The paper presents a Monitoring Framework for the integration layer of SOA systems realized by an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). It introduces a generic ESB Metamodel (EMM) and defines mechanisms which gather monitoring data related to the model entities. Applicability of the model is verified on the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification-available standardization of an ESB. An analysis of the JBI specification from the Metamodel perspective is presented, resulting in identification of JBI monitoring deficiencies. Then, the paper illustrates a realization of mechanisms ameliorating JBI deficiencies. The paper also defines the notion of a Monitoring Goal Metamodel which lays a foundation for a fully featured and technology-agnostic monitoring framework established on the EMM. The Monitoring Goal Metamodel allows a declarative definition of how the framework should react to anomalies by performing drill-down monitoring to diagnose the root cause of the problems. Evaluation of the prototype implementation of the ESB Monitoring Framework that verifies its correctness and fulfillment of the nonfunctional requirements is presented. Related work and some important relevant projects and technologies are also briefly described. Finally, the paper is summarized with conclusions and a vision of the proposed framework usage and extensions.


Biodiversity protects grassland stability How biodiversity interacts with ecosystem stability and productivity is key to understanding the impacts of environmental changes on ecosystem functions. In a series of decade-long experiments in temperate grassland, Hautier et al. manipulated nitrogen, water, carbon dioxide, herbivory, and fire. In all cases, plant species diversity was important for preserving ecosystem function during environmental change. Hence, the preservation and restoration of biodiversity buffer ecosystems against anthropogenic assault. Science, this issue p. 336 Experiments in grassland show that ecosystem stability is affected more by changes in biodiversity than in productivity. Human-driven environmental changes may simultaneously affect the biodiversity, productivity, and stability of Earth's ecosystems, but there is no consensus on the causal relationships linking these variables. Data from 12 multiyear experiments that manipulate important anthropogenic drivers, including plant diversity, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, fire, herbivory, and water, show that each driver influences ecosystem productivity. However, the stability of ecosystem productivity is only changed by those drivers that alter biodiversity, with a given decrease in plant species numbers leading to a quantitatively similar decrease in ecosystem stability regardless of which driver caused the biodiversity loss. These results suggest that changes in biodiversity caused by drivers of environmental change may be a major factor determining how global environmental changes affect ecosystem stability.


This article argues that an emphasis on how spectators piece to- gether documentary structure is more useful than nonfiction film theory's focus on epistemology and categorization. By examining individual texts such as The Aristocrats, critics can develop a set of devices that provide a better explanation of documentary comprehension at the local level. As an example, this article shows how a spectatorial position as an insider in the comedy world and the device of the "conversational turn" help us both segment the documentary flow and unify it.


Today's network control and management traffic are limited by their reliance on existing data networks. Fate sharing in this context is highly undesirable, since control traffic has very different availability and traffic delivery requirements. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of building a dedicated wireless facilities network for data centers. We propose Angora, a low-latency facilities network using low-cost, 60GHz beamforming radios that provides robust paths decoupled from the wired network, and flexibility to adapt to workloads and network dynamics. We describe our solutions to address challenges in link coordination, link interference and network failures. Our testbed measurements and simulation results show that Angora enables large number of low-latency control paths to run concurrently, while providing low latency end-to-end message delivery with high tolerance for radio and rack failures.


OF DISSERTATION POST-TRAUMATIC SLEEP FOLLOWING DIFFUSE TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY By Rachel Kathleen Rowe Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of death and disability throughout the world with few pharmacological treatments available for individuals who suffer from neurological morbidities associated with TBI. Cellular and molecular pathological processes initiated at the time of injury develop into neurological impairments, with chronic sleep disorders (insomnia, hypersomnolence) being among the somatic, cognitive and emotional neurological impairments. Immediately post-injury, TBI patients report excessive daytime sleepiness, however, discordant opinions suggest that individuals should not be allowed to sleep or should be frequently awoken following brain injury. To provide adequate medical care, it is imperative to understand the role of acute post-traumatic sleep on the recovery of neurological function after TBI. The aim of this thesis was to examine post-traumatic sleep after experimental TBI, defined as an increase in sleep during the first hours post-injury. In these studies, we non-invasively measured sleep activity following diffuse brain injury induced by midline fluid percussion injury to examine the architecture of post-traumatic sleep in mice. We detected significant injury-induced increases in acute sleep for six hours regardless of injury severity or time of day injury occurred. We found concurrent increases in cortical levels of the sleep promoting inflammatory cytokine interleukin 1beta. We extended the timeline of post-injury sleep recording and found increases in post-traumatic sleep are distinctly acute with no changes in chronic sleep following diffuse TBI. Further, we investigated if post-traumatic sleep was beneficial to neurological outcome after brain-injury by disrupting post-traumatic sleep. Disruption of post-traumatic sleep did not worsen functional outcome (neuromotor, sensorimotor, cognition) at one week after diffuse TBI. With sufferers of TBI not always seeking medical attention, our final studies investigated over-the-counter analgesics and their effect on post-traumatic sleep and functional outcome. Acute administration of analgesics with varying anti-inflammatory properties had little effect on post-traumatic sleep and functional outcome. Overall, these studies demonstrated translational potential and suggest sleep after a concussion is part of the natural recovery from injury. While disrupting sleep does not worsen outcome, it is in no way beneficial to recovery. Additionally, a single analgesic dose for pain management following concussion plays little role in short term outcome.


Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) have been increasingly used for many years as MRI agents and for gene delivery and hyperthermia therapy, although there have been conflicting results on their safety. In this study, cobalt ferrite magnetic nanoparticles (CoFe-MNPs) were prepared by the co-precipitation method and their surfaces were modified with silica by the sol-gel method. The particle and hydrodynamic sizes, morphology and crystal structure of the bare and silica-coated CoFe-MNPs were evaluated by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), dynamic light scattering (DLS), X-ray diffraction spectroscopy (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). The size of the bare CoFe-MNPs was in the range 8-20 nm and they were homogeneously coated with 3-4 nm silica shells. The bare and silica-coated CoFe-MNPs were agglomerated at physiological pH. However, the sizes of the agglomerates were below 200 nm both in water and complete medium. The cytotoxic and genotoxic potentials of the bare and silica-coated CoFe-MNPs were evaluated in a metastatic breast cancer cell line, MDA-MB-231, as well as a noncancerous mammary epithelial cell line, MCF-10A, by using XTT cytotoxicity, single-cell gel electrophoresis (comet), and cytokinesis-blocked (CB) micronucleus (CBMN) assays. Characterization studies with TEM, inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) and Prussian blue staining indicated that the CoFe-MNPs were internalized into the cells by energy-dependent endocytosis. The highest amount of uptake was observed in the cancer cells and the uptake of the silica-coated CoFe-MNPs was higher than that of the bare ones in both cell lines. The bare CoFe-MNPs showed higher levels of both cytotoxicity and genotoxicity than the silica-coated CoFe-MNPs. Moreover, the cancer cells seemed to be more susceptible to the CoFe-MNPs' toxicity compared to the noncancerous cells. There was a concentration and time-dependent increase in DNA damage and the micronucleus (MN) frequency, which was statistically significant starting with the lowest concentration of bare CoFe-MNPs (p < 0.05), while no significance was observed below the concentration of 250 μg mL-1 for the silica-coated MNPs. Also, the extent of both DNA damage and MN frequency was much higher in the cancer cells compared to the noncancerous cells. According to our results, the silica coating ameliorated both the cytotoxicity and genotoxicity as well the internalization of the CoFe-MNPs.


To examine the influence of arousal level on subjects' ability to voluntarily control alpha activity level, loud unpleasant noises were presented at random intervals. The effect of this aversive stimulus situation on alpha activity level relative to no noise was examined while subjects attempted to enhance or suppress alpha activity in both eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions. The eight subjects were pretrained to a specified criterion of alpha control before participating in the four experimental sessions. In addition to recordings of the EEG alpha activity, concurrent measures of neck EMG activity and heart rate were also obtained to provide information concerning general somatic arousal during the various experimental conditions. The results indicated that the strength and direction of the interrelationships of the physiological variables—heart rate, EMG, and alpha level—were dependent on whether the eyes were open or closed. The failure to demonstrate a relationship between alpha level and a subjectively aversive situation was discussed as possibly being dependent on the nature of the biofeedback control of alpha.


Proprotein Convertase Subtilisin/Kexin Type 9 (PCSK9) plays a key role in regulating the levels of plasma low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C). Here we demonstrate that the compound PF-06446846 inhibits translation of PCSK9 by inducing the ribosome to stall around codon 34, mediated by the sequence of the nascent chain within the exit tunnel. We further show that PF-06446846 reduces plasma PCSK9 and total cholesterol levels in rats following oral dosing. Using ribosome profiling, we demonstrate that PF-06446846 is highly selective for the inhibition of PCSK9 translation. The mechanism of action employed by PF-06446846 reveals a previously unexpected tunability of the human ribosome, which allows small molecules to specifically block translation of individual transcripts. One Sentence Summary A small-molecule PCSK9 inhibitor targets the human ribosome and selectively prevents PCSK9 synthesis.


This book argues that an approach to Buddhist-Christian dialogue where biblical texts are analyzed by placing Christian and Buddhist perspectives side by side is a method which provides a good platform for further in-depth dialogue.


The nature of the general connection between emotion and value, and of the various connections between specific emotions and values, lies at the heart of philosophical discussion of the emotions. It is also central to some accounts of the nature of value itself, of value in general but also of the specific values studied within particular philosophical domains. These issues all form the subject matter of this article, and they in turn are all connected by two main questions: (i) How do emotions disclose or create values? (ii) What are the epistemic credentials of emotion in justifying evaluative thought and discourse? This second question obviously presupposes some answer to the first question concerning the way in which emotions reveal, constitute, or create value.


Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade which seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. "Men at Arms" is the first book in Waugh's brilliant trilogy, "Sword of Honour", which chronicles the fortunes of Guy Crouchback. The second and third volumes, "Officers and Gentlemen" and "Unconditional Surrender", are also published in Penguin. "Sword of Honour" has recently been made into a television drama series, with screenplay by William Boyd.


Patients with type 2 diabetes have poor health-related quality of life due to the disease itself and/or its complications. Pharmacological treatment alone seems to be insufficient to improve quality of life for those patients. Thus, additional interventions are needed to achieve this target. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of inspiratory muscle training (IMT) on health-related quality of life as an adjunctive to drug treatment in type 2 diabetics. Twenty eight female patients with type 2 diabetes were equally assigned into two equal groups. The first group was the study group and received supervised IMT at low intensity (30% Pimax), once daily, 5 days per week, and for 8 weeks plus oral hypoglycemic medications. The second group acted as a control group and received oral hypoglycemic medications only. Health-related quality of life was assessed by the EuroQoL Group's 5-dimension 5-level questionnaire (EQ-5D-5L) and the Short Form-12 (SF-12) Health Survey. Glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1c) was also measured. Results showed that, IMT induced significant improvement in SF-12 physical functioning and vitality domains with observed non-significant improvements in other Sf-12 domains and EQ-5D-5L VAS score. Also, HbA1c was not improved in either group. In addition, there was between-group significant difference in (EQ-5D-5L) VAS score, SF-12 physical functioning, role physical, role emotional, bodily pain, and social functioning domains. Conclusion: Despite having no effect on glycemic control, low intensity inspiratory muscle training still can improve some aspects of health-related quality of life in female patients with type 2 diabetes.


Geochemical data are presented for the kimberlitic Holocene Igwisi Hills volcanoes (IHV), Tanzania, which preserve extra-crater lavas and pyroclastic rocks. Their young age and exceptional preservation enable investigation of kimberlite magma compositions and alteration pathways of kimberlites. The IHV lavas have a variable matrix assemblage dominated by calcite, olivine and a serpentine-like mineral (termed serpentine-X). Minor primary groundmass phases include apatite, phlogopite, monticellite, perovskite and spinel representing late-stage crystalisation. Secondary phases include hydrogarnet, a mixed-layer chlorite-vermiculite-montmorrilonite, minor brucite and low-temperature oxides and clays such as goethite and jamborite. The matrix of pyroclastic rocks is dominated by calcite with fewer groundmass phases. The parental magmas are inferred to have had ~ 21 wt % SiO2, ~ 22 wt % CaO, ~ 23 wt % MgO and Mg# ~ 70. The IHV are classified as calcite kimberlites. The total volatile concentrations of the primary melt are ~ 14 wt %, which predominantly consists of CO2 although the H2O content is also high. Whole-rock geochemical analyses indicate minor crustal contamination, low-temperature alteration and weathering. Pervasive serpentinisation in both lavas and pyroclastic rocks results from low-temperature alteration induced by the circulation of meteoric waters during cooling. Serpentine-X is potentially a new mineral and is richer in Al2O3 and FeO and poorer in SiO2 than published analyses of serpentine minerals. These compositions are attributed to a 1:2 mixture of serpentine and hydrotalcite. We propose that serpentine-X has replaced a reactive, late stage residual silicate glass, the existence of which helps explain the presence of vesicular scoria (similar to glassy basaltic pyroclasts) and viscous kimberlite lavas.


A lipid and glycoprotein-rich apical extracellular matrix (aECM) or glycocalyx lines exposed membranes in the body, and is particularly important to protect narrow tube integrity. Lipocalins ("fat cups") are small, secreted, cup-shaped proteins that bind and transport lipophilic cargo and are often found in luminal or aECM compartments such as mammalian plasma, urine, or tear film. Although some lipocalins can bind known aECM lipids and/or matrix metalloproteinases, it is not known if and how lipocalins affect aECM structure due to challenges in visualizing the aECM in most systems. Here we show that two Caenorhabditis elegans lipocalins, LPR-1 and LPR-3, have distinct functions in the precuticular glycocalyx of developing external epithelia. LPR-1 moves freely through luminal compartments, while LPR-3 stably localizes to a central layer of the membrane-anchored glycocalyx, adjacent to the transient zona pellucida domain protein LET-653. Like LET-653 and other C. elegans glycocalyx components, these lipocalins are required to maintain the patency of the narrow excretory duct tube, and also affect multiple aspects of later cuticle organization. lpr-1 mutants cannot maintain a continuous excretory duct apical domain and have misshapen cuticle ridges (alae) and abnormal patterns of cuticular surface lipid staining. lpr-3 mutants cannot maintain a passable excretory duct lumen, properly degrade the eggshell, or shed old cuticle during molting, and they lack cuticle barrier function. Based on these phenotypes, we infer that both LPR-1 and LPR-3 are required to build a properly organized aECM, while LPR-3 additionally is needed for aECM clearance and remodeling. The C. elegans glycocalyx provides a powerful system, amenable to both genetic analysis and live imaging, for investigating how lipocalins and lipids affect aECM structure.


Beethoven's piano sonatas form one of the most important collections of works in the whole history of music. Spanning several decades of his life as a composer, the sonatas soon came to be seen as the first body of substantial serious pieces for piano suited to performance in large concert halls seating hundreds of people. In this comprehensive and authoritative guide, Charles Rosen places the works in context and provides an understanding of the formal principles involved in interpreting and performing this unique repertoire, covering such aspects as sonata form, phrasing, and tempo, as well as the use of pedal and trills. In the second part of his book, he looks at the sonatas individually, from the earliest works of the 1970s through the sonatas of Beethoven's youthful popularity of the early 1800s, the subsequent years of mastery, the years of stress (1812-1817), and the last three sonatas of the 1820s. Composed as much for private music-making as public recital, Beethoven's sonatas have long formed a bridge between the worlds of the salon and the concert hall. For today's audience, Charles Rosen has written a guide that brings out the gravity, passion, and humour of these works and will enrich the appreciation of a wide range of readers, whether listeners, amateur musicians or professional pianists. This book includes a free CD of Rosen performing extracts from several of the sonatas, illustrating points made in the text.


In this paper we deal with the problem of map building and localization of a mobile robot in an environment using the information provided by an omnidirectional vision sensor that is mounted on the robot. Our main objective consists of studying the feasibility of the techniques based in the global appearance of a set of omnidirectional images captured by this vision sensor to solve this problem. First, we study how to describe globally the visual information so that it represents correctly locations and the geometrical relationships between these locations. Then, we integrate this information using an approach based on a spring-mass-damper model, to create a topological map of the environment. Once the map is built, we propose the use of a Monte Carlo localization approach to estimate the most probable pose of the vision system and its trajectory within the map. We perform a comparison in terms of computational cost and error in localization. The experimental results we present have been obtained with real indoor omnidirectional images.


Systematic determination of reliable source parameters for regional earthquakes in Taiwan, particularly offshore events with m(subscript b)<5.5, has been a difficult task because of poor coverage by the local network and the lack of signals at teleseismic distances. Establishment of the "Broadband Array in Taiwan for Seismology (BATS)" has greatly improved such a task through moment-tensor inversion of regional waveforms. Our inversion algorithm differs from previous studies in two major aspects. First, we evaluate the characteristics of background noise for individual stations. The results are then used to determine the lower corner of the frequency band used in the inversion to maximize the long-period information in waveforms. The higher corner is set at 0.06-0.08 Hz to avoid the effects of strong lateral heterogeneity and possible epicentral mislocation. Second, to further reduce the uncertainty caused by complex structures, a two-step procedure is adapted to select the best velocity models for different stations in calculating the synthetics. The inversion quality is classified by a combination of a letter (A-F) and a digit (1-4) reflecting the waveform misfit and the compensated linear vector dipole (CLVD) component, respectively. In total, source parameters of 36 events that occurred between July 1995 and December 1996 are reported in this study. For the few events that are big enough to be studied teleseismically, most of our solutions are consistent with those reported by other institutions. We intend to make our inversion results available on a routine basis that they will not only be able to provide precise source parameters for smaller regional earthquakes, but will also serve as an alternative to independently examine solutions of large and moderate-sized events reported from other sources.


Botulinum neurotoxins (BoNTs) represent a revolution in cosmetic science because of their remarkable and long-lasting antiwrinkle activity. However, their high neurotoxicity seriously limits their use. Thus, there is a need to design and validate non-toxic molecules that mimic the action of BoNTs. The hexapeptide Ac-EEMQRR-NH(2) (coined Argireline) was identified as a result of a rational design programme. Noteworthy, skin topography analysis of an oil/water (O/W) emulsion containing 10% of the hexapeptide on healthy women volunteers reduced wrinkle depth up to 30% upon 30 days treatment. Analysis of the mechanism of action showed that Argireline significantly inhibited neurotransmitter release with a potency similar to that of BoNT A, although as expected, it displayed much lower efficacy than the neurotoxin. Inhibition of neurotransmitter release was due to the interference of the hexapeptide with the formation and/or stability of the protein complex that is required to drive Ca(2+)-dependent exocytosis, namely the vesicular fusion (known as SNARE) complex. Notably, this peptide did not exhibit in vivo oral toxicity nor primary irritation at high doses. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that Argireline is a non-toxic, antiwrinkle peptide that emulates the action of currently used BoNTs. Therefore, this hexapetide represents a biosafe alternative to BoNTs in cosmetics.


The time-resolved photoluminescence in Rhodamine B dye embedded in aqueous suspensions of polystyrene spheres shows an anomalous fast nonexponential decay in addition to the slow decay that is intrinsic to dye molecules. When the volume fraction of spheres is increased to a critical value, the relative intensity of the fast component increases while the decay rate remains constant at 15 ps. A further increase of the volume fraction lengthens the lifetime of this component to the order of 1 ns. The quantitative behavior of the time dependence of the luminescence is explained well when we consider that dye molecules are adsorbed two dimensionally upon spheres and that the fast decay originates in the resonance energy transfer between the dye molecules.


Though they are widely forgotten today, the modern Olympic Games once offered competitive medals for art. This tradition, which lasted through the seven summer Games held from 1912 to 1948, found artists competing for gold much as athletes do now. These artists represented their nation in judged competitive events showcasing artistic works. In its initial form, the 'pentathlon of the muses,' as it was called, included competitive events in Architecture, Musical Composition, Sculpture, Painting, and Literature. This paper considers the history of these arts competitions and their eventual demise as a study in cultural policy, arguing that no understanding of cultural policy is sufficient unless it considers the rhetorical factors that contribute to its formation. Without abandoning the Foucauldian backbone of cultural-policy studies, this argument makes an interdisciplinary plea to open cultural policy studies to the field of rhetorical scholarship, which it has almost wholly neglected to date.


Human executive functions are sensitive to visual cues that make up the environmental context, but there are few research programs that study this influence or study the impact of changes in sensory neural signals on frontal cortical function. In this talk, I will present findings from studies of people with alcohol use disorders (AUD) that implicate the lateral occipital cortex (LOC) and its connections with the anterior insular cortex (AIC) in impulsive decisions-to-drink when exposed to visual alcohol cues. Specifically, 31 women (15 AUD) were scanned using fMRI while performing a decisions-to-drink task. In that task, they were presented with alcohol and food cues that were normed for attractiveness/desirability. They were asked to imagine themselves in a situation where deciding to drink had a high or low probability of a negative consequence and were asked to rate their likelihood of drinking (or eating) on a 4-point scale. AUD women endorsed alcohol cues more than non-AUD, but not food cues - a category-specific effect on decision making. Differences in BOLD signal between AUD women and non-AUD for alcohol vs food cues were widespread and always greater for AUD. This finding suggests that there was no single neural system (e.g., cognitive control) that accounts for the group difference in behavior. Comparing high- to low-risk scenarios highlighted differences between AUD and non-AUD in the LOC and AIC. A task-based functional connectivity analyses provided further support for the role of LOC and AIC in AUD women producing more impulsive category-specific decisions. In conclusion, widespread differences in decision-related BOLD signal between AUD and non-AUD may originate in the visual cortex (LOC) and cascade throughout the brain by way of network "hubs" such as the AIC. These results highlight the important (but underappreciated) role of sensory cortices in decision making and other executive functions. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


Decision-making in practical domains is usually complex, as a coordinated sequence of actions is needed to reach a satisfactory state, and responsive, as no fixed sequence works for all cases ‐ instead we need to select actions after sensing the environment. At each step, a lookahead control policy chooses among feasible actions by envisioning their effects into the future and selecting the action leading to the most promising state. There are several challenges to producing the appropriate policy. First, when each individual state description is large, the policy may instead use a low-dimensional abstraction of the states. Second, in some situations the quality of the final state is not given, but can only be learned from data. Deeper lookahead typically selects actions that lead to higher-quality outcomes. Of course, as deep forecasts are computationally expensive, it is problematic when computational time is a factor. This paper makes this accuracy/efficiency tradeoff explicit, defining a system's effectiveness in terms of both the quality of the returned response, and the computational cost. We then investigate how deeply a system should search, to optimize this "type II" performance criterion.


Abstract. The complex connections between environmental and socio-economic variables in the water sector system involve not only ecological changes such as climate change but also a need for changes in socio-economic arenas to reduce the impacts of climate change. It is necessary not only to acknowledge the elements of change but also to understand the constraints preventing change in specific cases. The challenges faced by the water sector in Mexico City, as the world's second largest urban agglomeration with its fast growing population, limited external water sources, depleted aquifers and increased disaster risks, call for urgent measures to resolve the inefficiencies found in the traditional approach to water investment. This paper explores how far the multiple objectives of different actors involved in water projects are balanced to attain integrated water management. The Santa Catarina Water Supply Project, which is in a highly contentious area because of the limited availability of drinking water, is presented as a case study. The analysis shows that the multiple objectives of the different actors involved, together with an institutional structure that perpetuates a traditional engineering approach, constrain the effective and efficient delivery of water projects. The institutional analysis development framework (Ostrom, 2006) is used to analyse the arena of investment decision-making in water for Mexico City. Following the notion of institutional arrangements as "incentives and deterrents" (Ostrom, 1976), eight contradictory elements are proposed to illustrate the process by which institutional arrangements, implemented by specific actors with the intention of producing specific outcomes, are inefficient in delivering the expected outcomes, and can even produce negative ones when interacting with other existing formal and informal arrangements determined by other actors. These elements explain both the resilience of the system, which has so far prevented its collapse, and the magnitude of a growing problem that demands change.


Previous research suggests that body image dissatisfaction is associated with decreased romantic relationship satisfaction, but little is known about why these variables are related. The purpose of the current study was to investigate mediating mechanisms involved in the association between body satisfaction and relationship satisfaction, building on earlier research that has highlighted the potential importance of sexual satisfaction, and incorporating the literature on partner perceptions. The study was informed by Murray, Holmes, and Collins' (2006) risk regulation framework, which identifies perceived partner regard as an important contributing factor to romantic relationship satisfaction. Specifically, the model states that people need to feel accepted by their partners in order to experience the sense of security necessary to engage in emotionally risky, relationship-enhancing behaviours, such as sexual intimacy. Participants were partners in 251 heterosexual dyads involved in committed relationships. Partners within each dyad completed online self-report questionnaires independently. Consistent with hypotheses, body dissatisfied individuals perceived that their partners shared their negative opinions of the respondent's body, regardless of their partner's actual feelings. Perceived partner dissatisfaction with the respondent's body predicted reduced sexual satisfaction, which in turn, predicted reduced relationship satisfaction. Major contributions of the current study include identifying explanatory processes underlying the body image and relationship satisfaction association, and showing that this process does not differ by gender. Significant methodological and statistical strengths of the current study include the inclusion of both romantic partners, the use of statistical


The analysis of flow maldistribution in a shell and tube heat exchanger is presented. The flow field within the headers was obtained through numerical solution of conservation equations of mass and momentum in addition to the equations of the turbulence model. The flow maldistribution inside the header was a 3-D numerical simulation with the help of commercial software To increase the performance of the heat exchanger, flow maldistribution among the tubes should be minimized.. Flow maldistribution in the header affects the heat transfer performance. The effects of the pressure drop and velocity distribution in the headers were analyzed, as it effects the heat transfer performance. The study showed that by changing the header geometry, the maldistribution can be reduced leading to improved performance. Two types of headers were considered with varying header length and inlet flow velocities from 0.8373mm/sec to 2.344mm/sec are considered. The uniformity of flow distribution improved with increasing header length, whereas it decreased with increasing flow rate. As the header length increased to 1500mm the flow maldistribution decreased and the static pressure was almost equal for all the tubes in case of a conical header. The results show that conical header minimizes flow maldistribution compared to a cylindrical header.© 2010 ASME


Title of Dissertation: DESIGN OF A LARGE BANDWIDTH SCANNING SQUID MICROSCOPE USING A CRYOCOOLED HYSTERETIC DC SQUID Soun Pil Kwon, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Frederick C. Wellstood Department of Physics I present the design and analysis of a large bandwidth scanning Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) microscope. Currently available SQUID microscopes are limited to detecting magnetic fields with frequencies less than 1 MHz. However, for observing nanosecond time scale phenomena such as logic operations in today's computer chips, SQUID microscopes with 1 GHz bandwidth and larger are required. The major limitation in SQUID microscope bandwidth is not the SQUID itself but the electronics and readout technique. To increase bandwidth, the fast transition of a hysteretic dc SQUID from the zero voltage state to the resistive state can be used as the detection element in a new SQUID readout technique, referred to as pulsed SQUID sampling. The technique involves pulsing the bias current to the dc SQUID while monitoring the voltage across it. As the pulse length shortens, the SQUID measures the applied external magnetic flux with shorter sampling time, which increases the bandwidth. Experimental tests of the technique have demonstrated the possibility of following signals with frequencies up to 1 GHz using a dc SQUID with Nb-AlOx-Nb Josephson junctions at around 4 K. Ringing in the pulse profile permitted the effective bandwidth of the sampling technique to be much greater than the nominal value suggested by the pulse length setting on the generator. I identify additional means of increasing bandwidth: redesigning the dc SQUID, implementing transmission line wiring, adding high speed superconducting circuits, etc. which should allow bandwidths to reach 40 GHz and higher. Towards creating a large bandwidth SQUID microscope, I also assembled and tested with collaborators a fully functional 4 K scanning SQUID microscope. With the microscope, which used a nonhysteretic niobium dc SQUID with conventional flux-locked-loop SQUID electronics, I was able to obtain the magnetic field image of a current carrying circuit. DESIGN OF A LARGE BANDWIDTH SCANNING SQUID MICROSCOPE USING A CRYOCOOLED HYSTERETIC DC SQUID


BACKGROUND
Plasma apolipoprotein B (apo B) and VLDL and LDL with apolipoprotein C-III (apo C-III) are independent risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Dietary intake affects lipoprotein concentration and composition related to those apolipoproteins.

OBJECTIVE
We studied differences in apo B lipoproteins with and without apo C-III after 3 healthy diets based on the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension Trial diet.

DESIGN
Healthy participants (n = 162) were fed each of 3 healthy diets for 6 wk in a crossover design. Diets differed by emphasis of either carbohydrate (Carb), unsaturated fat (Unsat), or protein (Prot). Blood was collected at baseline and after diets for analysis.

RESULTS
Compared with the Carb diet, the Prot diet reduced plasma apo B and triglycerides in VLDL with apo C-III (16%, P = 0.07; 11%, P = 0.05, respectively) and apo B in LDL with apo C-III (16%, P = 0.04). Compared with the Unsat diet, the Prot diet reduced triglycerides in VLDL with apo C-III (16%, P = 0.02). Compared with baseline (subjects' usual diet was higher in saturated fat), the Prot diet reduced apo B in LDL with apo C-III (11%, P = 0.05), and all 3 diets reduced plasma total apo B (6-10%, P < 0.05) and apo B in the major type of LDL, LDL without apo C-III (8-10%, P < 0.01). All 3 diets reduced the ratio of apo C-III to apo E in VLDL.

CONCLUSIONS
Substituting protein for carbohydrate in the context of a healthy dietary pattern reduced atherogenic apo C-III-containing LDL and its precursor, apo C-III-containing VLDL, resulting in the most favorable profile of apo B lipoproteins. In addition, compared with a typical high-saturated fat diet, healthy diets that emphasize carbohydrate, protein, or unsaturated fat reduce plasma total and LDL apo B and produce a lower more metabolically favorable ratio of apo C-III to apo E.


A systematic literature search has been conducted at the intersection of e‐waste and uncertainty and the mai n uncertainties identified have been categorized. The main uncertainties identified were: Different recycling technolog ies; unknown environmental impacts; different product design and composition; unknown reverse logistics costs; vari able cost of recycling; rapidly changing nature of electrical and electronic equipment; unpredictability about return o f items concerning quantity, quality and timing; unknown destination flow of e‐waste; different value of scrap mater ials; competition between the manufacturer and the remanufacturer; no common legislation at the national and global level ; outdated political aspects; and complexity of regulations.


This work provides the first unifying theoretical framework for node embeddings and structural graph representations, bridging methods like matrix factorization and graph neural networks. Using invariant theory, we show that relationship between structural representations and node embeddings is analogous to that of a distribution and its samples. We prove that all tasks that can be performed by node embeddings can also be performed by structural representations and vice-versa. We also show that the concept of transductive and inductive learning is unrelated to node embeddings and graph representations, clearing another source of confusion in the literature. Finally, we introduce new practical guidelines to generating and using node embeddings, which further augments standard operating procedures used today.


Approaches to the definition of essence of strategic management accounting in scientific works ofnational and foreign scientists are considered. The objective necessity of its application at the enterprises ofUkraine in the current conditions of the state and development of the economy and market relations whichrequires the expansion of the range of its objects and methods of management accounting aresubstantiated. The necessity of adaptation of foreign experience of organization and introduction of strategicmanagement accounting, are considered application of methods of its management to national economicand market conditions, taking into account specificity in Ukraine. The place of strategic managementaccounting as an instrument in the system of management of the efficiency of their activities andcompetitiveness in the present conditions is given.


This paper analyzes the performance of alternative versions of the New Keynesian monetary (NKM) model in order to replicate the comovement observed between output and inflation during the Greenspan era. Following Den Haan (2000), we analyze that comovement by computing the correlations of VAR forecast errors of the two variables at different forecast horizons. The empirical correlations obtained show a weak comovement. A simple NKM model under a standard parametrization provides a high negative comovement at any forecast horizon. However, a generalized version including habit formation and a forward-looking Taylor rule is able to mimic the observed weak comovement. The good performance of this generalized version also extends to the case in which the policymaker is committed to following an optimal contingent plan under certain parametrizations.


Uric Acid (UA) is the final product of the activity of xanthine oxidase (XO) in the purine metabolism. The enzyme, XO linked to oxidative stress, endothelial dysfunction and heart failure in humans. Clinically, an association of hyperuricemia with hypertension, diabetes, renal disease and cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been observed over the years. With the increasing prevalence of obesity and diabetes worldwide, co-existing hyperuricemia is getting more focused attention than ever before. Despite its proposed protective role against aging and oxidative stress, epidemiological studies revealed an association between altered levels of serum uric acid (SUA) and various multi-factorial disorders such as hypertension, gout, dyslipidemia, obesity, glucose intolerance, insulin resistance and renal disease etc. Therefore, manipulation of SUA levels is now either included in, or being investigated for, the treatment of CVD including stroke. The role of SUA as an independent risk factor for myocardial infarction (MI) and cerebrovascular ischemic stroke (CVIS) has been previously discussed, though this association has been under keen observation in view of conflicting reports. Here we discuss the recent progress in our understanding about the clinical conditions which are related to SUA in MI and CVIS diseases. Also we describe here the possible involvement of SUA in monitoring, prognosis and therapy of these diseases which is not delved so far.


ABSTRACT This investigation empirically examines the relation between daily rates of return and trading volumes on the stock market indices of six developing markets from Asia over the recent 34-month period ending in October 2005. The evidence of these markets supports the view that rising markets are accompanied by rising volumes and vice versa. The volume-return relation is found to depend on the direction of the market itself. The volume-absolute return relation is found to be significantly positive. The Granger causality tests find the absence of causality running in either direction in four of the six markets. In South Korean market, the evidence of causality running from returns to volume is found while the causality running in the diametrically opposite direction is uncovered in the Taiwanese market. INTRODUCTION The relation between security prices and the accompanying trading volume has been studied for almost five decades. One of the earliest published studies on this subject can be traced to Osborne (1959). In a 1987 paper, Karpoff provided an excellent review of the research on the relation between price changes and volume until the mid-1980s. Four crucial factors why the investigations of the said relation are important were outlined by Karpoff. Indeed, the various nuances of the relation between price changes and trading volume have continued to capture the interest of researchers and practitioners alike. One particular group of studies which can be found in the literature has focused on three different aspects of price-volume relation in speculative markets. Two of these can be linked to the well-publicized Wall Street beliefs. The Reilly and Norton investment textbook (2003) for example, notes that, "Therefore the technician looks for a price increase on heavy volume relative to the stocks' normal trading volume as an indication of bullish activity. Conversely, a price decline with heavy volume is bearish." Stickel and Verrecchia (1994) refer to one of the more frequently quoted saying that, "volume is the fuel for stock prices." These and similar commonly mentioned postulates provide motivation for the studies which attempt to evaluate the empirical support for these postulates. However, for the most part, the empirical studies have focused on the developed markets. There are only a handful of published studies of price-volume relation in the developing markets. This fact provides further impetus for the present study. The objective of this paper is to empirically examine the causal relation between the daily returns on the equity market indices and the accompanying trading volumes in six Asian markets during the most recent 34-month period ending in October 2005. The stock market indices of Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan are the focus of this investigation. While all six of these markets are considered to be developing or emerging markets, the Hong Kong market is generally viewed to be the most developed stock market and is often studied along with the developed markets of U.S. and Japan. (Chen, et. al, 2001). The specific goals of this study of six Asian markets are: 1. To ascertain if the rising markets are accompanied by rising volumes and if falling markets are accompanied by falling volumes, and to ascertain if there is evidence of asymmetric relation with respect to positive and negative returns; 2. To ascertain if the evidence supports the notion that it takes trading volume to make the market indices move; and 3. To test for the Granger causality between daily index returns and volumes to ascertain if the causality runs from volume to returns or from returns to volume or in both directions. In the next section, the relevant literature is briefly reviewed. The data, the definitions, and the methodology adopted in this study are outlined in the following section. The empirical findings of this study are discussed in the fourth section. …


A popular word is frequently so popular that it is received with open arms, or rather with open mouth and open ears, when really it should not be present at all in the company of those words with which it is associated on that particular occasion to form a sentence. The scientist, even when talking lightly and brightly (and even flippantly), should be very careful of the words he employs; so he likes to have all the words he intends to use regularly for scientific purposes carefully defined to have only one meaning. This article is about what we may popularly term "pushes" and "pulls" - both really quite good words, because we use them so frequently that we know what to expect when we push a thing or pull it. If you simply pull a free object, you expect generally that it will move towards you; and if you push it, you expect it to move away from you. Scientists prefer to use the word "force" when dealing with this action. We apply a force to a body, and, if the body be free to move, it will move in the direction of the force.


On 12 November 2014, Philae landed on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P), making an almost 30-year dream a reality. The pioneering flybys of 1P/Halley in 1986 revealed that despite being made primarily of ice, it was covered in highly absorbing carbonrich molecules. What is their composition? When did they form, and through which chemical routes? Might they have constituted prebiotic molecules necessary for life? At a larger scale, what can one learn from comets that has relevance to the evolution of the solar system and planets?

![Figure][1]

12 NOVEMBER 2014: PHILAE LANDED ON THE NUCLEUS OF COMET 67P

CREDIT: ESA/ROSETTA/MPS FOR OSIRIS TEAM MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

To address such questions, the Rosetta mission sought to perform a broad range of in-depth structural, physical, and chemical measurements from remote, in situ, and landed vantages. The candidate payload opened for a competitive selection included an instrumented Surface Science Platform (SSP). The initial two that were selected later merged into what is known as Philae, instrumented by 10 principal investigators selected by the SSP providers. The Philae platform and payloads were developed and operated by a highly integrated consortium of institutes, agencies, and industries.

Philae's scientific objectives were to provide ground-truth information and complement remote measurements performed from the Rosetta orbiter ( Science 347 , 23 January 2015) and to offer a self-standing suite of in situ measurements never before performed on a comet. This issue presents a first set of results acquired aboard Philae in the first 63 hours after it separated from Rosetta, descended, initially touched down on the comet at the site known as Agilkia, and finally came to rest at the site known as Abydos.

The release and descent happened as planned, precisely documented by imaging (Mottola et al. ), ranging (Kofman et al. ), thermal mapping (Spohn et al. ), and the evolution of the magnetic properties (Auster et al. ). The prospect of landing on such an alien body, at 515 million km from Earth and 3 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, was far more challenging than imagined. The unexpected bounce at touchdown required a major reshuffling and adaptation of the first sequence of science operations. It also provided the opportunity for additional measurements, whereas the bouncing and traversing constrained the mechanical (Biele et al. ) and magnetic properties of the surface.

ROLIS imagery at its highest resolution (1 cm per pixel) showed the surface of the comet near Agilkia to be dominated by the presence of granular material free of any dust deposits (Mottola et al. ). Regolith mobilization processes appear to be involved with the formation of these features. Once Philae came to rest at Abydos, the revised first science sequence began. CIVA panoramic images characterized the surrounding cometary material down to the millimeter scale and the attitude of Philae at rest (Bibring et al. ). The MUPUS package measured and constrained the thermal and mechanical properties of the near-surface material of the comet surface at Abydos (Spohn et al. ), indicating that the near-surface layers consist of a hard dust-rich sintered ice, possibly covered by a thin dust layer. The CONSERT bistatic radar provided an opportunity to investigate the comet's internal structure (Kofman et al. ). The upper "head" of 67P is fairly homogeneous on a spatial scale of tens of meters. The average permittivity provides ranges of the volumetric dust/ice ratio and the internal porosity. The dust component may be comparable, from the dielectric properties, to that of carbonaceous chondritic meteorites. COSAC and Ptolemy independently measured the composition of the volatile constituents of the grains lifted at touchdown and of the species outgassed at the final landing site (Goesmann et al. and Wright et al. ). The grains are primarily made of carbon-rich species in a complex suite of molecules, including precursors to some biomolecules and other compounds never before identified in comets.

Taken together, these first measurements performed at the surface of 67P profoundly modify our view of comets. 67P is nonmagnetized on a scale of less than a meter, with its surface layers composed of both sintered ices, which are hard in nature, and fluffy grains and pebbles of organic materials, possible remnants from the era of comet formation itself. Although it remains to be seen whether these observations hold true for all comets, the discoveries made by Philae—including these initial results—will continue to shape our view of the history of the solar system.

 [1]: pending:yes


The production and use of low-carbon energy technology and services, such as renewable energy, are imperative for Asia's emerging economies (which are heavily dependent on imported energy and resources) to tackle global environmental issues like climate change. Acknowledging this fact, recently, governments in the Asian region individually have been taking effective actions in the form of voluntary targets and policy commitments to improve the production and use of low-carbon technology, such as solar, wind, geo-thermal, and so forth. Nevertheless, the diffusion of these technologies has been through liberalized trade, which has been low compared with trade and investment in other energy intensive sectors. Though effective tariffs are low, non-tariff barriers or behind-the-border constraints are very high. In this exploratory study, the potential for increased exports in low-carbon technology and services under a grand regional coalition, partial regional coalition, and stand alone scenarios is studied. We find that production, trade, and investment in renewable energy technologies are very low regionally. There is a large gap between the demand for and the supply of low-carbon energy technology and associated pollution abatement services. Behind-the-border constraints that exist within the exporting country, such as poor infrastructure and inefficient institutions, create this gap between actually realized and potentially possible exports. This supply gap provides an opportunity for those emerging Asian economies, which have the potential to contribute to the manufacturing of such technologies individually and collectively pooling their physical and human capital.


This paper shows that a 4f-scheme of Fourier holography with wave-front reversal in the correlation plane can be used to implement a multiple linear regression model that constructs the best prediction for random processes that are steady-state in the broad sense. An experimental illustration is given. © 2005 Optical Society of America


During symbiosis between leguminous plants and rhizobia, flavonoids exuded by the plants act as chemoattractants and nodulation (nod) gene regulators in the other partner. To better understand the role of these compounds during the early steps of the alfalfa-Sinorhizobium meliloti symbiosis and the regulation of their production we have isolated nod gene inducers from alfalfa roots. All the compounds that we identified in this study as nod gene inducers in the root are flavonoids, indicating that other compounds with nod gene activator capacity may have little contribution, if any, to nod gene activation. Most of the intermediates of the flavonoid pathway were found in Medicago sativa roots and nodules, but only end products of the flavonoid pathway were identified in the root exudate. We have also studied flavonoid production in different parts of the root and found that it is developmentally regulated during root growth. Finally, we have shown that coumestrol and medicarpin, present in the exudates and ...


Private Labels have transformed from value purchases into powerful brands. This paper develops a framework based on the four strategic dimensions of brand breadth, positioning, segmentation, and relationship with the store brand that retailers can uniquely draw upon to organise their brand portfolios. It examines the case of German retailer Rewe that successfully organises its private label portfolio along these dimensions. This paper argues that maintaining multi-tiered and multi-segmented private label portfolios can be important tools for retailers enabling them to cover broader markets, fulfil current consumer needs, build brand equity, and strengthen customer loyalty.


Baron de Badassiere is from the Picpoul de Pinet region of the Languedoc, near the coast of the south of France. The name of the wine refers to the Badassiere vineyard which lies near the small town of Pomerols. In the 18th century, the vineyard belonged to Baron Charles Emmanuel, a colourful character who was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of King Louis XV. The wines are made exclusively for Liberty by New Zealand winemaker Graeme Paul, with consultant Matt Thomson, at the Cave de Pomerols cooperative where the Vignes de L'Eglise range is also produced. This region benefits from a sunny, warm climate which encourages ripe, fruity flavours in the wines, while the coastal breezes help retain freshness and aromatics.


Native Ni-Fe has been found over a wide area in the serpentinized asbestos-bearing rock of the eastern townships of Quebec. The chemical composition (average of 2 analyses) is: Ni 71.0%, Fe 25.3%, Co 3.5%, and Cu 0.2%. The Ni-Fe forms a single-phase alloy with a face-centered cubic structure and a cell constant which varies from 3.551 to 3.555 Aa. It occurs chiefly as tiny spheroidal grains, most of which are less than 10 microns in diameter, but also as large crenulated grains up to 100 microns in diameter, and as acicular crystals up to 100 microns in length. The Ni-Fe appears to have been formed as the result of the breakdown, during serpentinization of primary olivine and enstatite containing about 0.2% combined Ni.


The aim of the present study was to compare the effectiveness of cefuroxime, herd-specific autovaccine, and cefuroxime/herd-specific autovaccine treatments in eliminating S. aureus from the milk of 45 cows with subclinical mastitis. Prior to this study, cows with S. aureus mastitis were divided into 3 groups of 15 cows each. Group 1 received cefuroxime, group 2 received the autovaccine, and group 3 received cefuroxime and the autovaccine. The antibiotic was infused into the teat canal, whereas the autovaccine was administrated in the upper udder lymph node region. It was revealed that after day 35 of the treatment S. aureus was not detected in the milk of 40% of the cows treated with antibiotic, 60% of the cows treated with the autovaccine, and 100% of the cows that underwent combined therapy. Further observation of cows selected for the current study showed that in cows treated with both cefuroxime and a herd-specific autovaccine S. aureus mastitis was not recorded for at least 2 years. In conclusion, this investigation revealed that the administration of an anti-S. aureus herd-specific autovaccine into the upper udder lymph node region combined with infusion of an appropriate antibiotic into the teat canal eliminates S. aureus and leads to prolonged udder protection against invasion by these microorganisms.


Despite western Europe's traditional disdain for the United States' "adversarial legalism," the European Union is shifting toward a very similar approach to the law, according to Daniel Kelemen. Coining the term "eurolegalism" to describe the hybrid that is now developing in Europe, he shows how the political and organizational realities of the EU make this shift inevitable. The model of regulatory law that had long predominated in western Europe was more informal and cooperative than its American counterpart. It relied less on lawyers, courts, and private enforcement, and more on opaque networks of bureaucrats and other interests that developed and implemented regulatory policies in concert. European regulators chose flexible, informal means of achieving their objectives, and counted on the courts to challenge their decisions only rarely. Regulation through litigation--central to the U.S. model--was largely absent in Europe. But that changed with the advent of the European Union. Kelemen argues that the EU's fragmented institutional structure and the priority it has put on market integration have generated political incentives and functional pressures that have moved EU policymakers to enact detailed, transparent, judicially enforceable rules--often framed as "rights"--and back them with public enforcement litigation as well as enhanced opportunities for private litigation by individuals, interest groups, and firms.


The notion of focus structure in this work refers to the distinction between categorical, thetic and identificational sentences. The central claim is that the syntactic representation of every sentence has to encode which of these types of focus structure is realized. This claim is discussed in great detail with respect to syntax, intonation and semantics within the framework of the Minimalist Program. It is shown that the incorporation of focus structure into syntax offers new perspectives for a solution of vexing problems in syntax and semantics. For example, fronting (preposing, 'topicalisation') is treated as a syntactic operation which clearly belongs to core grammar, i.e. is not optional or 'stylistic'; the semantic notion of quantifier raising is dispensed with in favour of a focus structural treatment of phenomena which gave rise to it. The book appeals to generative linguists and to functional linguists who do not believe in an unbridgeable gap between the formal and functional analysis of language.


In practice, the right to adequate defense counsel in the United States is disturbingly unequal. Only some American criminal defendants actually receive the effective assistance of counsel. Although some indigent defendants are afforded zealous, effective representation, many indigent defendants and almost all of the working poor are not. The quality of representation a defendant receives generally is a product of fortuity, of economic status, and of the jurisdiction in which he or she is charged. For many defendants, the assistance of counsel means little more than counsel's help in facilitating a guilty plea. With luck, money, and location primarily determining whether a defendant has meaningful access to justice in this country, the promise of equal justice remains illusory. Providing defendants access to competent counsel with the time and resources to meaningfully test the prosecution's case is a badly needed step that would enhance the fairness and reliability of our criminal justice system. It is, however, just one step in fixing a "broken system." For even the presence of a capable defense lawyer does not necessarily ensure that the innocent will, in fact, go free. Contrary to popular wisdom, our system of justice does not overprotect criminal defendants, thereby minimizing the conviction of the innocent. Rather, our state criminal justice systems, as they currently operate, inadequately protect those wrongfully accused of crimes. Part I of this Article begins by examining the uneven right to counsel in this country. Wealthy defendants - and surprisingly, indigent defendants in some better funded jurisdictions - generally receive representation that is substantially better than that accorded most other defendants. For many indigent defendants and most of the working poor, however, the lawyers who represent them do not have the time or resources to effectively challenge the prosecution's case. Ultimately, overworked or inept lawyers increase the likelihood that innocent defendants will plead or be found guilty. It is not just bad lawyering, however, that produces wrongful convictions. Rather, other systemic practices and pressures contribute to such convictions. To illustrate this, Part II of the Article focuses on Arizona v. Youngblood, a case in which Larry Youngblood, despite the assistance of competent counsel, was convicted and imprisoned for seven years for a rape he did not commit. Yet for many Americans, the lessons of the Youngblood case and other DNA exonerations are not easily grasped. Quite simply, many Americans harbor myths about the actual workings of the criminal justice system that in turn create or influence attitudes about the system. Part III of the Article explores some of these common myths and corresponding attitudes and exposes systemic shortcomings and practices that need to be addressed if we are to minimize the number of innocent persons who will be wrongfully convicted. Fixing the system, however, will not be easy. Self interest and deeply held views about the criminal justice system create barriers to learning the lessons of the DNA exonerations and other cases of wrongful convictions. Indeed, some even refuse to acknowledge the existence of any significant systemic problems, arguing that the number of innocent persons wrongfully convicted has been grossly exaggerated. Others contend that the costs of improving the system outweigh the marginal benefits gained by freeing a few more innocent persons. Part IV of the Article responds to those critics and discusses the extent to which entrenched attitudes and narrow perspectives create barriers that impede meaningful systemic reforms. Finally, the Article concludes by identifying steps that can and should be taken to improve the criminal justice system and thereby minimize convicting the innocent.


There have been several approaches to use techniques from classical planning in HTN planning. While a direct translation is in general not possible due to the different expressiveness, there have been translations of bounded HTN problems and approaches to use classical heuristics in HTN search procedures. In this paper, we introduce a different approach. We exploit methods from the field of Computational Linguistics introduced to approximate Context-Free Languages by Finite Automata. We use them to approximate the decomposition structure of Totally Ordered (TO) HTN planning problems by classical problems. The resulting problem can then be solved using standard classical planning systems. A subset of TOHTN problems can be translated exactly, i.e., without changing the set of solutions. For problems where an approximation is necessary, we use an overapproximation, i.e., the set of solutions to the classical problem is a superset of that of the HTN problem. We then use plan verification to check whether a solution is valid and thus obtain a sound and complete overall approach. The resulting system outperforms the state of the art on the IPC 2020 benchmark set in terms of coverage.


Abstract Those who have the greatest need for excellent design are often the most vulnerable in society. These people may find it difficult or impossible to articulate their design requirements due to physical, sensory or memory impairment as a result of accident or disease. Finding ways to understand the challenges they face moment-by-moment and day-by-day is vital. Empathic and compassionate approaches that place an individual central to the design process can inform outcomes that significantly benefit the user as well as those that care for them. This paper presents research that aims to support the wellbeing of people living with advanced dementia by designing to promote pleasure and positive emotion. The LAUGH project is a recently completed international three-year UK AHRC funded design research project. Outputs from the study include a collection of playful objects, designed to provide comfort, pleasure and fun. This paper describes the research process underpinning the development of the designs and the Compassionate Design methodology that has informed the work. The design narratives behind the playful objects will be explained in relation to the three key themes of Compassionate Design, which stress the importance of personalization, sensory stimulation and maintaining connections between people and the world.


This document proposes a new strategy for how the ESARDA organization could work with education, training and knowledge management in nuclear safeguards. With this document we want to anchor these ideas within the organization and its management, in order to have a broad support for this initiative. We propose to activate all ESARDA working groups in the process of identifying, selecting and preparing material for module based education and training. ESARDA could then more effectively broaden its education and training activities and strengthen the connections with academia. In this way, we would also create a way to export knowledge on nuclear safeguards to nuclear education programs on the European level. We propose to create a task force that addresses a set of identified questions; examples are how to implement the new strategy, how to interact with academia and young professionals and how to develop, maintain, and structure the educational modules. By the end of 2015, the findings of the task force should be presented to the ESARDA management in order to be able to make a more informed decision on how to proceed with the new strategy.


Abstract:  We contend that "waste" is the political other of capitalist "value", repeated with difference as part of capital's spatial histories of surplus accumulation. We trace its work on India through a series of historical cuts, and suggest that the travels and perils of waste give us a "minor" history of capitalist surplus—the things, places and lives that are cast outside the pale of "value" at particular moments as superfluity, excess, or detritus; only to return at times in unexpected ways. The neologism "eviscerating urbanism" becomes our diagnostic tool to investigate both urban transformations in metropolitan India and their associated architectures for managing bodies and spaces designated as "wasteful". In sum, our essay reveals how "waste" begins as civil society's literal and figurative frontier only to become its internal and mobile limit in the contemporary era—a renewing source of jeopardy to urban life and economy, but also, in the banal violence and ironies of fin de millennium urbanism, a fiercely contested frontier of surplus value production.


Comparison is fundamental to evolutionary anthropology. When scientists study chimpanzee cognition, for example, they compare chimp performance on cognitive tasks to the performance of human children on the same tasks. And when new fossils are found, such as those of the tiny humans of Flores, scientists compare these remains to other fossils and contemporary humans. Comparison provides a way to draw general inferences about the evolution of traits and has long been the cornerstone of efforts to understand biological and cultural diversity. Individual studies of fossilized remains, living species, or human populations are the essential units of analysis in a comparative study; bringing these elements into a broader comparative framework creates a means of testing adaptive hypotheses and generating new ones. With this book, Charles L. Nunn intends to ensure that evolutionary anthropologists and organismal biologists have the tools to realize the potential of comparative research. Nunn provides a wide-ranging investigation of the comparative foundations of evolutionary anthropology in past and present research, including studies of animal behavior, biodiversity, linguistic evolution, allometry, and cross-cultural variation. He also points the way to the future, exploring the new phylogeny-based comparative approaches and offering a how-to manual for scientists who wish to incorporate these new methods into their research.


This report describes the functionality of the Architectural Agent (A2) developed by a team at CMU as part of the US ACERL-sponsored ACL (Investigation of an Agent Communication Language) project, which addresses communication issues in a distributed computer-supported building design environment The core functionality of A2 consists of generating schematic layouts of the functional units in a spatial program; this functionality is provided by using SEED-Layout (SL) as a server; SL is a module in the Software Environment to Support the Early Phases in Building Design (SEED) currently under development at the EDRC. A2 is in addition served by the object database UniSQL and AutoCAD, used strictly for display purposes. These diverse components communicate through a message server with each other and a facilitator API provided by another team. The communication protocol and data translations are based on an active object model expressed in the specification language OML developed by the CMU team explicitly for the ACL project The CMU team also suggests an approach toward conflict management and negotiation for an environment like ACL and describes an OML-based protocol that implements the approach. It offers general conclusions about relevant aspects of the ACL project.


# Former BMA chairman leaves NHS {#article-title-2}

Dr Jeremy Lee-Potter, chairman of the BMA council from 1990 to 1993, is to retire early from the NHS because he is disillusioned with the government's response to doctors' concerns about its policies on the NHS. Writing in this month's issue of BMA News Review Dr Lee-Potter says that the present government is so in the grip of political dogma that it will not respond to any approach from the profession. "We are faced with an intransigent and unpopular government which continues to trample on our professionalism and ignore our advice."

He said that for three years he tried to reestablish a working relationship with the government. But he failed, and he believed that the present chairman, Dr Sandy Macara, would also fail because the political dogma was that all forms of central administration should be replaced wherever possible by markets.

"Cannot health secretary Virginia Bottomley and her colleagues see the dangers of subjugating the profession?" he asks. "Being a doctor is not the same as being a business executive or an advertising man or an industrial worker."

Dr Lee-Potter says that neither Mrs Bottomley nor his successor are likely to be allowed to do anything radically sensible about any of the issues which have forced the profession into confrontation. For this reason he believes that a Labour government may offer the best hope for doctors and the NHS.

The minister for health, Mr Gerald Malone, said that Dr Lee-Potter was describing a health service that he did not recognise.

# GPs drop opposition to end point assessment of trainees {#article-title-3}

The General Medical Services Committee has reversed its decision taken a year ago that the proposals from the Joint …


Central to all Monte Carlo-based rendering algorithms is the construction of light transport paths from the light sources to the eye. Existing rendering approaches sample path vertices incrementally when constructing these light transport paths. The resulting probability density is thus a product of the conditional densities of each local sampling step, constructed without explicit control over the form of the final joint distribution of the complete path. We analyze why current incremental construction schemes often lead to high variance in the presence of participating media, and reveal that such approaches are an unnecessary legacy inherited from traditional surface-based rendering algorithms. We devise joint importance sampling of path vertices in participating media to construct paths that explicitly account for the product of all scattering and geometry terms along a sequence of vertices instead of just locally at a single vertex. This leads to a number of practical importance sampling routines to explicitly construct single-and double-scattering subpaths in anisotropically-scattering media. We demonstrate the benefit of our new sampling techniques, integrating them into several path-based rendering algorithms such as path tracing, bidirectional path tracing, and many-light methods. We also use our sampling routines to generalize deterministic shadow connections to connection subpaths consisting of two or three random decisions, to efficiently simulate higher-order multiple scattering. Our algorithms significantly reduce noise and increase performance in renderings with both isotropic and highly anisotropic, low-order scattering.


The United States manages natural resources held in the public trust for the collective benefit of all citizens. When human action injures certain natural resources, the government has statutory authority to pursue monetary damages, which are used to restore the resources to their pre-injury condition. As the only statutory tort remedy in environmental law, natural resource damages provide a valuable opportunity to consider the efficiency of a tort regime as a tool for addressing environmental problems. Moreover, administration of the remedy provides insights into interagency dynamics and valuation of natural resources without a market value. At present, these important inquiries are sharply limited by a lack of comprehensive information about the remedy. Commentators routinely underestimate the frequency and size of claims by failing to account for settlement, which resolves over ninety-five percent of natural resource damages matters, and lesser-known applications of the remedy.This Article begins to fill the void of information surrounding natural resource damages settlements. It presents a novel empirical overview of all settlements by federal trustees be- tween 1989 and 2015, constructed from data gathered by Freedom of Information Act requests to each relevant agency. The available data indicate that federal agencies settled for $10.4 billion across hundreds of claims over more than twenty years. This Article maps the statutory authorities that agencies use to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. Ultimately, the data presented in this Article lay a foundation for the important, yet under-theorized, questions surrounding the potential for statutory tort remedies to address environmental problems.


This study asks whether we are the same citizens as we were before the civil awakening that spilled over from tyrannical Arab states to core cities of the global economy and beyond. To address this question it offers an historical account of the role of New Social Movements, civil society, and deliberative and radical democracy as the three epistemic frameworks that have shaped the figure of the rights-bearing citizen, and which have conceived the neoliberal citizen as a choice driven individual. Taking the neoliberal shift in Israel of the 1980s as its point of departure, it then places the 2011 Tents' Protest in the broader context of acts of resistance to the entrenchment of neoliberalism. This is followed by a thorough exploration of two post-2011 Israeli activist groups in Jewish and ArabPalestinian societies respectively, allowing voices and new conceptions of citizenship that had arisen from the margins of the 2011 protest to come to the fore. In the final analysis, this exploration traces how the shift away from the conception of the citizen as a rights-bearing individual challenges neoliberal governmentality. It thus enables us to configure the image of a post-neoliberal citizen, one whose political subjectivity is grounded not in the discourse of rights, but rather in a new discourse of representation.


OBJECTIVE To determine effects of prosthetic laryngoplasty on return to racing, performance index, and career longevity in racing Quarter Horses with recurrent laryngeal neuropathy (RLN) and to evaluate performance variables for horses with RLN undergoing prosthetic laryngoplasty, compared with a control horse population. DESIGN Multicenter, retrospective cohort study. ANIMALS 162 racing Quarter Horses with RLN treated with prosthetic laryngoplasty (case horses) and 324 racing Quarter Horse without RLN (control horses). PROCEDURES Medical and race records of case and control horses examined at 5 referral centers between January 2000 and December 2015 were reviewed retrospectively. Two control horses were matched with each case horse. Return to racing, earnings, number of racing starts, performance index, and career longevity were evaluated. RESULTS The odds of returning to racing did not differ significantly between case and control horses but decreased with increasing age. Neither racing starts nor career longevity were affected by prosthetic laryngoplasty or by RLN grade. In fact, horses undergoing laryngoplasty for treatment of RLN and horses with the lowest RLN grade before surgery had higher performance indices after the surgery, compared with indices for control horses. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE The faster speeds and shorter distances raced with Quarter Horses could alter how RLN impacts respiratory variables and performance in Quarter Horses, compared with other racehorse breeds. Further study is needed to understand the impacts of RLN and surgical treatments for RLN in racing Quarter Horses.


This article argues that innovation may constitute a useful perspective on the link between society and arts and humanities research. Innovation is here seen as 'something new put into practical use', and there are two reasons why it can be relevant for humanities. First, there has been an expansion of what innovation refers to; it is now commonly used for non-economic change processes in public, private and non-profit organisations. Second, arts and humanities are not unique in their contribution to innovation: good teaching, research, dissemination and external relations are the central contributions for all university disciplines. But this does not mean that it is easy to promote innovation at universities in general and in arts and humanities in particular. Through examples from a historical case study at the University of Oslo, different tensions are analysed related to indicators, infrastructure, teaching versus research and quality. All these need to be handled in such a way as to avoid fruitless conflicts, misunderstandings and poorly designed policies and university strategies.


The D1 and D2 types of dopamine receptors are members of distinct subfamilies but appear to act together in a number of systems where combinations of specific agonists produce distinct biological effects from those produced by D1- or D2-specific agonists alone. Lee et al. now propose that this may reflect the fact that D1 and D2 receptors physically interact, and in doing so produce distinct signals not mediated by either receptor alone. D1 and D2 receptors are G protein-coupled receptors that signal predominantly through Gs or Golf, or Gi or Go, respectively, to adenylyl cyclase. However when both D1 and D2 dopamine receptors were stably expressed in cultured cells, treatment of the cells with a combination of D1- and D2-selective agonists caused a rapid increase in the intracellular concentration of free calcium ([Ca2+]i). The increase in ([Ca2+]i) was prevented when cells were treated with the phospholipase C inhibitor U73122 and was not present if cells were treated with only one of the agonists or if cells expressed only one of the receptors. Immunohistochemical analysis of rat and human brain cells indicated that the D1 and D2 receptors are expressed and localized together in some cells. Furthermore, D2 receptors were detected by immunoblotting in association with D1 receptors immunoprecipitated from membranes of rat striatal neurons. Thus, the combination of D1 and D2 receptors appears to produce a signal (presumably through coupling to a new G protein, Gq, which then regulates phospholipase C) that is distinct from those produced by either receptor alone. Such behavior may underlie some of the diverse effects of dopamine in the brain. S. P. Lee, C. H. So, A. J. Rashid, G. Varghese, R. Cheng, A. J. Lança, B. F. O'Dowd, S. R. George, Dopamine D1 and D2 receptor co-activation generates a novel phospholipase C-mediated calcium signal. J. Biol. Chem. 279, 35671-35678 (2004). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Asimina triloba, commonly known as paw paw, is one of approximately 2100 species in the Annonaceae family, scores of which are known to biosynthesize bioactive secondary metabolites, termed Annonaceous acetogenins. Even with over 400 acetogenins identified, a high-throughput screening protocol for these compounds does not exist. Advances in direct ambient ionization mass spectrometry have opened the door to many metabolite profiling methodologies, but for acetogenins, this is often complicated by the abundance of isomers that are present. A droplet-liquid microjunction-surface sampling probe coupled to UPLC-PDA-HRMS/MS system was employed to detect acetogenins in situ from A. triloba. The seeds, fruit pulp, twigs, leaves, and flowers of A. triloba were all examined for acetogenins. Additionally, lithium was infused post-column to increase the sensitivity of the fragments, thus allowing for characterization of the structural classes, and mass defect filtering was used to mine the data for the various acetogenin analogues. This surface sampling system allowed for the rapid identification and differentiation of Annonaceous acetogenins directly from the various organs of A. triloba, including the never before studied flowers.


Background: Since its arrival in North America in 1999, West Nile virus (WNV) has spread rapidly across the United States and into Canada. First detected in birds and mosquitoes in Ontario in 2001,1 by the end of 2002 viral activity had been documented in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.2 In the same year, cases of human infection were reported in Ontario and Quebec.2

WNV is a member of the Flaviviridae family, which includes the viruses responsible for Japanese encephalitis, dengue, St. Louis encephalitis and yellow fever. WNV infects over 150 species of birds as well as mammals such as squirrels, dogs, wolves, horses and mountain goats.3 The Corvidae family of birds, which includes crows, blue and grey jays, ravens and magpies, are particularly susceptible to illness and death from WNV.4 For this reason, sightings of dead crows have been used in Canada as a marker for WNV activity, and the testing of dead crows for WNV continues to be a fundamental part of an enhanced passive surveillance system.

Different types of mosquitoes are responsible for risk of disease in humans: "amplification" mosquitoes (e.g., Culex pipiens and Culex restuans), "bridging" species (e.g., Coquillettidia perturbans) and human biters (e.g., Aedes vexans). The first type feeds on birds and transmits the virus to other birds; this activity creates a large reservoir of WNV infection that starts to build in early spring. The second type of mosquito feeds on both birds and humans and is responsible for transmitting WVN to humans.5 Twenty-eight public health units in Ontario conducted mosquito surveillance for the presence of WNV in 2002.6 The most common species were C. pipiens and C. restuans, A. vexans and C. perturbans; however, field investigations found enough variation between adjacent health units to warrant local surveillance (Dr. Fiona Hunter, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ont.: personal communication, 2003). WNV-positive mosquitoes were identified in 19 Ontario health unit jurisdictions in 2002.7

Although mosquito transmission remains the most significant vehicle for human disease, WNV can also be spread through blood or organ donation,8 pregnancy,9 lactation,10 needle-stick injury and exposure to infected laboratory specimens.11 In an update on WVN, the Canadian Blood Services stated that 2 cases of transmission are "almost certainly transfusion-related" and that another 2 are currently under investigation.12

WNV incubates for 3 to 14 days in humans; data from New York City indicate that only 20% of infected people have a febrile illness.13 Clinical features range from fever accompanied by malaise, headache, myalgia, rash, lymphadenopathy, eye pain, anorexia and vomiting lasting for 3 to 6 days, to severe meningo-encephalitis. Severe muscle weakness and flaccid paralysis have been experienced by several patients admitted to hospital in the United States.14 In addition, patients with neurological disease are experiencing long-term disability.14 WNV should be considered in all patients with unexplained encephalitis and meningitis.14

Clinical management: Treatment of WNV illness remains supportive. For severe cases, intensive care and transfer to appropriate facilities is recommended. West Nile encephalitis is typical of arboviral encephalitides, with a nonspecific prodrome leading to a deterioration in mental status, profound flaccid paralysis in some cases and coma in 15% of cases.13,15

Prevention and control: Prevention of WNV transmission to humans relies on the elimination of mosquito breeding sites and the use of personal protection. The experience in New York City, first with the eradication of malaria and then with the reduction of human WNV disease, demonstrates the role for habitat reduction through improved drainage and the necessity of municipal bylaws to prevent standing water.16 These strategies require cooperation between public health, public works and conservation area officials and elected representatives.

Public education aimed at reducing the risk of mosquito bites has been conducted in Ontario, through the media, Internet, boards of education and public health units. Reducing the number of breeding sites and using personal protection are key components of education campaigns. Recent surveys of residents in Ontario's Halton region, conducted June to October in 2001 and 2002, showed a significant increase in the proportion of residents who had taken measures to eliminate standing water on their property in 2002 compared with 2001 (63% v. 26%); however, less than 8% had consistently used an insect repellent containing DEET during outdoor activities (Rapid Risk Factor Surveillance System, Ontario: unpublished data, extracted Feb 2003).

Given the limitations of habitat reduction and public education to promote personal protection, control measures including the use of larvicides and adulticides to reduce mosquito populations have been used in the North American response to WNV. The key to any mosquito control program is good surveillance. Public health units in Ontario have relied on dead crow sightings, the testing of standing water for the presence of mosquito larvae and the trapping of adult mosquitoes for WNV testing to inform control efforts. Although evidence from randomized controlled trials is lacking, results from well-established mosquito control programs in Illinois and Louisiana have shown reductions in mosquito populations.17,18

Larvicides, often in granular, pellet or teabag formulations, are used in the spring and early summer to reduce the number of emerging mosquitoes. They are placed in catch basins and standing water sites that are close enough to human populations to pose a risk (see news article, page 145519). (For larvicides approved for use in Canada, search the Pest Management Regulatory Agency's electronic database [www.eddenet.ca/b.asp; click on "ELSE label search" and enter "larvicide" in search box] or contact the agency by telephone [800 267-6315] or email ]ac.cg.cs-ch@vresofni_armp[). Each province regulates the sale, use, transportation, storage and disposal of federally regulated pesticides under its own provincial legislation. Two of the most common products used in North America as larvicides are biological agents (e.g., Bacillus thuringiensis var israelensis [commonly referred to as Bti] and Bacillus sphaericus [not yet available in Canada]) and growth regulators (e.g., methoprene).

Adulticides, used to kill adult mosquitoes and applied from ultra-low-volume equipment mounted on aircraft or trucks, are considered a final measure when other efforts have failed to reduce mosquito numbers, when human cases of mosquito-borne disease are increasing or when human health is at risk despite the use of larvicides and other environmental controls (Geoff Cutten, Insecticide National Steering Committee Team (INSECT) Subcommittee, Health Canada: personal communication, 2003). To date, most of the experience with WNV mosquito control has involved the use of resmethrin, a synthetic pyrethoid, and malathion, a rapidly degrading organophosphate.20 Experience with malathion for medfly eradication in California has shown no human health effects.21 However, malathion is highly toxic to insects, including bees, and to fish and aquatic invertebrates.22

Bob Nosal Medical Officer of Health Halton Region Health Department Oakville, Ont. Rosana Pellizzari Community Medicine Resident University of Toronto Toronto, Ont.

β See related articles pages 1399, 1427 and 1455


The polarization modes of the cosmological microwave background are an invaluable source of information for cosmology and a unique window to probe the energy scale of inflation. Extracting this information from microwave surveys requires distinguishing between foreground emissions and the cosmological signal, which means solving a component separation problem. Component separation techniques have been widely studied for the recovery of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies, but very rarely for the polarization modes. In this case, most component separation techniques make use of second-order statistics to distinguish between the various components. More recent methods, which instead emphasize the sparsity of the components in the wavelet domain, have been shown to provide low-foreground, full-sky estimates of the CMB temperature anisotropies. Building on sparsity, we here introduce a new component separation technique dubbed the polarized generalized morphological component analysis (PolGMCA), which refines previous work to specifically work on the estimation of the polarized CMB maps: i) it benefits from a recently introduced sparsity-based mechanism to cope with partially correlated components; ii) it builds upon estimator aggregation techniques to further yield a better noise contamination/non-Gaussian foreground residual trade-off. The PolGMCA algorithm is evaluated on simulations of full-sky polarized microwave sky simulations using the Planck Sky Model (PSM). The simulations show that the proposed method achieves a precise recovery of the CMB map in polarization with low-noise and foreground contamination residuals. It provides improvements over standard methods, especially on the Galactic center, where estimating the CMB is challenging.


As knowledge is essential in all research or even research initiative. Therefore, biologists always try to know where a protein resides in a cell . They can elucidate the functions of the protein with this revelation. Armed with marvelous accomplishment of upcoming and ongoing large-scale genome sequencing projects, an exponentially growing number of new protein sequences have been discovered. Rather than using expensive lab experiments, computational methods are far more effective to automatically and accurately identify the subcellular locations of these proteins. This book proposes an efficient multi-label predictor method, namely label powerset encoding, for predicting the subcellular localization of multilocation proteins. Briefly, on two recently published gram negative bacteria and plant datasets. Bacterial proteins play an important role in cell biology due to their importance in drug design and antibiotics research. The localization of bacterial proteins are very important since the function of a protein is closely linked with its location. A single gram negative bacteria proteins can be located in multiple locations in a protein. Prediction of subcellular locations of gram negative bacteria proteins is thus far more challenging and difficult. In this book, we proposed a novel method for subcellular localization of gram negative bacteria and plant protein dataset. Our method uses label power-set encoding scheme for the associated multi-label classification problem. Using a set of effective features also used in the literature our encoding significantly improves over the traditional approaches on several base classifiers. Our method was tested using a standard benchmark dataset and showed promising results.


Car sharing is one the pillars of a smart transportation infrastructure, as it is expected to reduce traffic congestion, parking demands and pollution in our cities. From the point of view of demand modelling, car sharing is a weak signal in the city landscape: only a small percentage of the population uses it, and thus it is difficult to study reliably with traditional techniques such as households travel diaries. In this work, we depart from these traditional approaches and we rely on web-based, digital records about vehicle availability in 10 European cities for one of the major active car sharing operators. We discuss how vehicles are used, what are the main characteristics of car sharing trips, whether events happening in certain areas are predictable or not, and how the spatio-temporal information about vehicle availability can be used to infer how different zones in a city are used by customers. We conclude the paper by presenting a direct application of the analysis of the dataset, aimed at identifying where to locate maintenance facilities within the car sharing operational area.


We developed a micro-motor based miniature catheter with an outer diameter of 3mm for ultrahigh speed endoscopic optical coherence tomography (OCT) using vertical cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) at a 1MHz axial scan rate. The micro-motor can rotate a micro-prism at 1,200-72,000rpm (corresponding to 20- 1,200fps) with less than 5V driving voltage to provide fast and stable scanning, which is not sensitive to the bending of the catheter. The side-viewing probe can be pulled back for a long distance to acquire three-dimensional (3D) dataset covering a large area on the specimen. VCSEL provides high a-line rate to support dense sampling under high frame rate operation. With the use of a C++ based high speed data acquisition (DAQ) system, in vivo three-dimensional OCT imaging in rabbit GI tract with 1.6mm depth range, 11μm axial resolution, 8μm lateral resolution, and frame rate of 400fps is demonstrated.