For Foucault, the experience of plague is a vital moment in the development of new techniques of power and ways of thinking about the social world. Plague compels city or state authorities to take extreme measures to control disease. Quarantine, of the home, the city, and the nation forces assessments of issues of state power, individual liberty and medical knowledge. The most important study of plague during this period was provided by Daniel Defoe's (1722) A journal of the plague year. Defoe's narrative style blurred the line between 'fact' and 'fiction', an authorial strategy similar to Foucault's. If quarantine marks the turn towards disciplinary power and knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then its failure to check the cholera epidemic of 1832 signalled the shift toward 'biopower', the assumption by the state of pastoral as well as disciplinary roles to public health. The state's new role in preserving or improving the health of the population relied upon the steady accumulation of detailed empirical data. The administrator gradually displaced the author as the chronicler of disease, health and normality.


Despite advances in HIV prevention and care, African Americans and Latino Americans remain at much higher risk of acquiring HIV, are more likely to be unaware of their HIV-positive status, are less likely to be linked to and retained in care, and are less likely to have suppressed viral load than are Whites. The first National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) has reducing these disparities as one of its three goals by encouraging the implementation of combination high-impact HIV intervention strategies. Federal agencies have expanded their collaborations in order to decrease HIV-related disparities through better implementation of data-driven decision making; integration and consolidation of the continuum of HIV care; and the reorganization of relationships among public health agencies, researchers, community-based organizations, and HIV advocates. Combination prevention, the integration of evidence-based and impactful behavioral, biomedical, and structural intervention strategies to reduce HIV incidence, provides the tools to address the HIV epidemic. Unfortunately, health disparities exist at every step along the HIV testing-to-care continuum. This provides an opportunity and a challenge to everyone involved in HIV prevention and care to understand and address health disparities as an integral part of ending the HIV epidemic in the United States. To further reduce health disparities, successful implementation of NHAS and combination prevention strategies will require multidisciplinary teams, including psychologists with diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences, to successfully engage groups at highest risk for HIV and those already infected with HIV. In order to utilize the comprehensive care continuum, psychologists and behavioral scientists have a role to play in reconceptualizing the continuum of care, conducting research to address health disparities, and creating community mobilization strategies.


A number of apparently anomalous features in the marking of arguments are examined in three contiguous languages spoken in Transcaucasia: Abkhaz from the North West Caucasian family, and Georgian and Mingrelian, two South Caucasian (or Kartvelian) languages. Among the categories examined are those of potentiality, unwilling/accidental activity, causation, (in)transitivity, and non-standard case-assignment, as well as the much debated question of whether Georgian (and, by extension, Proto-Kartvelian) is correctly described in part of its morpho-syntax as exemplifying an Ergative as opposed to an Active configuration. There are passing references to such other languages as (Indo-European) Ancient Greek, (North West Caucasian) Circassian and (Kartvelian) Svan.


The study was performed to evaluate the subjective and objective measurements of the carcasses and non-carcasses components of weaned lambs grazing on Italian ryegrass pasture fed with different levels of concentrate supplementation (without supplementation, 0,9%, 1,8% of body weight and ad libitum). Lambs were slaughtered at 32kg of live weight. After slaughtering, hot carcass, digestive content and weight of non-carcass components were recorded. Weight of cold carcasses was assessed after the refrigeration for 24h at 5°C. Weight, yield and carcasses measurements were taken and then the leg and carcass compactness were calculated. Data were subjected to regression and simple correlation analysis. The concentrate supplementation levels had a positive linear effect on the weights and yields of hot and cold carcass and leg and carcasses compactness. Supplementation of weaned lambs grazing on annual ryegrass enabled to get carcasses of better conformation and fat covering. These effects may result in better price opportunities and marketing for farmers.


This article explores the cultural process through which British colonialism was rearticulated by the institutions and discourses of American anti-communism. Focusing on George Orwell, the author provides a critical account of the British and US governments' efforts to advance the distribution of George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four--through adaptations, translations, films, cartoons, and subventions. The article concludes that these endeavors did less to disseminate "cultural values," than they did to reproduce existing social relationships. ********** For decades, George Orwell's blue quarto notebook, filled with the names of one hundred and thirty-five "crypto-communists and fellow travelers," languished, mostly unexamined, in the George Orwell Archives in London, attracting only passing interest from the few scholars granted permission by Orwell's estate to examine the material. In his 1980 biography of Orwell, Bernard Crick, for example, made only a brief allusion to the list, writing that Orwell worried about "communist infiltration ... and kept a notebook of suspects." (1) Many of those listed, Crick said, "are plausible as possible underground or front members, but a few seem far-fetched and unlikely." (2) A decade later, Orwell's authorized biographer Michael Shelden speculated that Orwell was "engaged in a continuous exercise of determining who was sincere and who was not." The notebook was "primarily to satisfy [Orwell's] own curiosity," Shelden wrote. (3) The notebook included the names of those whom Orwell suspected of having affiliations with the Communist Party, or sympathies with the very idea of "communism." (4) Among them, he mentioned poets such as Stephen Spender, whom he described as a "sentimental [communist] sympathizer," "very unreliable," and "easily influenced." (5) George Bernard Shaw was, he wrote, "no sort of tie-up, but reliably pro-Russian on all major issues." (6) The historian A. J. P. Taylor was "anti-American"; Isaac Deutcher was "a sympathizer"; Richard Crossman was a "political climber" and "too dishonest to be an outright f[ellow] t[raveler]"; J. B. Priestley was "a strong sympathizer," "very anti-USA," and "makes huge sums of money in the USSR." (7) The Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid was "probably reliably pro-Russian" and "very anti-English." C. Day Lewis was "not completely reliable" and the Irish playwright, Sean O'Casey, was "very stupid." (8) Orwell's notebook of "crypto-communists and fellow-travelers" inscribed "communism" in the form of various threats to the homogeneity of English culture. He observed, for example, that the historian Isaac Deutcher was a "Polish Jew"; that Ian Mikardo, a columnist at the Tribune, was "silly" and "Jewish"; that the writer Cedric Dover was "Eurasian"; that Paul Robeson was a "US Negro" and "very anti-white"; that the MP Konni Zilliacus was "Finnish" and "Jewish"; that the biologist J. D. Bernal was "Irish"; that Louis Adamic was "Jugo-Slav" and "very anti-British"; that Vera Dean was "Russian"; and that the French intellectual E. Mounier, author of La Pensee de Charles Peguy (1931) was "slimy." (9) Indeed, Orwell once wrote to his friend Dwight McDonald that he could "smell" a crypto-communist. (10) Irish and Scottish writers, such as Sean O'Casey, Liam O'Flaherty, and Hugh McDiarmid, were recast and refashioned as communist threats: "I think we should pay more attention to the small but violent separatist movements which exist within our own island," Orwell wrote in 1946; "They may look very unimportant now, but, after all, the Communist Manifesto was once an obscure document, and the Nazi party had only six members when Hitler joined it." (11) From the one hundred and thirty-five names in the notebook, Orwell drew up a more limited list of thirty-five, which he sent to the Information Research Department (IRD) on May 2, 1949. (12) "It isn't very sensational and I don't suppose it will tell your friends anything they don't know," he wrote the IRD; "At the same time it isn't a bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed. …


During the fourth or fifth revision of my children's book The Secret of Gumbo Grove - around 1984 or 1985 - my extraordinarily patient editor Jeanne Vestal at Franklin Watts crossed out yet another passage of my precious prose and tactfully explained, "You can't put the whole history of Black America into this one book, Eleanora. You're telling the story of just one little girl." Jeanne was right. What I had to tell wouldn't fit into one book, so after the publication of The Secret of Gumbo Grove (Watts, 1987), I wrote two more - Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! (Watts, 1990), and A Blessing in Disguise (Delacorte, 1995). The three became my "Carolina Trilogy." I spent most of my fourteen years (1978-1992) of living in Myrtle Beach (Horry County), South Carolina, writing these slices of realistic adolescent fiction about some very special African American girls, their families, and their neighborhoods in the coastal Carolina Low Country as my way of acquainting readers in print with what I was blessed to experience in reality. My writing room and our front porch on Carver Street located in the main African American neighborhood of Myrtle Beach became a window into a state whose heritage of exciting, evolving, and often turbulent African American struggle is evidenced not necessarily through the physical and rhetorical "plantations" found on almost every corner in the region, but more through the evidence of things not seen. Felt instead, from boneside out. What I saw and experienced in Myrtle Beach and Horry County - with its contrasting beer-guzzling, golf-crazy, yellow-shirt-and-green-pant-wearing, bikini-biker-beach resort-attracting, plat-eye ghost-roaming, millionaire and poverty-stricken, overalls- to swimsuit-wearing, tobacco-chewing, snuff-dipping, Gullah-speaking, roots- and hoodoo-working, fight-for-the-Confederate flag-till-you-die-evoking, pageant-prancing, ancestor-worshiping lifestyles - went straight into the books. I didn't have to make what I wrote larger than life, in other words. All I had to do for The Secret of Gumbo Grove was create a strong sense of place in a mythical "Calvary" County, South Carolina, to collect obscure history, develop full-fledged characters, particularly strong-willed Raisin Stackhouse (who'd probably be a rocket scientist by now), and then transform these observations, emotions, personalities, and research into a meaningful dialogue with the reader. That alone took me seven years. Having done that, writing the second and third books was easier, because they take place in the same county. All I needed to do then was give voices to their heroines, Mary Elouise Avery in Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! and Zambia Brown of "itsy-bitsy, do-nothin', countrified" Deacons Neck, South Carolina, in A Blessing in Disguise. An American Bookseller "Pick of the Lists," A Blessing in Disguise is "a timely book that speaks to the subject of drugs and crime in a rural Southern town," wrote School Library Journal, "and a valuable addition to most collections." The ALA Booklist called Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! "clear-eyed and accessible," and it was named a National Council for the Social Studies-Children's Book Council Notable Children's Book. Kirkus gave The Secret of Gumbo Grove a "pointer" and called it "a slice of Americana that would be widely enjoyed." Gumbo Grove received a Parents' Choice Gold Seal award, was featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and remains on state children's book recommended reading lists. Both Gumbo Grove and Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! are under contract to be made into audiotapes by Recorded Books, Inc. I've tried to offer a body of work that brings northeast coastal South Carolina into a finer perspective for both young and young-at-heart readers everywhere. If nothing else, the collection might in some way nullify the claim expressed years ago to me during my initial research - which I have Raisin's teacher tell her - "that nobody Black around here had ever done anything good worth talking about" (Secret 16). …


The major component of the casein fraction of human milk was cleaved by cyanogen bromide, and the composition of the resulting peptides was determined. Casein was also subjected to limited digestion by trypsin, and the amino acid composition of the isolated peptides was established. With this information the peptides were ordered as they occur in the purified protein.


Abstract. The two theories of abiogenic formation of hydrocarbons, the Russian‐Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins and Thomas Gold's deep gas theory, have been considered in some detail. Whilst the Russian‐Ukrainian theory was portrayed as being scientifically rigorous in contrast to the biogenic theory which was thought to be littered with invalid assumptions, this applies only to the formation of the higher hydrocarbons from methane in the upper mantle. In most other aspects, in particular the influence of the oxidation state of the mantle on the abundance of methane, this rigour is lacking especially when judged against modern criteria as opposed to the level of understanding in the 1950s to 1980s when this theory was at its peak. Thomas Gold's theory involves degassing of methane from the mantle and the formation of higher hydrocarbons from methane in the upper layers of the Earth's crust. However, formation of higher hydrocarbons in the upper layers of the Earth's crust occurs only as a result of Fischer‐Tropsch‐type reactions in the presence of hydrogen gas but is otherwise not possible on thermodynamic grounds. This theory is therefore invalid. Both theories have been overtaken by the increasingly sophisticated understanding of the modes of formation of hydrocarbon deposits in nature.


The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines represent a uniform set of formal rules that are implemented across a broad range of diverse social contexts. Drawing from neo-institutional theory and kindred perspectives on criminal courts, we argue that the federal courts represent an organizational field in which local influences play a key role in conformity to institutional rules. We use unique survey data from federal judges, aggregated to the district court level and combined with individual-level federal sentencing data, to examine hierarchical models of judicial departures from the Guidelines. Our analysis includes more proximate measures of court community culture than prior research. We find that the collective views of federal judges, including their perceptions of the degree of regulative constraint posed by the Guidelines, as well as the extent to which the Guidelines are normatively and morally legitimate, are intimately related to variation in judicial Guidelines departures across district courts.


The connection between the conditioning of a problem instance—the sensitivity of a problem instance to perturbations in the input—and the speed of certain iterative algorithms in solving that problem instance is a recurring topic of study in numerical analysis. This dissertation, consisting of three distinct parts, provides a further connection through the framework of randomized optimization algorithms.
In Part I, we explore how randomization can help asymptotic convergence properties of simple, directional search-based optimization methods. Specifically, we develop a randomized, iterative scheme for estimating the Hessian matrix of a twice-differentiable function. Using this estimation technique, we analyze how it can be used to enhance a random directional search method. From there, we proceed to develop a conjugate-directional search method that incorporates estimated Hessian information without requiring direct use of gradients.
In Part II, we turn our focus to randomized variants of two classical algorithms: coordinate descent methods for systems of linear equations and iterated projection methods for systems of linear inequalities. We then demonstrate that, under appropriate randomization schemes, linear rates of convergence can be bounded (in expectation) in terms of natural linear-algebraic conditioning measures for these problems. By considering conditioning concepts induced by metric regularity and metric subregularity, we then expand upon these results by examining randomized projection algorithms for convex feasibility problems. Extensions to reflection-based algorithms are also discussed.
Observing that convex feasibility problems can be reformulated into the problem of finding a common zero of maximal monotone operators, we proceed by studying the proximal point method in Part III. Specifically, for the problem of finding a zero of a single maximal monotone operator, we show that metric subregularity of that operator is sufficient for linear convergence of the proximal point method, leading to a convergence rate in terms of the conditioning induced by the modulus of subregularity. This result is then generalized—by considering randomized and averaged proximal point methods—to obtain a convergence rate for the problem of finding a common zero of finitely many such operators.


Abstract The philosophy behind the Geoparks concept was first introduced at the Digne Convention in 1991 as a means to protect and promote geological heritage and sustainable local development through a global network of territories containing geology of outstanding value. In 1997, in direct response to the 'Declaration of the Rights of the Memory of the Earth', the Division of Earth Sciences of UNESCO introduced the concept of a UNESCO Geoparks Programme to support national and international endeavours in Earth heritage conservation. In 2000, representatives from four European territories met together to address regional economic development through the protection of geological heritage and the promotion of geotourism. The result of this meeting was the signing of a convention declaring the creation of the European Geoparks Network (EGN). The next significant step for the EGN was the signing of an official agreement of collaboration with UNESCO in 2001, placing the Network under the auspices of the organzsation. In 2004 the 17 existing European Geoparks joined with eight new Chinese national Geoparks to form a Global Network of National Geoparks under the auspices of UNESCO. This Global Network of National Geoparks has encouraged other countries such as Iran and Brazil to develop Geoparks programmes. By 2007, European Geoparks were distributed across 15 European countries. There are 31 members of the European Geoparks Network, bringing the total number of Global Geoparks to 52. Progress has not always been easy, however, and finding funding to develop the initiative and secure the future of individual Geoparks remains a significant challenge.


Many compilers rely on branch prediction to improve program performance by identifying frequently executed regions and by aiding in scheduling instructions.Profile-based predictors require a time-consuming and inconvenient compile-profile-compile cycle in order to make predictions. We present a program-based branch predictor that performs well for a large and diverse set of programs written in C and Fortran. In addition to using natural loop analysis to predict branches that control the iteration of loops, we focus on heuristics for predicting non-loop branches, which dominate the dynamic branch count of many programs. The heuristics are simple and require little program analysis, yet they are effective in terms of coverage and miss rate. Although program-based prediction does not equal the accuracy of profile-based prediction, we believe it reaches a sufficiently high level to be useful. Additional type and semantic information available to a compiler would enhance our heuristics.


The principles and practice of sustainability have gained
momentum in the last 15 years and now form a central part
of conversations around social praxis and the future. It has
been proposed that the theories driving sustainability science are embedded in Indigenous history, and it has been shown that many ancient traditions always concerned themselves with sustainable and ethical living. Among the traditions identified with environmental stewardship are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia and Māori of New Zealand. Of interest in this context is the Vedic tradition, a tradition of sustainability and ecological awareness which identifies the source of sustainability in Natural Law, the universal source of tradition, language, and knowledge. In this paper we survey two Indigenous traditions as they relate to environmental stewardship, and explore their relation to the Vedic tradition.


The excitation potentials of the observed wavelengths of the spectral lines emitted in the low alloy steel spectrum were calculated. Tentative homologous line pairs were selected on the basis of similar excitation potentials and freedom from interferences. The slopes of the working curves were found to be independent of alloying elements, matrix, and discharge conditions. Alterations in the circuit parameters and consequent changes in the discharge had little or no influence upon the intercept of the working curves. Self-reversal of either or both of the alloying element line and the internal standard line was observed. The self-reversal was removed by selecting spectral lines of higher excitation potentials or directing an air blast across the discharge. In this way, the working curves were linear over all concentrations considered. Element interference correction factors, which were found to be functions of the concentration of the interfering element, could be applied to data so that one working curve could be used regardless of the major alloying constituents in the sample. Reproducibility tests indicate some improvement in accuracy when the air blast was employed.


The NextGen project investigates disease resistance in indigenous Ugandan cattle. Since population structure and stratification may produce biased results, We have investigated the genomic structure of sampled animals genotyped with the BovineSNP50 Genotyping Beadchip. A total of 788 animals from 9 populations belonging to Ankole (crossbred between B. indicus and B. taurus), Zebu and Ankole-Zebu crosses have been sampled in 52 grid cells throughout the country (Table 1). We merged this data whit other 400 Italian Holstein Cattle, genotyped in the framework of SELMOL project to seek for a likely introgression of European B. taurus. The data were filtered with the following exclusion criteria: MAF < 0.01, genotype call rate (SNPs) < 0.95, genotype call rate (Animals) < 0.95. The resulting working dataset were composed of 43494 SNPs and 1188 animals. Hidden genetic structures were investigated by a Bayesian clustering approach with the ADMIXTURE software (Novembre et al. 2010). The software Admixture identified four ancestral genomic components. Three of them likely correspond to European taurine, African indicine and African taurine components (Figure 2). The fourth has a still unidentified origin (Yellow, Figure 2d). Most Ugandan individuals investigated have a remarkable level of admixture. Overall, about 20% of the Zebu genome is of African taurine origin, confirming previous data on the foundation of African Zebu. The European taurine (Blue, Figure 2) is a minor component of African genomes, rare in Zebu and evenly distributed in Ankole, other taurine subgroups and Ankole- Zebu crosses. Indicine and taurine components show a clear geographical structure, the former being predominant in north-eastern Uganda, and the latter in the south-west. Holstein Fresian introgression is spread mostly in south-western Uganda, while the fourth component is located in restricted geographical area in the East (Figure 3). The Ugandan cattle population is a complex admixture of African taurine (green in Figure 2) and zebuine (red) genomes, with a minor component of European origin (blue) and a rare but relevant contribution (yellow) from a still unidentified source. This complexity is to be accounted for in the following GWAS and selection signatures analyses planned within the NextGen project.


OBJECTIVES
To develop an observer-free method for quantitatively evaluating the image quality of CBCT images by applying just-noticeable difference (JND).

METHODS
We used two test objects: (1) a Teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene) plate phantom attached to a dry human mandible; and (2) a block phantom consisting of a Teflon step phantom and an aluminium step phantom. These phantoms had holes with different depths. They were immersed in water and scanned with a CB MercuRay (Hitachi Medical Corporation, Tokyo, Japan) at tube voltages of 120 kV, 100 kV, 80 kV and 60 kV. Superimposed images of the phantoms with holes were used for evaluation. The number of detectable holes was used as an index of image quality. In detecting holes quantitatively, the threshold grey value (ΔG), which differentiated holes from the background, was calculated using a specific threshold (the JND), and we extracted the holes with grey values above ΔG. The indices obtained by this quantitative method (the extracted hole values) were compared with the observer evaluations (the observed hole values). In addition, the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) of the shallowest detectable holes and the deepest undetectable holes were measured to evaluate the contribution of CNR to detectability.

RESULTS
The results of this evaluation method corresponded almost exactly with the evaluations made by observers. The extracted hole values reflected the influence of different tube voltages. All extracted holes had an area with a CNR of ≥1.5.

CONCLUSIONS
This quantitative method of evaluating CBCT image quality may be more useful and less time-consuming than evaluation by observation.


Against the backdrop of escalating contradictions and critiques of the digital economy's trajectory, this study analyzes how the emerging digitalization issues might be philosophically understood from a systems viewpoint. Five systemic digitalization challenges including the circular economy (CE), cyberphysical systems (CPS), sharing economy (SE), digital transformation (DT), and smart systems were identified (SS). To investigate digitalization challenges, the machine, organism, cultural/political, societal/environmental, and interrelationship systems metaphors were used. The machine viewpoint demonstrates that the circular economy challenge may be examined utilizing Hard Systems Thinking (HST) methodologies, with a focus on sufficiency via product design and business model innovation. The organism approach demonstrated how the digital twin notion may be investigated using Socio-Technical Systems (STS) and the Viable System Model (VSM) to diagnose and forecast CPS viability in an increasingly linked Industry 4.5/5.0 environment. In analyzing SE's rentier capitalism, the cultural/political viewpoint demonstrated the applicability of purposeful systems techniques for "people complexity." The societal/environmental viewpoint stressed emancipatory systems approaches to "coercive complexity" as crucial to evaluating the perpetuation of digital exclusion by DT from an emancipatory systems perspective. The interrelationship viewpoint emphasized the significance of systems approaches for researching "structural complexity" in intelligent systems. These viewpoints aid decision- makers in identifying problem-solving strategies based on systems thinking.


Objective: The prevalence of asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB) in sickle cell disease (SCD) in Jamaica is 5.3%. This study sought to determine the association between ASB and anatomical urological abnormalities and symptomatic urinary tract infections (UTIs). Methods: A matched case-controlled study of 11 patients with a history of ASB from the Jamaican Sickle Cell Cohort and 11 controls who did not have a history of ASB or recurrent UTIs but who had SCD was conducted. Midstream urine collected aseptically was obtained for urinalysis and culture and sensitivity analysis. Serum creatinine was measured. Voiding cystourethrogram (VCUG) and kidney-ureter-bladder ultrasound were done. History of UTIs was recorded in all cases. Results: The mean ± sd age of the group (cases and controls) was 34.2 ± 7.2 years. All VCUGs were normal. There was no difference in mean cortical thickness or renal scarring between cases and controls. All serum creatinine values were normal: cases (mean ± sd: 55.9 ± 15.3; min-max: 32–90 μmol/L) and controls (mean ± sd: 59.6 ± 18.5; min-max: 41–95 μmol/L). There was no difference in symptomatic UTIs between cases and controls. Conclusion: There was no association between anatomical urinary tract abnormalities and ASB in patients with SCD. Asymptomatic bacteriuria in SCD was not associated with increased numbers of symptomatic UTIs.


Despite policies to discourage them, informal milk markets account for over 80% of milk sales in most sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Informal milk market agents include farmer dairy co-operatives, small traders using bicycles and public or private transport and small retail outlets, such as dairy kiosks, and shops. Studies conducted by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and national collaborators (e.g., in Kenya) show that convenient delivery and lower prices (reflecting lower handling and processing costs) are the principal benefits for consumers. Current milk handling and safety regulations in most SSA countries are derived from models in industrialised countries. These may not be appropriate for local market conditions where such regulations may unnecessarily inhibit efficient milk marketing. An important step in developing targeted policies more supportive of market participation of the majority is to collect quantitative and qualitative information about milk-borne health risks under different production and marketing situations. This paper gives an over-view of on-going activities in central Kenya aimed at assessing public health risks from informally marketed milk and presents preliminary results of milk quality and handling practices of informal milk market agents and consumers.


Introduction: Effective teaching is critical for student learning, especially in professional fields such as dentistry and dental hygiene and further, the effective behavior of educator must include organization, enthusiasm, empathy, rapport, clarity, general knowledge, and being available for students. Aim: The aim of this study is to assess teachers' perception regarding the final-year dental students' classroom behavior. Materials and Methods: Data for this qualitative study came from three focus group discussions (FGDs) with teachers teaching final-year BDS students. Participants (n = 15) represented the department of pedodontics, prosthodontics, and conservative and endodontic dentistry. FGD was conducted department wise with participation of five teachers each. A conceptual framework was prepared with seven questions for conducting FGD. Data from the FGD were analyzed by combining similar quotes into categories. Results: The data from the FGD led to the formation of seven categories with similar quotes in each category. Teachers reported about different behaviors of students depicting their lack of attention in lectures with the most common reason being: engaging in electronic gadgets, chatting with each other, yawning, and getting bored after 5 min of commencement of lecture. Teachers also mentioned the hectic schedule of students being one of the reasons for lack of attention. Suggestions of improving students' behavior were also reported which included different meditation techniques and change in classroom structure. Conclusion: The study reveals that teachers face a lot of inappropriate behavior from the students' side while delivering a lecture in the classroom. Different ways can be employed to increase the concentration of the students.


To operate wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) with optimized efficiency, influent conditions (ICs) as initial states of inflow fed to WWTPs were monitored to identify potential anomalies that would trigger adverse events or system crash. To employ voluminous measurements for data-driven decisions, the non-linear, non-Gaussian, non-stationary, auto-correlated, cross-correlated, hetero-skedastic, case-specific nature of multivariate environmental datasets must be considered. This research proposed kernel machine learning models, the kernel principal components analysis based one-class support vector machine (KPCA-OCSVM) with various kernels, to learn anomaly-free training set then classify the testing set. A seven-years multivariate ICs time series was introduced with exploratory analysis performed to reveal temporal behaviors and statistical properties. KPCA with polynomial kernels sufficiently output representative features, based on which OCSVM with Gaussian kernels sensitively and specifically identified anomalies in ICs that were previously omitted by WWTP operators. The proposed kernel algorithms surpassed previous linear PCA-based K-nearest-neighbors models, and improved outcomes with limited increase in computation cost. Without requiring linear, Gaussian, stationary, independent, and homo-skedastic qualities from data, the proposed flexible environmental data science approach could be transferred, rebuilt, and tuned conveniently for ICs from different WWTPs.


Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) has become a global pandemic with at least 25 million deaths and no cure. One of the most important targets to inhibit this virus is HIV-1 protease (PR), which is required to cleave the viral proteins needed for maturation of the virus after it invades and replicates in the host cell. There are nine protease inhibitors that are used in AIDS treatment. The virus loses susceptibility to these inhibitors by drug resistance due to mutations. The goal of the project is to examine the highly drug resistant HIV PR P51 in its complex with inhibitors. In this experiment we expressed and purified HIV PR P51 protein. We performed protein crystallization with inhibitors Tipranavir, Amprenavir, Darunavir, and Saquinavir to obtain the structure of the protease and the inhibitors in their complexes. Future analysis of the crystal structures will help with the development of successful therapeutic inhibitors. INDEX WORDS: Human Immunodeficiency Virus, Inhibitor, Mutant, Protease P51, Drug Resistance, Protein Crystallization HIV-1 PR P51 MUTANT COMPLEX FORMATION WITH INHIBITORS


'The surrender of our sovereignty to unelected bureaucrats and a centralised legislative process has been justified solely in economic terms. But, as David Green points out in this powerful book, even if the economic arguments are good ones (which they are not), the question of EU membership is not primarily one of economics. It is about the happiness and cohesion of our nation, and the civilisation of which we have been, in Europe, the prominent guardians. The true argument is not that it is economically advisable to reclaim our sovereignty, but that it is our moral duty to do so.' Roger Scruton 'Amidst the technical jargon and diplomatic double-talk, the debate over Britain's future relationship with the European Union is fundamentally about values. In this thoughtful new book, David Green serves a damning indictment on the EU, charging it with a wholesale attack on the principles of liberal democracy and self-determination, in the name of a progressive authoritarianism at odds with British moral and political values. This intellectual rearguard action is sure to strike a nerve in Brussels, and open a new front in the debate on Europe.' Dominic Raab MP 'David Green's book is a timely and elegant new perspective on a problem which has been frustrating politicians ever since we entered the European Union. His analysis and conclusions should be read by every politician and citizen who wants to enhance their view on what is the best future for our country as we approach the crossroads of a decision in 2017.' David Davis MP 'Since the enlightenment progressives from across the political spectrum have believed their governments should be chosen by the people. The electorate should regularly have the opportunity to throw out the rascals. The creation of the EU removes that right. David Green is doing democracy a favour by writing this important book.' Graham Stringer MP 'This book, historically, politically and constitutionally, hits the nail on the head. This should be the subject of a widespread debate which has been deliberately driven underground by the Euro-cognoscenti, who know that otherwise they cannot win. Failure to have this debate in the light of the undemocratic Leviathan which has been created is simply an irresponsible defiance of the electorate in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe.' Bill Cash MP


The U.S. Congress recently passed a new energy bill that, until that last minute, included provisions that would have established a national renewable portfolio standard (RPS). The RPS would have required electric utilities to procure a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable resources or purchase renewable energy credits from other sources to meet the standard. The recent energy bill is just the latest of repeated, and thus far failed, efforts to impose a national RPS. As such, there has been much debate about the potential merits and hazards of a national RPS, and more is sure to follow. Rather than joining this part of the policy debate, this Article considers the effects implementing a national RPS would have on the operation of the energy industry. More specifically, the Article considers what a national RPS would mean for electric utilities, regulators (state and federal), and consumers. The Article begins with an introduction to the most recent national RPS proposal, including a brief summary of both the program's goals and major criticisms of the proposal. This introduction also includes an overview of the current and pending state-level RPS standards. The Article then discusses the primary issues a national RPS would raise for key stakeholders. First, the Article considers what a national RPS would mean for electric utilities - focusing on necessary compliance activities and the possible effects on short- and long-term investment decisions - including infrastructure and RPS compliance sources. Next, the Article discusses the impacts on state and federal regulators, focusing on the development of a renewable energy credit tracking system, the enforcement of the national RPS, and the role regulators at each level will have in the process. Finally, the Article considers the impacts a national RPS could have on consumers with regard to short- and long-term electricity costs. The Article concludes that, although the implementation of any major policy initiative takes significant resources, the biggest hurdle facing a national RPS is political, not technological or economic.


Anorectal dysfunction and constipation are well recognized in Parkinson's disease and may reflect the direct involvement of the gastrointestinal tract by the primary Parkinson's disease process. We hypothesized, therefore, that anorectal function would alter in parallel with fluctuations in motor function related to on‐ and off‐periods in Parkinson's disease, and employed combined anorectal manometry and electromyography to investigate anorectal function during both on‐ and off‐periods in patients with Parkinson's disease. Manometric recordings revealed a deterioration in voluntary sphincter squeeze during off‐periods (squeeze index, on versus off, mean ± SEM: 46.4 ± 11.1 versus 29.6 ± 7.9 mm Hg, p < 0.05); correspondingly, simultaneous electromyographic (EMG) recordings showed poor recruitment of external anal sphincter and puborectalis muscles during off‐periods. A hypercontractile ("paradoxical") rectosphincteric reflex response occurred during both on‐ and off‐periods, and was associated with an increase in EMG activity in the external sphincter and/or the puborectalis muscle. These changes in manometric and EMG parameters paralleled changes in overall motor function. These findings provide further support for the involvement of the pelvic floor musculature in the Parkinson's disease process and also provide EMG correlates for some of the manometric abnormalities described in Parkinson's disease.


"Nursing the Acutely ill Adult is a comprehensive text ...Each chapter draws on the clinical and academic expertise of the author and follows a structured approach that explores the case problems, altered physiology and nursing interventions and care. It is an ideal reference resource for nurses who wish to reflect and explore the evidence base underpinning the complexities of nursing acutely ill adults." Alison Eddleston, Senior Lecturer Acute, Operative and Critical Care, School of Health, University of Central Lancashire, UK "This informative case-based book encourages the reader to critically consider the assessment and care needed by acutely ill adult patients with a variety of underlying conditions. Nursing and other healthcare students ...should find that the book helps with the development of an integrated mindset and evidence-based decision making." Janice Christie, Senior Lecturer in Public Health and Primary Care, City University London, UK "The book will enable practitioners to approach the assessment of patients with a range of acute conditions in a structured manner. The case scenarios are very realistic and there are good explanations of underlying patho-physiology. There is also a well structured explanation of investigations and priority interventions ...This book will enable the development of expertise in assessment and prioritising of care in a range of settings." Laurence Leonard, Senior Lecturer, Kingston University and St George's, University of London, UK The complexity of caring for patients who become acutely ill or have deteriorated can be a daunting challenge for nurses. Part of a case book series, this accessible book contains 17 in-depth case studies relating to care of the acutely ill adult. The cases combine pathophysiology, pharmacology and nursing care in realistic clinical settings, providing an engaging resource for nursing students taking acute care modules. This handy book: Follows a step-by-step question and answer format Facilitates the application of theory to practice through the use of clinical case studies Considers the most common acute illness scenarios that are frequently encountered by practitioners Integrates knowledge of pathological processes, applied pharmacology and related nursing implications to acute illnessNursing the Acutely Ill Adult: Case Book offers a unique way of relating theory to practice, making it key reading for undergraduate nursing students. It will also be beneficial to students in areas such as intensive care as well as nurse educators looking for a way to bridge the gap between the classroom and clinical practice. Contributors: Patrick Gallagher, Niall McKenna, Billie Joan Rice.


The development of Islam as a twentieth-century African American religious tradition and political discourse has been shaped by the interaction of black Americans with immigrants and visitors from Muslim-majority lands. After the Second World War, during the era of decolonization and the "rising tide of color," African American identifications with Muslims from overseas only increased as black Americans viewed Muslims as potential allies in the struggle against European neocolonialism and white supremacy. But little is known about the actual contact between African American Muslims and Muslims from historically Islamic lands and the impact of Middle East politics on the practice of Islam among African Americans. This essay begins to fill that void by uncovering African American Muslim reactions to Islamism, the twentieth-century transnational ideology that sees Islam as both a political system and a religion. It analyzes the contact, exchange, and competition that resulted as African American Muslims participated in a global Islamist missionary culture spawned by the ideological participants of the Arab cold war. As foreign and immigrant Muslim missionaries reached out to African American Muslims in the 1960s, they claimed the authority to interpret what constituted legitimate Islamic practice, encouraged African American Muslims to join their missionary organizations, and in some cases, challenged the Islamic authenticity of indigenous African American Muslim groups and leaders. This essay examines the differing responses to such missionary activity, showing how Shaikh Daoud Ahmed Faisal, the founder of the State Street Mosque in Brooklyn, New York, aligned his community of believers with Islamist ideologies; how Malcolm X became the student and ally of these new foreign and immigrant missionaries, though he resisted their politicized interpretation of Islam; and finally, how members of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam rejected the missionaries' claims to ultimate religious authority and instead defended Elijah Muhammad's prophetic voice. The essay also explores the shared repercussions of these exchanges. As a result of the increased contact with Islamic missionaries and Muslim immigrants, African American Muslims altered their religious practices and political identities, increasingly read and studied canonical Islamic texts, and created new visual art and poetry signaling their identification with the rest of the Muslim world and the heritage of Islam.


This study examined the influence of localized disturbances on the heterogeneity of ecological communities at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Foraging disturbances by the epibenthic predator, Atlantic Horseshoe Crab Limulus polyphemus, on the intertidal mudflats of Great Bay estuary, New Hampshire, USA were used as the study system. This study overcame methodological hurdles in the study of small localized disturbance over extensive areas of soft-sediments. Using a novel, low-cost technique to monitor Limulus foraging disturbances, Great Bay's tidal flats were found to be critical feeding habitats from late spring till fall. Foraging Limulus disturbed the benthos of Great Bay at high frequencies and intensities -disturbing 67-70% of the survey area more than once every four weeks over the intertidal foraging season. It was also found that Limulus disturbance within a single site exhibited a clustered spatial pattern over a spatial scale of 3 weeks and also over the entire intertidal foraging season. Infauna densities in individual Limulus feeding pits were significantly lower than in undisturbed sediment, and recovered to resemble the structure of undisturbed communities within 28 days. The role of Limulus disturbance on infaunal community structure was confirmed by long-term exclusion experiments in 2009 and 2010. Removal of Limulus disturbance resulted in significant increase in predatory polychaetes in both years, although there were no significant trends observed in abundance of total infauna or deposit feeding polychaetes and oligochaetes. On the other hand, bivalve, Macoma balthica, abundance and biomass were significantly higher within exclusions. On the scale of the estuary, Limulus disturbance was found to contribute between 24% to 91% of the variability of total infaunal abundance, and had similarly negative effects on the abundance of predatory and deposit feeding polychaetes across the estuary. However, Limulus disturbance patterns did not explain the variability of Macoma abundance and biomass across the estuary. Observational and experimental results revealed that Limulus is a critical factor structuring infaunal communities in Great Bay. However, the infaunal taxa that is most affected by Limulus foraging disturbance varies from the localized scale of individual disturbances to the landscape scale of the estuary.


One of the most common operations on graph databases is graph pattern matching (e.g., graph isomorphism and more general types of "subgraph pattern matching"). In fact, in some graph query languages every single query is expressed as a graph matching operation. Consequently, there has been a significant amount of research effort in optimizing graph matching operations in graph database systems. As graph databases have scaled in recent years, so too has recent work on scaling graph matching operations. However, the performance of recent proposals for scaling graph pattern matching is limited by the presence of high-degree nodes. These high-degree nodes result in an explosion of intermediate result sizes during query execution, and therefore significant performance bottlenecks. In this paper we present a dedensification technique that losslessly compresses the neighborhood around high-degree nodes. Furthermore, we introduce a query processing technique that enables direct operation of graph query processing operations over the compressed data, without ever having to decompress the data. For pattern matching operations, we show how this technique can be implemented as a layer above existing graph database systems, so that the end-user can benefit from this technique without requiring modifications to the core graph database engine code. Our technique reduces the size of the intermediate result sets during query processing, and thereby improves query performance.


Background Much of the research related to Teach For America (TFA) is related to the concerns surrounding whether such teachers should assume primary teaching responsibility and whether alternatively certified teachers are effective in the classroom. This research study takes a different approach and moves the conversation into a new domain of evaluating the coursework that TFA teachers undertake to meet state-mandated certification requirements. Based on initial course evaluations at a college of education, TFA students rated their university courses and instructors more critically than did non-TFA students. Purpose of Study The purposes of this study were (1) to explore the aforementioned differences in quality ratings of courses and instructors and (2) to examine what items on the student evaluation instrument could be used to identify salient constructs that are most necessary to meet the needs of TFA students. Setting This research was conducted at a college of education at a Research I university involved with a TFA partnership through which TFA students earn master's and certification while teaching in high-needs schools. Participants Participants in this study were TFA students who were teaching on an alternative teaching certificate, as compared with traditional students who were enrolled in the same methods courses with the same instructors. Both sets of students were enrolled in their first year of their teacher preparation program. Research Design The researchers analyzed the numerical differences between student evaluation scores posted for the same instructors by different groups of students (TFA and traditional students enrolled in the same methods coursework). The researchers also analyzed survey (Likert-type and open-ended) data to evidence and explain differences. Findings/Results (1) TFA students did in fact rate their courses and instructors significantly lower than did their non-TFA peers; (2) TFA students, as practicing teachers in charge of real-time classrooms, were more critical consumers, critical in the sense that they needed—or, more appropriately, felt that they needed—coursework that provided just-in-time knowledge; and (3) TFA students did not feel as if they were treated like master's students. They wanted instructors who modeled practical teaching strategies and did not dumb down course activities, many of which they believed were irrelevant and a waste of time given their immediate needs. Conclusions/Recommendations Issues related to certification coursework are highlighted, and included are specific and immediate course improvement recommendations and a call to reexamine educational policies related to alternative teacher certification.


Context. We consider security properties of decentralized blockchain-based consensus protocols. The object of research is block confirmation time for users to get assurance that their transaction will not be reverted. Objective. The goal of the paper is to analyze double-spend attacks on the different blockchain-based systems and compare resulting probabilities of attacker's success. Method. We presented two models for two types of attacks on the Ouroboros protocol (for the general and covert adversaries). The models allow calculating the exact number of slots needed to achieve the required level of security. It was shown that the Ouroboros protocol allows achieving the required security level with significantly shorter confirmation period in comparison with Bitcoin. We estimated minimal number of confirmation blocks and compare estimation time for Bitcoin, GHOST and Ouroboros protocols. As a measure of comparison, we considered transaction confirmation time for which the probability of a double-spend attack is less than 0.1%. We use different standard probability distribution and different properties of Markov chains and Random Walks to get comparison of estimated security properties of Bitcoin blockchain against three different models of Bitcoin double spend attack. The splitting attack based on the model where resources of honest participants are divided to compete different chains is applied to Bitcoin and GHOST consensus protocols. Properties of Markov chains and Random Walks are also applied to obtain security estimations for the Ouroboros protocol. Results. We developed methods to get specific numbers for average block confirmation time for Ouroboros protocol. We compared minimal number of confirmation blocks needed to ensure a high security for considered protocols: Bitcoin, GHOST and Ouroboros. Conclusions. The obtained results allow determination of security bounds for the Bitcoin, GHOST and Ouroboros consensus protocols. Users of the practically deployed blockchain systems may get specific parameters for a given assurance level.


Fuel resource diversification is a global effort to deviate from non-renewable fossil fuels. Biomass has been identified as an alternative solid biofuel source due to its desirable properties and carbon neutrality. As reported in the literature, biomass can positively contribute towards combating climate change while providing alleviation for energy security issue. As part of efforts to diversify biomass resources, this work intends to explore the potential of Napier grass, one type of energy crop, for the production of renewable syngas via gasification. This energy crop is originally from Africa, which is highly productive with low cost (40 tonnes per year per hectare). Limited studies were conducted to analyze the potential of such an energy crop as a fuel source, which is the subject of this work. In order to analyze the full potential of such energy crop, the physical and chemical characteristics of this biomass was first analyzed. To determine the productivity of syngas from this biomass, fluidized bed gasifier was used in this work. The effects of gasification process parameters (i.e., equivalence ratio and temperature) on product yield and producer gas compositions were examined. Besides, the effects of equivalence ratio towards higher heating value of syngas and carbon conversion efficiency were analyzed. Based on the ultimate analysis results, the molecular formula of Napier gas was CH1.56O0.81N0.0043. Meanwhile, the higher heating value of such biomass was determined as 16.73 MJ/kg, which was comparable to other biomasses. It is noted that in this work, the volatile matter was determined as 85.52% and this promoted gasification process remarkably. The dynamics of the reactions involved were observed as a significant variation in product yield and biogas components were recorded at varying equivalence ratio and gasifier operating temperature.


I. INTRODUCTION Ever since the skyjackings of four wide-bodied planes on September 11, 2001 (henceforth 9/11), economists have displayed a strong research interest in terrorism. Theoretical and empirical papers have investigated myriad aspects of terrorism--for example, the economic consequences of terrorism, the impact of terrorism on economic development, the root causes of terrorism, and the effectiveness of counterterrorism policies (see the literature survey by Enders and Sandier 2012). This research has derived some guiding principles. First, the macroeconomic consequences of terrorism are generally quite small and of a short-term nature for most economies. Like crime, terrorism is anticipated to have a local influence because property damage is typically limited and few people die--on average, 420 people lost their lives annually from transnational terrorist attacks since 1968 (Sandier, Arce, and Enders 2009). Second, large diversified economies are particularly able to endure terrorism with minimal repercussions as economic activities transfer from terrorism-prone to safer sectors. Third, small developing countries are more inclined to suffer adverse economic effects from terrorism (Keefer and Loayza 2008). Fourth, in cross-sectional and panel regressions, transnational terrorism has had a small but significant impact on economic growth (Blomberg, Hess, and Orphanides 2004; Gaibulloev and Sandler 2008, 2011; Tavares 2004). Fifth, the root cause of terrorism is not poverty (Gassebner and Luechinger 2011; Kmeger and Maleckova 2003; Piazza 2011); unpopular foreign policy decisions appear to be a significant cause of transnational terrorism (Savun and Phillips 2009). Sixth, actions to protect against specific types of terrorist attacks (e.g., metal detectors in airports to curb skyjackings) or to guard specific kinds of targets (e.g., government officials) result in terrorists substituting into other modes and targets of attacks (Brandt and Sandler 2010; Enders and Sandler 1993). Seventh, terrorism can influence the outcome of national elections (Gassebner, Jong-A-Pin, and Mierau 2008; Gassebner and Luechinger 2011). The primary purpose of this article is to apply modern principal component analysis to identify common (worldwide) and idiosyncratic (country-specific) factors that influence transnational terrorism involving two or more countries. Our main goal is to identify any co-movement of transnational terrorism across countries, which has not been previously investigated. Principal component analysis is a statistical method to estimate the most influenced common stochastic series by analyzing cross-sectional correlation. For our particular application, principal component analysis identifies if there are influences that commonly or generally affect the dynamic co-movement of transnational terrorist attacks in the sample countries. If one or more common factors are estimated, then we relate these factors to the transnational terrorist attacks in the sample countries to ascertain whether some countries' transnational terrorist campaigns drive attacks worldwide. Principal component analysis also indicates which countries' transnational terrorism is driven by considerations specific to them and, thus, independent of attacks occurring abroad. Such countries likely confront perpetrators who are not driven by grievances, ideologies, or resources shared with groups abroad--hence, the notion of idiosyncratic factors. The principal component analysis here finds a single common factor for transnational terrorism during 1970-2007, which we then relate by our methodology to the transnational terrorist campaigns in some specific countries. In fact, all co-movements of transnational terrorism across countries are explained by just five countries' transnational terrorist attacks. Among them, Lebanon's transnational terrorist attacks explain most of the worldwide co-movement of transnational terrorism, with the other four countries--United States, Germany, Iraq, and the United Kingdom--explaining the remainder. …


Microalgae represent a promising source of renewable biomass for the production of biofuels and valuable chemicals. However, the development of high throughput microalgal cultivation methods and energy efficient biomass harvesting technology is necessary to improve the economic viability of large scale microalgal biomass production. The issue of poor distribution and absorption of light is one of the hurdle that can be addressed to improve the productivity in microalgal cultivation systems. As it happens, microalgal photosynthetic activities have shown great dependence on the irradiance to which the microalgal cells are exposed. Quantitatively, microalgal growth increases with increasing light intensity until a saturation level beyond which the microalgal photosynthetic machinery can be subject to photodamage. Qualitatively, most microalgal species have exhibited a propensity for wavelengths in the blue and red regions of the visible electromagnetic spectrum whereas other wavelengths can induce photoinhibition. Further, a change in the incident light can lead to photoacclimation where the microalgal species activate the preferential synthesis of certain compounds or completely alter their metabolic activity. Despite such importance of light for microalgal growth and biomass production, only a small fraction of microalgal cells receives an optimal irradiance in current microalgal cultivation systems (open and enclosed ponds). The remaining microalgal cells are found either in the over illuminated zones (e.g. top surface of open culture) of the cultivation systems where they are exposed to photoinhibition or in the poorly illuminated zones where their growth is limited. In this dissertation, this issue is addressed by developing a multi-fold approach to improve the distribution and absorption of light in microalgal photobioreactors. First, a plasmonic film light filter technology is developed. By virtue of enhancing the irradiation of blue and red lights using silver nanospheres and gold nanorods, this technology can enhance microalgal biomass production by up to 50% and increase photosynthetic pigments production by up to 78%. A short light path capable Tris-Acetate-Phosphate-Pluronic (TAPP) microalgal cultivation and harvesting system is also developed. Adding to the interesting light manipulation features, this energy efficient microalgal cultivation and harvesting system that exploits the thermoreversible sol-gel transition properties of the copolymer pluronic can increase the harvesting rate of microalgal biomass via gravimetric sedimentation by a factor of ten. Further, the adhesion properties of microalgal cells on the surface of photobioreactors are studied as a way to control the impacts of biofouling on light penetration and light absorption in microalgal cultivation systems. Furthermore, the rheological properties of microalga C. reinhardtii broths are studied and the interesting properties of such complex fluids are used as tools to control the periodical motion of microalgal cells from dark sections to well illuminated sections of typical photobioreactors for enhanced microalgal growth. Improving distribution and absorption of light in microalgal photobioreactors through plasmon enhancement, entrapped cultivation and controlled motion


Information quality (IQ) plays a critical role in ecommerce consumers' purchase decisions, and product-related user-generated content (PUGC) is an increasingly important source of information. Nevertheless, vendors currently do not take full advantage of PUGC since it is mainly used in later phases of the purchase process to evaluate single products. Integrating PUGC into earlier phases of the purchase process might be promising. However, little is known about which dimensions of IQ consumers evaluate as being most important in different phases of the purchase process. To close this gap, this study comprises an exploratory survey to investigate the perceived importance of various IQ dimensions in each of the three phases of an idealized purchase process (i.e., screening, filtering, and evaluation). Conceptually, this study thus extends the concept of IQ to a dynamic perspective. The results indicated that IQ needs are stable throughout the process and that users strongly favor accuracy and believability when using aggregated PUGC extracted from reviews in contrast to timeliness, completeness, and amount of data, which were assessed as the least important IQ dimensions. Practically, the findings can inform the design of ecommerce websites, specifically how to optimize the presentation and integration of PUGC.


During late 1981 Mexico began experiencing a rapid deterioration in its current account balance which is frequently associated with an overvalued exchange rate. The government's initial reaction to this problem was to increase its official intervention in the foreign exchange market. This policy was abandoned in early 1982 as Mexico's international reserves were depleted by falling export revenues, capital flight, and an inability to obtain further loans in international credit markets. The adjustment program which followed included three devaluations of the peso, exchange controls, reduced import tariffs to mitigate the inflationary effects of the devaluation, and tighter monetary and fiscal policies. In response to this austerity program Mexico was able to obtain short-term loans from foreign central banks, U.S. government agencies, and multi-lateral institutions. Unfortunately, neither the adjustment programs nor the assistance it received from abroad was sufficient to prevent the foreign exchange crisis from creating a severe macroeconomic contraction. While the effects of the foreign exchange crisis on Mexico's current account balance and domestic economy are well known, the effects on the U.S. economy have not been as widely addressed. This neglect is understandable as most work on the international transmission of economic disturbances focuses on the relationships among developed countries (DCs) and implicitly assumes that a disturbance emanating from a less developed country (LDC) would have a trivial impact on DC. However, Mexico is the third largest trading partner of the U.S. While the economic disturbance in Mexico may not have a large impact on the U.S. as a whole, it should have a measurable impact on U.S. trade with Mexico and, by extension, employment in export and import competing sectors.


Recently, the concept of microgrids (clusters of distributed generation, energy storage units, and reactive power sources serving a cluster of distributed loads in grid-connected and isolated grid modes) has gained a lot of interest under the smart grid vision. However, there is a strong need to develop systematic procedure for optimal construction of microgrids. This paper presents systematic and optimized approaches for clustering of the distribution system into a set of virtual microgrids with optimized self-adequacy. The probabilistic characteristics of distributed generation (DG) units are also considered by defining two new probabilistic indices representing real and reactive power of the lines. Next, the advantages of installing both distributed energy storage resources (DESRs) and distributed reactive sources (DRSs) are investigated to improve the self-adequacy of the constructed micro-grids. The new strategy facilitates robust infrastructure for smart distribution systems operational control functions, such as self-healing, by using virtual microgrids as building blocks in future distribution systems. The problem formulation and solution algorithms are presented in this paper. The well-known PG&E 69-bus distribution system is selected as a test case and through several sensitivity studies, the effect of the total DESRs or DRSs capacities on the design and the robustness of the algorithm are investigated.


The tropical tropopause layer (TTL) is a transition region between the troposphere and the stratosphere. In this study the vertical extent of the TTL is diagnosed from radiosonde and ozonesonde profiles in the tropics and a climatology of this layer is presented. The radiative balance in the TTL is also characterized. The TTL is locally defined as extending from the level of the lapse rate minimum at 10-12 km to the cold point tropopause (CPT) at 16-17 km. The minimum in lapse rate represents the level of maximum convective impact on upper tropospheric temperatures, which is found to closely correspond to a minimum in ozone. Variations in this level are correlated with convective activity as measured by satellite brightness temperatures and Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR). At the cold point, the TTL height is nearly uniform throughout the tropics, and has a pronounced annual cycle. There are regional variations in the altitude of the lower boundary of the TTL. Interannual variations of the TTL result from changes in the large scale organization of convective activity, such as from the El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Over the last 40 years, records indicate an increase (200-400 m) in the height of both the cold point tropopause and the level of minimum lapse rate. To better understand vertical transport in the TTL, the clear sky radiative heating rate is diagnosed using a sophisticated radiative transfer scheme. The level of zero radiative heating occurs roughly 1 km below the CPT, implying that convection needs to loft air 4-5 km above the base of the TTL if the air is to eventually enter the stratosphere.


Election laws regulate the number of deputies who are elected in individual electoral districts, and set them in relation to the population, respectively to the number of voters participating in elections in individual regions. Elected deputies could thus be regarded as political representatives of citizens living in electoral districts. However, under systems of proportional representation, current deputies represent the ideology of the party to which they belong rather than the region. Nevertheless, it makes sense to study the spatial distribution of the places of origin and residence of members of parliament and their changes over time, because it suggests much about the political system and the system of representative democracy in the country. The spatial distribution of places of residence of candidates and elected members indicates not only the territorial proportionality and geographic representativeness, but also the shifting centers of political power. The analysis clearly confirms the gradual decentralization and regionalization of political power in the country, which stands in contrast to the centralization of power in the economy, this latter trend apparent from the concentration of economic management and decision-making in the largest cities, especially in Prague.


The objective of the paper is an analysis of the service life of dwellings in Germany. The service life of dwellings is important for different reasons: It is necessary for an estimation of the future development of the building stock and quality as well as for projections on new constructions. In addition, asset durability is one of the most important features of the housing market. An analysis of this feature may provide further insight into the market. Furthermore, the service life of the investment good is an important characteristic of the decision to invest in dwellings. Hence the service life is also important in the context of housing valuation: Since the initial rent in the housing market is usually less than in other real estate markets (e.g. office or retail), the payback period of the investment is quite long. The aim of the paper is the comparison of actual service life times with projections of how the service life of buildings will develop assuming economically rational investors. Since many, formerly publicly owned, housing companies in Germany are subject to increased economic pressure as a result of their sale to private investors, future predictions on the development and composition of the housing stock may be improved under this assumption for owner behaviour. The service life times of buildings have internationally been analysed (among others) by Johnstone (2001), Meikle&Connaughton (1994) Gleeson (1985) and Needleman (1965). In Germany, the service life of the building stock has been analysed by Bradley et al. (2005), Bradley (2004) and estimated by Voss (2001) and Eekhoff (2002). Among these, two different approaches can be identified: The analytic approach is based on macro data and estimates building loss rates over the whole stock and the micro/life table analysis identifies loss rates in certain subsets of the total stock within regional, age or other boundaries. The estimation of service life and loss rates of buildings by using the Kaplan-Meier-Estimator conducted is one standard method among the authors of the second (life table) approach: It was already conducted by Johnstone and Bradley, both using data on a different stock. However, the idea of the calculus of the investor as the most important determinant of service life has not been articulated among these assessments. The work is based on observations of houses of a big dwelling company in the Ruhr region of Germany with approx. 15,000 buildings. The buildings date from all over the 20th century. They are of lower quality. Data on loss and cash-flows is available from 1991-2004, over 14 years. The normal service of a building is defined as the time that elapses before 50% of the objects under observation are knocked down. Using the Kaplan-Meier-estimator for estimating the survival function and extrapolating these estimations with the Weibull-function yields an estimated service life. This is remarkably longer than expected using conventional data on service life. This result for service life will be compared to the service life that is obtained under the assumption of an economically acting investor. To obtain this, more information about the development of rent and running costs of the buildings is necessary. This is done by analysing the patterns of the cash-flows of the dwellings using data from 1991 to 2004 (14 years). The results are obtained by towns as boxplot diagrams (cash-flow over time) and mean values over time. Using the results from this analysis a replacement time may be identified. Down to the present day the analysis has not been finished yet. However, preliminary results are available: Even when extrapolating the extraordinarily high demolition rates (in relation to the one for the whole stock of Germany) from the last decade the estimation for the service life of the dwellings included in the analysis is approx. 140 years. This means that the German society will live in these low-quality buildings for a longer time than perceived at present. Another preliminary result is concerning rent: It is decreasing as the building is ageing. There does not seem to be a strong correlation of rent and age, though. These findings are only partly in line with considerations of Sotelo (2001) for the German dwelling market, the results of Baum (1991) for the London office market and the Filtering Theory. No dwelling included in the analysis is older than 107 years though, hence validity over the total German stock is limited. On the other hand, there seems to be a similar correlation of running, especially maintenance costs, with age. In opposition to other investment goods, the maintenance costs of dwellings seem not to follow the bathtub curve. This curve with initially falling, in the second phase constant and then rising maintenance costs is presumed to be typically for investment goods. However, this seems not to be the case for housing. After a short period of low maintenance costs the costs are rising quite rapidly. After 10 years approximately the annual increase is starting to slow down. The pattern can be described with a initially slowly growing logarithmic function. Further analysis needs to be conducted. These two observations of slowly decreasing rents and increasing running costs need to be further assessed for their stability. If the findings should hold it may be possible to calculate an optimal time for replacement of dwellings. Comparing this calculated economic replacement age with the observed replacement age will yield results that allow for the estimation of future development of the necessary construction rate, demolition rate and of the size, state and age of the building stock.


Background: In this paper we study the long-term consequences of parental divorce in a comparative perspective. Special attention is paid to the heterogeneity of the consequences of divorce for children's educational attainment by parental education. Objective: The study attempts to establish whether the parental breakup penalty for tertiary education attainment varies by socioeconomic background, and whether it depends on the societal context. Methods: Data are drawn from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey, covering 14 countries. We estimate multi-level random-slope models for the completion of tertiary education. Results: The results show that parental divorce is negatively associated with children's tertiary education attainment. Across the 14 countries considered in this study, children of separated parents have a probability of achieving a university degree that is on average seven percentage points lower than that of children from intact families. The breakup penalty is stronger for children of highly educated parents, and is independent of the degree of diffusion of divorce. In countries with early selection into educational tracks, divorce appears to have more negative consequences for the children of poorly educated mothers. Conclusions: For children in most countries, parental divorce is associated with a lower probability of attaining a university degree. The divorce penalty is larger for children with highly educated parents. This equalizing pattern is accentuated in countries with a comprehensive educational system. Comments: Future research on the heterogeneous consequences of parental divorce should address the issue of self-selection into divorce, which might lead to an overestimation of the negative effect of divorce on students with highly educated parents. It should also further investigate the micro mechanisms underlying the divorce penalty.


Web 4.0 is a new evolution of the Web paradigm based on multiple models, technologies and social relationships. The concept of Web 4.0 is not totally clear and unanimous in literature, because it is composed by several dimensions. In this sense, this study uses a systematic review approach to clarify the concept of Web 4.0 and explore its various dimensions, analyzing if they have elements in common. The findings indicate that the number of studies published from 2009 to 2017 on this field significantly increased, having reached a peak in 2014. Furthermore, we identified five dimensions associated with the Web 4.0 paradigm, in which the terms "pervasive computing" and "ubiquitous computing" are the most widely used in the literature. On the other side, terms such as "Web 4.0", "symbiotic Web" and "Web social computing" are not often used.


Working processes in agriculture nowadays cannot be imagined without the use of modern agricultural mechanization, especially primary power unit, tractor. Along with the tractor unit development and the benefits induced by its application, according to the author's research, these machines are one of the main causes of accidents with different types of violations of the participants, and the tragic consequences. The great number of those accidents with tractors and other agricultural machinery take place on the roads of public importance of the Republic of Serbia WITHOUT PROVINCES. This paper deals with the problems and consequences of accidents that occurred in public transportation, on different categories of roads, which appear tractors and agricultural machinery, in the Republic of Serbia without provinces. Tractors and agricultural machinery has a high risk factor in causing accidents and injuries of various degrees of participants in public transport. Between years 1990-2009, in Republic of Serbia public transport, 72 agricultural machinery operators died and 157 operators were seriously injured, on annual average basis. The material damage is enormous. The most influential factor in causing accidents is a man-handler agricultural machinery, primarily tractor driver behaviour, that is reflected through his psycho-physical condition, observance of traffic rules and other road users and of course expertise. Varied and dangerous accidents and injuries caused by public transport drivers of tractors and other agricultural machinery in the central part of the Republic of Serbia, remains a fact of life. It is obvious that there is the lack of basic and special additional professional training machine operators and tractor drivers, constant professional and technical courses for the safe and proper use of modern agricultural machinery. Additional safety factor is technical condition and safety of machines themselves.


This book provides comprehensive coverage of mobile data networking and mobile communications under a single cover for diverse audiences including managers, practicing engineers, and students who need to understand this industry. In the last two decades, many books have been written on the subject of wireless communications and networking. However, mobile data networking and mobile communications were not fully addressed in a unified fashion. This book fills that gap in the literature and is written to provide essentials of wireless communications and wireless networking, including Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN), Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN), and Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWAN).

 The first ten chapters of the book focus on the fundamentals that are required to study mobile data networking and mobile communications. Numerous solved examples have been included to show applications of theoretical concepts. In addition, unsolved problems are given at the end of each chapter for practice. (A solutions manual will be available.)

 After introducing fundamental concepts, the book focuses on mobile networking aspects. Four chapters are devoted on the discussion of WPAN, WLAN, WWAN, and internetworking between WLAN and WWAN. Remaining seven chapters deal with other aspects of mobile communications such as mobility management, security, cellular network planning, and 4G systems.

 A unique feature of this book that is missing in most of the available books on wireless communications and networking is a balance between the theoretical and practical concepts.

 Moreover, this book can be used to teach a one/two semester course in mobile data networking and mobile communications to ECE and CS students.

 *Details the essentials of Wireless Personal Area Networks(WPAN), Wireless Local Are Networks (WLAN), and Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWAN)
 *Comprehensive and up-to-date coverage including the latest in standards and 4G technology
 *Suitable for classroom use in senior/first year grad level courses. Solutions manual and other instructor support available


This book examines many little understood aspects of the Irish Landscape from the last Ice Age until now. Historians, archaeologists, biologists and earth scientists each bring their unique take on how the landscape and the life it supports have been crafted by natural and human events. Some of the great enigmas of the past are now being unravelled, and this book gives a fascinating and fresh glimpse of how Ireland's unique and stunning ecosystem has evolved. The latest scientific theories, techniques and methods are used to bring readers up-to-date on each of these remarkable stories. Unravelling this history, as revealed through the chapters of this book, uses a wide array of evidence and clues, some ingenious; to build an amazing history that is part of all our pasts. The endeavours of humans whether in politics, art or territorial ambition are every bit as important as great ice-sheets, climatic catastrophes and even microscopic plant diseases in shaping and understanding this landscape of ours. The book also celebrates the pioneering work of Robert Lloyd Praeger. In 1895 Praeger began a pilgrimage across Ireland that was to last five years. His aim was to chart the distribution of all plants across the country. His observations of the landscape and its people became a classic of Irish travel writing in The Way That I Went. Praeger pondered the question of where the flora of Ireland come from, and conducted some of the greatest investigations into these matters with the Clare Island survey which was completed in 1913 - this being its centenary year. Inspired by Praeger, modern experts are unravelling these stories using new techniques and methods, and bring together their recent findings to unravel the remarkable secrets of the Irish landscape.


A retrospective study of dog bite cases reported to ECWA Veterinary Clinic Bukuru was carried out in Plateau State, Nigeria to understand the pattern of occurrence in this region. A total of two hundred and forty seven (247) dog bite cases were reported between May, 2009 and June, 2010. The dogs profile showed that 82.1% of the dogs involved had no history of anti-rabies vaccination, 12.6% had records of expired vaccination and only 5.3% had current vaccination. Based on clinical signs, 6.5% of the offending dogs were suspected to be rabid with 2.4% confirmed rabies positive based on laboratory analysis carried out in National Veterinary Research Institute Vom. About 92.7% of the dogs were owned. Of the 50 (247) victims 33 (66%) are less than 20 years old.


We have developed an automated reasoning system, called Dynamic Interaction Generation (DIG), which automatically designs and dynamically presents adaptive user interfaces. We have demonstrated DIG in the domain of building management in the form of the DIGBE system. In this report, we focus on the mechanisms we employ to specialize dynamically generated interactions for the situational needs and constraints present in a building operations environment. These constraints are introduced through the control system and domain objects, the users and user roles, the tasks and subtasks that are required, and the need for both anchored and mobile interaction. To adapt the user interface that DIGBE designs for each user and situation, the system uses a combination of mechanisms including role based task composition and object specialization. It responds dynamically by constructing and maintaining realtime models of the system of interest and the user-system interaction, and provides device independence through the separation of interaction and presentation reasoning and the ability for multiple presentation agents to use a single interaction design.


According to Morris Fiorina, Americans are moderate, tolerant, and ambivalent in their political attitudes. This has always been true and it is, if anything, more true today than in the past. The culture war is almost entirely an elite phenomenon, driven by a small group of activists on the left and right who exert influence far out of proportion to their numbers. It is the elites and activists who are polarized, not the public. In this study we use data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls to test five major claims made by Fiorina about the state of public opinion in the United States. This evidence indicates that while some of the claims of culture war proponents are overstated, there are deep divisions in America between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of elected officials and activists—they involve a large segment of the public and they are likely to increase in the future as a result of long-term trends affecting American society.


The security of property rights is fragile under dictatorships. This is particularly so if economic agents are uncertain as to whether the regime will last. As a result, private investment is withheld and economic performance is poor. Spain was in such a situation after World War II. However, as the Cold War intensified the United States became interested in Spain as a military ally, thereby helping to consolidate Franco's regime. This led to an increase in economic confidence and helps to explain why economic growth resumed in Spain ahead of significant changes in its autarkic economic policies.


The thesis examines the decoration of Greek bookbinding, through the study of the leather-covered bindings from the monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai, Egypt.

The manuscript collection is remarkable for the variety of binding styles that represent mainly Greek but also other bookbinding traditions, including Georgian. Syrian and Eastern European. The examination of the decorative motifs tooled on the leather covered bindings aims to identify the style and characteristics of bookbinding at the monastery. Moreover, links between and evidence for specific bindings and the manuscripts they contain are established by grouping them and relating them to specific binders and bookbinding workshops. The workshops of the monastery are examined in parallel with groups of bindings that were imported into the monastery. The extent to which the trade in books and the circulation of binding techniques between the monastery and the west was a reflection of the relations of the monastery with its dependencies is also explored.

Rubbings of the approximately 5500 tool impressions on the 1195 decorated bindings have provided the core research material. They have been identified, classified and organized into a descriptive electronic database. Imaging techniques have been developed to compare the scanned impressions, which permitted the identification of impressions of the same finishing tools. Based on the identity of their decorative tools and on the process of comparison of their structural features, a number of the bindings have been ascribed to a total of 70 specific workshops, whose dates and origins are explored. 16 of these workshops - nine from the monastery of St Catherine and seven from elsewhere, which produced bindings imported to the monastery, are discussed analytically. In addition to that, 40 original bookbinding finishing tools were discovered at the monastery during this research, which have provided invaluable material for our understanding of the tooling methods and particularities of decorated book covers at the monastery.

The largest corpus of finishing tools used on Greek bindings to date has been compiled to provide a reference tool which will aid future research on Greek bookbinding.

Supervisors: Nicholas Pickwoad and Mirjam Foot.


The loss of material ductility in the presence of very high amplitude cyclic straining is an observed phenomenon in many extreme conditions like earthquake loadings. This phenomenon is called ultra-low cycle fatigue (ULCF) and failure is often achieved in a few number of cycles – around 5 to 10. Design to ULCF often involves the use of finite element (FE) models to assess the plastic strain history at critical points in a component. In the case of a welded joint, a number of factors contribute to its ultimate cyclic fracture strain, such as the weld and heat affected zone's (HAZ) material characteristics, and the weld geometry, which cause a local rise in plastic strains at the weld toe. The purpose of the paper is to study the influence of the weld geometry on the plastic strain history of material points near the weld toe, through an FE parametric analysis with nonlinear kinematic hardening. The motivation behind this study stems from a set of experiments conducted on high-strength S770QL steel, whose material properties will be used in this paper. The joint that will be analyzed consists of a welded tube to plate connection. Here 3 geometric parameters will be studied: throat thickness (a – 4, 6, 8 and 10mm, on a 8 mm thick tube wall), weld angle (Θ – 30°, 45° and 60°), and weld toe radius (R – 0, 1 and 2 mm). In addition to these factors, the impact of the type of loading (L – bending, pure torsion and combined proportional bending and torsion during 5 high amplitude cycles) and mesh size (M – 1.0 and 0.5 mm) will also be addressed. As a simplification, the weld material and heat affected zone have the same mechanical properties as the base material. Stress state variables important in ULCF analyses, such as the stress triaxiality and the Lode parameter, are analyzed in addition to the plastic strain history.


We studied the effects of dialysates from leukocyte lysates containing dialyzable transfer factor activity and other leukocyte dialysates devoid of transfer factor activity on accumulation of cyclic nucleotides in human leukocytes. Dialysates from normal leukocytes produced 4- to 11-fold increases in leukocyte cGMP, and experiments with purified cell populations revealed that the increases were predominantly, if not entirely, in blood monocytes. Substances that increased monocyte cGMP could be obtained from several cell populations including mononuclear cells from Hypaque-Ficoll gradients, plastic-adherent monocytes, nonadherent lymphocytes, and neutrophils, but were not present in dialysates of leukemic lymphocytes from patients with the Sezary syndrome. Moreover, dialysates that increased leukocyte cGMP had essentially no effect on intracellular cAMP. Dialysates of lysed mononuclear cells contained serotonin, ascorbate, and an unidentified cholinergic activity, agents known to increase leukocyte cGMP. After passage of dialyzable transfer factor from mononuclear cells through a gel-filtration column, four fractions were obtained that increased leukocyte cGMP. Two of these fractions contained ascorbate; two other active fractions, including one that also caused conversion of delayed skin tests, did not contain detectable ascorbate or serotonin. The dialysate of lysed neutrophils also increased cGMP, but this activity was limited to the column fractions which contained ascorbic acid. These observations raise the possibility that alterations in monocyte cGMP content could modulate either the specific antigen-dependent, or, more likely, the antigen-independent activities in preparations of transfer factor.


This paper analyses the determinants of outward processing (OP) trade; specifically, imports of intermediates subsequent to processing abroad. A model where firms choose between OP and importing intermediates directly from a third country (generic offshoring, GO) predicts higher tariffs, lower monitoring costs and higher quality make OP more likely, while better institutions and rule of law abroad lower contractual breakdown risk under GO making OP less likely. Analysis of EU trade data from 2002 to 2008 emphasizes proximity, quality differentiation and weaker rule of law as OP determinants. Results suggest relationship-specific investments and monitoring under OP may offset contractual uncertainty. JEL Classification: F14, D23, L23


Writing British Infanticide tracks the ways that the circulation of narratives of child-murder in eighteenth- and nineteenth century Britain shaped perceptions and punishments of the crime and, more elusively, hierarchies of class and gender. The essays brought together in this volume pose the question: How are we to understand the proliferation of writing about child-murder in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the overlap of an expanding print culture with the widely evident narration of this particular crime? Further, what are we to make of the recurrent and remarkably consistent representation of child-murder as the special province of unmarried, desparate women? Focussing on specific instances of the transformative effect of the circulation of narratives of child-murder, 'Writing British Infanticide' takes as its purview not child-murder per se but the ways that writing about its credentialed and differentiated writers in different, but often overlapping, genres and moments in a key period in the expansion of print. Jennifer Thorn is an Assistant Professor of English at Duke University.


Proposed empirical relationships between frequency dependent complex electrical resistivity and key physical properties, such as grain or pore throat size, may allow hydraulic conductivity to be indirectly estimated from variable frequency electrical measurements, often referred to as spectral induced polarization (SIP). The SIP response may be described by several models, each providing one or more estimated values of relaxation time and chargeability, and a variety of additional parameters. Recent interest has been shown in modelling the SIP response as the coupling of a large number of simple Debye responses, each fully described by the two parameters of relaxation time and chargeability, and with no requirement for additional model parameters. This deterministic approach allows the SIP response to be matched with high accuracy, but since the mean, mode and median relaxation times of the total chargeability may differ widely, none of these statistics is sufficient to summarise the SIP response adequately. We introduce a parsimonious set of descriptors which efficiently summarises the distribution of Debye relaxations, with minimal loss of the information content in the electrical measurements. Our method applies a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to provide a Bayesian estimation of the relaxation distribution parameters, and does not require an accurate prior estimation of DC resistivity. The distribution parameters may be combined with electrical-physical relationships identified in other studies, to give stochastic estimates of hydraulic conductivity. We apply our approach to electrical spectra measured in the laboratory and in field surveys, and we compare our results with those from deterministic methods.