A preliminary study was conducted to quantify the effects of a specific form of therapeutic intervention on claustrophobia using methods from an emerging field called energy psychology, which uses the acupuncture system to reduce or eliminate irrational anxiety and fears. The treatment includes a form of self-applied acupressure, focused thought, and structured breathing exercises to effect a rapid desensitization of the feared object or situation. Four claustrophobic and four normal individuals were rectuited. The claustrophic individuals were measured with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and physiological measures of EEG, EMG, heart rate, respiration rate, and measures of the electro-conductance within the acupuncture meridians. The results when compared with normal individuals showed that a 30-minute treatment appeared to create reduction in EMG for the trapezius muscle; changes of EEG Theta wave activity and changes in the electrical conductance between acupuncture points along a meridian pathway. The measures pre-and post-treatment on the STAI for the experimental group were significantly lower even at a two week followup. This pilot study suggests that specific physiological and psychological changes occur for claustrophobic individuals after undergoing an energy psychology treatment. Further investigation appears warranted.


Planning for the transition from pediatric to adult healthcare is broadly understood to be beneficial to the quality of care of patients with chronic illness. Due to the level of self-care that is necessary in the maintenance of most chronic diseases, it is important that pediatric settings can offer support during a time when adolescents are beginning to take more responsibility in all areas of their lives. Lack of supportive resources for adolescents with chronic conditions often results in both decreased access to care and impaired health and function likely leading to increased medical costs later. Additionally, fundamental differences in health care delivery exist between pediatric and adult care settings. There is limited empiric data and information on best practices in transition care. In this article we address the importance of bridging pediatric and adult care settings and highlight the challenges and successes of the implementation of the young adult transition clinic program for patients with type 1 diabetes at our facility. We provide recommendations for further research and program implementation with the transition population.


PAH emissions from a municipal waste incinerator stack in central Taiwan were sampled and analyzed by gas phase and particulate phase samples. A modified Gaussian atmospheric dispersion model, industrial sources complex (ISCST3), was used to simulate the PAH concentration in ambient air, which was compared with the measured PAH concentration in the ambient air. Total-PAH emission factor for the municipal waste incinerator ranged between 748 and 992 mg/ton-waste and averaged 871 mg/ton-waste, while the total-PAH emission rate ranged between 21,000 and 27,900 mg/hr and averaged 24,500 mg/hr. The results of dispersion modeling indicated that the contribution of PAHs to the ambient air by the municipal waste incinerator only reached 0.98% of the background concentration. Consequently, other emission sources, especially mobile sources, impact air quality more significantly.


This article focuses on the long history of mural painting in Northern Ireland and specifically on the changing relationship between mural painting and the state in various eras. Originally unionist murals were state-friendly, painted as part of the annual celebration of King William's victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Later, murals were seen as beyond the pale, each for their own reasons; republican murals supported the armed struggle of the IRA against the state, while loyalist murals glorified the campaign of the loyalist paramilitary groups to terrorise the nationalist population. As the peace process took hold in Northern Ireland, republicans began to transform their own images; loyalists found this task more problematic, leading the state to intervene to fund the re-imaging of murals, thereby seeking to remove all offensive and military iconography. The article ends by critically assessing the outcome of the state's Re-imaging Communities Programme.


Energy harvesting is an emerging field in power electronic industry. Extracting energy from the environment, especially from non conventional energy sources has becoming highly demanded nowadays. From this point of view, solar energy plays a most promising role as a non conventional energy source. In this paper, a small scale grid connected solar power generation system with a maximum capacity of 1KW power output with a single phase AC has been considered for study. For the improved system performance, an Artificial Bee Colony integrated Perturb & Observe (ABC-PO) algorithm is used to track the Maximum Power Point (MPP) of solar panels. ABC-PO is capable of tracking Global Maximum Power Peak (GMPP) even under Partial Shading Condition (PSC). A DC-DC boost converter followed by a single stage H-bridge inverter along with LC filter is utilized to feed an RMS voltage of 230V to the grid. The simulation results clearly show the tracking of true MPP under varying irradiance conditions and 230Vrms at the grid side. Key-Words: Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithm, Grid connected systems, Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT), Partial Shading Condition (PSC), Perturb and Observe (P&O) algorithm, Solar PV systems.


Background: Cancer is a life threatening disease of present scenario among which breast cancer is the second highly mortal disease in women. There are several stages of cancer and an early detection of breast cancer can reduce the mortality rate. The primary detection of breast cancer is mammography due to the naked eye prediction of the disease by radiologist, they suggest for the next level of diagnosis like MRI, PET or biopsy. These tests are time consuming and not cost effective. In this work, we aim for an interactive dashboard methodology to determine the presence or absence of a distinct mass called tumor in mammographic image. Here we also tend to confirm the mass to be benign or malignant by analyzing the shape of the mass using image processing techniques. We also predict a possibility to determine the stages of breast cancer using big data and cloud as a next level to the computer aided method of cancer detection. Methodology: In this paper, we also use Backpropagation and Support vector machine system (SVM) for analysis of benign or malignant cancer, we can also predict the stage of cancer using mammographic images. Conclusion: The results performed in nntraintool determine the performance rate, training state, regression and error histogram of the test image. And the cloud and big data analysis idea suggest to a next level of home level cancer stage prediction.


Knowledge about swarm dynamics and underlying causes is essential to understand the ecology and distribution of Antarctic krill Euphausia superba. We collected acoustic data and key environmental data continuously across extensive gradients in the little-studied Southeast Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. A total of 4791 krill swarms with swarm descriptors includ- ing swarm height and length, packing density, swimming depth and inter-swarm distance were extracted. Through multivariate statistics, swarms were categorized into 4 groups. Group 2 swarms were largest (median length 108 m and thickness 18 m), whereas swarms in both Groups 1 and 4 were on average small, but differed markedly in depth distribution (median: 52 m for Group 1 vs. 133 m for Group 4). There was a strong spatial autocorrelation in the occurrence of swarms, and an autologistic regression model found no prediction of swarm occurrence from envi- ronmental variables for any of the Groups 1, 2 or 4. Probability of occurrence of Group 3 swarms, however, increased with increasing depth and temperature. Group 3 was the most distinctive swarm group with an order of magnitude higher packing density (median: 226 ind. m �3 ) than swarms from any of the other groups and about twice the distance to nearest neighbor swarm (median: 493 m). The majority of the krill were present in Group 3 swarms, and the absence of association with hydrographic or topographic concentrating mechanisms strongly suggests that these swarms aggregate through their own locomotion, possibly associated with migration.


Group key agreement (GKA) protocols are used to secure group communications in wireless networks but most current GKA protocols do not consider privacy protection. GKA protocols for wireless networks should also handle dynamic group membership events such as user join and leave events. The Join and Leave Protocols provide backward and forward secrecy respectively, that is, the Join Protocol must ensure that a new user cannot obtain the previously established group key(s) and access the corresponding group communications (backward secrecy) while the Leave Protocol must ensure that a leaving user cannot obtain subsequent group key(s) and access new group communications (forward secrecy). Most recently, Wan et al proposed three anonymous ID-based GKA protocols, namely Initial GKA, Join and Leave Protocol, for wireless networks. We first show in this paper that their proposed Join and Leave Protocols do not provide backward and forward secrecy (as claimed) respectively. We also highlight the anonymity issues in their Join and Leave Protocols. We then propose three improved anonymous ID-based GKA protocols (Initial GKA, Join and Leave Protocol).


It is our aim to deepen the understanding of family life in modern societies through an emphasis on its 'religious'-like quality. The description of some of its phenomenal properties, of its intense and crucial experiential dimension, includes several traits of a family cult (mostly inexplicit). This fact has important consequences for the actualization of the contemporary experience of established religious institutions. The intrinsic 'relatedness' at the basis of both 'cults' take shape in a broad and varied range of empirical phenomena, dependent on the status of personhood within the family structure. Our data include both the results of direct original research within several status groups in the area of Rio de Janeiro and the information available about family and religion in Brazilian society.


The accumulation of advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) and oxidative stress underlie the pathogenesis of diabetic complications. In many developing countries, diabetes treatment is unaffordable, and plants such as bitter gourd (or bitter melon; Momordica charantia) are used as traditional remedies because they exhibit hypoglycaemic properties. This study compared the antiglycation and antioxidant properties of aqueous extracts of M. charantia pulp (MCP), flesh (MCF) and charantin in vitro. Lysozyme was mixed with methylglyoxal and 0–15 mg/ml of M. charantia extracts in a pH 7.4 buffer and incubated at 37°C for 3 days. Crosslinked AGEs were assessed using gel electrophoresis, and the carboxymethyllysine (CML) content was analyzed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays. The antioxidant activities of the extracts were evaluated using assays to assess DPPH (1,1-diphenyl-2-picryl-hydrazyl) and hydroxyl radical scavenging activities, metal-chelating activity and reducing power of the extracts. The phenolic, flavonol and flavonoid content of the extracts were also determined. All extracts inhibited the formation of crosslinked AGEs and CML in a dose-dependent manner, with MCF being the most potent. The antioxidant activity of MCF was higher than that of MCP, but MCP showed the highest metal-chelating activity. MCF had the highest phenolic and flavonoid contents, whereas MCP had the highest flavonol content. M. charantia has hypoglycaemic effects, but this study shows that M. charantia extracts are also capable of preventing AGE formation in vitro. This activity may be due to the antioxidant properties, particularly the total phenolic content of the extracts. Thus, the use of M. charantia deserves more attention, as it may not only reduce hyperglycaemia but also protect against the build-up of tissue AGEs and reduce oxidative stress in patients with diabetes.


This article forages the fruits of Radbruch's Legal Philosophy of 1932, taking into account his writings after the horrors of National Socialism in Germany. This contribution builds on the findings of my chapter concerning Radbruch's inquiry into the origins of the criminal law, in Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law. In that chapter I present the rise of the sovereign state as a precondition for a Rule of Law that institutes a balancing act between the different powers of the state. In the current article I briefly present the rise of the Rule of Law in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exemplified by the rise of the German Rechtsstaat, the French État de Droit and the Anglo-American Rule of Law. This provides the background for a discussion of the contribution that Radbruch's antinomian concept of law can make to a better understanding of the difference between legalism and legality. I argue that a mistaken view on legality informs the prevalent confusion around the notion of the Rule of Law. The investigation is complemented with the introduction of a procedural conception of both law and the Rule of Law, taking the discussion beyond formal and substantial conceptions of both. Finally, I integrate an analysis of Schmitt's keen attention to the institution of law, observing that legalism and legality align with different institutionalizations, different legal orders and different modes of existence of law and the Rule of Law.


In the present study were examined relations of scores on the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (Randolph, 1998) with measures of daily functioning in a sample with dementia. Participants (N = 66) with various forms of dementia were seen at a dementia diagnostic clinic. All participants were administered the battery as part of a larger battery of neuropsychological measures. The participants' functional status was assessed by their primary caregivers, who completed the Physical Self-maintenance Scale and the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living scale (Lawton & Brody, 1969) as part of a social work interview. Analysis indicated that the Repeatable Battery for Assessment of Neuropsychological Status, particularly the Attention, Visuospatial/Constructional, and Immediate Memory indices, strongly correlated with measures of daily functioning. These results were supported by multiple regression analyses showing the RBANS Attention and Immediate Memory indices as significant predictors of functional abilities. One may conclude the RBANS should be favorably considered in understanding the functional problems of probable dementing patients.


BACKGROUND
Diffuse panbronchiolitis (DPB) is a chronic airways disease predominantly affecting East Asians. Macrolides, a class of antibiotics, have been used as the main treatment for DPB, based on evidence from retrospective and non-randomised studies.

OBJECTIVES
To assess the efficacy and safety of macrolides for DPB.

SEARCH METHODS
We searched CENTRAL (2014, Issue 6), MEDLINE (1966 to July week 1, 2014), EMBASE (1974 to July 2014), Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM) (1978 to July 2014), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) (1974 to July 2014), KoreaMed (1997 to July 2014) and Database of Japana Centra Revuo Medicina (1983 to July 2014).

SELECTION CRITERIA
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) or quasi-RCTs assessing the effect of macrolides for DPB.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Two review authors independently assessed study quality and subsequent risk of bias according to The Cochrane Collaboration's tool for assessing risk of bias. The primary outcomes were five-year survival rate, lung function and clinical response. We used risk ratios (RR) for individual trial results in the data analysis and measured all outcomes with 95% confidence intervals (CI).

MAIN RESULTS
Only one RCT (19 participants) with significant methodological limitations was included in this review. It found that the computerised tomography images of all participants treated with a long-term, low-dose macrolide (erythromycin) improved from baseline, while the images of 71.4% of participants in the control group (with no treatment) worsened and 28.6% remained unchanged. Adverse effects were not reported. This review was previously published in 2010 and 2013. For this 2014 update, we identified no new trials for inclusion or exclusion.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
There is little evidence for macrolides in the treatment of DPB. We are therefore unable to make any new recommendations. It may be reasonable to use low-dose macrolides soon after diagnosis is made and to continue this treatment for at least six months, according to current guidelines.


A search engine for font recognition is presented and evaluated. The intended usage is the search in very large font databases. The input to the search engine is an image of a text line, and the output is the name of the font used when rendering the text. After pre-processing and segmentation of the input image, a local approach is used, where features are calculated for individual characters. The method is based on eigenimages calculated from edge filtered character images, which enables compact feature vectors that can be computed rapidly. In this study the database contains 2763 different fonts for the English alphabet. To resemble a real life situation, the proposed method is evaluated with printed and scanned text lines and character images. Our evaluation shows that for 99.1% of the queries, the correct font name can be found within the five best matches.


Drosophila melanogaster has been for over a century the model of choice of several neurobiologists to decipher the formation and development of the nervous system as well as to mirror the pathophysiological conditions of many human neurodegenerative diseases. The rare disease Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA) is not an exception. Since the isolation of the responsible gene more than two decades ago, the analysis of the fly orthologue has proven to be an excellent avenue to understand the development and progression of the disease, to unravel pivotal mechanisms underpinning the pathology and to identify genes and molecules that might well be either disease biomarkers or promising targets for therapeutic interventions. In this review, we aim to summarize the collection of findings provided by the Drosophila models but also to go one step beyond and propose the implications of these discoveries for the study and cure of this disorder. We will present the physiological, cellular and molecular phenotypes described in the fly, highlighting those that have given insight into the pathology and we will show how the ability of Drosophila to perform genetic and pharmacological screens has provided valuable information that is not easily within reach of other cellular or mammalian models.


Beginning soon after the implementation of the policies of the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1961, when the drive to collectivize and industrialize undermined the livelihoods of the vast majority of peasant workers, China?s Great Famine was the worst famine in human history. In addition to claiming more than 45 million lives, it also led to the destruction of agriculture, industry, trade, and every aspect of human life, leaving large parts of the Chinese countryside scarred forever by human-created environmental disasters. Drawing on previously closed archives that have since been made inaccessible again, Zhou Xun offers readers, for the first time in English, access to the most vital archival documentation of the famine. For some time to come this documentary history may be the only publication available that contains the most crucial primary documents concerning the fate of the Chinese peasantry between 1957 and 1962. It covers everything from collectivization and survival strategies, including cannibalism, to selective killing and mass murder.


Large scale suburbanisation is a relatively recent phenomenon in East Central Europe and responsible for major socio-spatial changes in metropolitan areas. Little is known about the ethnic dimensions of this process. However, large minority population groups, mainly ethnic Russians, remained into the former member states of the Soviet Union after its dissolution in 1991. We use individual level Estonia Census data in order to investigate the ethnic dimensions of suburbanisation. The results show that ethnic minorities have a considerably lower probability to suburbanise compared to the majority population, and minorities are less likely to move to rural municipalities – the main sites of suburban change – in the suburban ring of cities. Individual characteristics that measure strong ties with the majority population and host society exert a positive effect on ethnic minority suburbanization, and on settling in rural municipalities.


In November 2007, the Writers Guild of America, the labor union representing U.S. film, television and radio writers, called a strike targeted at the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, a trade association representing over 350 entertainment production companies. Eventually over 12,000 writers joined the strike, which ended in February 2008. Production on many television programs ceased, which made this strike immediately visible to a large number of Americans - the national television audience. Informed by a critical theory perspective and guided by the principles of qualitative textual analysis, this study examines framing of the strike in three major newspapers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. The Post's and the Journal's mutual parent company, News Corporation, had a financial stake in the strike; it owns the Fox television networks and film production studios, and is represented by the alliance. The New York Times' parent company, in contrast, did not have a stake in the strike. The results show that though the three newspapers used different assortments of frames to cover the strike, they all framed it negatively - by emphasizing "damage" caused by the strike, promoting consumer values and marginalizing the guild. Ultimately, this study affirms the literature describing media coverage of labor, and furthers the understanding of the relationship between media ownership and content. .


In many cases, when dealing with argillaceous fine-grained sedimentary rocks, the isotopic ages obtained from Rb–Sr whole-rock isochron calculations are of geological significance, despite the fact that the initial conditions of Sr isotopic homogenization are not fulfilled. To explain this, a mechanical mixing during deposition has been suggested, leading to an aggregate of mixed material with fairly uniform 87Sr/86Sr values, whatever Rb/Sr ratio is found in the analysed samples. This investigation of the behaviour of Rb and Sr during sedimentation and early diagenesis, involves study of more than 60 samples of fine-grained recent sediments from selected coastal localities of Brazil. The results indicate that pelitic samples from some recent to present-day transitional or shallow marine environments, such as the Jacarepaguá tidal flat and the Amazonas River mouth, where halmirolysis could have occurred, may produce nearly horizontal best-fit lines in a Rb–Sr isochron diagram. Moreover, the initial isotopic 87Sr/86Sr ratios appear to be well above 0.710. In open marine environments, such as the Campos Basin, where sampling was spread over more than 100 metres, exchanges between the argillaceous sediments and seawater potentially happen at low temperature, inducing a reduction of the 87Sr/86Sr isotopic composition of the sediments to nearly 0.710. An almost horizontal best-fit line is produced for the entire stratigraphic section, independent of the sedimentation age. We believe that in similar environments such 'zero age isochrons' are maintained for some time, testifying to exchanges between the sediment and the interstitial fluids, before the onset of burial diagenesis. The above described studies on fine-grained and recent argillaceous sediments seem to confirm the production of horizontal best-fit lines in isochron diagrams, justifying the application of the Rb–Sr whole-rock method to pelitic sedimentary rocks. The nature of the material is critical. The pelitic sediments to be analysed should contain only very limited amounts of coarse clastic material (especially feldspars and mica fragments) and consist mainly of fine clay minerals in which smectites, illite and mixed layers illite–smectite largely predominate.


The study of ancient emotion has become a substantial and thriving sub-discipline in the fields of Classics and Ancient History, enabling Classicists to make a significant contribution to the wider upsurge in interest in the emotions that has taken place across a range of scholarly disciplines in recent years. In the belief that now is the time to take stock of what has been achieved so far and to attempt to give a sense of research opportunities to come, this e-book assembles an international team of experts, including a number of those who have already made essential contributions to the study of ancient emotion, to offer an authoritative and representative selection of contemporary methods and approaches. With a chronological range from Homer to Seneca, this e-book deals with disgust, hope, horror, pity, grief, sympathy, and anger in a variety of contexts, including the poetics of emotional expression, philosophical theories of emotion, the role of emotion in historiography, intertextuality and the emotions, and the role of art and material culture in the representation of ancient affectivity.


There has been much discussion recently about the scope and limits of purely symbolic models of the mind and about the proper role of connectionism in cognitive modeling. This paper describes the "symbol grounding problem": How can the semantic interpretation of a formal symbol system be made intrinsic to the system, rather than just parasitic on the meanings in our heads? How can the meanings of the meaningless symbol tokens, manipulated solely on the basis of their (arbitrary) shapes, be grounded in anything but other meaningless symbols? The problem is analogous to trying to learn Chinese from a Chinese/Chinese dictionary alone. A candidate solution is sketched: Symbolic representations must be grounded bottom-up in nonsymbolic representations of two kinds: (1) "iconic representations" , which are analogs of the proximal sensory projections of distal objects and events, and (2) "categorical representations" , which are learned and innate feature-detectors that pick out the invariant features of object and event categories from their sensory projections. Elementary symbols are the names of these object and event categories, assigned on the basis of their (nonsymbolic) categorical representations. Higher-order (3) "symbolic representations" , grounded in these elementary symbols, consist of symbol strings describing category membership relations (e.g., "An X is a Y that is Z"). Connectionism is one natural candidate for the mechanism that learns the invariant features underlying categorical representations, thereby connecting names to the proximal projections of the distal objects they stand for. In this way connectionism can be seen as a complementary component in a hybrid nonsymbolic/symbolic model of the mind, rather than a rival to purely symbolic modeling. Such a hybrid model would not have an autonomous symbolic "module," however; the symbolic functions would emerge as an intrinsically "dedicated" symbol system as a consequence of the bottom-up grounding of categories' names in their sensory representations. Symbol manipulation would be governed not just by the arbitrary shapes of the symbol tokens, but by the nonarbitrary shapes of the icons and category invariants in which they are grounded.


»Sicherheitspolitik und Verschwörungstheorien im entstehenden europäischen Staatensystem (15./16. Jh.)«. The article develops a new definition of conspiracy theory more apt for historicizing purposes than the existing systematic and philosophical ones. It shows that modern conspiracy narratives do appear only with the Renaissance. Also, 'security' as the aim of state and international politics became important only now during the Italian Renaissance while the term and concept had been nearly forgotten during the Middle Ages. The article shows then that both, security politics in practice and political language as well as modern conspiracy narratives belong to the new type of political communication which emerged with inter-territorial diplomacy in 15th century Italy (example: Lorenzo de' Medici) and with the first emerging information public sphere in 16th century Europe (example: conspiracicsm during the French Wars of Religion). The narrative modus of analyzing the present state of affairs, of constructing reality and of planning and conjecturing in that form of political communication is highly similar to the construction of conspiracy narratives. All modern forms of opposition between security and conspiracy theories can be seen as derivatives of that Renaissance constellation.


Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research, Second Edition, provides practitioners and researchers with the information they need to confidently quantify, qualify, and justify their data. The book presents a practical guide on how to use statistics to solve common quantitative problems that arise in user research. It addresses questions users face every day, including, Is the current product more usable than our competition? Can we be sure at least 70% of users can complete the task on their first attempt? How long will it take users to purchase products on the website? This book provides a foundation for statistical theories and the best practices needed to apply them. The authors draw on decades of statistical literature from human factors, industrial engineering, and psychology, as well as their own published research, providing both concrete solutions (Excel formulas and links to their own web-calculators), along with an engaging discussion on the statistical reasons why tests work and how to effectively communicate results. Throughout this new edition, users will find updates on standardized usability questionnaires, a new chapter on general linear modeling (correlation, regression, and analysis of variance), with updated examples and case studies throughout. Completely updated to provide practical guidance on solving usability testing problems with statistics for any project, including those using Six Sigma practices Includes new and revised information on standardized usability questionnaires Includes a completely new chapter introducing correlation, regression, and analysis of variance Shows practitioners which test to use, why they work, and best practices for application, along with easy-to-use Excel formulas and web-calculators for analyzing data Recommends ways for researchers and practitioners to communicate results to stakeholders in plain English


This thesis reports on an extensive qualitative study of women ministers in the Church of Scotland. It examines the literature in relation to women clergy in other denominations in the UK and the USA and considers ways in which the Church of Scotland clergy are similar and dissimilar to their counterparts.

The research included a quantitative survey, the examination of data from the Church of Scotland Yearbook and thirty one 'ministry-story' interviews.

The Survey and the Yearbook produced basic demographic data about women ministers in the Kirk showing an increasing age profile and a shortage of younger women ministers. The survey also found that women ministers considered themselves to be different from male ministers most especially in the fields of collaboration and leadership style.

The interviews considered factors in the path to ministry, women ministers in the exercise of their ministry, relationships with congregations, colleagues and the institutional Church. Whilst there was considerable progress in terms of the acceptance of women's ministry by congregations and the wider community, there was also evidence of a lack of acceptance from some male ministers and an unwillingness to confront the issue on the part of the institution. Women ministers consider there to have been some progress towards integration of women's ministry within the Church of Scotland but are also uncertain about the future and whether a backlash against women will be experienced.

Although women have been ordained to ministry of word and sacrament within the Church of Scotland since 1968, this represents the first major study of women ministers within the Kirk and will provide a background for further study and exploration.


Recent federal regulations and amendments to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct—most of which have responded to lawyer involvement in corporate scandals—rest on the assumption that lawyers have a role to play in forcing clients to act legally, morally, or appropriately. Lawyers are distinctive, perhaps even unique among professionals, in that they are sometimes legally authorized to force clients into obeying the lawyers' advice. This Article reviews the rules that empower lawyers in this way, with a focus on the corporate context. For the most part, the recent regulatory changes take a static view of the lawyer-client relationship. They assume that if lawyers are authorized or required to counteract proposed client misconduct, lawyers will do so and less client misconduct will result. This Article demonstrates that the reality is far more complex. Lawyers and clients have incentives to implement coercive rules in ways that serve reasons wholly unrelated to the rules' purposes. Code drafters and those evaluating lawyers' coercive authority, therefore, must confront the fact that attorney-client relationships are dynamic—that is, that a change in the power of one party in the relationship has ripple effects. This practical reality influences both the positions of lawyers in deciding whether to favor or oppose particular regulation and the likely effectiveness of coercive rules.


In recent years, internal laser probing techniques that exploit the electro-optical and the thermo-optical effects have been introduced. Space-resolved and time-resolved measurements of charge-carrier and temperature distributions in the interior of semiconductor samples have thus become possible. For a profound analysis and the optimization of these measurement techniques, a physically rigorous model for simulating the entire measurement process is presented. The model includes the electrothermal device simulation of the sample's operating condition, the calculation of the resulting refractive-index modulations, the simulation of wave propagation through the device under test, the imaging lenses and aperture holes, and the simulation of the detector response. As an essential part of this model, a numerically efficient algorithm for simulating wave propagation in large computational domains has been developed. The decisive step is introduction of a suitably chosen set of computational variables that allows a significantly coarser discretization width without loss of accuracy.


Irish universities are adopting eLearning technologies to improve the quality of learning for third level students, across a variety of disciplines. As the technology to support blended learning is becoming more stable, there is an emerging awareness that the key source of value for students is derived from the pedagogic application of that technology rather than the technology itself. This research examines the quality of students' learning as measured by assessment performances in a hybrid technology-supported education model. Tests are conducted on the efficacy of this model by examining undergraduate accounting students' online assessment performances in comparison to similar off-line assessments. Students' performances are then related to the frequency/time spent online and the student's preferred learning style. We conclude that the introduction of eAssessments does improve the offine performances of undergraduate accounting students. However, these improvements are not universally observed in this heterogeneous group. Therefore, we recommend that in order to harness the benefits of learning technologies, pedagogic consideration should be given to the choice, variety, and level of difficulty of eAssessments offered to students.


In its jurisprudence relating to Article 267 TFEU, the Court of Justice of the European Union seems to oscillate between two different approaches. According to the jurisprudential mainstream, the preliminary ruling is an instrument of dialogue between national courts and the Court of Justice. This constant dialogue can fulfill the role assigned to the Court to ensure consistency of interpretation and application of Union law. Another line of cases, however, seems to make preliminary rulings means for individuals to ensure their rights which derive from EU law. These two visions of the preliminary references recently have been opposed in discussions about a particular aspect of the preliminary procedure, which is the late withdrawal of the question referred by the national court. In fact, when the national court considered that the response of the Court of Justice was not "necessary to render judgment," it could, at any time, including both before and after the deliberate publication, date the judgment to the parties and remove this issue. Therefore, the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice became dependent on matters of procedure (dealings between the parties, amicable agreements, etc.) that occurred in extremis before the national court, which sometimes cast doubt on a possible manipulation of the Court by the parties to the main proceedings. It became necessary to find a solution to solve this problem. The two different visions were then compared. If the preliminary ruling is conceived as an additional instrument for the rights that individuals derive from EU law, there is no need for the Court of Justice of the European Union to make a decision when the dispute is resolved before the national court and the defendant has obtained satisfaction. Conversely, if the preliminary ruling is conceived as an instrument to ensure the uniform application and interpretation of EU law, this judgment may be necessary. In fact, without deciding in abstracto, the Court in its judgement will anchor an interpretation that should be applied in all similar cases in the courts of the 27 Member States. In this case, a judgment may still be necessary, even if the dispute before the national court ended off. In order to preserve this approach, the new Rules of Procedure now contain a provision in Article 100 (1) which reads as follows: "The Court shall remain seised of a request for a preliminary ruling for as long as it is not withdrawn by the court or tribunal which made that request to the Court. The withdrawal of a request may be taken into account until notice of the date of delivery of the judgment has been served on the interest persons referred to in Article 23 of the Statute". Thus, the late withdrawal of a request for a preliminary ruling is clearly limited in time and, even if such removal would occur in extremis, the judgment of the Court will be delivered in the interest of interpretation and uniform application of Union law.


Background: Cognitive impairment is common in multiple sclerosis (MS) and adds significantly to the burden of the disease. The ability to predict future cognitive impairment from imaging obtained at disease onset has not been investigated. Methods: 62 patients imaged within 3 months of a clinically isolated syndrome were assessed neuropsychologically 7 years later. Baseline and periodic MRI measures of lesions, atrophy and normal-appearing white and grey matter were regressed against neuropsychological scores to explore the best predictors of cognitive outcome. Results: 28 patients had developed clinically definite MS at follow-up and a further nine met revised McDonald criteria for MS. Deficits in speed of information processing and executive function were the most common abnormalities. Poor performance correlated with high anxiety ratings. Baseline T1 lesion metrics predicted executive deficits, and new T2 lesions at the 3-month follow-up predicted slowed information processing. An increase in myo-inositol concentration in normal-appearing white matter over the first 3 years was associated with poor executive function. Conclusions: MRI variables obtained at the onset of a clinically isolated syndrome can predict future development of cognitive abnormalities. Our findings may have implications in monitoring and treating patients.


Academic dishonesty among students has been recognised as a major concern in higher education in Indonesia. Accounting research arguably need to give more attention to this issue. This is partly because of the importance of integrity as part of accounting ethics and professionalism. However, little currently known about academic dishonesty among accounting students in Indonesia. We address this issue by surveying 342 accounting students about their perception of academic dishonesty and what motivates such behaviour. Our respondents were from all first, second or third year undergraduate students at one state university in Indonesia. Drawing from Theory of Planned Behaviour, we examine three individual variables - attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control. In addition, we also examine three situational variables - academic integrity culture, definitional ambiguity, and pressure. Six hypotheses were tested, using a Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling. The results reveal that 77.5% of respondents admitted committing academic dishonesty. While all individual factors studies have positive significant effect on the intention to commit academic dishonesty, of the three situational factors only pressure and definitional ambiguity have a positive significant effect. Surprisingly, it is found that academic integrity culture does not have a significant effect.


There are now several large scale deployments of differential privacy used to collect statistical information about users. However, these deployments periodically recollect the data and recompute the statistics using algorithms designed for a single use. As a result, these systems do not provide meaningful privacy guarantees over long time scales. Moreover, existing techniques to mitigate this effect do not apply in the "local model" of differential privacy that these systems use.
In this paper, we introduce a new technique for local differential privacy that makes it possible to maintain up-to-date statistics over time, with privacy guarantees that degrade only in the number of changes in the underlying distribution rather than the number of collection periods. We use our technique for tracking a changing statistic in the setting where users are partitioned into an unknown collection of groups, and at every time period each user draws a single bit from a common (but changing) group-specific distribution. We also provide an application to frequency and heavy-hitter estimation.


Youths with type 1 diabetes mellitus may decide to use insulin pump therapy. Limited information describes youths' glycemic control with insulin pump therapy. A repeated-measures design guided data collection at five points from one month before insulin pump therapy through 12 months with insulin pump therapy. The research question was, "How do youths' hemoglobin A(1c) (HbA(1c)) values change with insulin pump therapy?" Glycemic control target was 7.6% HbA(1c) value. Thirty youths (9 to 18 years old) had at least 4 HbA(1c) values. Nineteen youths who achieved glycemic control had three different patterns during 12 months of insulin pump therapy. Eleven youths who did not achieve glycemic control had two different patterns. Multiple factors can influence a youth's glycemic control. Uncontrolled blood glucose levels increase the individual's risk for developing type 1 diabetes complications. Youths and health care providers need to work as a team to identify factors affecting the youth's glycemic control and discuss changes.


The paradigm of aquatic food webs has undergone fundamental revision over the past twenty years. Research suggests that a significant proportion of organic material and energy in aquatic ecosystems flows through a "microbial loop" before passage into the classic aquatic food web. Unique Antarctic conditions mean such "bottom-up" control can be of extreme importance during the austral winter. In order to investigate this, the microbial communities and physico-chemical properties of three saline lakes in the Vestfold Hills, eastern Antarctica, Ace, Highway and Rookery, were investigated between December 1995 and February 1997 .
The lakes of the Vestfold Hills were formed approximately 8000 years ago following a period of post-glacial marine transgression, which isolated seawater in glacially scoured basins. Post-formation, the chemistry and biology of this isolated seawater underwent significant changes creating a suite of lakes and ponds with highly varied chemical and biological compositions. This study was concerned with meromictic Ace Lake in particular. Physico-chemical results demonstrated that the lake was highly stratified. An upper, nutrient-poor mixolimnion was separated by a thermoclinelhalocline from a lower, nutrient-replete monimolimnion. The monimolimnion was further stratified in terms of oxygen; an oxycline separated an oxic upper stratum from an anoxic lower stratum. At the oxycline, organic substrate sedimenting from above and inorganic nutrients diffusing from below were entrained. This stable stratification exerted a profound influence on the microbial dynamics of Ace Lake.
Over the course of its evolution the microbial food web of Ace Lake was truncated and a simple, low diversity community of bacteria, algae and Protozoa, with a paucity of metazoan zooplankton, now dominates. This evolutionary process was illustrated by the intermediate diversity of the protozoan community in recently formed, Rookery Lake. The most dominant micro-organisms in Ace Lake were those which were highly motile and employed versatile nutritional strategies, such as mixotrophy, to remain physiologically active during the austral winter.
Ace Lake is an oligotrophic system which receives negligible allochthonous inputs of organic carbon and inorganic nutrients. However, a simple model of the carbon flux within Ace Lake highlighted the fact that autotrophic production within the plankton was insufficient alone to maintain the level of heterotrophic activity observed. Instead, the microbial plankton were dependent on regenerative fluxes of inorganic nutrients and slow-turnover autochthonous carbon, consistent with the concept of the microbial loop.


A common strategy to measure the efficacy of drug treatment is the in vitro comparison of ensemble readouts with and without treatment, such as proliferation and cell death. A fundamental assumption underlying this approach is there is minimal cell to cell variability in the response to drug. Here, we demonstrate that ensemble and non-spatial single cell readouts applied to primary cells lead to incomplete conclusions due to cell to cell variability. We exposed primary fetal pulmonary artery endothelial cells (PAEC) isolated from healthy newborn healthy and persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn (PPHN) sheep to the growth hormone insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). We found that IGF-1 increased proliferation and branch points in tube formation assays but not angiogenic signaling proteins at the population level for both cell types. We hypothesized that this molecular ambiguity was due to the presence of cellular subpopulations with variable responses to IGF-1. Using high throughput single cell imaging, we discovered a spatially localized response to IGF-1. This suggests localized signaling or heritable cell response to external stimuli may ultimately be responsible for our observations. Discovering and further exploring these rare cells is critical to finding new molecular targets to restore cellular function.


This paper reports the development and implementation of an energy aware autonomous wireless condition monitoring sensor system (ACMS) powered by ambient vibrations. An electromagnetic (EM) generator has been designed to harvest sufficient energy to power a radio-frequency (RF) linked accelerometer-based sensor system. The ACMS is energy aware and will adjust the measurement/transmit duty cycle according to the available energy; this is typically every 3 s at 0.6 m s−2rms acceleration and can be as low as 0.2 m s−2rms with a duty cycle around 12 min. The EM generator has a volume of only 150 mm3 producing an average power of 58 µW at 0.6 m s−2rms acceleration at a frequency of 52 Hz. In addition, a voltage multiplier circuit is shown to increase the electrical damping compared to a purely resistive load; this allows for an average power of 120 µW to be generated at 1.7 m s−2rms acceleration. The ACMS has been successfully demonstrated on an industrial air compressor and an office air conditioning unit, continuously monitoring vibration levels and thereby simulating a typical condition monitoring application.


PURPOSE
Transitional cell carcinoma (TCC) of the bladder that extends directly into contiguous organs (pT4) portends a poor prognosis. The 2002 American Joint Committee on Cancer staging system does not include seminal vesicle involvement by primary TCC of the bladder. In this analysis we evaluated the clinical outcomes and prognostic significance of seminal vesicle involvement with TCC of the bladder after radical cystectomy.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
From 1971 to 2001, 1,682 patients underwent radical cystectomy and pelvic lymphadenectomy for bladder cancer. Only those tumors that involved adjacent organs through the bladder wall (pT4) were included. Overall 132 male patients with a median age of 68 years (range 36 to 98) qualified for analysis. Patients were stratified into 4 subgroups of 1) direct extravesical prostatic stromal involvement only in 37 patients (28%), 2) prostatic stroma and seminal vesicle involvement in 37 patients (28%), 3) seminal vesicle involvement only in 10 patients (8%) and 4) other contiguous pelvic organ involvement (stage pT4b) in 48 patients (36%). Overall 88 patients (67%) received some form of adjuvant therapy. At a median followup of 12.5 years (range 0 to 15.2) clinical outcomes were analyzed including overall and recurrence-free survival using Kaplan-Meier plots.

RESULTS
There was no significant difference in clinical outcomes or prognosis for groups 2 and 3, thus they were combined for analysis. Five-year overall survival for any seminal vesicle involvement (10%) was significantly worse than prostatic stromal involvement only (38%) but was similar to pT4b tumors (7%, p <0.0001). The 5-year recurrence-free survival for seminal vesicle involvement (14%) was also significantly worse than prostatic stromal involvement alone (68%) but similar to that pT4b disease (25%, p = 0.01). Results were controlled for lymph node status.

CONCLUSIONS
Patients with extravesical tumor extension into seminal vesicles and contiguous pelvic organs are at high risk for recurrence and progression. Involvement of the seminal vesicles by direct extension of bladder TCC portends a prognosis similar to that of pT4b disease and should, therefore, be classified as such.


Color grading is a crucial step in the processing of fruits and vegetables that directly affects profitability, because the quality of agricultural products is often associated with their color. Most existing automatic color grading systems determine color quality either by directly comparing product color against a predefined and fixed set of reference colors or by using a set of color separating parameters, often in three-dimensional color spaces. Using these methods, it is not convenient for the user to adjust color preferences or grading parameters. In this paper, we present an effective and user-friendly color mapping concept for automated color grading that is well suited for commercial production. User friendliness is often viewed by the industry as a very important factor to the acceptance and success of automation equipment. This color mapping method uses preselected colors of interest specific to a given application to calculate a unique set of coefficients for color space conversion. The three-dimensional RGB color space is converted into a small set of color indices unique to the application. In contrast with more complex color grading techniques, the proposed method makes it easy for a human operator to specify and adjust color-preference settings Tomato and date maturity evaluation and date surface defect detection are used to demonstrate the performance of this novel color mapping concept.


This article adopts a social constructivist and developmental perspective on English as a lingua franca (ELF). On this basis and with reference to the My English condition, it explores the conflict generally perceived between non-native speaker-learners' claim of ownership of English and their preference for Standard English target models. The conflict is shown to result from a conceptual misunderstanding caused by the conflation of Standard English as an object of linguistic description and Standard English as a cognitive, emotional and social construct by the speaker-learners themselves. With the constructivist reconciliation of ownership and target language preference, the role of Standard English in second language learning and teaching appears in a new and refreshing light.


Abstract. Statistically significant correlations between increase of asthma attacks in children and elevated concentrations of particulate matter of diameter 10 microns and less (PM 10 ) were determined for metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona. Interpolated concentrations from a five-site network provided spatial distribution of PM 10 that was mapped onto census tracts with population health records. The case-crossover statistical method was applied to determine the relationship between PM 10 concentration and asthma attacks. For children ages 5–17, a significant relationship was discovered between the two, while children ages 0–4 exhibited virtually no relationship. The risk of adverse health effects was expressed as a function of the change from the 25th to 75th percentiles of mean level PM 10 (36 μg m −3 ). This increase in concentration was associated with a 12.6% (95% CI: 5.8%, 19.4%) increase in the log odds of asthma attacks among children ages 5–17. Neither gender nor other demographic variables were significant. The results are being used to develop an asthma early warning system for the study area.


This article studies the implementation of the global norm of women's inclusion in the Malian peace negotiations. It constructs a theoretical framework for analyzing practices of resistance, which object to the validity of the norm, and practices of refinement, which engage with the application of the norm. Based on interviews with women who attended the Malian peace negotiations it finds that women face widespread practices of resistance when they demand to be included. However, when pressure is applied concessions often follow, indicating growing acceptance of the norm. Actors also engaged in practices of refinement, observed through a number of disagreements over how, when and which women should be included. The article contributes important insights on the relationship between norms and practices by demonstrating not only that norms influence practice, but how practices of resistance and refinement shape the meanings and life cycles of norms. (Less)


Individuals need to seek professional financial advice to achieve their financial goals. However, some do not see the value of consulting financial planners, and show little intention to use financial planners. Furthermore, there is a lack of research explaining why these individuals do not make use of financial planners. This study aims, therefore, to investigate the factors that could possibly influence individuals' intentions to make use of a financial planner: awareness, perceived image, trust, and perceived rewards. To achieve this, a hypothesised model and hypotheses were developed and empirically tested. The results of the study indicated that there are significant relationships between perceived image and rewards, on the one hand, and intentions to use a financial planner, on the other. Thus financial planners must portray a positive image and deliver the perceived benefits of engaging in financial planning if individuals are to recognise the value in making use of their services.


The electronic and ir spectra of rare earth perovskites of the general formula LnZO3, where Ln is the rare earth ion or yttrium and Z is Cr, Mn, or Fe, have been studied in detail. The results have been discussed in terms of crystallography, magnetic properties, covalency of Ln—O and Z—O bonds, and Goodenough's one electron energy diagrams. In all these compounds the rare earth ions do not markedly affect the electronic transitions of the transition metal ions; the 3d electrons clearly exhibit localized behavior. Both the electronic and ir spectra of the LnZO3 perovskites are comparable to the spectra of the corresponding transition metal sesquioxides, Z2O3.


DTP (Desk Top Publishing) professionals rely on CRT displays to provide visual feedback to adjust or to proof color prior to hardcopy. Solutions are now appearing in the market to meet this need. But the proper CRT calibration is still not clear to the end users. The objective of this work is to study the CRT setting in terms of gamma and white point; and to explore gamma and white point's effects on softcopy (CRT displayed image) and hardcopy (CMYK printed image) agreement. A number ofCRT calibration experiments were performed. Two SCID (Standard Color Image Data) images were used in this study to test the agreement between a softcopy and a hardcopy image. A number of colormeasurement devices and color management software packages were used in this study. Specifically, ColorTron was used in this study as the tool to calibrate the CRT. Adobe Photoshop, with the ColorSync 2.0 plug-in module was used in this study to implement the printer CMYK to CRT RGB transformation. ColorBlind was used in this study to generate printer and monitor profiles. CA-100 was used in this study as a colorimetric measurement device for data collection and image gamma analysis. By means of observer experiment conducted under dark ambient light, it was found that the different CRT profiles do influence the color transformation between printer CMYK and CRT RGB; the system's default CRT profile (gamma=1.8, whit point=D50, out of 6 CRT profiles tested) cannot achieve the bestmatch between CRT and hardcopy. The optimum CRT profile for the best match was not to be found because of the influence of the keyness of the image itself.


A new class of kernel estimates is proposed for long run variance (LRV) and heteroskedastic autocorrelation consistent (HAC) estimation. The kernels are called steep origin kernels and are related to a class of sharp origin kernels explored by the authors (2003) in other work. They are constructed by exponentiating a mother kernel (a conventional lag kernel that is smooth at the origin) and they can be used without truncation or bandwidth parameters. When the exponent is passed to infinity with the sample size, these kernels produce consistent LRV/HAC estimates. The new estimates are shown to have limit normal distributions, and formulae for the asymptotic bias and variance are derived. With steep origin kernel estimation, bandwidth selection is replaced by exponent selection and data-based selection is possible. Rules for exponent selection based on minimum mean squared error (MSE)\ criteria are developed. Optimal rates for steep origin kernels that are based on exponentiating quadratic kernels are shown to be faster than those based on exponentiating the Bartlett kernel, which produces the sharp origin kernel. It is further shown that, unlike conventional kernel estimation where an optimal choice of kernel is possible in terms of MSE\ criteria (Priestley, 1962; Andrews, 1991), steep origin kernels are asymptotically MSE equivalent, so that choice of mother kernel does not matter asymptotically. The approach is extended to spectral estimation at frequencies \omega \neq 0. Some simulation evidence is reported detailing the finite sample performance of steep kernel methods in LRV/HAC estimation and robust regression testing in comparison with sharp kernel and conventional (truncated) kernel methods.


Abstract. TROPOMI (the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument), on board the Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) satellite, has been monitoring the Earth's atmosphere since October 2017 with an unprecedented horizontal resolution (initially 7 km 2×3.5  km 2 , upgraded to 5.5 km 2×3.5  km 2 in August 2019). Monitoring air quality is one of the main objectives of TROPOMI; it obtains measurements of important pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde (HCHO). In this paper we assess the quality of the latest HCHO TROPOMI products versions 1.1.(5-7), using ground-based solar-absorption FTIR (Fourier-transform infrared) measurements of HCHO from 25 stations around the world, including high-, mid-, and low-latitude sites.
Most of these stations are part of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC), and they provide a wide range of observation conditions, from very clean remote sites to those with high HCHO levels from anthropogenic or biogenic emissions. The ground-based HCHO retrieval settings have been optimized and harmonized at all the stations, ensuring a consistent validation among the sites. In this validation work, we first assess the accuracy of TROPOMI HCHO tropospheric columns using the median of the relative differences between TROPOMI and FTIR ground-based data (BIAS). The pre-launch accuracy requirements of TROPOMI HCHO are 40 %–80 %. We observe that these requirements are well reached, with the BIAS found below 80 % at all the sites and below 40 % at 20 of the 25 sites. The provided TROPOMI systematic uncertainties are well in agreement with the observed biases at most of the stations except for the highest-HCHO-level site, where it is found to be underestimated. We find that while the BIAS has no latitudinal dependence, it is dependent on the HCHO concentration levels: an overestimation ( + 26 ± 5  %) of TROPOMI is observed for very low HCHO levels ( 2.5 × 10 15  molec. cm −2 ), while an underestimation ( - 30.8 % ± 1.4  %) is found for high HCHO levels ( > 8.0 × 10 15  molec. cm −2 ). This demonstrates the great value of such a harmonized network covering a wide range of concentration levels, the sites with high HCHO concentrations being crucial for the determination of the satellite bias in the regions of emissions and the clean sites allowing a small TROPOMI offset to be determined. The wide range of sampled HCHO levels within the network allows the robust determination of the significant constant and proportional TROPOMI HCHO biases (TROPOMI  = + 1.10 ± 0.05 × 10 15 + 0.64 ± 0.03 × FTIR; in molecules per square centimetre). Second, the precision of TROPOMI HCHO data is estimated by the median absolute deviation (MAD) of the relative differences between TROPOMI and FTIR ground-based data. The clean sites are especially useful for minimizing a possible additional collocation error. The precision requirement of 1.2×1016  molec. cm −2 for a single pixel is reached at most of the clean sites, where it is found that the TROPOMI precision can even be 2 times better (0.5– 0.8×1015  molec. cm −2 for a single pixel). However, we find that the provided TROPOMI random uncertainties may be underestimated by a factor of 1.6 (for clean sites) to 2.3 (for high HCHO levels). The correlation is very good between TROPOMI and FTIR data ( R=0.88 for 3 h mean coincidences; R=0.91 for monthly means coincidences). Using about 17 months of data (from May 2018 to September 2019), we show that the TROPOMI seasonal variability is in very good agreement at all of the FTIR sites. The FTIR network demonstrates the very good quality of the TROPOMI HCHO products, which is well within the pre-launch requirements for both accuracy and precision. This paper makes suggestions for the refinement of the TROPOMI random uncertainty budget and TROPOMI quality assurance values for a better filtering of the remaining outliers.


There are several well-known problems with conventional ar tificial neural networks (ANN), such as difficulties with selecting the structure of the network, and problems wi th forgetting previously-learned knowledge after further training. Constructive neural network algorithms att empt to solve these problems, but in turn have problems of their own. The Evolving Connectionist System (ECoS) is a class of open a rchitecture artificial neural networks that are similar in the way in which neurons are added to their structu res, and in the way in which their connection weights are modified. The ECoS algorithm is intended to address the pr oblems with constructive neural networks. Several problems with ECoS are identified and discussed in th is thesis. These problems are: the lack of comparison of ECoS with constructive neural networks; the e xcessive complexity of the Evolving Fuzzy Neural Network (EFuNN), which is the seminal ECoS network; the lack of a testable formalisation of ECoS; the dependence on fuzzy logic elements embedded within the network fo r fuzzy rule extraction; and the lack of methods for optimising ECoS networks. The research in this thesis addre sses these problems. The overall theme of the research can be summarised as the cha racterisation, simplification, formalisation, explanation and optimisation of ECoS. Characterisation in this thesis means the comparison of ECoS with existing constructive ANN. Simplification means reducing the networ k to a minimalist implementation. Formalisation means the creation of a testable predictive model of ECoS tra ining. Explanation means explaining ECoS networks via the extraction of fuzzy rules. Finally, optimisation me ans creating ECoS networks that have a minimum number of neurons with maximum accuracy. Each of these themes is approached in ways that build upon, an d are complementary to, the basic ECoS network and ECoS training algorithm. The basic ECoS structure and al gorithm is left unchanged, and the problems are addressed by extending that structure, rather than alterin g it as has been done in other work on ECoS. The principal contributions of this thesis are: a qualitati ve comparison of ECoS to constructive neural network algorithms; a proposed simplified version of EFuNN called SE CoS; an experimentally tested formalisation of ECoS; novel algorithms for explicating SECoS via the extrac tion of fuzzy rules; and several novel algorithms for the optimisation of ECoS networks. The formalisation of ECoS and the proposed algorithms are ev aluated on data from a set of standard benchmarking problems. Further experiments are performed with a dat set with real-world applications, namely the recognition of isolated New Zealand English phonemes. The analyses of the experimental results show that the propo sed algorithms are effective across both the benchmark data sets and the case study data set.


During the last twenty years, we have assisted to a growing interest in the detection of verbal cues under deception. In this context, we focused our attention on the truth vs. deception topic in adults. In particular, we were interested in discrepant findings concerning some verbal indicators. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether different experimental designs may yield different results regarding the presence or absence of CBCA criteria. Forty participants were shown a video of a robbery and were asked to give a truthful and a deceitful statement of the criminal event. The participants' performances were recorded in order to analyze content of the reports. Results showed more changes in verbal behaviour under within-subjects design compared to between- subjects one, though the presence/absence of some criteria was the same across the two statistical procedures. The different results yielded by between- and within-subjects analyses can provide some hints as regards the discrepancy in deception literature on verbal cues. Implications for applied settings are discussed.


We study the heating of charged test particles in three-dimensional numerical simulations of weakly compressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence ("Alfvénic turbulence"); we focus on plasmas with comparable thermal and magnetic energy densities, i.e., β ∼ 0.1–10. Our results are relevant to particle heating and acceleration in the solar wind, accretion disks onto black holes, and other astrophysics and heliospheric environments. The physics of particle heating depends on whether the gyrofrequency of a particle Ω0 is comparable to the frequency of a turbulent fluctuation ω that is resolved on the computational domain. Particles with Ω0 ∼ ω undergo strong perpendicular heating (relative to the local magnetic field) and pitch angle scattering. By contrast, particles with Ω0 ≫ ω undergo strong parallel heating. Simulations with a finite resistivity produce additional parallel heating due to parallel electric fields in small-scale current sheets. Many of our results are consistent with linear theory predictions for the particle heating produced by the Alfvén and slow magnetosonic waves that make up Alfvénic turbulence. However, in contrast to linear theory predictions, energy exchange is not dominated by discrete resonances between particles and waves; instead, the resonances are substantially "broadened." We discuss the implications of our results for solar and astrophysics problems, in particular, the thermodynamics of the near-Earth solar wind. This requires an extrapolation of our results to higher numerical resolution, because the dynamic range that can be simulated is far less than the true dynamic range between the proton cyclotron frequency and the outer-scale frequency of MHD turbulence. We conclude that Alfvénic turbulence produces significant parallel heating via the interaction between particles and magnetic field compressions ("slow waves"). However, on scales above the proton Larmor radius Alfvénic turbulence does not produce significant perpendicular heating of protons or minor ions (this is consistent with linear theory, but inconsistent with previous claims from test particle simulations). Instead, the Alfvén wave energy cascades to perpendicular scales below the proton Larmor radius, initiating a kinetic Alfvén wave cascade.


Recently, the increasing availability of digital cameras and the rapid advances in social media have led to the accumulation of a large number of geotagged photos, which may reflect people's travel experiences in different cities and can be used to generate location recommendations for tourists. Research on this aspect mainly focused on providing personalized recommendations matching a tourist's travel preferences, while ignoring the context of the visit (e.g., weather, season and time of the day) that potentially influences his/her travel behavior. This article explores context-aware methods to provide location recommendations matching a tourist's travel preferences and visiting context. Specifically, we apply clustering methods to detect touristic locations and extract travel histories from geotagged photos on Flickr. We then propose a novel context similarity measure to quantify the similarity between any two contexts and develop three context-aware collaborative filtering methods, i.e., contextual pre-filtering, post-filtering and modeling. With these methods, location recommendations like "in similar contexts, other tourists similar to you often visited …" can be provided to the current user. Results of the evaluation with a publicly-available Flickr photo collection show that these methods are able to provide a tourist with location recommendations matching his/her travel preferences and visiting context. More importantly, compared to other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed methods, which employ the introduced context similarity measure, can provide tourists with significantly better recommendations. While Flickr data have been used in this study, these context-aware collaborative filtering (CaCF) methods can also be extended for other kinds of travel histories, such as GPS trajectories and Foursquare check-ins, to provide context-aware recommendations.


Innovation Propensity in Croatian Enterprises: Results of a Community Innovation Survey This paper assesses the determinants of innovation activities in Croatian enterprises and their implications for innovation policy. A Type-2 Tobit model is used for modelling the innovation behaviour of Croatian companies, based on the results of a Community Innovation Survey conducted for the period 2001-2003. This model identified the positive effects of conditions for enterprise growth (enterprise size and demand pull variable) and the integration of enterprises into international flows of capital and goods (through foreign direct investments) as well as R&D activities. These variables can be tackled through a more effective policy framework that should increase competitiveness within industries in order to stimulate the demand for innovation. The focus should be on fostering enterprise growth, attraction of FDI with strong spillover effects, and stimulating the export capability of enterprises. Only in such a context can the positive effects of engagement in R&D be maximised.


This report describes cases relating to the management of national marine sanctuaries in which certain scientific information was required so managers could make decisions that effectively protected trust resources. The cases presented represent only a fraction of difficult issues that marine sanctuary managers deal with daily. They include, among others, problems related to wildlife disturbance, vessel routing, marine reserve placement, watershed management, oil spill response, and habitat restoration. Scientific approaches to address these problems vary significantly, and include literature surveys, data mining, field studies (monitoring, mapping, observations, and measurement), geospatial and biogeographic analysis, and modeling. In most cases there is also an element of expert consultation and collaboration among multiple partners, agencies with resource protection responsibilities, and other users and stakeholders. The resulting management responses may involve direct intervention (e.g., for spill response or habitat restoration issues), proposal of boundary alternatives for marine sanctuaries or reserves, changes in agency policy or regulations, making recommendations to other agencies with resource protection responsibilities, proposing changes to international or domestic shipping rules, or development of new education or outreach programs. (PDF contains 37 pages.)


Huygens's principle that each point on a wave front represents a source of spherical waves is conceptually useful but is incomplete; the backward parts of the wavelets have to be neglected ad hoc, otherwise backward waves are generated. The problem is solved mathematically by Kirchhoff's rigorous integration of the wave equation, but the intuitive appeal of Huygens's simple principle is lost. I show that, by using spatiotemporal dipoles instead of spherical point sources, one can recover a simple principle of scalar wave propagation that is correct whenever the concept of a wave front is meaningful.


Objective To study the GI symptoms in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infected patients. Design We analysed epidemiological, demographic, clinical and laboratory data of 95 cases with SARS-CoV-2 caused coronavirus disease 2019. Real-time reverse transcriptase PCR was used to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in faeces and GI tissues. Results Among the 95 patients, 58 cases exhibited GI symptoms of which 11 (11.6%) occurred on admission and 47 (49.5%) developed during hospitalisation. Diarrhoea (24.2%), anorexia (17.9%) and nausea (17.9%) were the main symptoms with five (5.3%), five (5.3%) and three (3.2%) cases occurred on the illness onset, respectively. A substantial proportion of patients developed diarrhoea during hospitalisation, potentially aggravated by various drugs including antibiotics. Faecal samples of 65 hospitalised patients were tested for the presence of SARS-CoV-2, including 42 with and 23 without GI symptoms, of which 22 (52.4%) and 9 (39.1%) were positive, respectively. Six patients with GI symptoms were subjected to endoscopy, revealing oesophageal bleeding with erosions and ulcers in one severe patient. SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in oesophagus, stomach, duodenum and rectum specimens for both two severe patients. In contrast, only duodenum was positive in one of the four non-severe patients. Conclusions GI tract may be a potential transmission route and target organ of SARS-CoV-2.


Er3+/Yb3+ co-doped tellurite glass is prepared by conventional melt-quenching method. The thermal and optical properties of the glass are investigated for temperature sensing. The Judd-Ofelt theory is applied for spectral analysis and the obtained intensity parameters (Ω2 = 6.48 × 10−20 cm2, Ω4 = 1.82 × 10−20 cm2, Ω6 = 1.27 × 10−20 cm2) are used to estimate the spectroscopic parameters of Er3+ ions in the glass. The upconversion (UC) luminescence of the glass is investigated under the laser diode (LD) excitation at 976 nm. The absolute quantum yield for UC luminescence is determined to be 0.0049% when the pump power density is 10 W/cm2. The dependences of green and red UC emission intensities on pump power indicate that both of the red and green UC emissions of Er3+ ions are mostly contributed by the co-existing two and three-photon involved energy transfer processes between the Yb3+ and Er3+ ions. Furthermore, the temperature-dependent green UC emissions of the glass are studied and the results show that the glass is an excellent candidate for construction of temperature sensors based on the self-referenced fluorescence intensity ratio (FIR) technique.


Abstract In this paper we present an algorithm for segmenting musical audio data. Our aim is to identify solo instrument phrases in polyphonic music. We extract relevant features from the audio to be input into our algorithm. A large corpus of audio descriptors was tested for its ability to discriminate between solo and non-solo sections, which resulted in a subset of five best features. We derived a two-stage algorithm that first creates a set of boundary candidates from local changes of these features and then classifies fixed-length segments according to the desired target classes. The output of the two stages is combined to derive the final segmentation and segment labels. Our system was trained and tested with excerpts from classical pieces and evaluated using full-length recordings, all taken from commercially available audio. We evaluated our algorithm by using precision and recall measurements for the boundary estimation and introduced new evaluation metrics from image processing for the final segmentation. Along with a resulting accuracy of 77%, we demonstrate that the selected features are discriminative for this specific task and achieve reasonable results for the segmentation problem.


European corporate law has enjoyed a renaissance in the past decade. Fifteen years ago, this would have seemed most implausible. In the mid-1990s, the early integration strategy of seeking to harmonise substantive company law seemed to have been stalled by the need to reconcile fundamental differences in approaches to corporate governance. Little was happening, and the grand vision of the early pioneers appeared more dream than ambition. Yet since then, a combination of adventurous decisions by the Court of Justice, innovative approaches to legislation by the Commission, and disastrous crises in capital markets has produced a headlong rush of reform activity. The volume and pace of change has been such that few have had time to digest it: not least policymakers, with the consequence that the developments have not always been well coordinated. The recent 2007/08 financial crisis has yet again thrown many - quite fundamental - issues into question. In this article, we offer an overview that puts the most significant developments of this decade into context, alongside each other and the changing patterns of corporate structure in European countries.


Open relation extraction (ORE) aims to assign semantic relationships among arguments, essential to the automatic construction of knowledge graphs (KG). The previous ORE methods and some benchmark datasets consider a relation between two arguments as definitely existing and in a simple single-span form, neglecting possible non-existent relationships and flexible, expressive multi-span relations. However, detecting non-existent relations is necessary for a pipelined information extraction system (first performing named entity recognition then relation extraction), and multi-span relationships contribute to the diversity of connections in KGs. To fulfill the practical demands of ORE, we design a novel Query-based Multi-head Open Relation Extractor (QuORE) to extract single/multi-span relations and detect non-existent relationships effectively. Moreover, we re-construct some public datasets covering English and Chinese to derive augmented and multi-span relation tuples. Extensive experiment results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art ORE model LOREM in the extraction of existing single/multi-span relations and the overall performances on four datasets with non-existent relationships.


In this work we report a new type of nanostructure, the bridged bowtie aperture (BBA) antenna, for producing a simultaneously enhanced and confined electric and magnetic near field. The optical nanocircuit theory is employed to reveal its underlying mechanism. The electric near-field distribution of the nanostructure is observed using transmission-type s-SNOM at the nanoscale, and the magnetic near-field distribution is then derived from the electric near field of a complementary BBA structure using Babinet's principle. To our knowledge, the generation of such an electromagnetic hot spot has never been experimentally demonstrated. Relative to the existing nanostructures that can produce an electromagnetic hot spot, the BBA antenna has apparent advantages, which offers a new approach for nonlinear optics, surface-enhanced spectroscopy, biosensing, and metamaterials.


This study explores what students understand about enzyme–substrate interactions, using multiple representations of the phenomenon. In this paper we describe our use of the 3 Phase-Single Interview Technique with multiple representations to generate cognitive dissonance within students in order to uncover misconceptions of enzyme–substrate interactions. Findings from 25 student interviews are interpreted through the lens of multiple theoretical frameworks, including personal constructivism and coherence formation. The importance of classroom teachers engaging students in dialogue about representations is discussed.


View synthesis prediction (VSP) is a coding mode that predicts video blocks from synthesised frames. It is particularly useful in a multi-camera setup with large inter-camera distances. Adding a VSP-based SKIP mode to a standard Multiview Video Coding (MVC) framework improves the rate-distortion (RD) performance but increases the time complexity of the encoder. This letter proposes an early mode decision technique for VSP SKIP-enhanced MVC. Our method uses the correlation between the RD costs of the VSP SKIP mode in neighbouring views and Bayesian decision theory to reduce the number of candidate coding modes for a given macroblock. Simulation results showed that our technique can save up to 36.20% of the encoding time without any significant loss in RD performance.


Over the last two decades, advances in fabrication have led to significant progress in creating patterned heterostructures that support either carriers, such as electrons or holes, with specific band structure or electromagnetic waves with a given mode structure and dispersion. In this article, we review the properties of light in coupled optical waveguides that support specific energy spectra, with or without the effects of disorder, that are well-described by a Hermitian tight-binding model. We show that with a judicious choice of the initial wave packet, this system displays the characteristics of a quantum particle, including transverse photonic transport and localization, and that of a classical particle. We extend the analysis to non-Hermitian, parity and time-reversal ( PT $ \mathcal{PT}$ ) symmetric Hamiltonians which physically represent waveguide arrays with spatially separated, balanced absorption or amplification. We show that coupled waveguides are an ideal candidate to simulate PT $ \mathcal{PT}$ -symmetric Hamiltonians and the transition from a purely real energy spectrum to a spectrum with complex conjugate eigenvalues that occurs in them.


Future warfare concerns information superiority, i.e. supplying decisionmakers with better information than their opponents. Their decisions will be based on information from various sensors such as radars, UAVs, satellites, or any other object that can supply the decision makers with information. A system like this will make use of a huge amount of data, and the decisionmakers may not be able to handle all information that will be presented to them. Because of this, they might make decisions that are not optimal for the task. To enhance tha capability in decision making, the national defence college will create an avatar which will be located in a 3D presentation device, called the Visioscope (tm). If the computer system detects that a person might have made an erroneous decision, the avatar will act and point out the error, i.e. there will be a dialog between the decision makers and the avatar. One important factor when humans communicate with each other is mutual eye gaze. If mutual eye gaze can occur between the users and the avatar, and if the avatar can behave like a human, the communication process will be improved and the users will make less errors. This literature study aims to generate some ideas about how existing technology supports mutual eye gaze between the avatar and the users in the ROLF 2010 environment. The study partly concerns how a computer system can control an avatar so that it behaves like a human.


This white paper resulted from a risk dialogue project with climate scientists and experts on the subject of climate engineering – conducted by the neutral and independent Risk-Dialogue Foundation St. Gallen between April 2016 and March 2017. The aim was to identify the current state of research on the topic as well as related risk and to evaluate a potential need for wider public deliberation. The project was carried out on behalf of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), Climate Division. In line with views expressed during the dialogue, the sole objective of this paper is to argue for an open and public deliberation process and not to favour or promote any technologies or deployment thereof. The views expressed in this report are solely those of its authors, and do not reflect any official positions


A design study was undertaken on an infrared, 3-5-μm, panoramic optical system for a particular monitoring application. The different types of systems investigated covered the conventional fish-eye lens system, a panoramic block arrangement, and a new type of configuration based on a panoramic shell. Examples of these systems are included, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed.


MPEG-M is a suite of ISO/IEC standards (ISO/IEC 23006) that has been developed under the auspices of Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). MPEG-M, also known as Multimedia Service Platform Technologies (MSPT), facilitates a collection of middleware application programming interfaces (APIs) and elementary services (ESs) as well as service aggregation so that service providers (SPs) can offer users a plethora of innovative services by extending current Internet Protocol television (IPTV) technology toward the seamless integration of personal content creation and distribution, e-commerce, social networks, and Internet distribution of digital media.


Octocorals have been recognised as abundant and ecologically significant on many deep-sea
features. However their taxonomy and distribution remains poorly understood due to inadequate
historical literature and a paucity of definitive morphological characteristics, and this is now
hindering conservation and management in many of our important deep-sea marine ecosystems.
For example, a decadal study of fishing impacts on seamounts south of Tasmania, Australia revealed
a great diversity of octocorals, including two commonly collected and widely distributed genera,
Anthothela and Primnoisis, but specimens could not be identified to species due to taxonomic
confusion within the groups and hence could not be considered in diversity assessments and
conservation measures. The taxonomy of these genera is revised herein in order to prescribe genus
and species level morphological definitions, phylogeny and geographical extent. A multi-disciplinary
approach was used combining morphological characteristics such as colonial branching patterns,
polyp structure and sclerite form and arrangement, and phylogenetic reconstructions using two
mitochondrial gene regions (mtMutS and igr1–COI).
Anthothela (Family Anthothelidae), with six nominal species globally, is here divided into four
genera, two of which are new. Anthothela is found to have three valid species, A. grandiflora,
A. pacifica and A. tropicalis, another species Spongioderma (?) vickersi is reassigned to Anthothela
and two new species A. aldersladei and A. quattriniae, are described. Anthothela argentea and
A. nuttingi are reassigned to Victorgorgia (Family Anthothelidae) and two new species of this genus,
V. eminens and V. nyahae are described. These are the first records of Anthothela and Victorgorgia
from Australia. One new genus, Williamsius, is described for A. parviflora, which is restricted to
South African waters, and Lateothela anitorkilda n. gen., n. sp. is described to incorporate north
Atlantic Ocean specimens which have been traditionally been mistaken for A. grandiflora. There was
good congruence between morphological characteristics and molecular data at a generic level, but
at the species-level morphological and genetic variation was very low. Anthothela and Lateothela n.
gen. are found to be closely related to some nominal Alcyonium species and the Family
Anthothelidae is shown to be paraphyletic.
The genus Primnoisis (Isididae) is retained with 7 of the 8 nominal species, P. antarctica, P. rigida,
P. ambigua, P. delicatula, P. fragilis, P. formosa, P. mimas, validated and the eighth, P. sparsa is
synonymised with P. antarctica. In addition, the species Mopsea gracilis is reassigned to Primnoisis
and five new species are described; P. chatham, P. erymna, P. millerae, P. niwa and P. tasmani.
Most of the species fell into two clear groups, defined both by morphology and genetics, for which
two new sub-genera are proposed (P. (Primnoisis) and (P. Delicatisis)). Three species, P. ambigua, P. mimas and P. tasmani n. sp., could not be placed reliably in either sub-genus due to distinctive
morphological features or genetic dissimilarity. It was not possible to confirm the monophyly of the
genus due to unresolved relationships with the closely related genus Notisis and an undescribed
Mopseinae genus. P. tasmani n. sp., with a distribution restricted to the southeast of Australia, is
positioned basal to all other Primnoisis species based on DNA sequence data, suggesting southern
Australia as the origin of the genus, with subsequent vicariant speciation after the separation of
Gondwana and initiation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). North of the ACC, species are
restricted to general geographical features such as seamount complexes, ridges and plateaus. Three
species recorded south of the ACC are found to have extensive distributions around the Antarctic
continental shelf and two further species appear to be widely distributed. P. millerae n. sp. is found
to be separated by depth from other species on the Antarctic continental shelf and P. fragilis
appears to have limited connectivity between vastly separated Antarctic populations, although low
variability in the gene regions used and small sample size prohibit definitive conclusions.
These results illustrate significant undescribed diversity in the octocorals of the Southern Ocean and
indicate that without comprehensive taxonomic reviews, current biodiversity estimates are likely to
be grossly inaccurate, even at a genus level. This research will facilitate future ecological and
conservation research on these octocorals by allowing more robust identification, and producing
accurate geographic distributions and connectivity assessments. These in turn will guide
conservation efforts to protect these poorly understood deep-sea communities.


Search for efficient algorithms for distributed systems has become an important area of computer science. This research is driven by the need to efficiently process and communicate information generated by the system. In distributed systems, topologi cal information plays an important role in the design of fast algorithms for problems such as routing, broadcasting, and sorting. The central focus of this dissertation is the design and analysis of distributed algorithms for determining topological information in asynchronous communication networks. Specifically, we present distributed algo rithms for two generic problems: distributed graph problems and network traversal problems. Network location and network recognition are two important graph problems in distributed systems. We present unified algorithms for locating centers and medians of asynchronous communication networks. Also, we present both the centralized and decentralized versions of the algorithm. Furthermore, this is the first decentralized algorithm reported in the literature. These results are further extended to weighted net works. In addition, the unified algorithm can also be used to determine other topologi cal parameters such as the diameter, and centroids of distributed networks. Efficient algorithms for problems such as finding shortest paths, centers, and sorting could be designed if the network topology is known a priori. Towards this end, we solve an open problem of recognizing mesh ( grid ) structures. We formulate both centralized and decentralized algorithms for recognizing mesh networks. The time and message complexities of the algorithm are 0 (n 16) and 0(e+nlogn), respec tively, where n is the number of nodes and e is the number of edges of the graph vii underlying the network. Network traversal is a fundamental activity in a distributed system and it has been widely studied in the literature. We present efficient distributed algorithms for depth first traversal of an asynchronous communication network and show the useful ness of this algorithm in deriving efficient solutions to the problems related to network learning. Finally, we discuss application of some of these algorithms in distributed sensor networks.


Effective fusion of multiple data, including geographical, geological, geophysical, geochemical and dynamic data for hydrocarbon potential mapping, involves both a fusion algorithm and a convenient modelling platform. In this study, fuzzy logic and a geographical information system (GIS) are used to fuse geological and geophysical interpretations in mapping the gas potential of the Kazakhstan Marsel Territory Carboniferous system based on the assumed gas-accumulation model. Non-linear membership functions are used to transform the input data, while the gamma operator is used to combine the multiple datasets. Finally, the Carboniferous system targets, the Visean (C1v) and Serpukhovian (C1sr) units, are mapped. Gas testing in situ validated our results.


Nowadays, use of multilevel inverters in high-power applications clearly can be seen. High quality and lower distortion of the output voltage and low blocking voltage of semiconductor switches are being presented as the major privileges of the multilevel inverter compared to the traditional voltage source inverter. In this paper, a new topology of multilevel inverter is proposed as fundamental block. The proposed topology is generalized using series connection of the fundamental blocks. The proposed multilevel inverter has been analyzed in both symmetric and asymmetric operation modes. A great perfection in voltage levels number with minimum switching devices has been obtained in both symmetric and asymmetric modes. Thereafter, a detailed study of losses and peak inverse voltage (PIV) of the proposed multilevel inverter is given. Also, in continuation, a comparison between the proposed topology and the traditional one and a recently developed topology is carried out. Finally, a computer simulation using MATLAB/Simulink is presented and a laboratory prototype implementation verifies the results.