MUSICAL THEATER The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim. By Scott McMillin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. [xvi, 230 p. ISBN-10 0-691-12740-1; ISBN-13 978-0-691-12730-9. $24.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Rarely does a book come along that seems to elegantly summarize what has come before while taking its subject to the next level. The Musical as Drama by Scott McMillin is just such a book. Published in the last year of the author's life, this volume encapsulates an entire career's reflection on the nature and structure of musical theater. Although he doesn't advance any one overarching thesis, McMillin looks at musical theater as a dramaturgical phenomenon, not searching for organic unity within works but instead exploring the incongruities and disjunctions that form one of the central tensions in musical theater. Taking examples from among the best known and best loved shows in the repertoire, McMillin successfully argues for a more subtle reading of musical theater works as products of a collaborative process, and, as he asserts, the most important form of drama produced so far in America. Scholarship on musical theater has tended towards studies of individual works (bruce mcclung's Lady in the Dark: A Biography of a Musical [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007]) or, more commonly, studies of the works of one composer (Stephen Banfield's Sondheim's Broadway Musicals [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993]), or one issue (lesbian and feminist reality in Stacy Wolf's A Problem like Maria [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002], or Jewish identity in Andrea Most's Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universtiy Press, 2004]). Alternatively, a number of books have come out in recent years that provide a broader narrative of Broadway appropriate as textbooks (Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990] or Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Showboat to Sondheim [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997] for example). Rarer is this kind of study, which takes a critical and dramaturgical look at a number of important musicals from different historical eras, and advances ideas about how the disunities of the genre function dramatically, and how music and text and staging make the musical "work" in the theater. As McMillin notes, "I am not aware of a book that brings the musical before us as an aesthetic entity, a genre of drama with definable conventions around which one can think about the musical as a form of art." (pp. ix-x). McMillin also poses a crucial question: "There is a challenge involved, and it is offered to the universities: are we in universities able to use our methods of analysis-historical, musical, literary, philosophical -and still get this form of popular entertainment right?" (p. xi) Certainly if musical theater history has had a weak spot, it is that few scholars can be adept in all of these areas at the same time and conduct research that adequately addresses the multifariousness of the genre while at the same time representing it realistically. One of the central issues in musical theater history has been the extent to which musicals of different eras are "integrated," i.e., the extent to which the various elements of the musical belong together. McMillin dismisses to a certain degree this emphasis-born from organicist and in some ways European models of looking at opera-as inadequate for dealing with the way in which musical theater works operate. Bringing to bear on his analyses are a number of thinkers, including Joseph Kerman, Brecht, Wagner, and Kierkegaard. More prevalent is his borrowing of aspects of narrativity from Carolyn Abbate, who is best known for her work on opera, particularly the music dramas of Wagner (see her Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991]). …


Objectives: We assessed the factors relating to the prevention of the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) for students at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy at Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed in February and March 2020. A 21 item self-administered questionnaire on the knowledge, attitude, and practices regarding COVID-19 was collected from students of the first to the sixth year using the strategy of simple random sampling. The aim was to establish factors that relate to practices using Odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) which were estimated by the logistic regression model, p-value <0.05 shows a significant difference.

Results: Of the 551 students, 41.0% recorded responses indicating good practices toward prevention measures, while around half the students reported that they did not wash their hands for 20 full seconds (50.5%). The overall rate of good knowledge and positive attitude was 49.0% and 26.1%, respectively. When adjusted for all variables in the logistic regression model, a positive overall attitude was associated with good overall preventive practice; AOR = 1.72 (95% CI: 1.16 – 2.55). Furthermore, students mainly accessed information via social media and television (95.8% and 85.8%, respectively).

Conclusions: There were only 41.0% recorded responses indicating good practices toward prevention measures. Besides, knowledge and attitudes about COVID-19 among students were inadequate. Further health education interventions should be focused to change bad hand-washing habits via mass media messages.


This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place-specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco-based model of "tech gentrification" results in deracinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scholars acknowledge the role of historical difference in contouring dispossessions in metropolitan versus postcolonial cities, this consideration should be broadened to account for the racial/colonial dimensions of urbanism in the US as well. Treating Oakland as a "crossroads of theory", this paper joins calls for a deeper engagement between postcolonial urban studies and critical race and ethnic studies from North America. Drawing upon the authors' activist and empirical work, it contends that "thinking from Oakland" demands a foregrounding of racial capitalism, policing, and refusal.


Some literary scholars have begun incorporating neuroscience, cognitive science, anthropology, and—most prominently and controversially—evolutionary psychology into their work. Their work explores how evolution might have shaped aspects of literature, the potential adaptive benefits of storytelling for our Pleistocene ancestors, and the mystery of why humans spend so much time immersed in it. Evolution provides a framework for understanding human behavior; evolutionary psychology explores the origins of mental phenomena and can bridge evolutionary biology and the humanities. Some recent evopsychology also emphasizes the plasticity of the human mind, which helps explain how universal human behaviors (such as storytelling) can exist but can nevertheless be expressed in different ways in different cultures. Many scientists encourage this work, although applying evolutionary thought to the human mind has never been popular in the humanities. But since 2007, the number of books and articles incorporating Darwinian and other scientific thought into literary studies has more than doubled. These scholars are convinced not only that evolutionary thought can improve literary research but also that literature can teach scientists a thing or two about human evolution.


In this study we take an 'above the clause' perspective on the conceptualisation of complex events of Irish English and Modern Irish within a functional Role and Reference Grammar perspective, using corpus based data. Functional models of language generally assume some layered structure of the clause, the noun phrase and the word. (Nolan 2012a, 2012b; Van Valin 2005). While excellent work has heretofore been achieved at clause level, the description of important linguistic phenomena above the clause has often been somewhat neglected. In this regard, a central part of the grammar of every human language is the encoding of events and their participants in a clause. This motivates an 'above the clause' perspective to characterise the balance between uniformity of encoding and variability in encoding within and across languages. In the functional-cognitive paradigm, form and meaning are not separated into self-contained components. Instead, syntactic structures of varying degrees of complexity and abstraction are paired with their corresponding semantic structures. We argue that the interaction of semantic relations with the hierarchy of clausal linkage is at the strongest pole with the semantic relations covering phase and modifying subevents. We also argue that light verb constructions are formed pre-syntactically in the lexicon using and defend this by applying certain criteria as a diagnostic. The function of light verbs in these constructions is to modulate the realisation of event and sub-event semantics into syntax. We provide evidence of the dynamicity in conceptualising a complex event, considered as complex predication across constructions, in Irish English and Modern Irish.


Urban land surface schemes have been developed to model the distinct features of the urban surface and the associated energy exchange processes. These models have been developed for a range of purposes and make different assumptions related to the inclusion and representation of the relevant processes. Here, the first results of Phase 2 from an international comparison project to evaluate 32 urban land surface schemes are presented. This is the first large‐scale systematic evaluation of these models. In four stages, participants were given increasingly detailed information about an urban site for which urban fluxes were directly observed. At each stage, each group returned their models' calculated surface energy balance fluxes. Wide variations are evident in the performance of the models for individual fluxes. No individual model performs best for all fluxes. Providing additional information about the surface generally results in better performance. However, there is clear evidence that poor choice of parameter values can cause a large drop in performance for models that otherwise perform well. As many models do not perform well across all fluxes, there is need for caution in their application, and users should be aware of the implications for applications and decision making. Copyright © 2010 Royal Meteorological Society


Accurate rainfall data are critical for accurate representation of temporal and spatial uncertainties of simulated watershed-scale hydrology and water quality from models. In addition, the methods used to incorporate the rainfall data into the simulation model can significantly impact the results. The objectives of this study were to (1) assess the hydrologic impacts of different methods for incorporating spatially variable rainfall input into the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) in conjunction with subwatershed delineation level and (2) assess seasonal and spatial uncertainty in hydrologic and water quality simulations of SWAT with respect to rain gauge density. The study uses three different methods to incorporate spatially variable rainfall into the SWAT model and three levels of subwatershed delineation. The impacts of ten different gauge-density scenarios on hydrology and water quality were subsequently evaluated by using the highest gauge-density scenario as a baseline for comparison. Through the centroid method, which is currently used by the AVSWAT-X interface, variations in the representation of measured annual rainfall as model input and corresponding simulated streamflow increased as subwatershed delineation level decreased from high-density to low-density. The rainfall input by the Thiessen averaging method for each subwatershed (Thiessen method) and the inverse-distance-weighted averaging method for the entire watershed (average method) were not sensitive to subwatershed delineation. The impacts of delineation on streamflow were also less with these two methods. The Thiessen method is recommended for SWAT simulation of a watershed with high spatial variability of rainfall. The currently used AVSWAT-X centroid method will also accurately represent spatially variable rainfall if a subwatershed delineation is used that sufficiently incorporates the density of observed rainfall stations. As the number of rain gauges used for the simulation decreased, the uncertainty in the hydrologic and water quality model output increased exponentially. Total phosphorus was most sensitive to the changes in rain gauge density, with an average coefficient of variation of root mean square difference (CVRMSD) of 0.30 from three watersheds, followed by sediment, total nitrogen, and streamflow, showing CVRMSD values of 0.24, 0.18, and 0.17, respectively. Seasonal variations in simulated streamflow and water quality were higher during summer and fall seasons compared to spring and winter seasons. These seasonal and temporal variations can be attributed to the rainfall patterns within the watershed.


Zika virus infection in humans is usually mild or asymptomatic. However, some babies born to women infected with Zika virus have severe neurological sequelae. An unusual cluster of cases of congenital microcephaly and other neurological disorders in the WHO Region of the Americas, led to the declaration of a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 1 February 2016. By 5 May 2016, reports of newborns or fetuses with microcephaly or other malformations – presumably associated with Zika virus infection – have been described in the following countries and territories: Brazil (1271 cases); Cabo Verde (3 cases); Colombia (7 cases); French Polynesia (8 cases); Martinique (2 cases) and Panama (4 cases). Additional cases were also reported in Slovenia and the United States of America, in which the mothers had histories of travel to Brazil during their pregnancies.1

Zika virus is an intensely neurotropic virus that particularly targets neural progenitor cells but also – to a lesser extent – neuronal cells in all stages of maturity. Viral cerebritis can disrupt cerebral embryogenesis and result in microcephaly and other neurological abnormalities.2 Zika virus has been isolated from the brains and cerebrospinal fluid of neonates born with congenital microcephaly and identified in the placental tissue of mothers who had had clinical symptoms consistent with Zika virus infection during their pregnancies.3–5 The spatiotemporal association of cases of microcephaly with the Zika virus outbreak and the evidence emerging from case reports and epidemiologic studies, has led to a strong scientific consensus that Zika virus is implicated in congenital abnormalities.6,7

Existing evidence and unpublished data shared with WHO highlight the wider range of congenital abnormalities probably associated with the acquisition of Zika virus infection in utero. In addition to microcephaly, other manifestations include craniofacial disproportion, spasticity, seizures, irritability and brainstem dysfunction including feeding difficulties, ocular abnormalities and findings on neuroimaging such as calcifications, cortical disorders and ventriculomegaly.3–6,8–10 Similar to other infections acquired in utero, cases range in severity; some babies have been reported to have neurological abnormalities with a normal head circumference. Preliminary data from Colombia and Panama also suggest that the genitourinary, cardiac and digestive systems can be affected (Pilar Ramon-Pardo, unpublished data).

The range of abnormalities seen and the likely causal relationship with Zika virus infection suggest the presence of a new congenital syndrome. WHO has set in place a process for defining the spectrum of this syndrome. The process focuses on mapping and analysing the clinical manifestations encompassing the neurological, hearing, visual and other abnormalities, and neuroimaging findings. WHO will need good antenatal and postnatal histories and follow-up data, sound laboratory results, exclusion of other etiologies and analysis of imaging findings to properly delineate this syndrome. The scope of the syndrome will expand as further information and longer follow-up of affected children become available. The surveillance system that was established as part of the epidemic response to the outbreak initially called only for the reporting of microcephaly cases. This surveillance guidance has been expanded to include a spectrum of congenital malformations that could be associated with intrauterine Zika virus infection.11

Effective sharing of data is needed to define this syndrome. A few reports have described a wide range of abnormalities,3–6,8–10 but most data related to congenital manifestations of Zika infection remain unpublished. Global health organizations and research funders have committed to sharing data and results relevant to the Zika epidemic as openly as possible.12 Further analysis of data from cohorts of pregnant women with Zika virus infection are needed to understand all outcomes of Zika virus infection in pregnancy.

Thirty-seven countries and territories in the Region of the Americas now report mosquito-borne transmission of Zika virus and risk of sexual transmission. With such spread, it is possible that many thousands of infants will incur moderate to severe neurological disabilities. Therefore, routine surveillance systems and research protocols need to include a larger population than simply children with microcephaly. The health system response, including psychosocial services for women, babies and affected families will need to be fully resourced.

The Zika virus public health emergency is distinct because of its long-term health consequences and social impact. A coordinated approach to data sharing, surveillance and research is needed. WHO has thus started coordinating efforts to define the congenital Zika virus syndrome and issues an open invitation to all partners to join in this effort.


For a robot to be capable of development, it must be able to explore its environment and learn from its experiences. It must nd (or create) opportunities to experience the unfamiliar in ways that reveal properties valid beyond the immediate context. In this paper, we develop a novel method for using the rhythm of everyday actions as a basis for identifying the characteristic appearance and sounds associated with objects, people, and the robot itself. Our approach is to identify and segment groups of signals in individual modalities (sight, hearing, and proprioception) based on their rhythmic variation, then to identify and bind causally-related groups of signals across dieren t modalities. By including proprioception as a modality, this cross-modal binding method applies to the robot itself, and we report a series of experiments in which the robot learns about the characteristics of its own body.


Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of pulmonary TB, causes chronic intracellular infection of lung-resident antigen-presenting cells, including macrophages and dendritic cells (DCs). Life-long bacterial control requires robust T-cell immune responses. Lung DCs are critical for initiating and co-ordinating adaptive immune responses against TB. The recent description of previously uncharacterized DC subsets has prompted the re-examination of lung DCs and their role in priming antimycobacterial T-cell responses. While there is some data on these new DCs in their naive state, very little is known about how these DCs respond to pulmonary mycobacterial infection. In this article, we attempt to identify the major antigen-presenting cell subsets that may be critical to lymph node homing, T-cell priming and controlling mycobacterial infection. We further examine the areas of DC heterogeneity that may relate to differential susceptibility between mouse strains. Furthermore, we discuss how DCs may be manipulated and exploited as a cell-based prophylactic TB vaccine and the prospect of using this strategy for post-M. tuberculosis exposure settings.


Seven prey species (n toral > 2,700) were fed to seven captive male Pacific harbor seals (Phoca vitulina richardii) in 177 experimental meals to quantify biases associated with scat analysis and current consumption models. Hard parts from an individual meal were recovered in an average of 3.8 ± 1.8 scats (range 1-10; mean ± SD). Overall, 57.7 ± 33.2% of otoliths and 89.5 ± 15.5% of squid beaks were recovered. Recovery rates varied, and prey with smaller, fragile otoliths were recovered in lesser quantities than prey with larger, robust otoliths. Recovery rates of all prey except pink salmon were improved by a mean of 31.7% when all diagnostic structures were included in estimates. Estimated recovery of pink salmon was 9.5 times that fed seals based on the all-structure technique. Mean length reduction of recovered otoliths was 20.4 ± 10.1%. Correction factors calculated from average length reduction improved length estimates for all fish species. Grade-specific length correction factors (gLCFs) reduced variability in all of the estimates and significantly improved estimates of prey with highly eroded otoliths including Pacific hake and shortbelly rockfish. The Biomass Reconstruction (BR) model accurately predicted biomass consumption within 4% of known consumption, whereas estimates based on frequency of occurrence were inaccurate.


Two concerns pervade Levinas's writings. The first is to persuade us that the basic ideas of monotheistic religion -- God, the transcendent, the infinite, and the holy -- are indispensible for understanding human subjectivity. The second is to rid these religious ideas of all metaphysical and theological impurity. One of the major sources of this impurity, in Levinas's view, is the traditional idea of the sacred. Levinas typically writes as if the very idea of the sacred were one of the chief obstacles to a proper understanding of religion. He denounces the sacred as "the essence of idolatry" (1990a: 14), as the "brother of sorcery" and "the half light" in which sorcery flourishes (1990b: 141). At other times, however, Levinas speaks of the sacred more positively, suggesting a contrast between a 'false', idolatrous sacred, and a 'true' sacred, one that expresses the authentic meaning of religion (1990a: 159, 1990b: 159). While it is true that Levinas is reluctant about using the word 'sacred' at all -- he prefers the expression "the holy" -- it makes sense to read him as rejecting not the concept of the sacred as such, but a particular metaphysical conception of it. That is to say, Levinas's reflections on the meaning of the basic concepts of monothesitic religion can be understood as a new way of thinking about the sacred, a way fitting for a modern, disenchanted, post-metaphysical age.


The highly fossiliferous Barstow Formation, of medial Miocene age, crops out in the Mud Hills, north of Barstow, in the northwestern part of the Mojave Desert, San Bernardino County, California. The Barstow Formation is composed of a sequence of fluviatile and lacustrine sediments, and water-laid air-fall tuff beds; it is about 1,000 m thick, interfingers with the lower Miocene Pickhandle Formation, and is unconformably overlain by Pliocene basalt and Quaternary alluvium. The sediments have been folded into a syncline and broken by several faults that generally trend northwest-southeast and show right-lateral separation.

In this report, the Barstow Formation has been divided into three members. A newly expanded Owl Conglomerate Member is at least 200 m thick. It is exposed on both limbs of the syncline and is composed mainly of gray-green granitic conglomerate on the north limb and of conglomerate and conglomeratic sandstone of reddish hues on the south. Near the base of both sequences, the distinctive Red Tuff has been dated isotopically at about 19.3 Ma, and on the north limb of the syncline, the uppermost unit of the Pickhandle Formation stratigraphically overlies this tuff. Owl Conglomerate clasts in the unit indicate deposition from the north and south to southwest sides of the basin. Although the actual limits of the basin are not known, present outcrops of potential source terranes suggest that it may have been about 8 km wide from north to south. Fossil mammals, termed the "Red Division Fauna," that occur in the upper part of the Owl Conglomerate Member are of late Hemingfordian age, probably range in isotopic age from 16.5 to 163 m.y., and correlate to the upper part of the reversed magnetozone of magnetic chron C5C. The uppermost breccias of the Pickhandle Formation are younger than 19.3 m.y. and are likely older than 16.3 m.y., the age of the Rak Tuff that locally caps the Owl Conglomerate Member.

The middle member of the Barstow Formation lies stratigraphically above the Owl Conglomerate Member and below the Skyline Tuff. The lower contact is locally unconformable. The unit is about 570 m thick and is composed of predominantly fluviatile conglomerate and conglomeratic sandstone beds on the west and southwest that pass laterally into a sequence of predominantly lower-energy sandstone and claystone beds on the east. Facies distribution and sparse paleocurrent data suggest that the conglomeratic sequence was derived from sources to the south and southwest and that the finergrained beds were deposited in the more distal part of the basin to the east and northeast.

The Oreodont Tuff, situated about 270 m stratigraphically above the base of the middle member, has been dated at about 15.8 Ma, and the strata that occur in the interval from the top of the Owl Conglomerate Member to a level 40 m below this tuff produce a previously unreported assemblage, herein named the "Rak Division Fauna." This fauna is biologically and stratigraphically intermediate between the Red Division and Green Hills Faunas, is assigned a latest Hemingfordian age, ranges in isotopic age from about 16.3 to 15.9 m.y., and correlates to the upper half of magnetic chron C5C and the lowermost part of Chron C5B and Chron C5AD.

Strata about 40 m below the position of the Oreodont Tuff and extending 270 m higher than the Oreodont Tuff, in the middle member of the Barstow Formation, contain fossil mammals of the Green Hills Fauna, of early Barstovian age. The Cupidinimus lindsayi Assemblage Zone also begins about 40 m stratigraphically below the Oreodont Tuff. Beds that contain the Green Hills Fauna range in isotopic age from about 15.9 to 15.3 m.y. and correlate to all but the lowest and uppermost parts of magnetic chron C5B.

The upper 60 m of the middle member of the Barstow Formation yields a transitional assemblage, herein named the "Second Division Fauna," that contains some elements of the Green Hills Fauna associated with other taxa typical of the succeeding Barstow Fauna. Beds that contain the Second Division Fauna range in isotopic age from about 15.3 to 14.8 m.y. and correlate to the reversed magnetozone of magnetic chron C5AC.

The upper member of the Barstow Formation begins at the base of the Skyline Tuff and extends to the top of the formation, a stratigraphic interval of about 270 m. In the eastern half of the outcrop area and on the north limb of the syncline in the western outcrop area, the deposits are largely beds of fine-grained lacustrine shale, mudstone, and claystone, with lesser amounts of interbedded sandstone and conglomeratic sandstone. To the west and southwest, the equivalent stratigraphic interval is represented by beds of sandstone and conglomeratic sandstone. The interval bearing the Lapilli Sandstone (isotopically dated at about 13.4 Ma) and 30 m of capping beds of limestone and equivalent beds of mudstone appears to be the geologically youngest part of the Barstow Formation in the Mud Hills.

This part of the Barstow Formation also seems to have been deposited in a basin that was filled from the west and southwest by fluviatile deposits, whereas lacustrine sedimentation took place mainly on the north and east. A distinctly northern source may have been responsible for an ∼30-m-thick unit of hornblende-rich sandstone including the Lapilli Sandstone.

Fossil mammals from the upper member of the Barstow Formation pertain to the Barstow Fauna, of late Barstovian age, defined by the first appearance of proboscideans (just below the Dated Tuff). The Barstow Fauna thus is found in beds just below the Dated Tuff to the top of the Barstow Formation in the Mud Hills, ranges in isotopic age from about 14.8 to 133 m.y., and correlates to most of the normal magnetozone of Chrons C5AC and C5AB. Three rodent assemblage zones ( Pseudadjidaumo stirtoni, Copemys longidens , and Copemys russelli , from oldest to youngest) have been described from the interval that begins just below the Dated Tuff and extends upward for about 250 m.

The evidence from the Barstow Formation provides local calibration of important biochronological events: the Hemingfordian-Barstovian boundary at 15.9 Ma, and the local first appearance of proboscideans at about 14.8 Ma.


Cambium injury is an important factor in post-fire tree survival. Measurements that quantify the degree of bark charring on tree stems after fire are often used as surrogates for direct cambium injury because they are relatively easy to assign and are non-destructive. However, bark char codes based on these measurements have been inadequately tested to determine how well they relate to live or dead cambium. Methods for assessing cambium injury through direct sampling have also been questioned as a potential factor for increasing tree mortality. In this study we used data collected from 11 wildfires and 6 prescribed fires in California, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming to develop a relationship between bark char codes and cambium status for 14 coniferous species. Burned trees were assessed at groundline for bark char severity on each bole quadrant and then sampled at the center of each quadrant to determine cambium status (live or dead). We found that the moderate and deep bark char codes were strongly associated with dead cambium for thin-bark species: lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), whitebark pine (P. albicaulis), western white pine (P. monticola), western redcedar (Thuja plicata), Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii), western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), and subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa). However, bark char codes were somewhat inaccurate in predicting cambium status of the thicker-bark species of white fir (Abies concolor), incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens), ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), Jeffrey pine (P. jeffreyi), Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), western larch (Larix occidentalis), and sugar pine (P. lambertiana). We also evaluated the effect of direct cambium sampling on ponderosa pine tree mortality in eastern Montana. Mortality rates were equivalent for eastern Montana ponderosa pines with and without cambium sampling. Our results support using bark char codes as surrogates for cambium sampling in tree species with thin bark, but bark char codes for thick-bark species, especially the moderate char code, are often not accurate fire-injury variables, as they do not correlate well with cambium status.


In microfluidics, valves and pumps that can combine specifications like precise flow control, provision of precise reagent quantities, minimal sample carryover, and low-cost manufacture, while also being inherently compatible with microfluidic system fabrication, are beyond the current state of the art. Actuators in micro-fluidics made using stimuliresponsive materials are therefore of great interest as functional materials since actuation can be controlled without physical contact, offering improvements in versatility during manifold fabrication, and control of the actuation mechanism. Herein we review the potential use of novel approaches to valving and pumping based on stimuli-responsive polymers for controlling fluid movement within micro-fluidic channels. This has the potential to dramatically simplify the design, fabrication and cost of microfluidic systems. In particular, stimuli-responsive gels incorporating ionic liquids (ILs) produce so-called 'ionogels' that have many advantages over conventional materials. For example, through the tailoring of chemical and physical properties of ILs, robustness, acid/ base character, viscosity and other critical operational characteristics can be finely adjusted. Therefore, the characteristics of the ionogels can be tuned by simply changing the IL and so the actuation behaviour of micro-valves made from these novel materials can be more closely controlled.


We examined risk factors for breast cancer after subdividing cases based on the presence of HER-2 /neu oncogene amplification in their tumors. Data were from the Carolina Breast Cancer Study, a population-based, case-control study of 577 invasive breast cancer patients, diagnosed during 1993–1996 and ages 20–74 years, and 790 controls frequency-matched on race and age. Information on breast cancer risk factors was obtained from structured personal interviews. About 20% of paraffin-embedded tissues from the breast cancers of cases were identified as positive for HER-2 /neu amplification (HER-2/neu1) by differential PCR. Early age at menarche, higher waist:hip ratio, and family history of breast or ovarian cancer were associated with elevated odds ratios (ORs) for both HER-2/neu1 and HER-2/neu2 breast cancers. Breastfeeding for at least 1 year was inversely associated with HER-2 /neu1 breast cancer [OR, 0.3; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.1–0.7] more so than HER-2/neu2breast cancer (OR, 0.8; 95% CI, 0.5–1.2). Most of the remaining risk factors had ORs around 1.0 for both HER-2/neu1 and HER-2/neu2 breast cancers, although a few exhibited possible associations with one disease subtype in analyses stratified by menopausal status. These study results suggest that most recognized breast cancer risk factors do not operate through HER-2/neuamplification in breast carcinogenesis. Differential effects of long-term breastfeeding by HER-2/neuamplification status have been observed in earlier studies and are provocative; however, the direction and magnitude of the associations have not been consistent.


The political and economic geography of occupied Palestinian territory presents significant constraints to the livelihoods of Palestinian families. And yet the story of many Palestinian families is one not of resignation but of steadfastness and resistance. This article explores this as an important example of civil resistance. It begins by building a theoretical case for giving greater attention to the constitutive role of marginalised people in the production of concepts and practices of civil resistance claiming that this helps us identify overlooked and seemingly everyday practices of colonised groups. Next it explores the case of one Palestinian family farm in the west Bethlehem village of Nahhalin as an example of alternative imagined geographies and communities that present a refusal to Israeli colonial occupation. It argues that this refusal is an expression of civil resistance that constitutes a counter-map that rejects Israel's settler-colonial map of their farmland by refusing to leave, and that rejects the violence of the state and its claims to sovereignty by 'refusing to be enemies'.


Multiple description coding (MDC) is a source coding technique that exploits path diversity to increase the robustness of transmitting a compressed signal over error-prone channels. However, the application of MDC to video coding is still problematic because a prediction mismatch problem, called drift, may occur at the decoder when one description is lost. In the literature, it has been shown that drift can be effectively prevented by encoding this prediction mismatch and sending it as side information in a three-prediction-loop structure. However, this side information is totally redundant when both descriptions are received. We propose a very simple, but efficient two-stage MDC in the central prediction loop based on the three-prediction-loop structure of A. Reibman et al. (see Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Image Processing - ICIP'99, p.837-41, 1999). We introduce an additional multiple description scalar quantizer into the central prediction loop. The encoding of the side information is modified in such a way that it can be used to improve the video quality when no drift occurs, but still maintain a drift prevention capability. The simulation results, with different video sequences at various packet loss rates, demonstrate that the proposed two-stage MDC structure indeed enhances the quality when the channel is error-free, yet effectively avoids drift when one description is completely lost.


Abstract : KEY INSIGHTS: *The civil-military relationship, and specifically the interaction between civilian leadership and uniformed military leaders, relies on the attitudes and actions of both civilians and the military. *Although recently there has been tension in the relationship between civilian leadership and the uniformed (and retired) military, there is currently no crisis in the civil control aspects of the civil-military relationship. *Many options are available to uniformed military leaders to express dissent other than resigning in protest - although these options are rarely discussed in open fora. *With an impending change in administration, care should be taken by the arriving civilian and incumbent military leaders to nurture the civil-military leadership.


ANALOG FEEDBACK CONTROL OF AN ACTIVE SOUND TRANSMISSION CONTROL MODULE Jason D. Sagers Department of Mechanical Engineering Master of Science This thesis provides analytical and experimental proof-of-concept for a new feedback-controlled sound transmission control module for use in an active segmented partition (ASP) array. The objective of such a module is to provide high transmission loss down to low audible frequencies while minimizing the overall mass of the module. This objective is accomplished in the new module by using actively controlled panels in conjunction with analog feedback controllers. The new module also overcomes two limitations that exist in current ASP modules: the inability to control broadband randomnoise and the lack of bidirectional control through the module. Overcoming these limitations represents an important advancement in the research area of actively controlled partitions and broadens the number of potential applications for ASP arrays. Analogous circuit models were developed and used to predict the performance of the new ASP module under feedback control. The preliminary design consists of two loudspeaker drivers mounted back-to-back in a duct, with two decoupled analog feedback controllers connected to reduce the vibration of the loudspeaker cones. It was found that the classical analogous circuit model of a loudspeaker proved inadequate for modeling the lowand mid-frequency transmission loss due to resonance effects of the loudspeaker surround. An enhanced model of a loudspeaker was then used to account for this phenomenon and more accurately predict the transmission loss behavior. An experimental proof-of-concept module was constructed using two 10 cm diameter loudspeaker drivers, two accelerometers, and other off-the-shelf materials. The two analog feedback controllers used in the module were designed and built using measured frequency response function techniques. The passive and active transmission loss of the module was measured using a plane-wave tube. Transmission loss of broadband random-noise in excess of 50 dB was achieved between 100 Hz and 2 kHz. The experimental transmission loss results validated the numerical model and showcased the transmission loss performance of the new module design.


We describe two hybrid nanomaterial biosensor platforms, based on networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) enhanced with Pd nanocubes and Pt nanospheres and grown in situ from a porous anodic alumina (PAA) template. These nanocube and nanosphere SWCNT networks are converted into glutamate biosensors by immobilizing the enzyme glutamate oxidase (cross-linked with gluteraldehyde) onto the electrode surface. The Pt nanosphere/SWCNT biosensor outperformed the Pd nanocube/SWCNT biosensor and previously reported similar nanomaterial-based biosensors by amperometrically monitoring glutamate concentrations with a wide linear sensing range (50 nM to 1.6 mM) and a small detection limit (4.6 nM, 3σ). These results combined with the biosensor fabrication scheme (in situgrowth of SWCNTs, electrodeposition of metal nanoparticles, and facile enzyme immobilization protocol) create a biosensor that can potentially be scaled for integration into a wide range of applications including the treatment of neurological disorders.


In Contested Creations in the Book of Job: the-world-as-it-ought- and -ought-not-to-be Abigail Pelham examines the perspectives on creation presented by Job's characters and explores the challenges to their certainties about creative agency and power raised by its epilogue.


OBJECTIVE
We examined the reliability of the Motor-Free Visual Perception Test-Revised (MVPT-R) and the Test of Visual-Perceptual Skills-Revised (TVPS-R) in 52 children with cerebral palsy.

METHOD
The MVPT-R and TVPS-R were initially assessed by a single rater and then randomly assigned to the same rater or another rater after 6 to 14 days.

RESULTS
For scale-level reliability of both tests, the intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were high. The smallest real differences (SRDs) were largely acceptable. The OICCs of most subscale-level reliability of the TVPS-R were satisfactory. The SRD of each TVPS-R subscale score was notable (>29%). The internal consistency was high for both tests.

CONCLUSION
The scale-level reliabilities of both tests were satisfactory in children with cerebral palsy. Although most subscales of the TVPS-R had acceptable test-retest or interrater agreement, all subscales of the TVPS-R had large SRDs, limiting their clinical utility.


Network embedding is a classical task which aims to map the nodes of a network to lowdimensional vectors. Most of the previous network embedding methods are trained in an unsupervised scheme. Then the learned node embeddings can be used as inputs of many machine learning tasks such as node classification, attribute inference. However, the discriminant power of the node embeddings maybe improved by considering the node label information and the node attribute information. Inspired by traditional semi-supervised learning techniques, we explore to train the node embeddings and the node classifiers simultaneously with the text attributes information in a flexible framework. We present Non-Linear Smoothed Transductive Network Embedding (NLSTNE), a transductive network embedding method, whose embeddings are enhanced by modeling the non-linear pairwise similarity between the nodes and the non-linear relationships between the nodes and the text attributes. We use the node classification task to evaluate the quality of the node embeddings learned by different models on four real-world network datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art network embedding methods.


Microcredit markets and institutions have experienced a certain number of major crises over the last decades. This paper aims to understand the dynamics that have led to those crises, including latent crises, by analysing a set of factors at three levels: customers, institutions, and markets. Based on multidisciplinary research, it provides a holistic and systemic understanding of microcredit crises and a graphic representation of the main causes and interactions. It calls for a broad conception of sustainability, which should be understood not only as a financial issue, but also as a sociocultural and political issue, at the level of both microfinance institutions (MFIs) and clients. The paper also identifies some of the key questions that anyone should ask when getting involved with microcredit programmes or institutions in order to avoid crises.


Given two  polynomial sets $\{ P_n(x) \}_{n\geq 0},$ and $\{ Q_n(x) \}_{n\geq 0}$  such that $\deg ( P_n(x) ) = \deg ( Q_n(x) )=n.$ The so-called connection problem between them asks to find coefficients  $\alpha_{n,k}$ in the expression $\displaystyle Q_n(x) =\sum_{k=0}^{n} \alpha_{n,k} P_k(x).$ The connection problem for  different types of polynomials has a long history, and it is still of interest. The connection coefficients play an important role in many problems in pure and applied mathematics, especially in combinatorics, mathematical physics and quantum chemical applications. For the particular case $Q_n(x)=x^n$  the connection problem  is called the inversion problem associated to $\{P_n(x)\}_{n\geq 0}.$ The particular case $Q_n(x)=P'_{n+1}(x)$ is called the derivative connecting problem for polynomial family $\{ P_n(x) \}_{n\geq 0}.$ In this paper, we give a closed-form expression of the inversion and the derivative coefficients for hypergeometric polynomials of the form $${}_2 F_1 \left[ \left. \begin{array}{c} -n, a \\ b \end{array} \right | z \right], {}_2 F_1 \left[ \left. \begin{array}{c} -n, n+a \\ b \end{array} \right | z \right], {}_2 F_1 \left[ \left. \begin{array}{c} -n, a \\ \pm n +b \end{array} \right | z \right],$$ where $\displaystyle {}_2 F_1 \left[ \left. \begin{array}{c} a, b \\ c \end{array} \right | z \right] =\sum_{k=0}^{\infty} \frac{(a)_k (b)_k}{(c)_k} \frac{z^k}{k!},$ is the Gauss hypergeometric function and $(x)_n$ denotes the Pochhammer symbol defined by $$\displaystyle  (x)_n=\begin{cases}1, n=0, \\x(x+1)(x+2)\cdots (x+n-1) , n>0.\end{cases}$$ All polynomials are considered over the field of real numbers.


Accurate assessment of perturbation and recovery from anthropogenic nutrient inputs in wetland ecosystems is important for resource management decisions. Nutrient availability affects detrital decomposition and sediment accumulation rates, contributing to and helping to maintain changes in plant community structure. In this paper we report patterns of microbial enzyme activities as indicators of change in areas of a subtropical wetland 8 yr after cessation of nutrient loading. Select enzyme (acid phosphatase, β-glucosidase, and dehydrogenase) activities were assayed on detrital material and surface soils collected from different vegetation communities within impacted and reference (unimpacted) areas. Acid phosphatase activity (APA) did not vary as dramatically as total P (TP) in soil, but was distinctly different in detritus of impacted and reference vegetation communities. The APA in soil and detritus was greatest in the reference sites, particularly in the Panicum area. Beta-glucosidase activity was highest in Typha areas and demonstrated significant temporal variation. Differences in the timing and length of inundation may play a role in observed trends, since the NW Panicum and Cladium reference sites flooded and reached anaerobiosis later in the growing season than did impacted areas. Data from this study indicate ongoing changes in biogeo-chemical cycling of nutrients in soils and detritus associated with vegetation communities in areas of historic nutrient loading.


The majority of available systems for nerve stimulation use circumferential stimulation electrodes inside an insulating cuff, which produce largely uniform current density within the nerve. Flat stimulation electrodes that contact only one side of the nerve may provide advantages including simpler implantation, ease of production, and more resistance to mechanical failure. However, it is possible that the flat configuration will yield inefficient fiber recruitment due to a less uniform current distribution within the nerve. Here we tested the hypothesis that flat electrodes will require higher current amplitude to achieve effective stimulation than circumferential designs. Computational modeling and in vivo experiments were performed to evaluate fiber recruitment in different nerves and different species using a variety of electrode designs. Initial results demonstrated similar fiber recruitment in the rat vagus and sciatic nerves with a standard circumferential cuff electrode and a cuff electrode modified to approximate a flat configuration. Follow up experiments comparing true flat electrodes to circumferential electrodes on the rabbit sciatic nerve confirmed that fiber recruitment was equivalent between the two designs. These findings demonstrate that flat electrodes represent a viable design for nerve stimulation that may provide advantages over the current circumferential designs for applications in which the goal is uniform activation of the nerve.


Proactive caching at the baseband units (BBUs) in cloud radio access networks (CRANs) has attracted significant attention. However, most existing works assume certain content distribution while ignoring the massive nature of data in CRANs. In contrast, in this paper, the problem of proactive caching is studied for CRANs. In this model, the BBUs can predict the content distribution of each user, determine which content to cache, and cluster remote radio heads (RRHs) based on the content predictions. This problem is formulated as an optimization problem which jointly incorporates backhaul loads, RRH clustering, and content caching. To solve this problem, an algorithm that combines the machine learning framework of echo state networks with sublinear algorithms is proposed. Using echo state networks, the BBUs can predict users content distribution while having only limited information on the network's and users' states. Then, a sublinear algorithm is proposed to determine which content to cache and how to cluster the RRHs while using limited content request samples. Simulation results using real data from Youku show that the proposed approach yields significant gains, in terms of sum effective capacity, that reach up to 26.8 and 36.5%, respectively, compared to random caching and random caching without clustering.


Some organizations have faced serious obstacles for disseminating their data according to the Open Data requirements and characteristics, e.g., for everybody and any use. Often this is the case when the data is of low quality, has (potentially) sensitive information, or has non-interoperable data format and semantics. Not being able to (completely) satisfy the Open Data requirements may have made such organizations to appear incompliant with the ideals and objectives of Open Data, despite their full commitments and efforts for data opening. In this contribution we propose a new paradigm -- called Semi-Open Data paradigm -- in order to frame, acknowledge, and encourage such initiatives and efforts that strive along the Open Data objectives but do not comply with Open Data requirements completely due to some practical constraints. For the proposed Semi-Open Data paradigm we further present an assessment method to measure and categorize Semi-Open Data initiatives objectively. This method offers a better way to assess and reward the extent of organizations' efforts to meet the Open Data characteristics than the current method that checks whether all Open Data requirements are met or not (i.e., by making a binary decision).


By the start of the millennium, most ACP and other developing countries had liberalised their economies, following the advice of multilateral development agencies. They have undergone structural adjustment programmes and, in becoming members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), most have committed themselves to reduce barriers to international trade. But exporting at any cost has a high price.

In liberalising their economies, many economists have argued, developing countries can achieve sustainable growth by attracting foreign investment and using low labour costs and natural resources to compete effectively in world markets. This recipe for prosperity is linked directly to increasing exports in reality, of primary products: the only sector where they have a chance of achieving a competitive advantage over industrialised economies.

Some developing countries have valuable commodities like diamonds and oil beneath their soil. Others can exploit their natural beauty to attract tourists. Most, however, have only agricultural products to sell to the outside world. And even in this sector they cannot grow many crops as efficiently as industrialised countries which can, in addition, offer their farmers lavish subsidies. There have been some success stories with cut flowers, prawns and fresh vegetables but, frankly, the range of significant export options is very narrow.

Unfortunately many countries are competing with each other in trying to export the same range of agricultural products rubber, coffee, tea, cocoa, vegetable oils, spices and some tropical fruits and nuts. As each country has been encouraged to increase production, competition gets fiercer and prices fall. The table below shows, that although retail prices of processed agricultural products have risen enormously over the last twenty years, the prices of primary products from which they are made have crashed. If export orientation continues to be sought after, this can only worsen.

Old supply controls no longer relevant

Over-production has long been a systemic problem for tropical cash crops. The attempts in the early 1970s to control surpluses and prices of such goods as coffee and cocoa through international commodity agreements operated by UNCTAD are far behind us. By the early 1990s, the effects of an extended period of low demand, widespread circumvention and loss of support from importing countries had eviscerated these agreements. We are now in a free-for-all period, but it cannot last.

Orthodox economists refuse any return to artificially managing supplies so that they more nearly match demand, but should we follow them? The WTO agreement to reduce import tariffs will bring no benefit to exporters of tropical products because they are already set at zero. The wholesale commercialisation of farming into agro-industry is not an option for many poor countries. In any event it tends to marginalise small-scale farmers, destroy the social integrity of rural communities and exacerbate urban drift. Exportable cash crops are produced for an already glutted market at the expense of food crops, thus reducing food security.

It is time to revisit the idea of trying to manage supplies of tropical commodities, from a new angle.

What group of products can developing countries alone produce that the rest of the world can t or won t live without? Cocoa cannot yet be made in a test tube and, anyway, rich consumers now rebel against the use of artificial food products.

Coffee producing countries made a start in May 2000 in aiming to cut coffee exports by 20% until the world price reaches 110 US cents per pound, a price the consumer is likely to accept. Even this goal may not be achieved if, as in the past, member countries fail to abide by their agreement. Furthermore, stock-retention schemes to control prices often do not work.

Decrease cash crop production, earn more

If cash crop production were decreased, export earnings would grow. I therefore call for production capacity to be cut fairly and universally, after full consultation with farmers associations and groups representing civil society. The cuts should be policed by these same groups, with supervision from an international body made up of representatives from producer countries with a strong element of trust.

The land now used to grow surpluses could be used to grow food and reduce burgeoning food import bills. The increased income could be used to invest in added value products, perhaps for export to niche markets.

Agricultural development agencies are doing their best to help countries to become more efficient and competitive producers. Yet unless something drastic is done to begin to match supply to demand they are merely rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.


This paper constructs a simple model in which asset price fluctuations are caused by sunspots. Most existing sunspot models use local linear approximations: instead, I construct global sunspot equilibria. My agents are expected utility maximizers with logarithmic utility functions, there are no fundamental shocks and markets are sequentially complete. Despite the simplicity of these assumptions, I am able to go a considerable way towards explaining features of asset pricing data that have presented an obstacle to previous models that adopted similar assumptions. My model generates volatile persistent swings in asset prices, a substantial term premium for long bonds and bursts of conditional volatility in rates of return.


As with other evolving fields within the realms of science the ontological assumptions and epistemological aspirations of intercultural communication studies are matters of debate and disagreement. Differently put, the very point of take-off from which studies in this field are conducted is seldom scrutinized. This being said, this paper identifies and discusses a number of blindspots and biases of intercultural communication studies – e.g. the reluctance or inability to account for analytical ethnocentrism ('home blindness'), heterocentrism (the unreflected and disproportionate focus on difference) or xenocentrism (the unreflected and disproportionate focus on 'the other'). Additionally, normativism (the unreflected assumption that intercultural communication has desirable effects on people's prejudices), cultural relativism versus absolutism, and particularism versus universalism are discussed. It is concluded that if the blindspots and biases of intercultural communication studies are overlooked, and thus the researcher is held as a cultural constant, the understanding of intercultural communication as interaction between two unavoidably and equally cultural interlocutors is deficient. Inspired by classical hermeneutics and discourse analysis it is therefore argued that intercultural communication studies researchers must declare their ontological assumptions and epistemological aspirations more actively and systematically.


Abstract. Ionospheric data assimilation is a powerful approach to reconstruct the 3-D distribution of the ionospheric electron density from various types of observations. We present a data assimilation model for the ionosphere, based on the Gauss–Markov Kalman filter with the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) as the background model, to assimilate two different types of slant total electron content (TEC) observations from ground-based GPS and space-based FORMOSAT-3/COSMIC (F3/C) radio occultation. Covariance models for the background model error and observational error play important roles in data assimilation. The objective of this study is to investigate impacts of stationary (location-independent) and non-stationary (location-dependent) classes of the background model error covariance on the quality of assimilation analyses. Location-dependent correlations are modeled using empirical orthogonal functions computed from an ensemble of the IRI outputs, while location-independent correlations are modeled using a Gaussian function. Observing system simulation experiments suggest that assimilation of slant TEC data facilitated by the location-dependent background model error covariance yields considerably higher quality assimilation analyses. Results from assimilation of real ground-based GPS and F3/C radio occultation observations over the continental United States are presented as TEC and electron density profiles. Validation with the Millstone Hill incoherent scatter radar data and comparison with the Abel inversion results are also presented. Our new ionospheric data assimilation model that employs the location-dependent background model error covariance outperforms the earlier assimilation model with the location-independent background model error covariance, and can reconstruct the 3-D ionospheric electron density distribution satisfactorily from both ground- and space-based GPS observations.


The dromedary camel (Camelus dromedarius) is a significant invasive species in Australia. It is an unusual pest species that is of large body size with relatively low fecundity compared with other pest species. Camels are highly adapted to the arid regions that characterize a large proportion of Australia and occupy an almost completely undisturbed area of ≥3 million km 2. They have no history of invasion elsewhere in the world. Despite this, their population has been expanding at approximately 80,000 camels per annum, with the most recent estimate of population size around 1,000,000 individuals. We employed a landscape-genetic approach to evaluate the population structure and molecular ecology of Australian camels. We combined mitochondrial control region sequence (n = 209 animals) with 18 microsatellite markers to profile over 800 adult camels to identify the presence of a single panmictic population. We showed that demographically defined neighborhoods for wild camels are about 200 km; this value was supported by home range estimates. Distances greater than this display no pattern of isolation by distance across the Australian continent. The result is the largest single geographical population so far recorded for an invasive species in Australia. This pattern may be explained by the impressive and near-nomadic dispersal pattern of camels, in combination with an unpredictable environment virtually devoid of barriers to movement and predatory suppression. Although it is technically feasible, the reality is that it would not be economically or politically viable to have continental eradication of wild camels in Australia because of the vast size and movement dynamics of the camel population. As such, we advocate a change away from an expensive solution to an intractable reduction program (that is almost entirely focused on protection of biological refugia) and moves to include cultural, economic, and biodiversity asset protection for the management of this most unorthodox of invasive species.


We address the issue of kinematic heating in disc
galaxies by analysing a suite of cosmological Milky Way-type disc simulations
run with different particle-and grid-based hydrodynamical codes and different resolution, and
compare them with observations of the Milky Way. By studying the kinematics of disc stars in
these simulations, we seek to determine whether or not the existence of a fragile thin disc
is possible within a cosmological framework, where multiple mergers and interactions are the
essence of galaxy formation.

We study the velocity dispersion-age relation for disc stars at $z=0$ and find that four
of the simulations, the stellar disc appears to undergo continual/secular heating. Two other
simulations suggest a "saturation" in the heating profile for young stars in the disc. None of the simulations have thin discs as old as that of the Milky Way.

We also analyse the kinematics of disc stars at the time of their birth, and find that in some simulations old stars are born cold within the disc and are subsequently heated, while other simulations possess old stellar populations, which are born relatively hot. The models which are in better agreement with
observations of the Milky Way's stellar disc undergo significantly lower minor-merger/assembly activity after the last major merger.

By running a set of isolated Milky Way-type simulations with different resolution and different density thresholds for star formation we conclude that, on top of the effects of mergers, there exists a ``floor'' in the dispersion that is related to the underlying treatment
of the heating and cooling of the interstellar medium, and the low density threshold which such codes use for star formation.

A persistent issue in simulations of disc galaxies is the formation of large spheroidal components,
and disc galaxies with larger bulge to disc ratios than is observed. This problem is alleviated by supernova feedback. We found that by increasing the feedback in the simulations, we decrease the amount of stars that are accreted onto the main galaxy. The star formation is quenched more efficiently in low mass satellites when stronger feedback is implemented as well as in the main halo. These effects result in a disc galaxy, which has formed less stars overall, but more importantly, contains less accreted stars. As the strong stellar feedback quenches the star formation in the small building blocks, the metallicity of the accreted stars is lower than in the case where less feedback was used.

In the context of hierarchical formation, mass assembly is expected to be scale free. Yet the properties of galaxies depend strongly on their mass. We examine how baryonic physics has different effects at different mass scales by analysing three cosmological simulations using the same initial conditions that are scaled to three different masses. Despite their identical dark matter merger history, we show that the simulated galaxies have significantly different stellar accretion histories. As we go down in mass, the lowest mass progenitors are unable to form stars, resulting in a low mass galaxy with less accreted stars. The overall chemical properties are also distinct at the different mass scales, as one might expect from the mass-metallicity relation of observed galaxies. We examine gradients of chemical abundances with radius and with height above the disc, and look for properties that are retained at different mass scales and properties which change, often dramatically.

We analyse the kinematic and chemical properties of their accreted and in-situ populations. Again,
trends can be found that persist at all mass scales, providing signatures of hierarchical structure formation. We find that accreted populations in the high mass simulation did not resemble any of the populations in the lower mass galaxies, showing that the chemical properties of proto-galaxies, which merge at high redshift to form massive galaxies, differ from the properties of low mass galaxies that survive at z=0.
We probe further the signatures of hierarchical structure formation at smaller scales, in dwarf galaxies. We analysed the morphologies, kinematics and chemical properties of two simulated dwarf galaxies with different merger histories. We again analyse the accreted and in-situ populations. Observations of dwarf galaxies have found that they are comprised of multiple components. Our simulated dwarfs indicate that such populations may indeed be a manifestation of the hierarchical formation process in action in these lower mass galaxies.

In one simulated dwarf, the in-situ stellar component forms a thin disc and a thick disc. We show that the thick disc in this simulation forms from in-situ stars that are born kinematically hot in the disc from
early gas-rich mergers. The thin disc is formed quiescently from the later infall of gas. The accreted stars in the simulation were found to form an extended stellar halo. Chemical signatures of the three
populations are also explored.

The second dwarf we analysed has different galactic components, a result found to be due to the different
merger history of this galaxy. The last major merger in this simulation occurs early on in the formation process
between two proto-galaxies of similar mass. The result is a dwarf galaxy comprised of a disc formed of in-situ stars and a flattened rotating stellar halo formed of accreted stars. The angular momentum of the accreted and old in-insitu stars is obtained from the last major merger. We discuss the resemblance of this flattened rotating stellar halo to fast rotating flattened elliptical galaxies, and propose that such structures may explain some of the observed extra-galactic thick discs.

These studies show that galactic properties emerge through the complex inter-play between hierarchical
structure formation, star formation, and feedback from supernovae. Different modelling of these processes
will alter the simulated galaxy's properties, and detailed comparisons with observations can then be made to determine the dominant processes responsible for different galactic properties. We remain optimistic that
further improvement in modelling will allow deeper insights into the processes of galaxy formation and evolution.


Dr. Douglas Schocken from Duke University, Durham, NC moderated the topic "Heart Failure in the Euvolemic Patient with Drs. Mark Dunlap from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, Paul Sobotka from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, and Irving Zucker from the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE. The discussion focused primarily on: (1) a case of a woman presenting with decompensated HF caused by possible weight gain and salt and volume overload; (2) causes that lead to re-hospitalization, including signs for arrhythmias, ischemia, and nonadherence to dietary or pharmacologic recommendations; (3) what governs the movement of volume into and out of storage areas; (4) the future development of diagnostic tests and treatments for acute decompensated HF; (5) prevention of acute translocation of volume into effective arterial circulation. (Med Roundtable Cardiovasc Ed. 2012;3(1):102-109) ©2012 FoxP2 Media, LLC


The key idea of game semantics is that a term can interact with its enclosing context via various events, such as function calls and returns. A trace is a sequence of such interaction events. The meaning of the term is then naturally represented by the set of all event traces that the term can generate. Game semantics allows us to define the meaning of both expressions and types in the same domain which enables an interesting alternative to subject reduction for proving type soundness. This paper uses game semantics to define the meaning of and verify type soundness for a sequence of programming languages, starting with a functional sequential language (the call-by-value simply-typed lambda calculus), and then extending that proof with sub typing, side effects, control effects, and concurrency. These proofs are reasonably short and fairly semantic in structure, focusing on the relationship between the meanings of each term and its corresponding type. In particular, we show that the typing and sub typing relations are both conservative approximations of alternating trace containment.


Additional index words. Allium cepa, controlled-release fertilizer, N use efficiency Abstract. Nitrogen (N) losses can be substantial in furrow-irrigated onions (Allium cepa L.). Polymer-coated urea (PU) may reduce N losses and result in an increase in productivity. In this study, we investigated the effects of different rates and blends of urea and PU on onion yield and N use for two cropping seasons. Nitrogen was applied at 112, 168, and 224 kg·ha -1 as PU or urea. In addition, three PU/urea blends equal to 224 kg·ha -1 of N were compared. Plant growth and N concentration, soil nitrate concentrations, and bulb yield were evaluated each year. Onion yield decreased by 95 Mg·ha -1 for each 25% increase in the proportion of urea in the fertilizer blends. Reducing the N rates from 224 to 112 kg·ha -1 had minimal effect on bulb yield when all the fertilizer was supplied by urea. A reduction of N applied from 224 to 168 kg·ha -1 had little effect on yield, although a further reduction to 112 kg·ha -1 did significantly reduce bulb yield when the entire N was supplied from PU. Nitrogen source and rate had no effect on bulb maturity and only minor effects on leaf area and storage potential. Soil sampling indicated that more N was retained in PU- treated onion beds than in urea-treated beds, which improved nitrogen use efficiency. In addition, N use efficiency improved when there was more PU in the blend and when PU was compared with urea at the same rate. We conclude that the use of PU can dramatically improve N use efficiency and productivity in direct-seeded onions.


The 'underclass' is widely held by commentators of the Right to be responsible for a host of social problems, including violent crime. This paper shows how in the reporting of sexually motivated murder in a sample of nine British newspapers for one complete year (1992), the image constructed is one where unemployed and other marginalised men are portrayed as the main perpetrators of sexual violence. This, the authors argue, hampers our understanding of sexual violence, for it suggests that it is only men of a 'low' socio-economic background who are a potential threat to women and children. It is also suggested that the 'symbolic environment' of the press reporting of sexual murder provides a context in which a more authoritarian benefit regime and greater control of poor communities can be spuriously justified.


BACKGROUND
Bone healing is a complex process. Whilst the majority of fractures heal with conventional treatment, open fractures, large bone defects and non unions still provide great challenges to Orthopaedic Surgeons. Whilst autologous bone graft is seen as the gold standard, the use of growth factors is a growing area of research to find an effective alternative with lower side effects such as donor site morbidity and the finite amount available.

OBJECTIVES
This systematic review aims to summarize the pre clinical in-vivo studies and examine the clinical studies on the use of growth factors in bone healing.

DATA SOURCES
Databases: PubMed, Medline, OVID, and Cochrane library. The following key words and search terms were used: Growth Factors, Bone Healing, Bone Morphogenic Protein, Transforming Growth Factor Beta, Insulin Like Growth Factor, Platelet Derived Growth Factor, Fracture.

METHODS
All articles were screened based on title with abstracts and full text articles reviewed as appropriate. Reference lists were reviewed from relevant articles to ensure comprehensive and systematic review.

RESULTS
Three tables of studies were constructed focussing on Bone Morphogenic Proteins, Platelet Rich Plasma and Growth Factors and Tissue Engineering.

CONCLUSIONS
Bone Morphogenic Proteins and Platelet Rich Plasma, which contains multiple growth factors, have been shown in preclinical and clinical trials to be an effective alternative to autologous bone graft. Bone Morphogenic Proteins have been shown to be effective in fracture non union, and in open tibial fractures. Platelet Rich Plasma has shown promise in preclinical trials and some small clinical trials, however numbers are limited. Bone Morphogenic Proteins have been shown to be superior to Platelet Rich Protein in one trial. Combining these growth factors with tissue engineering techniques is the focus of ongoing research, and through further clinical trials the most effective techniques for enhancing bone healing will be revealed.


This paper investigates if multinationals in.uence the political process through lobbying more effectively than national firms. First, I introduce a model which contrasts a multinationali?½s incentives for lobbying with those of a national firm. Then the effect of lobbying on the political decision is analyzed. I conclude that multinationals have smaller incentives to lobby because they have smaller stakes in national markets. But the effectiveness of lobbying by multinationals might be higher if the government cares much about production in the home country. The resulting regulation depends on the relative strength of these effects.


Intelligent Tutorials Systems have demonstrated their effectiveness in various applications of the teaching-learning processes. However; its construction involves a complex and intense work of knowledge engineering, which prevents a more general use and optimal use. In this work provides a model that integrates the knowledge-based systems, the Conceptual Maps and Intelligent Tutorials Systems that favors the design of these systems, taking into account the facilities and naturalness of the Conceptual Maps. The proposed model is the basis for the design and implementation of HEMCI computational tool, which is under development, and promotes the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems to computer non-expert users. Finally, an example of the model described for the teaching-learning process of the basic theory of combinational logic approach.


Virtual environments (VEs) are making their way into various sectors of life to enhance and support human activity, including learning. VEs have been used in various contexts for training, and in many cases they are designed to model or simulate - as accurately and authentically as possible - a specific work context. In striving for authenticity, visual and representative realism tends to receive most of the development input, despite of several studies that challenge its importance. New training avenues have raised the importance of rigorous phenomenological descriptions for a deeper understanding of user experience in the actual context of use. This paper reports the preliminary steps in a phenomenological analysis of how employees working in actual hazardous settings experience virtual safety training environments. Such open-ended research project can reveal new aspects of user experience that can advice the development and evaluation of human-computer interaction in digital technology-enhanced training contexts.


Background: The increased use of mobile phones, the media's attention for general health, and the increase of idiopathic male infertility suggest to investigate the possible consequences of an excessive use of mobile phones on semen quality. Aim: To evaluate the conventional and some of the main biofunctional sperm parameters in healthy men according to the different use of the mobile phone. Subjects and methods: All the enrolled subjects in this study were divided into four groups according to their active cell phone use: group A= no use (no.=10 subjects); group B= <2 h/day (no.=16); group C= 2–4 h/day (no.=17); and group D= >4 h/day (no.=20). Among the subjects of the group D (>4 h/day), a further evaluation was made between the "trousers users"(no.=12) and "shirt users"(no.=8), and they underwent semen collection to evaluate conventional and biofunctional sperm parameters (density, total count, morphology, progressive motility, apoptosis, mithocondrial membrane potential, chromatin compaction, DNA fragmentation). Results: None of the conventional sperm parameters examined were significantly altered. However, the group D and the trousers users showed a higher percentage of sperm DNA fragmentation compared to other groups. Conclusion: These results suggest that the sperm DNA fragmentation could represent the only parameter significantly altered in the subjects who use the mobile phone for more than 4 h/day and in particular for those who use the device in the pocket of the trousers.


In the optical tweezers technique a microdielectric object with a higher refractive index than a surrounding liquid is trapped near the focal point of a laser beam, whereas an object with a lower refractive index is subjected to a repulsive force from the focused beam. We demonstrate that the optical repulsive forces are generated with a focused-beam array dynamically formed by a computer-generated hologram displayed on a liquid-crystal spatial light modulator. We also demonstrate that the optical repulsive forces perform a size selection and flow control of hollow glass microspheres.


Rhodiola rosea L. (Crassulaceae) is a plant that lives at high altitude in Europe and Asia, widely used for its high capacity to increase the organism resistance to different stress conditions. Although a few international literature supports these effects, today R. rosea has become a common component of many dietary supplements also in the Western world. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of the R. rosea roots aqueous extract on in vitro human erythrocytes exposed to hypochlorous acid (HOCl)-oxidative stress. Several damages occur in human erythrocytes exposed in vitro to HOCl, among these membrane protein and lipid modifications, shifting from the discocyte shape to the echinocyte one, and determining lysis ultimately. Therefore, in the present work, the evaluation of the antioxidant capacity of the Rhodiola extract has been carried out by means of scanning electron microscopy and of hemolytic behaviour on human erythrocytes exposed to HOCl in the presence of increasing doses of the aqueous extract in different experimental environments (co-incubation and subsequent incubations). The results obtained are consistent with a significant protection of the extract in presence of the oxidative agent, but a cautionary note emerges from the analysis of the data related to the cell exposition to the plant extract in the absence of any induced oxidative stress. In fact, the addition to erythrocyte of high doses of R. rosea extract always determines severe alterations of the cell shape.


This study aims to examine the impact of overhead cost apportionment on selling price determination in the Malaysian automobile manufacturing industry. Specifically, the study looks at the treatment of overhead costs apportionment from the perspective of the profit making effort of automobile manufacturing firms. The methodology used is interview with staff of one automobile manufacturing company in Malaysia taken as a case study: that is Naza Automotive Manufacturing Sdn. Bhd. The findings of this study show that overhead costs apportionment has significant impact on the determination of "true and fair" selling price of an automobile manufacturing firm, especially as service centres are considered in primary apportionment before their shares are re-apportioned to production centres, using an appropriate method. This study, therefore, recommends that automobile manufacturing firms in Malaysia should adopt the activity based costing method of overhead costs apportionment as it considers service centres of the company together with production centres in fair apportionment of overhead costs, taking into account the percentage of services enjoyed by the production centres from the service centres. This would allow room for fairly accurate determination of total cost per unit of their products, which would ultimately lead to effective pricing decision.


Background & Aim: Sleep is one of the physiological needs of patients; however, sleep disorders are prevalent among patients hospitalized in cardiac care units. This study aimed to compare the effect of Damask rose aromatherapy and blindfold on sleep quality of patients hospitalized in cardiac care units. Material & Methods: In this randomized clinical trial, 60 patients who met the inclusion criteria were selected conveniently and randomly assigned into Damask rose aromatherapy and blindfold groups using blocked randomization. In addition to the routine care, interventions were implemented for three subsequent nights from 22:00 to 6:00 A.M. In both groups and the patients' sleep quality was assessed using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, before and after the three nights. Data was analyzed using Chi-square, independent t , Mann-Whitney U and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests using SPSS-PC (v. 11.5). Results: The overall sleep quality significantly improved after the intervention in both Damask rose aromatherapy (P = 0.001) and blindfold groups (P = 0.001). Although improvement of sleep quality was higher in blindfold group (P = 0.005). Conclusion: Both Damask rose aromatherapy and blindfold could improve the sleep quality of patients hospitalized in the cardiac care unit, though blindfold was more effective. Therefore, according to patient's preference, one of these methods might be used to improve the sleep quality.


Abstract. Situational awareness of the crew is critical for the safety of the air flight. Head-up display allows providing all required flight information in front of the pilot over the cockpit view visible through the cockpit's front window. This device has been created for solving the problem of informational overload during piloting of an aircraft. While computer graphics such as scales and digital terrain model can be easily presented on the such display, errors in the Head-up display alignment for correct presenting of sensor data pose challenges. The main problem arises from the parallax between the pilot's eyes and the position of the camera. This paper is focused on the development of an online calibration algorithm for conform projection of the 3D terrain and runway models on the pilot's head-up display. The aim of our algorithm is to align the objects visible through the cockpit glass with their projections on the Head-up display. To improve the projection accuracy, we use an additional optical sensor installed on the aircraft. We combine classical photogrammetric techniques with modern deep learning approaches. Specifically, we use an object detection neural network model to find the runway area and align runway projection with its actual location. Secondly, we re-project the sensor's image onto the 3D model of the terrain to eliminate errors caused by the parallax. We developed an environment simulator to evaluate our algorithm. Using the simulator we prepared a large training dataset. The dataset includes 2000 images of video sequences representing aircraft's motion during takeoff, landing and taxi. The results of the evaluation are encouraging and demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that the proposed algorithm is capable of precise alignment of the 3D models projected on a Head-up display.


In order to evaluate the extent to which a country achieves the objectives of poverty and inequality reduction, up-to-date, reliable and comparable survey data is required. This paper critically reviews the factors which could affect the comparability and reliability of poverty estimates and trends across various household surveys. First, whether income or expenditure variable should be used for the analyses and whether the diary approach is associated with more reliable capture of income and expenditure information compared with the conventional recall method are looked at. If the respondents are asked to declare the income and expenditure in exact amounts, whether they are asked to report these as 'one-shot' amounts (single estimation approach) or aggregate amount derived from the sum of the amounts for sub-categories (aggregation approach) could affect the poverty estimates. If the respondents are asked to report income and expenditure in intervals, issues that could affect the reliability of this approach, such as the number and width of the intervals, the appropriate method used to approximate the income (expenditure) amount in each interval, as well as the possible methods to deal with households reporting zero or unspecified income (expenditure) are investigated. In addition, survey data is validated against external sources such as national accounts data to investigate if it would lead to improved reliability of the former data for the subsequent poverty analyses. Furthermore, since the survey data are, strictly speaking, not time-series data, the data are re-weighted by means of the cross entropy approach in order to be consistent with demographic and geographic numbers presented by the Actuarial Society of South Africa (ASSA) model and Census data so as to find out if the comparability and reliability of the poverty estimates and trends are improved.


This paper examines the dynamic relationship between changes in the funds rate and nonborrowed reserves within a reduced form framework that allows the relationship to have two distinct patterns over time. A regime switching model a la Hamilton (1989) is estimated. On average, CPI inflation has been significantly higher in the regime characterized by large and volatile changes in funds rate. Innovations in money growth are associated with a strong anticipated inflation effect in this high inflation regime, and a moderate liquidity effect in the low inflation regime. Furthermore, an identical money innovation generates a much bigger increase in the interest rate during a transition period from the low to high inflation regime than during a steady high inflation period. This accords well with economic intuition since the transition period is when the anticipated inflation effect initially gets incorporated into the interest rate. The converse also holds. That is, the liquidity effect becomes stronger when the economy leaves a high inflation regime period and enters a low inflation regime period.


In the name of national security, federal and local governments have begun to intervene domestically in the religious lives of Muslims and into Islam itself. Taken together, these interventions form part of the emerging strategy of counter-radicalization, by which officials aim to diminish the pull of radical Islamic ideology in part by promoting more "mainstream" theological alternatives. Both the official opposition to radical Islam (as opposed to the violence that it is thought to generate) and the support for more palatable (to the state, that is) religious alternatives generate friction with the Establishment Clause and the values that it enshrines. But the prospect of establishing "Official Islam" is not the only worry surrounding counter-radicalization. Counter-radicalization also suffers from a number of strategic flaws that have become apparent in the context of British counter-radicalization efforts undertaken over the last five years. Most fundamentally, Western governments, including our own, are unlikely to succeed in tackling the risk of future terrorism by attempting to shape religious ideology. In fact, this strategy is likely to backfire by stoking animosities and fear. This Article describes the emergence of American counter-radicalization and its roots in the British example, highlights the tension between this area of official endeavor and the Establishment Clause, and reveals the tight connection between the legal and strategic challenges with which American counter-radicalization must contend.


This article addresses the current levels of anger within South African society from a practical theological perspective. Following a description of the current context with regard to the on-going processes of reconciliation and transformation two theories are revisited and critiqued. Normative insights are thereafter gained by making use of several stories from the book of Judges, and in conclusion an outline for a liturgical and homiletical theory for praxis is presented. The aim of this contribution as a whole is to reflect – in a praxis-theory cycle – on the theme of anger in order to formulate practical theological ritual-liturgical route markers for South Africa.


Much of international criminal law's attraction rests on the 'authoritative narrative theory' — the claim that legal judgment creates incontestable narratives that serve as the foundation, or at least a baseline, for post-conflict reconciliation. So what happens when there is no judgment? This is the situation that confronted the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia when its most prominent defendant, Slobodan Milosevic, died. By turning scholarship's attention towards a terminated trial, this Article develops an indirect but powerful challenge to one of the dominant views about what international criminal law is for, with interdisciplinary implications for human rights, international relations, diplomacy, and political science. What can be salvaged from the terminated Milosevic trial? One candidate for ersatz substitute judgment was the Decision on the Motion for Acquittal brought under the Tribunal's Rule 98bis. Halfway through the trial, when the prosecution rested, the Trial Chamber had to decide whether there was a case to answer. The Chamber declared that the trial should go forward, though what the judges actually decided was necessarily ambiguous: The prosecution had presented enough evidence that a court could find Milosevic guilty — but they didn't say that this court would. Since there never was a final verdict, the decision has become a site of contestation and ambiguous value. This Article examines how the prosecution, defense, chambers, and outsiders deployed the Rule 98bis Decision to tell a story about Milosevic's guilt or innocence and craft a final judgment in the eyes of the world, if not in the law. The doctrinal constraints on these efforts suggest real limits on international criminal law's ability to craft authoritative and transformative narratives through any trial process short of final judgment. By forensically exploring these limits, the Article also indicates parameters for an even more consequential investigation into whether the strong version of the authoritative narrative theory works under any circumstances.


Electronic games and simulations (eGames) are a valuable support for adaptive learning. This adaptation can be based on different inputs, such as the user's performance, behaviour or cognitive load. Both adaptation and eGames can be modelled with IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) or integrated from an external resource. In this article we show the relation between IMS LD and the Project when it comes to authoring adaptive Units of Learning (UoLs) integrated with eGames. We first describe the challenges of this objective and the several different solutions on authoring and integration. We also describe the content-centred authoring approach in , and the need for a communication service with IMS LD that makes a bidirectional influence on the user's adaptive learning experience. At the end, we describe a practical example that illustrates how an adaptive IMS LD UoL with an integrated eGame is developed.


Farmers' views on research and extension services (RES) included in the Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System are rarely investigated. This study analyses the relationship between key factors of innovation behaviour (market orientation, learning orientation, and innovation attitude) and the use of RES through structural equation modelling, focusing on small-scale agricultural holdings. Market orientation and learning orientation appear to be positively correlated, confirming that synergies between both factors provide a background for innovativeness. Learning orientation and farm-holders' education level, improve knowledge exchange and make the agriculture innovation process more inclusive. However, farmers' innovation attitude is not clearly correlated with the use of RES. Motivations about "the will to do innovations" are represented by a construct that does not appear to have a determinant effect as a mediator in farmer's decisions about using RES.


Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder that often develops in adolescence, which impacts patients, families, and society. Although research on the beneficial effects of exercise in patients with schizophrenia is scant, it is worth reviewing the relevant studies in order to gain some insight into finding alternative ways for improvement in patients. We start with discussing the possible aetiology of schizophrenia and then review studies on exercise and schizophrenia. Although there are different and unsettled issues related to the aetiologies of schizophrenia, neuroscience studies have demonstrated that patients with schizophrenia possess abnormal brain structures, with elements such as a smaller hippocampus and abnormal neurotransmitters systems. As for the benefits of exercise, although some researches have shown that exercise can improve the psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia, most of the researches suffer from methodological problems such as too-small sample size, non-random assignment, and inconsistent results. The only study that took a neuroscience approach still suffered from a small sample size that replication with larger sample is warranted. Future interventional studies should target randomised controlled trials with large sample size and control the effect of medication. These efforts may shed light on finding suitable exercise prescription for patients with schizophrenia.


We prove a central limit theorem for a class of additive processes that arise naturally in the theory of finite horizon Markov decision problems. The main theorem generalizes a classic result of Dobrushin (1956) for temporally non-homogeneous Markov chains, and the principal innovation is that here the summands are permitted to depend on both the current state and a bounded number of future states of the chain. We show through several examples that this added flexibility gives one a direct path to asymptotic normality of the optimal total reward of finite horizon Markov decision problems. The same examples also explain why such results are not easily obtained by alternative Markovian techniques such as enlargement of the state space.