stenosis formation was observed at any of the follow-up time points. No animals or organs have shown any signs of distress due to the intervention. Histological examination showed no signs of hemorrhage, excellent biocompatibility with no inflammation and a very limited fibrous capsule formation around the device, comparable to titanium implants. Further, no histological changes were detected in the endothelia of the vessels subject to intervention. Conclusions The trans-vessel wall technique can be applied for e.g. cell transplantations, local substance administration and tissue sampling with low risk for complications during the procedure and low risk for hemorrhage, stenosis development or adverse tissue reactions with an 80 days follow-up time. The benefit should be greatest in organs that are difficult or risky to reach with surgical techniques, such as the pancreas, the CNS and the heart.


Abstract Advertising agency compensation may change dramatically in coming years as advertisers put pressure on agencies to reduce commissions and tie compensation to performance resulting from advertising campaigns. Drawing on agency theory from the economics discipline, the authors develop and test several hypotheses to address the advertising agency compensation decision. Their study provides the first comprehensive look at the prevalence of outcome-based compensation tied to performance and other compensation systems currently used among U.S. advertisers.


The ideal of the rule of law speaks differently to law-makers and law-appliers. The judge, being the legal official tasked with the application of law by the court, is not in the lawmaker's position of choosing what, legally, ought to obtain, but rather is tasked with furthering, by administering, what, legally, already obtains. This demarcation of responsibilities rests on the ability of the law-maker to settle authoritatively moral-political questions in such a way as to render possible the artificial techne of legal reasoning. Bills of rights are unusual law-making acts insofar as they deliberately fail to settle moral-political questions under law by declining to specify the general right 'P has the right to x'. How, then, have judges sought to satisfy their law-applying role in relation to disputed claims of rights? The approach shared by judges in Europe and much of the Commonwealth is to interpret the open-ended rights of bills of rights to include nearly all possible instances of conduct that could be related to the right, with the consequence that nearly all legislation, including legislative specifications of open-ended rights, could be held to infringe the bill of rights. In turn, the legality of legislation turns on judiciallycreated standards of proportionality and balancing, which lack the discipline afforded by technical legal reasoning. As a consequence, judges have assumed the function of law-makers, with all of the associated challenges to the rule of law when law-applying institutions make law in the very moment the legal subject is before them.


Under the codes of conduct agreed by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) certain political norms and standards should be observed and the following principles must lie at the heart of any electoral system : broad representation of diverse political interests and population groups, inclusiveness and the political participation of key actors, political accountability of parliamentarians to the voters, and a transparent and legitimate election process and outcome. Any analysis of elections in Africa in recent years must be placed within the wider debate about democracy and its application. Yet, prior to 2003 there were few 'codified sets of agreed-upon election principles' (p 4).


This study is primarily concerned with two overarching "how" questions. The first question is "how are the teaching, learning and assessment preferences of Chinese Hong Kong learners met by the distance learning courses offered?" Specifically it concerns the feasibility of transferring a western course to the Hong Kong market. The second question interrogates the usefulness of models that measure learning style in categorising learners and making recommendations from them regarding their learning preferences. To enable these questions to be answered six research propositions concerning the learning preferences of Chinese learners were identified. A comprehensive literature review was undertaken. This was founded upon two theoretical building blocks of national culture and learning style theory. This exploration of cultural theory is extended to an examination of differences in Chinese culture that may impact upon educational preferences. To investigate the second building block of learning style theory, certain theories of learning style that attempt to measure learning style are critically examined in depth. To bring cultural differences and learning style theory together a capstone is used. This capstone is six learning preferences of the Chinese learner. These preferences are founded upon application of cultural and learning style theory and other, mainly western perceptions, of the Chinese learner. This section of the literature provides a bridge between cultural and learning style theory and the research. The research questions are answered by using a single case study. The case study focuses upon the teaching, learning and assessment preferences of twenty-five Hong Kong Chinese students studying for two UK Higher Education awards by distance learning. The study makes three contributions to knowledge. First, the study concludes that in transferring the courses from the British culture to the Hong Kong Chinese culture that the study materials in a western context may be appropriate but the method of delivery may not. Second, applying measurements of learning style to national groups is challenged as inappropriate methods of teaching and learning may be advocated and appropriate methods may be ignored. Finally, of the theoretical propositions, only two are supported. These are that this group of learners dislikes classroom discussion and that the role of the teacher/lecturer is didactic.


Lori Latrice Martin Many Americans view sports as race-neutral and apolitical. However, sports both influence, and are influenced by, society. Athletes, fans, coaches, and owners are not immune from all of the social ills impacting the larger society, including evidence of racial injustices. Protests in sports are not new (Rhoden; Smith). Tommie Smith and John Carlos, elite American sprinters, famously raised fists of freedom in the air on the medal stand during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, to protest unequal treatment facing black people in America, and other people of color around the globe. More recently, some black athletes have joined, and led efforts to again protest unequal treatment facing people of African ancestry in America with the hopes of bringing about positive social changes.


Abstract Brand posts are concise and recurrent updates created by brands and sent out to their followers on social media. Brand posts play a crucial linking role by connecting brands to their customers and fans on a daily basis. Brand posts represent a rich form of communication that convey various brand meaning and experiences using multiple media formats. Despite this, however, brand posts have not been subjected to formalized analyses in the literature. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to conduct a formalized analysis of brand posts and propose a systematic framework to categorize them. With this aim, the study performed qualitative content analysis involving three interrelated coding procedures. First, the study reviewed the relevant literature to identify pre-existing coding categories (deductive coding). Second, the study drew together systematic inferences from a purposive sample of brand posts (n = 371) to derive new coding categories (inductive coding). Finally, the study implemented a double-coding procedure on a probabilistic sample of brand posts (n = 249) to validate the initial coding categories (validation coding). Together, the three coding procedures produced 12 exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories of brand posts. The proposed categorization offers a comprehensive framework to think about brand posts. For marketers, it provides guidance to create the stream of content necessary to stimulate daily customer interaction on social media. For researchers, it offers a solid conceptual foundation to categorize, code and model brand posts.