Block copolymers of poly(ethylene glycol)-bl-poly(propylene sulfide) (PEG-PPS) have recently emerged as a new macromolecular amphiphile capable of forming a wide range of morphologies when dispersed in water. To understand better the relationship between stability and morphology in terms of the relative and absolute block compositions, we have synthesized a collection of PEG-PPS block copolymers and quantified their critical aggregation concentration and observed their morphology using cryogenic transmission electron microscopy after thin film hydration with extrusion and after solvent dispersion from tetrahydrofuran, a solvent for both blocks. By understanding the relationship between aggregate character and block copolymer architecture, we have observed that whereas the relative block lengths control morphology, the stability of the aggregates upon dilution is determined by the absolute block length of the hydrophobic PPS block. We have compared results obtained with PEG-PPS to those obtained with poly(ethylene glycol)-bl-poly(propylene oxide)-bl-poly(ethylene glycol) block copolymers (Pluronics). The results reveal that the PEG-PPS aggregates are substantially more stable than Pluronic aggregates, by more than an order of magnitude. PEG-PPS can form a wide variety of stable or metastable morphologies in dilute solution within normal time and temperature ranges, whereas Pluronics can generally form only spherical micelles under the same conditions. On the basis of these results, block copolymers of PEG with poly(propylene sulfide) may present distinct advantages over those with poly(propylene glycol) for a number of applications.


Gerald Neuman discusses in historical and contemporary terms the repeated efforts of U.S. insiders to claim the Constitution as their exclusive property and to deny con-stitutional rights to aliens and immigrants - and even citizens if they are outside the nation's borders. Tracing such efforts from the debates over the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 to present-day controversies about illegal aliens and their children, the author argues that no human being subject to the governance of the United States should be a "stranger to the Constitution". Thus, whenever the government asserts its power to impose obligations on individuals, it brings them within the constitutional system and should afford them constitutional rights. In Neuman's view, this mutuality of obligation is the most persuasive approach to extending constitutional rights extraterritorially to all U.S. citizens and to those aliens on whom the United States seeks to impose legal responsibilities. Examining both mutuality and more flexible theories, Neuman defends some constitutional con-straints on immigration and deportation policies and argues that the political rights of aliens need not exclude suffrage. Finally, in regard to whether children born in the United States to illegally present alien parents should be U.S. citizens, he concludes that the Constitution's traditional shield against the emergence of a hereditary caste of "illegals" should be vigilantly preserved.


We studied climate trends and the occurrence of rare and extreme temperature and precipitation events in northern Fennoscandia in 1914–2013. Weather data were derived from nine observation stations located in Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia. The results showed that spring and autumn temperatures and to a lesser extent summer temperatures increased significantly in the study region, the observed changes being the greatest for daily minimum temperatures. The number of frost days declined both in spring and autumn. Rarely cold winter, spring, summer and autumn seasons had a low occurrence and rarely warm spring and autumn seasons a high occurrence during the last 20-year interval (1994–2013), compared to the other 20-year intervals. That period was also characterized by a low number of days with extremely low temperature in all seasons (4–9% of all extremely cold days) and a high number of April and October days with extremely high temperature (36–42% of all extremely warm days). A tendency of exceptionally high daily precipitation sums to grow even higher towards the end of the study period was also observed. To summarize, the results indicate a shortening of the cold season in northern Fennoscandia. Furthermore, the results suggest significant declines in extremely cold climate events in all seasons and increases in extremely warm climate events particularly in spring and autumn seasons.


This publication is the first scoping study aimed at compiling existing evaluation cases in the field of Communication for Development as applied to agricultural and rural development initiatives. It draws on a literature review and 19 cases across Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean comparing evidence of evaluative approaches, methods and outcomes of communication programmes and rural communication services. It also provides clear indications about the need to build evidence that inform policy to advance inclusive rural communication services.


Abstract : In this volume, John Collins speaks with the authority of one who was literally present at the birth of the low intensity conflict era. His long-term, intimate, and direct contact with the esoteric world of special operations has few parallels. Their roots go back in time and history considerably farther, but today's Special Operations Forces are largely products of the past three decades. Their development has been in response to the pressures of world-wide situations perceived to bear upon or which actually do affect American strategic interests. The use of raw military power may not provide solutions to the complex problems involved and may even be counter-productive. Special Operations forces, uniquely suited to fill the quasi-military gap, require the highest degree of professional competence in the application of the classical principles of war. This is a big order. It is difficult in a few words to pay John Collins the tribute he deserves for continuing efforts to educate both the Congress and the U.S. Armed Forces concerning the capabilities and limitations of special operations and the forces they involve. This latest addition to his carefully researched studies combines history, philosophy, factual data, and reference materials in a single document that should be on the desks of civilian and military leaders whose responsibilities relate in any way to special operations


The by-product use in agriculture has become a very promising alternative, once that, when guaranteeing destination for high organic content residues produced in diverse human activities, includes environment and economic aspects. This is because by providing a high nutrient input to plants, allows the reduction of costs of chemical fertilization. Thus, the objective of this work was to evaluate the residual effect of chemical fertilization and organic fertilization on yield and its components of cotton in crop rotation with sesame, when irrigated with treated wastewater and freshwater. For this, cotton plants (Gossypium hirsutum L.) were cultivated in 20 L capacity pots which had been previously cultivate with sesame (Sesamum indicum L.). This plants had been submitted to the treatments that resulted of a factorial combination of five doses of castor meal in the soil (0, 2, 3, 4 and 5 ton ha-1), two qualities of irrigation water (freshwater and treated wastewater), and two additional treatments with chemical fertilization (NPK + freshwater and NPK + wastewater). The wastewater was treated in UASB reactor (Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket) and the irrigation was carried through daily in accordance with culture water demand. The plants was cultivated until the end of the crop cycle and were determined the number of bolls for plant, mean weight of bolls and cotton yield for plant. Results showed that the residual effect of organic and chemical fertilization did not cause alteration the yield components and cotton yield. The irrigation with wastewater caused increase in cotton yield and its components in comparison to the plants irrigated with freshwater.


LFG-DOP is a powerful, hybrid model of language processing where the tree representations of Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) are augmented with the functional representations of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). The result is a robust parsing model which generates linguistically informed output. However, difficulties arise in the accurate implementation of fragmentation and sampling in this model. Due to these unresolved issues, there is currently no satisfactory implementation of the LFG-DOP model.

In this thesis, we propose a backing-off to Grammatical Feature-DOP (GF-DOP). The GF-DOP model differs from Tree-DOP and LFG-DOP in that the trees are annotated with selected features extracted from the f-structure, rather than explicitly linked to corresponding f-structure units. In this way, we rnake use of the irlformation available to us in the f-structure, while avoiding the problems inherent in the implementation of LFG-DOP. We aim to improve the quality of the parses generated by modeling additional functional and feature information.

Experiments on the HomeCentre corpus have shown this model to be a valuable middleground between the two alternative models. GF-DOP has been shown to outperform the Tree-DOP model, as a result of its ability to identify and make use of grammatical features, while maintaining the integrity of the probability model.


PURPOSE
Little is known about the context of the post-release risk environment among formerly incarcerated people who inject drugs (PWID) in Russia. The purpose of this paper is to explore these challenges as they relate to reentry, relapse to injection opioid use, and overdose.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH
The authors conducted 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews among PWID living in St Petersburg, Russia who had been incarcerated within the past two years. Participants were recruited from street outreach (n=20) and a drug treatment center (n=5).

FINDINGS
Emergent themes related to the post-release environment included financial instability, negative interactions with police, return to a drug using community, and reuniting with drug using peers. Many respondents relapsed to opioid use immediately after release. Those whose relapse occurred weeks or months after their release expressed more motivation to resist. Alcohol or stimulant use often preceded the opioid relapse episode. Among those who overdosed, alcohol use was often reported prior to overdosing on opioids.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
Future post-release interventions in Russia should effectively link PWID to social, medical, and harm reduction services. Particular attention should be focussed on helping former inmates find employment and overdose prevention training prior to leaving prison that should also cover the heightened risk of concomitant alcohol use.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE
In addition to describing a syndemic involving the intersection of incarceration, injection drug use, poverty, and alcohol abuse, the findings can inform future interventions to address these interrelated public health challenges within the Russian setting.


Two similar samples of InAs/GaAs quantum dots and their response to annealing at 700°C have been studied using scanning transmission electron microscopy. The only difference in the growth of both samples is the inclusion of p-doping by carbon in the GaAs barriers between the quantum dots in one of the wafers. The size and line density of and the change of indium concentration within the quantum dots have been investigated to understand the effect of carbon doping on the diffusion of indium atoms within the structures during the anneal.


Oligodendroglial tumors are rare subtypes of brain tumors and are often combined with other glial tumors in epidemiological analyses. However, different demographic associations and clinical characteristics suggest potentially different risk factors. The purpose of this study was to investigate possible risk factors for oligodendroglial tumors (including oligodendroglioma, anaplastic oligodendroglioma, and mixed glioma). Data from 7 case-control studies (5 US and 2 Scandinavian) were pooled. Unconditional logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), adjusted for age group, gender, and study site. Data on 617 cases and 1260 controls were available for analyses. Using data from all 7 studies, history of allergies and/or asthma was associated with a decreased risk of anaplastic oligodendroglioma (OR = 0.6; 95% CI: 0.4-0.9), and history of asthma only was associated with a decreased risk of oligodendroglioma (OR = 0.5; 95% CI: 0.3-0.9) and anaplastic oligodendroglioma (OR = 0.3; 95% CI: 0.1-0.9). A family history of brain tumors was associated with an increased risk of anaplastic oligodendroglioma (OR = 2.2; 95% CI: 1.1-4.5). Having had chicken pox was associated with a decreased risk of oligodendroglioma (OR = 0.6; 95% CI: 0.4-0.9) and anaplastic oligodendroglioma (OR = 0.5; 95% CI: 0.3-0.9) in the US studies. Although there is some overlap in risk factors between oligodendroglial tumors and gliomas as a group, it is likely that additional factors specific to oligodendroglial tumors have yet to be identified. Large, multi-institution international studies will be necessary to better characterize these etiological risk factors.


The behaviors of particles in a gas-solid contactor with inclined baffle plates that form a zig-zag path are experimentally studied. To improve the gas-solid contact efficiency, a table discharger is installed at the bottom of the column. In this contactor solid particles slide down along the baffle plates and are fluidized at the openings between the wall and the edge of the baffle plates by the upflowing gas. This structure, called a "moving-fluidized bed", has some of the advantages of both moving and fluidized beds.The feed rate of solid particles, the open spacing fraction and the inclination angle of the particle reflector were chosen as parameters for experimental conditions. The formation of bubbles was observed between the fluidized bed and moving bed regions and the bubble diameters were measured by using fiber optic probes. Particle velocities in the moving bed region along the baffle plate were measured as a measure of the circulating motion of the particles in the moving and fluidized bed region. It is concluded that the present apparatus performs at a high efficiency of gas-solid contact under dense flow conditions, as compared with a gas-solid contactor which was used in our earlier study.


In "Deceit and Self Deception Robert Trivers", whose work has been acclaimed by figures such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, looks at how and why we so often deceive ourselves. We lie to ourselves every day: about how well we drive, how much we're enjoying ourselves - even how good looking we are. In this ground-breaking book, Robert Trivers examines not only how we self-deceive, but also why, taking fascinating examples from aviation disasters, con artists, sexual betrayals and conflicts within families. Revealing, provocative and witty, "Deceit and Self-Deception" is one of the most vital books written this century, and will make you rethink everything that you think you know. Robert Trivers is one of the leading figures pioneering the field of sociobiology. He received his bachelors and PhD from Harvard University. He has been on the faculty at Harvard, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Rutgers University. "A remarkable book, by a uniquely brilliant scientist." (Richard Dawkins). "One of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought." (Steven Pinker). "Trivers ranks as one of the most important evolutionary theorists of his generation." (E. O. Wilson). "A powerful book ...essential for anyone who wants to try to counter their own unconscious biases." ("Independent").


In this interview, Dr. Kang illustrates some of the ways in which a country can address indoor air quality issues through legislation. Taking South Korea as a case study, the article explores the measures available to governments to ensure efficient control of indoor air quality, and to elaborate a plan for improvement going forward. Through a discussion on public-private interactions, the author shows that indoor air quality is a complex issue that requires an alignment of all policies, market forces and citizens in order to be managed appropriately. By and large, it is the dialogue and transparency between these different actors that ensures that good practices are promoted, and appropriate measures taken. While South Korea seems particularly advanced in orchestrating a response to air quality issues on a national scale, it is hoped that other countries will be inspired by the results achieved and follow suit by drafting innovative legislation on the topic.


Ad-hoc networks are crucial enablers of next generation communications. Such networks can be formed and reconfigured dynamically and they can be mobile, standalone or inter-networked with other networks. Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) are established by group of autonomous nodes that communicate with each other by establishing a multihop radio network and maintain connectivity in an infrastructureless manner. Security of the connections between devices and networks is crucial. Current MANET routing protocols inherently trust all participants being cooperative by nature and they depend on neighbouring nodes to route packets to a destination. Such a model allows malicious nods to potentially harm MANET communications links or reveal confidential data by launching different kind of attacks. The main objective of this thesis is to investigate and propose security mechanisms for MANET communications mainly emphasising on emergency scenarios where first responders' devices communicate by establishing a decentralised wireless network. To this end, we have proposed security mechanisms for innovtive routing and peer-to-peer overlay mechanisms for emergency MANETs proposed supplementarily to the findings of this thesis. Such security mechanisms guarntee confidentiality and integrity of the emergency MANET communications. We have also proposed novel ways of improving availability in MANETs in presence of intrusion detection systems by increasing the nodes' lifetime based on a novel game theoretic routing protocol for MANETs. We have thoroughly evaluated the performance of all the proposed mechanisms using a network simulator. The main objective of undertaking these evaluations was to guarantee that security introduces affordable overhead thereby respecting the Quality-of-Service of MANET communication links.


Six synthetic manganese dioxides (coded SBPA, Faradiser WSZ, IBA no.14, IBA no.19, R2 and Faradiser M) covering the range of crystal structures exhibited by battery active materials were studied by XRD (X-Ray Diffraction) and FTIR (Fourier Transform Infra-Red) spectroscopy when H was inserted with organic reductants. Initial x-ray diffraction patterns (i.e. before H insertion) indicated a structural series, the γ-γt-MnO2 series. where γ-MnO2 designates the phase defined by de Wolff's intergrowth model. This model described γ-MnO2 as a random alternation of two types of layers derived
from the known structures of the minerals ramsdellite and pyrolusite. γ-MnO2 may be characterised by one parameter, p, the pyrolusite type layer fraction. p=0 corresponds to ramsdellite whereas p=1 corresponds to pyrolusite. The additional structural defect responsible for the γ-γt-MnO2 series was found to be that of microtwinning in accordance with the model proposed by Pannetier et al. Material SBPA possessed a low degree of microtwinning with p=0.204±O.OO5 whereas typical battery active manganese dioxides IBA no.19 and R2 possessed x-ray diffraction patterns consistent with a high degree of microtwinning and p-0.2. The other materials, except Faradiser M, displayed
x-ray diffraction patterns intermediate between those of SBPA and IBA no. 19/R2. Faradiser M possessed a high degree of microtwinning but with p-0.7.
The most H inserted compounds (i.e. of composition MnOOH1.0) also formed an analogous structural series. the δ-δt-MnOOH series. δ-MnOOH may be described as a random alternation of two types of layers derived from the known structures of the minerals groutite and manganite which are reduced isostructural derivatives of ramsdellite and pyrolusite. δ-MnOOH was successfully analyzed for the concentration of (presumed) manganite type layer defects (m) in an analogous manner to that required to determine p, which confirmed the existence of reduced intergrowth structures. m was found to be less than p unless the H insertion reaction temperature was lowered (-2°C) in which case m=p. This was consistent with the observed precipitation of small amounts of γ-MnOOH when H was inserted with chemical reductants in non-aqueous solvents.
The level of H insertion may be represented by the formula r in MnOOHr, where -0.1≤r≤1.0 (r starts at a value greater than zero due to the non-stoichiometry of battery active materials). H insertion into EMD (Electrodeposited Manganese Dioxide) R2 led to approximate isotropic lattice expansion in the H insertion region 0.11≤r≤0.80. This observation was consistent with a homogeneous solid state reduction with formation of a solid solution in which H+ and e- were mobile. In the region 0.80≤r≤1.01'new' non-moving peaks emerged characteristic of the final product while the original lines continued to move. The line shift indicated anisotropic lattice expansion. The 'new' non moving peaks could not be interpreted on the basis that a new phase was emerging. An explanation for this behaviour based on the properties of the defect crystal structure of the original material has been found. It involved identification of a type of x-ray line shift characteristic of random layer structures. The effects observed were consistent with random precipitation of δ-MnOOH micro-domains within the solid solution. The 'new lines' which emerged represented a re-emergence of lines originally overlapped with other lines due to the particular effects of microtwinning. The appearance of microdomains of the end product crystallizing within the solid solution implied that H+ and e- were no longer mobile in the crystal structure but located or 'frozen' in position. The presence of 'frozen' H (i.e δ-MnOOH micro-domains) was supported by measurements of FTIR band areas at wavenumber regions where OH vibration modes occurred. The onset of OH vibration modes with increasing H insertion supported the interpretation of the x-ray patterns.
Interpretation of the FTIR spectra of material SBPA indicated no OH bond formation in the H insertion region 0.068≤r≤0.35 and OH bond formation in the region 0.35≤r≤0.882. Examination of the XRD patterns indicated heterogeneous solid state reduction had occurred in the H insertion region 0.40≤r≤0.882. The onset of OH bond formation at r=0.35 was interpreted as a necessary precursor to heterogeneous reduction starting at r=OAO. Heterogeneous reduction was presumed to have occurred by H location in an outer particulate layer which propagated into the bulk.
H insertion into the remaining materials was interpreted in a similar manner. That is beyond a certain r in MnOOHr H location, as indicated by OH bond formation, led to crystallization of δ-MnOOH micro-domains which either randomly precipitated in the solid solution or they associated in such a way that led to heterogeneous reduction. The r in MnOOHr at which H started to locate appeared to depend on the relative rates at which H was inserted and diffused into the solid. H location occurred at r-0.20 for Faradiser M in contrast to R2 in which it located at r=0.80.
A complementary study of the stability of the H inserted compounds in 7M KOH was carried out. Results from potential measurements, x-ray diffraction and SEM were obtained. Over a period of six weeks potential measurements indicated development of a heterogeneous potential at deep H insertion levels. X-ray diffraction and SEM signified formation of δ-MnO2 and γ-MnOOH. The results confirm the proposition of Holton et al. that H inserted compounds are unstable in KOH and disproportionate into δ-MnO2 and γ–MnOOH. This work removes doubt concerning the above proposition since
formation of δ-MnO2 n their work was not simply the result of instability. The H insertion level at which instability was observed appeared related to the formation of δ-MnOOH micro-domains, particularly for R2 in which instability occurred between 0.80≤r≤1.0. This coincides with the oxidation state, MnO1.6, beyond which alkaline manganese batteries cease to deliver useful power on prolonged intermittent discharge. Faradiser M possessed the largest instability region (0.48≤r≤1.0) and would, on this basis, be unsuitable for alkaline manganese batteries.


Andean highland ecosystems (known as paramos) have a great potential to store water and organic carbon, which fulfill the inherent functions associated to the regulation of carbon and water cycles, characteristics linked to their parent material (volcanic ash). However, paramos are at high risk of degradation associated with land use dynamics that affect organic carbon quality in the surface soil. Changes in vegetation cover, with transition from natural forest to tillage and then pasture, make the soil vulnerable to degradation by compaction, erosion, and carbon dioxide emissions associated with increased anthropogenic activity. Despite this cover change, information on soil carbon dynamics in paramos is scarce, impeding conservation management strategies in these ecosystems. This study evaluates the impact of different soil uses within a transect in the Guerrero paramo estimated from soil organic carbon (SOC) stock in the upper meter and carbon condition (expressed as stratification ratio, SR) in the surface soil. Carbon storage varied from 165.2 to 721.9 t ha-1 in the upper meter of soil with SR1(0-10/10-20cm) between 0.92 and 2.01 and SR2(0-10/20-30cm) between 0.99 and 2.05. Results of this study highlighted that in the fragile ecosystems than Andean paramos, the geomorphological position in relation to soil uses and management practices conditioned soil carbon availability, affecting pedogenetic processes. SR of SOC associated to anthropogenic intervention activities it does not indicate by itself C sequestration. In future researches it is necessary include additional parameters than net primary productivity and historic vegetation.


Abstract Cell parameters and atomic coordinates for the true micas are varied to simulate layer deformation along the [001]* direction by an external force. The resulting (deformed) structures are then used to determine bonding forces and to calculate a maximum force component along the [001]*. Bonding forces are compared to experimental observations of bond lengths of the interlayer, octahedral, and tetrahedral sites. Calculated bonding forces are consistent with experimental observations that locate the cleavage plane along the interlayer. Because many studies have shown that the chemical composition of the cleavage surface often differs from the structure of the bulk, compositional variations were considered in determining cleavage energy. The chemical composition of the cleavage surface may produce a reduction in cleavage energy. This reduction in energy depends on various elements occurring in greater number at the cleavage surface than in the bulk. A reduction in cleavage energy occurs if there is a reduction in the interlayer site size, as measured by the area defined by the first-coordination basal oxygen atoms. In addition, a reduction in lateral cell dimensions and an increase in the bonding force between the basal oxygen atoms and the interlayer cation also results in a reduction in cleavage energy in the direction normal to the layer. Joins considered are phlogopite-annite, tetra-ferriphlogopite-tetra-ferri-annite, polylithionite-siderophyllite, muscovite-celadonite, and muscovite-paragonite. A lack of homogeneity in composition may produce preferential cleavage locations within the family of (001) planes. The cleavage energy appears to be greater for homogeneous synthetic micas compared to natural micas.


Background: Both arnica and corticosteroids have been suggested for reducing the postoperative edema and bruising associated with rhinoplasty. This study compared the efficacy of these products following rhinoplasty. Methods: Forty-eight primary rhinoplasty patients were randomized into three groups: group P received 10 mg of dexamethasone (intravenously) intraoperatively followed by a 6-day oral tapering dose of methyl-prednisone; group A received arnica three times a day for 4 days; and group C received neither agent and served as the control. Three blinded panelists rated the extent of ecchymosis, the intensity of the ecchymosis, and the severity of the edema. Results: On postoperative day 2, there were no significant differences in the ratings of extent and intensity of ecchymosis among the groups. There was a significant difference for the edema rating (p < 0.0001), with group C demonstrating more swelling compared with groups A and P. In addition, on postoperative day 8, group P demonstrated a significantly larger extent of ecchymosis (p < 0.05) and higher intensity of ecchymosis (p < 0.01) compared with groups A and C. There were no differences in the magnitude of edema by postoperative day 8 among the three groups. When the differences between day 2 and day 8 ratings were considered, groups A and C exhibited significantly more resolution of ecchymosis by day 8 compared with group P (p < 0.05). Conclusions: This study suggests that both arnica and corticosteroids may be effective in reducing edema during the early postoperative period. Arnica does not appear to provide any benefit with regard to extent and intensity of ecchymosis. The delay in resolution of ecchymosis for patients receiving corticosteroids may outweigh the benefit of reducing edema during the early postoperative period.


This paper presents a shape transformation control method of a mobile robot with wheel-arms. The proposed method aims at transformation from a four-wheeled mode for high-speed mobility to an inverted pendulum mode, which has advantages of high viewing position and small turning radius. The transformation starts with lifting up the wheel-arms to raise the center of gravity of the whole robot including the main body and arms. From such initial states, the body is lifted up and controlled to the target angle by partial linearization, while returning the arms to the initial angle. Then, the robot position is controlled by manipulating the target body angle. Unlike existing methods, we take into account the effects of the body angular velocity and the tracking error of the body angle by constructing a model set, which is composed of a single nominal model and its polytopic uncertainty for the system matrices. In order to derive the model set, we assume that the target body angle is constrained to a prescribed range. Therefore, the target body angle is manipulated using a model predictive control method, such that the closed-loop system is asymptotically stabilized, while the given constraint is satisfied, for all systems in the model set. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in both simulations and real robot experiments.


Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict by John B. Dunlop (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, xi, 234 pp, $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper). Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus by Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal (New York: New York University Press, 1998, xiv, 416 pp, $39.50). Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power by Anatol Lieven (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, xii, 436 pp, $57.95 cloth, $25.60 paper). Prisoner of the Mountains directed by Sergei Bodrov (Orion Pictures, 1997, 99 minutes).In November 1994 Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia, was worried about his standing in the opinion polls. Elections to the State Duma the previous year had not gone well, and the legislature was now dominated by a 'red-brown' opposition of old-line communists and nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovskii's somewhat misleadingly named Liberal Democratic party. Meanwhile, chronic economic difficulties, rising crime, and increasingly flagrant corruption continued to erode Yeltsin's popularity. Even more worrisome, in the Caucasus region on Russia's southern border, Islamic separatists were threatening the Russian Federation's fragile unity.The crisis in the south centred on Chechnya, a small Muslim nation on the northern edge of the Caucasus mountain range that had declared its independence from Moscow in November 1991, shortly after the collapse of the USSR. Ironically, Yeltsin initially encouraged Chechen separatism in his campaign to weaken the authority of his archrival, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Although Yeltsin now opposed the move, over the next two years he did little to re-establish Moscow's authority over the breakaway republic. There were far bigger fish to fry at home, such as the struggle with the Supreme Soviet that had ended in a bloody showdown in October 1993.As for Chechnya, President Dzhokhar Dudaev, a charismatic former Soviet air force general with a penchant for melodramatic rhetoric and Cosa Nostra couture, had proven spectacularly unfit to govern his infant regime. With an unusually high number of BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes racing about the streets, there were many outward signs of prosperity in the capital, Grozny. Yet much of the republic's civic apparatus, such as schools and hospitals, had all but ceased to function. In the words of a British journalist: 'Dudaev seemed much more interested in the idea of calling Chechnya independent than in the practicality of making it work.' By 1994, Chechens were growing increasingly unhappy with their leader's laissez-faire style. There were many signs that his many domestic political opponents might soon force Dudaev out of office.Yeltsin was not prepared to wait. His own heavy-handed efforts to encourage Dudaev's foes had ended ignominiously on 26 November 1994, when an attempt to seize Grozny by opposition forces reinforced with Russian armour was easily quashed. The humiliation of this Caucasian Bay of Pigs only further encouraged hard-liners in the Kremlin. At the same time, although the presidential election was still more than a year away, it seemed that decisive action would surely boost Yeltsin's sagging political fortunes. One leading official reasoned: 'It is not only a question of the integrity of Russia. We need a small victorious war to raise the president's ratings.' After all, only two months earlier United States troops had easily occupied the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, in a similar operation to restore 'legitimacy' there. The Russian minister of defence, Pavel Grachev, boasted that one paratroop brigade would need no more than two hours to secure Grozny.General Grachev proved to be too optimistic. On 31 December, a day that happened to coincide with the minister's birthday, some 6,000 Russian ground troops launched a major assault on the Chechen capital. Even though Dudaev's men had done little to prepare the city's defences, it would take seven weeks of vicious urban combat and heavy artillery strikes to drive them out of their capital. …


We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Direct File System (DFS) for virtualized flash storage. Instead of using traditional layers of abstraction, our layers of abstraction are designed for directly accessing flash memory devices. DFS has two main novel features. First, it lays out its files directly in a very large virtual storage address space provided by FusionIO's virtual flash storage layer. Second, it leverages the virtual flash storage layer to perform block allocations and atomic updates. As a result, DFS performs better and is much simpler than a traditional Unix file system with similar functionalities. Our microbenchmark results show that DFS can deliver 94,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) for direct reads and 71,000 IOPS for direct writes with the virtualized flash storage layer on FusionIO's ioDrive. For direct access performance, DFS is consistently better than ext3 on the same platform, sometimes by 20%. For buffered access performance, DFS is also consistently better than ext3, and sometimes by over 149%. Our application benchmarks show that DFS outperforms ext3 by 7% to 250% while requiring less CPU power.


This paper documents the short run and long run behavior of the search and matching model with staggered Nash wage bargaining. It turns out that there is a strong tradeoff inherent in assuming that previously bargained sticky wages apply to new hires. If sticky wages apply to new hires, then the staggered Nash bargaining model can generate realistic volatility in labor input, but it predicts a strong counterfactually negative long run relationship between inflation and unemployment. This finding is robust to including a microeconomically realistic degree of indexation of wages to inflation. The lack of a negative long run relationship between trend inflation and unemployment provides indirect evidence against the proposed mechanism that high inflation systematically makes new hiring more profitable by depressing the real wages of new hires.


In Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system, the speech signal is degraded when passed through the network layers. The speech signal is processed through the best effort policy based IP network, which leads to the network degradations including delay, packet loss and jitter. The packet loss is the major issue of the degradation in the VoIP signal quality; even a single lost packet may generate audible distortion in the decoded speech signal. In addition to these network degradations, the quality of the speech signal is also affected by the environmental noises and coder distortions. The signal quality of the VoIP system is improved through the interleaving technique. The performance of the system is evaluated for various types of noises at different network conditions. The performance of the enhanced VoIP signal is evaluated using wideband extension-perceptual evaluation of speech quality (WB-PESQ) measurement for wideband signal.


Major changes in the U.S. high level waste management program since passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA) have weakened the social consensus about waste policy that existed at that time. Establishment of a stronger and more inclusive consensus is perhaps the most important social system issue now facing the waste program. The current period of reexamination of the program offers an opportunity for such an effort. Central to any consensus must be agreement about the relationship between the approach to repository development and interim storage of spent fuel, and in particular about the role of a Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) facility. A basis for agreement might be found by combining a more experimental approach to repository development with an early MRS facility.


This study used a 24-h ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) monitor to study the relationship between dialysis room-measured blood pressures (BP) and mean 24-h systolic and diastolic ambulatory BP (SABP and DABP) with left ventricular mass (LV) in a group of 35 stable hemodialysis patients. Predialysis and postdialysis systolic and diastolic blood pressure data were collected for the 12 dialysis treatments before the wearing of the ABP device, and the means of these values are reported. All patients were maintained on the same antihypertensive medications for 3 months before the study and had a stable hematocrit value of 30 +/- 3% during this time period. There was no difference detected between daytime and nighttime ABP. SABP was a mean of 4.7 mm Hg below predialysis systolic BP (P = 0.004) and DABP was a mean of 3.7 mm Hg below predialysis diastolic BP. There was a strong correlation between SABP and predialysis systolic BP (r = 0.67, P = 0.0001); however, postdialysis diastolic BP correlated better with DABP than did predialysis diastolic BP. In addition, LV mass correlated with SABP (r = 0.35, P = 0.03) and predialysis systolic BP (r = 0.35, P = 0.03). There was no apparent correlation between either pre- or postdialysis diastolic BP with LV mass. It was concluded that predialysis systolic BP and postdialysis diastolic BP correlates strongly with SABP and DABP. Furthermore, predialysis systolic BP correlates with LV mass in hemodialysis patients. If the deleterious effects of hypertension in this patient population are to be avoided, it is the predialysis systolic BP that needs to be controlled: It is insufficient to be satisfied with good postdialysis BP control, if patients are hypertensive before beginning dialysis.


Background Compromised lipophagy with unknown mechanisms may be critically involved in the intracellular accumulation of lipids, contributing to elevated atherosclerosis and liver steatosis. We hypothesize that toll‐interacting protein (Tollip), a key innate immune molecule involved in the fusion of autolysosome, may play a significant role in lipophagy and modulate lipid accumulation during the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis and liver steatosis. Methods and Results By comparing mice fed with either a Western high‐fat diet or a regular chow diet, we observed that both atherosclerosis and liver steatosis were aggravated in apolipoprotein E–deficient (ApoE−/−)/Tollip−/− mice as compared with ApoE−/− mice. Through electron microscopy analyses, we observed compromised fusion of lipid droplets with lysosomes within aortic macrophages as well as liver hepatocytes from ApoE−/−/Tollip−/− mice as compared with ApoE−/− mice. As a molecular indicator for disrupted lysosome fusion, the levels of p62 were significantly elevated in aortic and liver tissues from ApoE−/−/Tollip−/− mice. Molecules involved in facilitating lipophagy completion such as Ras‐related protein 7 and gamma‐aminobutyric acid receptor‐associated protein were reduced in ApoE−/−/Tollip−/− mice as compared with ApoE−/− mice. Intriguingly, ApoE−/−/Tollip−/− mice had reduced circulating levels of inflammatory cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor‐α and increased levels of transforming growth factor‐β. The reduced inflammation due to Tollip deficiency is consistent with a stable atherosclerotic plaque phenotype with increased levels of plaque collagen and smooth muscle cells in ApoE−/−/Tollip−/− mice. Conclusions Tollip deficiency selectively leads to enlarged yet stable atherosclerotic plaques, increased circulating lipids, liver steatosis, and reduced inflammation. Compromised lipophagy and reduced expression of inflammatory mediators due to Tollip deficiency may be the underlying causes. Our data suggest that lipid accumulation and inflammation may be intertwined yet independent processes during the progression of atherosclerosis and steatosis.


A device for the convenient quantitative measurement of the thermal radiation from the atmosphere has been developed. In the instrument the emission spectrum of the earth's atmosphere as observed at ground level is compared automatically with a spectrum approximating that of a blackbody at the boiling point of liquid nitrogen at atmospheric pressure. The most prominent features of the atmospheric spectrum between 4 μ and 15.5 μ, observed during daylight and darkness when the sky is clear, are due to emission by carbon dioxide, ozone, and water vapor; the intensity of the water vapor emission shows pronounced variations with atmospheric temperature and humidity. The spectrum of an overcast sky resembles that of a blackbody. By comparing the recorder traces of the atmospheric spectra with similar traces obtained with a blackbody source, it is possible to estimate the effective radiation temperature of various portions of the sky for various atmospheric conditions.


The religious history of Bremen includes many impressive figures. Probably the most enigmatic figure of Bremen's church life around 1900 was the pastor at St. Martini, Albert Kalthoff (1850-1906). However, his impact reached beyond the borders of local religious history: He was important for the history of the Protestant culture of piety as well as for a religious historical analysis of reform attempts within Protestantism in Imperial Germany. Kalthoff was part of the leftist reform movement within German Protestantism. Furthermore, he can be said to have had certain sympathies for the free thinker movement. This article wants to situate Kalthoff and his public works and goals in religious history with regard to the religious-confessional, cultural-religious, and cultural-political tendencies of his time. His example delineates the contours of a transitional space between Protestantism and the free thinker movement.


Labor productivity, human capital formation, and income growth decline amid hot ambient temperatures. The implications of such temperature sensitivity for climate change damages depend upon the capacity for human adaptation to persistent temperature changes—as opposed to idiosyncratic temperature variation. Studying millions of collegiate track and field performances from 2005 to 2019, this paper shows that performance diminution in hot ambient conditions is mitigated by heat adaptation, a physiological response to heat stress and associated physical and cognitive impairments. Across varied specifications of the temperature-performance relationship, adaptation reduces performance losses from alternative climate change scenarios by more than 50%.


ABSTRACT The Islamic State's conquest of swathes of Iraqi territory, combined with falling oil prices, revealed the fault lines of a model of economic development that made the country extremely vulnerable to the events of 2014. Over the last 13 years, the consolidation of the rentier economy in parallel to the promotion of a neoliberal model – a neoliberal rentier system – has not initiated a process of sustainable economic development. The main factors explaining this missed opportunity can be found in the tensions that exist between the two models and, in particular, between the relative roles of the state and the private sector as drivers of economic development.


Eastern Anatolia is regarded as one of the best examples of continental collision, represented by a 2 km high plateau. It displays shallow and diffuse seismicity, indicating that the crust is still being actively deformed. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Eastern Anatolia is the volume and compositional variability of collision‐related volcanic products erupted during the Neogene and Quaternary time. A number of models have been proposed for the genesis of this volcanism in the region. However, recent geophysical studies have revealed that a mantle lithosphere is almost completely absent beneath a greater portion of the region, which makes us question the validity of the previous models. In this paper, we propose a new model for magma genesis: slab steepening and breakoff beneath a large subduction‐accretion complex. This model holds that a northward subducting oceanic lithosphere beneath the Eastern Anatolia Accretionary Prism gets steepened and eventually detached from the continental lithosphere of the Bitlis‐Poturge Massif, following the continent‐accretionary complex collision. This brings the asthenospheric mantle in contact with the accretionary complex at shallow depths (e.g., around 50 km), resulting in rapid regional uplift and extensive melting which leads to collisional volcanism.


Introduction Anthroposophic medicine is a form of integrative medicine that originated in Europe but is not well known in the US. It is comprehensive and heterogenous in scope and remains provocative and controversial in many academic circles. Assessment of the nature and potential contribution of anthroposophic medicine to whole person care and global health seems appropriate. Methods Because of the heterogenous and multifaceted character of anthroposophic medicine, a narrative review format was chosen. A Health Technology Assessment of anthroposophic medicine in 2006 was reviewed and used as a starting point. A Medline search from 2006 to July 2020 was performed using various search terms and restricted to English. Books, articles, reviews and websites were assessed for clinical relevance and interest to the general reader. Abstracts of German language articles were reviewed when available. Reference lists of articles and the author's personal references were also consulted. Results The literature on anthroposophic medicine is vast, providing new ways of thinking, a holistic view of the world, and many integrating concepts useful in medicine. In the last ∼20 years there has been a growing research base and implementation of many anthroposophical concepts in the integrated care of patients. Books and articles relevant to describing the foundations, scientific status, safety, effectiveness and criticisms of anthroposophic medicine are discussed. Discussion An objective and comprehensive analysis of anthroposophic medicine finds it provocative, stimulating and potentially fruitful as an integrative system for whole person care, including under-recognized life processes and psychospiritual aspects of human beings. It has a legitimate, new type of scientific status as well as documented safety and effectiveness in some areas of its multimodal approach. Criticisms and controversies of anthroposophic medicine are often a result of lack of familiarity with its methods and approach and/or come from historically fixed ideas of what constitutes legitimate science.


In our research, we have examined how often children and teenagers sit down in front of
television screens and come into contact with television advertisements and other sales
promotion tools used by companies. We mostly placed emphasis on brand-related cartoon
characters, logos and slogans used by companies. The remembering rate is shockingly high,
higher than is case of their parents. We can say that well-placed cartoon characters, logos and colors
play a very important role in influencing children. All of these contribute to the development of
brand loyalty, which – if develops during childhood – can last an entire lifetime.


The current research aims to contribute to the literature by examining the previously untested relationship of individual differences in working memory, trait anxiety and Iowa gambling task performance in healthy adults. Previous research has found working memory negatively relates to trait anxiety, and that trait anxiety has been positively and negatively related to Iowa gambling task performance, yet working memory and Iowa gambling task performance are often positively related to one another. In order to explore this uncertain relationship the current experiment hypothesised that trait anxiety and working memory would correlate with Iowa gambling task performance, and would combine to explain additional variance of Iowa gambling task performance. Two complex span measures of working memory were used to examine general domain working memory; operation span and symmetry span. Anxiety was measured using the trait component of the state-trait anxiety inventory. 64 students M=20.69, SD=2.57 completed each measure in the current experiment. A multiple regression analysis was used to examine the correlation between measures of working memory, anxiety, and complex decision making, the experiment found no relationship between any of the variables. The results are discussed in relation to the attentional control theory, the somatic marker hypothesis, the fuzzy trace theory, and tripartite theory. It concludes by arguing that working memory and trait anxiety are related to Iowa gambling task performance but in a nonlinear way, and postulating the need for more comprehensive research that reflects the multifaceted demands of Iowa gambling task performance.


ABSTRACT: The laser and the transistor are two of the most important inventions of the 20th century. Basic agreement exists that Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented the transistor. Inventorship priority over the laser has been contested. By mobilizing patent and patent-related sources, traditional scientific literature, published commentaries, interviews with several of the surviving principals, and the Townes papers in the Library of Congress, we are able to suggest an invention priority for the laser that we believe improves on previous scholarship. We conclude that there is no single inventor of the laser, but that the most fundamental U.S. contributions were made by Townes, Schawlow, and Bloembergen. We believe the logic used here for deciding invention priority, which includes a careful study of patent claims, may be useful in other cases where inventorship is of interest.


We investigate improvements of AdaBoost that can exploit the fact that the weak hypotheses are one-sided, i.e. either all its positive (or negative) predictions are correct. In particular, for any set of m labeled examples consistent with a disjunction of k literals (which are one-sided in this case), AdaBoost constructs a consistent hypothesis by using O(k2 logm) iterations. On the other hand, a greedy set covering algorithm finds a consistent hypothesis of size O(k log m). Our primary question is whether there is a simple boosting algorithm that performs as well as the greedy set covering.

We first show that InfoBoost, a modification of AdaBoost proposed by Aslam for a different purpose, does perform as well as the greedy set covering algorithm. We then show that AdaBoost requires Ω(k2 log m) iterations for learning k-literal disjunctions. We achieve this with an adversary construction and as well as in simple experiments based on artificial data. Further we give a variant called SemiBoost that can handle the degenerate case when the given examples all have the same label. We conclude by showing that SemiBoost can be used to produce small conjunctions as well.


The influence of informal institutions on economic outcomes for low income individuals and households has received little attention in the United States. Yet, drawing on social capital theory and existing studies from developing countries where informal institutions have been widely used in promoting economic opportunities of families in poverty, one would expect these institutions to have positive effects on the economic outcomes of low income individuals in the context of an IDA program. Using a sample of 840 respondents who were enrolled in a community action program, this study assesses the effects of informal networks of social support on performance in a matched savings program. Results show partial support for the hypothesized relationship. Specifically, an increase in the amount of help a respondent gives to members of her community is inversely related to performance in an IDA program. This may imply that although informal networks have mutual benefits for both the individual and community, economically these benefits may be mixed. Among low income individuals saving in an IDA program, participating in such networks may constrain the economic resources available to them or their households; hence impacting their performance negatively.


Childhood obesity forms a link between adult obesity and cardio-vascular risk. Thus we conducted a school-based cross-sectional survey to estimate the prevalence of obesity in 6-12 year-old children of Vadodara City and to investigate the role of associated risk factors. Background information and anthropometry (1067), diet history and activity pattern (n=140), serum glucose and lipids (n=36) were studied on children. Prevalence of over-weight and obesity as per IOTF, CDC and Must et al standards were 20.3%, 21.6% and 23.4% respectively. Risk factor analysis revealed that heredity and income of parents con-tributed significantly to the prevalence of obesity. BMI of obese children's parents were sig-nificantly higher than normal BMIchildren's parents. Mean calorie intake was higher in obese and overweight children as compared to normal children. Energy expenditure pattern and lipid profile were not significantly different between normal, overweight or obese chil-dren. Thus obesity is a problem even in the lower age-groups and large-scale intervention strategies, focusing on improving modifiable risk factors, especially type of diet (with re-gard to calorie & and fat intake) and physical activity should be designed to arrest the trend.


Impact assessment is an important tool to inform decision makers and stakeholders in advance about the impact their decisions will have. Within the field of impact assessment an aspect-byaspect approach is currently used. For each impact, economic, social and environmental, a different team will write their own report. Links between the impact fields can therefore not be taken into account. The different reports often review different alternatives and may be contradicting. Based on the incomplete, inconsistent and sometimes contradicting information, decision makers currently have to draw their own conclusion about the overall impact of the project.
From the impact assessment community there are calls for a new `integrated impact assessment? method. This method should deliver a single document, which reviews all the impact fields. The method should offer traceability, assuring that decisions made uring the impact assessment process are made explicit and traceable. It should make second order effects visible, which are effects caused by the impact of the main project. Finally it should provide the
links between the impact fields, making trade-offs between the impacts on different impact fields possible. Based on the observed problems in the impact assessment community, this report asks the
question: How can the methods of system engineering and value engineering be integrated with the environmental impact assessment and can the resulting integrated impact assessment method be used to find and solve or mitigate the environmental, social and economic impact of a planned golf resort on St. Eustatius?


In this paper, we develop a linear technique that predicts how the stability of a thermoacoustic system changes due to the action of a generic passive feedback device or a generic change in the base state. From this, one can calculate the passive device or base state change that most stabilizes the system. This theoretical framework, based on adjoint equations, is applied to two types of Rijke tube. The first contains an electrically heated hot wire, and the second contains a diffusion flame. Both heat sources are assumed to be compact, so that the acoustic and heat release models can be decoupled. We find that the most effective passive control device is an adiabatic mesh placed at the downstream end of the Rijke tube. We also investigate the effects of a second hot wire and a local variation of the cross-sectional area but find that both affect the frequency more than the growth rate. This application of adjoint sensitivity analysis opens up new possibilities for the passive control of thermoacoustic oscillations. For example, the influence of base state changes can be combined with other constraints, such as that the total heat release rate remains constant, in order to show how an unstable thermoacoustic system should be changed in order to make it stable. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4024957]


ABSTRACT The objective of this study was to provide an updated review of the magnitude of the relationship between alcohol use and suicidal behaviour at the individual and the population level. Systematic literature searches retrieved 14 reviews of individual level studies and 16 primary population level studies. Alcohol abuse and alcohol intoxication are often present in suicidal behaviour; risk of suicide is elevated in alcohol abusers and increasing population drinking tends to be associated with increase in suicide rates. Estimated magnitude of the relationship differs for men and women and it varies at the population level across cultures with different drinking pattern. These variations probably reflect gender differences and cultural variation in drinking behavior generally. Empirical evidence for a causal relationship is still urgently needed.


The global arena for foreign direct investment (FDI) has become much more fluid and complex in the five years from 2010 to 2015. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) as a region has shown exceptional growth but relatively lacklustre FDI inflows. Investment protocols might be revised, as SADC needs to re-envisage itself as an investment destination. It currently receives mostly resource-based investment in subsequent supporting service industries. The end of 2014 saw sharp declines in commodity prices, especially oil, and forecasts show a sluggish return to previous levels. This requires SADC policymakers to take a new look at current investment policies and attitudes. Global value chains and spatial factors show that dated ideological policymaking will need to be replaced with proven, growth-orientated developmental strategies. SADC Investment Perspectives in a Changing International Investment Landscape


The nomenklatura system that had taken shape in the Soviet Union in the 1920s was implemented in the Estonian SSR in the post-war years, even though this issue was already on the agenda during the first year of Soviet occupation. The year 1945 was the most important from the standpoint of getting the nomenklatura system to start functioning since it was then that the system for documenting nomenklatura cadres was worked out, personal fi les were drawn up, a card fi le of personal cards of the nomenklatura cadres was established, and the ECP CC nomenklatura was approved. The specification of the principles of the nomenklatura carried out at the USSR-wide level in 1946 and the drawing up of a new USSR-wide list also brought changes in the nomenklaturas of the local Party committees. The first post-war ECP CC nomenklatura was approved in September of 1946 and it listed a total of 1739 official posts. The total number of positions that belonged to the ECP CC nomenklatura increased with each approved list starting from 1946 to 1950, when 3155 positions were included in the nomenklatura. Based on the decision of the CPSU CC, the new ECP CC nomenklatura was approved in August of 1953 with a total of 2252 positions. The reduction in nomenklatura posts continued during the subsequent years as well both at the USSR-wide level as well as regionally. The smallest number of ECP CC nomenklatura positions is found in the list from 1961, when their number had dropped to 1579 positions. Two years later, on the other hand, there were once again over 2000 posts in the ECP CC nomenklatura, remaining in this order of magnitude with small variations until 1971, when the total number of ECP CC nomenklatura extended to nearly 3000 positions. The total number of nomenklatura positions was 2166 in the full listing that was approved four years later. The ECP CC nomenklatura was of the same order of magnitude in the 1980s as well, shrinking to 1761 positions by 1988 and 1349 posts by 1990.
In 1947–50, the number of posts belonging to the listed nomenklatura increased and the number of posts belonging to the list of potential replacements for nomenklatura positions decreased with each new listing of official positions. This meant that during these years, the number of positions that required the direct approval of the ECP CC increased. The relative proportion of listed nomenklatura began decreasing in the ECP CC nomenklatura in the latter half of the 1950s, reaching its lowest point in the full listing of 1956, when only 55% of the ECP CC nomenklatura required the approval of the ECP CC Bureau or Secretariat. From this point onward, the relative proportion of listed nomenklatura began increasing again, levelling off at between 74 and 83% in the 1960s. Positions in the Party apparat, the ideological, agricultural and other administrative apparats formed the bulk of the ECP CC nomenklatura in 1946–75. The relative proportion of these spheres of activity remained somewhere in the range of 52–73% in total in the different listings. The institutions that belonged to the ECP CC nomenklatura in 1946–90 went through several changes in their designations and structure over the years. For the most part, the number of positions included in the ECP CC nomenklatura in the jurisdiction of such institutions decreased or increased with the approved listings or by way of decisions made during the intervening periods. Regardless of frequent changes, the core of the ECP CC nomenklatura remained essentially the same over this period of 45 years.

Keywords: nomenklatura, political elite, cadre policy, sovietization, Estonian SSR


Chinese salt-lake brine is mainly of the magnesium sulfate subtype with a high Mg/Li ratio. Mining lithium from Chinese salt-lake brine has been a decades-long technical challenge. The pros and cons of various technologies are briefly discussed. Chemical extraction has been the most important technology for the recovery of lithium from Chinese salt-lake brine with a high Mg/Li ratio. Several other innovative technologies, including lithium ion sieves, membrane separation, and electro–electrodialysis, have also emerged as potential options.


xero, kline & coma is an artist run project space at 258 Hackney Road, London. It's program, curated by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, focuses primarily on solo exhibitions by internationally established as well as emerging artists. Work by recent graduates King Conny Wobble and David Steans is being shown alongside projects like the Museum of American Art – Berlin, previously included in the Venice and Istanbul Biennales, Jeffrey Vallance, whose recent solo exhibition was at the Warhol Museum, and Plastique Fantastique, whose work has been shown at Tate Britain and the Pratt Manhatten Gallery, New York, with the aim of raising the profile of lesser known artists and allowing others to experiment with work that more institutional contexts don't always permit. Some of the themes this program has explored have included fictional identities, a-chronological art histories and the mediation of ritual in time-based media. A commitment to critically engaged art is also central to the ethos of the space, and future shows include an exploration of unionism in art by Sophie Carapetian. As well as displaying new work, the gallery hosts events, talks and screenings. Most recently these have included meetings of the Political Currency of Art research group, a discussion and film screening dealing with the theme of 'hostile objects' led by Evan Calder Williams and Marina Vishmidt, a book launch for New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty by Antonio Negri and Felix Guattari and an event dedicated to the theatre work of Slovenian art collective NSK, featuring a screening of unreleased documentation and a discussion about the future of total performance.


OBJECTIVE
Lithium salts, once the mainstay of therapy for bipolar disorder, have tolerability issues at a higher dosage that often limit adherence. The authors investigated the comparative effectiveness of more tolerable dosages of lithium as part of optimized personalized treatment (OPT).

METHOD
The authors randomly assigned 283 bipolar disorder outpatients to 6 months of open, flexible, moderate dosages of lithium plus OPT or to 6 months of OPT alone. The primary outcome measures were the Clinical Global Impression Scale for Bipolar Disorder-Severity (CGI-BP-S) and "necessary clinical adjustments" (medication adjustments per month). Secondary outcome measures included mood symptoms and functioning. The authors also assessed sustained remission (defined as a CGI-BP-S score ≤2 for 2 months) and treatment with second-generation antipsychotics. The authors hypothesized that lithium plus OPT would result in greater clinical improvement and fewer necessary clinical adjustments.

RESULTS
The authors observed no statistically significant advantage of lithium plus OPT on CGI-BP-S scores, necessary clinical adjustments, or proportion with sustained remission. Both groups had similar outcomes across secondary clinical and functional measures. Fewer patients in the lithium-plus-OPT group received second-generation antipsychotics compared with the OPT-only group (48.3% and 62.5%, respectively).

CONCLUSIONS
In this pragmatic comparative effectiveness study, a moderate but tolerated dosage of lithium plus OPT conferred no symptomatic advantage when compared with OPT alone, but the lithium-plus-OPT group had less exposure to second-generation antipsychotics. Only about one-quarter of patients in both groups achieved sustained remission of symptoms. These findings highlight the persistent and chronic nature of bipolar disorder as well as the magnitude of unmet needs in its treatment.


The automation of fault detection in material science is getting popular because of less cost and time. Steel plates fault detection is an important material science problem. Data mining techniques deal with data analysis of large data. Decision trees are very popular classifiers because of their simple structures and accuracy. A classifier ensemble is a set of classifiers whose individual decisions are combined in to classify new examples. Classifiers ensembles generally perform better than single classifier. In this paper, we show the application of decision tree ensembles for steel plates faults prediction. The results suggest that Random Subspace and AdaBoost.M1 are the best ensemble methods for steel plates faults prediction with prediction accuracy more than 80%. We also demonstrate that if insignificant features are removed from the datasets, the performance of the decision tree ensembles improve for steel plates faults prediction. The results suggest the future development of steel plate faults analysis tools by using decision tree ensembles.


Eighteenth-century Britain saw dramatic developments in travel and communications. As travel became easier, so too did correspondence by letter. This article explores the representation of various kinds of travel in the verse epistle, a kind of writing that has received little attention from travel historians. Discussing 25 examples written during the century, it argues that these offer evidence of particular value, partly because as letters they often engage in dialogic relationships with their addressees, and partly because they are also poems. The examples, some of which are very little known, represent all forms of travel at the period and over a striking range of distances. They demonstrate the development of a modern form of mobility and the adaptation of an existing literary form for its representation.


A decade after the successful peacekeeping mission, and a year and a half before the window opens for a referendum on Bougainville's political status, the peace process is dangerously adrift. In this paper, Peter Jennings and Karl Claxton set out a plan to help deliver a sustainable solution for next steps in the peace process. An Australian-led preventive development effort, conducted in close cooperation with our regional partners, is needed to avoid the future requirement for a larger, costlier, riskier, and more intrusive peacekeeping mission than the limited intervention appropriate in 1997-2003. The new Government's decision to link aid more directly to our strategic interests could assist. While the initiative would require a significant initial investment, it could create a substantial longer-term cost saving and avoid serious military, diplomatic and reputational risks.


A linguistic database is a collection of texts where sentences and words are annotated with linguistic information, such as part of speech, morphology, and syntactic sentence structure. While early linguistic databases focused on word annotations, and later also on parse-trees of sentences (so-called treebanks), the recent years have seen a growing interest in richly annotated corpora of historic texts that include not only syntactic annotations but further complex annotations, such as alignments between related text layers. This raises the issue of efficiently querying such complex structured linguistic databases. We present a generic approach for defining domain-specific query languages that we use in developing a query language for richly annotated historic corpora. In our approach, a query language is defined as a set of predicates. A query in form of a logic rule is translated by our LoToS query compiler into a single, possibly deeply nested SQL query. In contrast to previous approaches, the annotation structures that can be queried need not be trees but can also form DAGs, or, for a restricted class of recursive queries, arbitrary graphs. To this end, LoToS offers an operator for computing transitive closures using the recursive capabilities of modern database systems. We believe that this is the first approach to use modern SQL capabilities for evaluating recursive predicates in logic-based query languages. Chapter


Iodoantipyrine was used to record relative blood flow in the retina, choroid, optic nerve head, lamina cribrosa, and postlaminar optic nerve of cats at different levels of intraocular pressure. The IOP could be elevated to within 25 mm Hg of mean femoral arterial pressure, with only a slight effect on blood flow in the retina, choroid, and optic nerve head. At higher IOPs, the blood flow is reduced in the retina, choroid, and optic nerve head, but, in the lamina cribrosa, the blood flow is reduced only with extreme pressure elevation and is not reduced at all in the intraorbital optic nerve. Thus, there is no demonstrated effect of IOP on blood flow preferentially in the normal optic nerve. It is concluded that there is an efficient autoregulation in the optic nerve head and lamina cribrosa so that the IOP over a wide range does not much influence blood flow under normal circumstances. These findings do not rule out a role of ischemia in the pathophysiology of glaucomatous cupping, which may be caused by faulty autoregulation.


We consider a line-search method for continuous optimization under a stochastic setting where the function values and gradients are available only through inexact probabilistic zeroth and first-order oracles. These oracles capture multiple standard settings including expected loss minimization and zeroth-order optimization. Moreover, our framework is very general and allows the function and gradient estimates to be biased. The proposed algorithm is simple to describe, easy to implement, and uses these oracles in a similar way as the standard deterministic line search uses exact function and gradient values. Under fairly general conditions on the oracles, we derive a high probability tail bound on the iteration complexity of the algorithm for non-convex, convex, and strongly convex functions. These results are stronger than those for other existing stochastic line search methods and apply in more general settings.


This paper discusses the phenomena of youth language in multiethnic suburbs in Eastern Helsinki. The paper describes how adolescents make use of multiethnic social reality and the linguistic resources of their surroundings, i.e. different languages as well as varieties of Finnish. The possibility of the emergence of new multiethnic youth varieties or styles (Quist 2008) is discussed. The paper is mainly based on a sociolinguistic study conducted in 2002–2004 (Lehtonen 2004) and the data consist of participant observation, recorded interviews and other audio and video recordings. In the data, phenomena such as stylisation and language crossing (Rampton 1995) and a continuum from code-switching to language mixing (Auer 1999) can be observed.


The present article is an investigation about the effects of mnemonic vocabulary teaching to improve content vocabulary learning in EFL classrooms. A major issue with the most of the past studies was that they paid little or no attention to the effects of using mnemonic strategies to improve content vocabulary learning. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how key word mnemonic vocabulary teaching can improve the comprehension and learning of the content vocabulary for the students. To this end, 256 third year senior high school students from 6 senior high schools in Zanjan (Iran) were selected through a multistage cluster random sampling method and based on the Cambridge placement test (2010), 230 students proved to be upper intermediate. A quasi-experimental design was used to determine the effects of a mnemonic vocabulary intervention on content vocabulary learning. In this article there were one control group (A, n=115), and one experimental group (C, n=115) all of which were male and there were selected randomly. This study was done in May 2017, and over four weeks, in two thirty-minute sessions per week, group C received key word mnemonic instruction. In order to test the effects of mnemonic vocabulary teaching on content vocabulary learning, the covariance analysis was employed and the results demonstrated that by eliminating the covariance factor of the pre-test, mnemonic vocabulary instruction improved content vocabulary learning for students. The use of keyword mnemonics as a means to differentiate instruction is an educational result that can assist teachers.
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Social network, particularly Facebook, can be defined as a unique online service, platform, or area where social communication and/or social relations can be established and individuals intensely share information. This definition implies that communication specialists should have more expertise and interest in social media than any other group of experts. Based on this assumption, the present study investigated the views and attitudes of instructors in the Faculty of Communication Sciences at Anadolu University in Turkey, which is a country where the total number of Facebook users ranks fourth in the world. The sample of the study consisted of 67 professors with various levels of academic titles. Data were gathered through a specially-designed survey form including 52 items in four subcategories. Results suggest that three fourth of instructors have a Facebook account and they spend less than half an hour per day on Facebook. There is no gender-related difference among the faculty in terms of attitudes toward Facebook. Instructors who are younger than 45 years old login Facebook on daily basis, while senior faculty login several times a week. Two in every three instructors use Facebook mainly as a tool of communication with friends. Finally, two thirds of the faculty think that Facebook can provide important contributions to social interactions among students as well as to communications between instructors and students.


The Silverpit Crater consists of a set of concentric faults up to 20 km in diameter in the southern North Sea. Although formerly described as the first impact structure to be recognized in the UK, its spatial association with local tectonic and stratigraphic features suggests that it is unlikely to have been caused by a random extra-terrestrial event. This paper proposes a terrestrial origin for the Silverpit Crater as a Palaeogene pull-apart basin linked to strike-slip faulting in the Carboniferous basement. Faulting and thinning of Permian evaporites underlying the crater acted as a buffer to basement extension and caused both a flexural collapse of the overlying Triassic strata and circumferential listric faulting in the Cretaceous succession. Reactive diapirism in Lower Jurassic shales may have contributed to the formation of a central uplift at base Cretaceous level. The paper compares the tectonic setting of two contemporaneous strike-slip-related structures in southern England (Bovey Basin in Devon and the Compton Valence structure in Dorset) with that of the Silverpit Crater, and concludes by briefly considering whether a pull-apart model can help to explain the formation of Upheaval Dome, a similar putative impact structure in the Canyonlands National Park of Utah.


This paper presents an Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) system model for heavy-duty diesel (HDD) applications. The dynamic, physics-based model includes: heat exchangers for parallel exhaust and EGR circuits, compressible vapor working fluid, distribution and flow control valves, a high pressure pump, and a reservoir. A finite volume method is used to model the evaporator, and a pressure drop model is included to improve the accuracy of predictions. Experimental results obtained on a prototype ORC system are used for model calibration and validation. Comparison of predicted and measured values under steady-state conditions is pursued first, followed by the analysis of selected transient events. Validation reveals the model's ability to track real-world temperature and pressure dynamics of the ORC system. Therefore, this modeling framework is suitable for future system design studies, optimization of ORC power generation, and as a basis for development of control-oriented ORC models.


Well-resolved photoluminescence (PL) spectra of C70 and 13C70 in a glassy methylcyclohexane matrix have been obtained over the range 10 000-16 000 cm-1 at temperatures between 4 and 77 K. The PL spectrum consists of a short-lived, red fluorescence system extending from 14 OOO to 15 500 cm-l and a longer-lived, IR phosphorescence system extending from 10 000 to 12 500 cm-l. The PL spectrum is unusual in several aspects: the line widths are nearly 10-fold narrower than those of catacondensed hydrocarbons under similar conditions, and the temperature dependence suggests the presence of multiple emitting states (of the same spin multiplicity) or several emitting species in the highly dilute glassy matrix. To better understand the photophysical behavior of C70, we have attempted to correlate vibrational frequencies in the IR and Raman spectra of C70 and with the vibronic intervals observed in the PL spectra. The study of 13C70 enabled a more detailed analysis of the vibronic structure of the fluorescence and phosphorescence spectra.


With increasing usage of electronic devices, people are creating digital footprints of their everyday actions. These footprints come in the form of big data, and can provide useful insights into customer preferences, thus enabling companies to gain business benefits. However, customers may perceive usage of their personal information as a threat. The telecommunications sector is facing this issue. It is capable of collecting huge amount of data due to wide usage of smartphones and mobile Internet. Yet, it is unable to capitalize on these data. To manage customer perception of information risks in giving telecommunications companies permission to use their personal information, this study examines factors that influence customers' risk perception. A survey of 512 Internet panel members in Korea shows that information practices play an important role in shaping information privacy concerns, trust, and perceived information risks. Information privacy concern is the strongest predictor of perceived information risks, followed by perceived data control, and trust. Perceived policy awareness and perceived information protection significantly influence perceived data control. The findings imply that telecommunications companies ought to increase the level of customer trust, improve their information practices, and reduce customers' information privacy concerns if they want to lower customer perception toward information risks.


OBJECTIVE
To characterize the pharmacokinetics of remifentanil in conscious cats and cats anesthetized with isoflurane.

ANIMALS
6 cats.

PROCEDURES
Remifentanil (1 microg/kg/min for 5 minutes) was administered IV in conscious cats or cats anesthetized with 1.63% isoflurane in oxygen in a randomized crossover design. Blood samples were obtained immediately prior to remifentanil administration and every minute for 10 minutes, every 2 minutes for 10 minutes, and every 5 minutes for 10 minutes after the beginning of the infusion. Blood was immediately transferred to tubes containing citric acid, flash frozen in liquid nitrogen, and stored at -80 degrees C until analysis. Blood remifentanil concentration was determined by use of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. Remifentanil concentration-time data were fitted to compartment models.

RESULTS
A 2-compartment model (with zero-order input because of study design) best described the disposition of remifentanil in awake and isoflurane-anesthetized cats. The apparent volume of distribution of the central compartment, the apparent volume of distribution at steady state, the clearance, and the terminal half-life (median [range]) were 1,596 (1,164 to 2,111) and 567 (278 to 641) mL/kg, 7,632 (2,284 to 76,039) and 1,651 (446 to 29,229) mL/kg, 766 (408 to 1,473) and 371 (197 to 472) mL/min/kg, and 17.4 (5.5 to 920.3) and 15.7 (3.8 to 410.3) minutes in conscious and anesthetized cats, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE
The disposition of remifentanil in cats was characterized by a high clearance. Isoflurane anesthesia significantly decreased the volume of the central compartment, likely by decreasing blood flow to vessel-rich organs.


The purpose of this study is to develop a methodology to guide managers in determining the optimal promotion campaigns to be directed towards different market segments in order to maximize the value of customers. For the purposes of this study, a two-step methodology is used, based on stochastic dynamic programming and the classification and regression tree. This methodology groups the customers according to their value. Within this framework, an experiment is conducted in which each of the different promotion campaigns is assigned to different randomly selected groups. The impact of each type of promotion on each type of market segment is analysed in order to find the optimal promotion campaigns appropriate for each. In contrast to previous research, this study takes into account a firm that provides more than one specific type of product or service. In addition, it analyses the impact of widely used types of promotion campaigns compared with the narrow scope of those investigated in previous studies. Therefore, this research presents important insights into managing relations with the customers in a more interactive and profitable way.


Traditional data integration delivers high integration quality but requires significant upfront effort because of the need for expensive experts to be involved. The pay-as-you-go approach to data integration aims to reduce this effort by relying on a bootstrap phase where algorithms replace experts in identifying or validating source-to-target semantic correspondences and executable mappings. Since the results of this phase are expected to be of lower quality, a continuous improvement phase is then launched where user feedback is collected and assimilated in order to improve the integration. It is crucial, therefore, to quantify integration quality. This paper presents a solution to this problem using feedback on mapping results as evidence. We contribute a methodology for quantifying integration quality while taking into account the inherent uncertainty of user feedback. The approach is evaluated in synthetic and real-world integration scenarios and shown to accurately and cost-effectively quantify their quality as a conditional probability.


Simple Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) learned from pixels of natural image patches have been recently shown to be surprisingly strong performers in modeling the statistics of natural images. Here we provide an in depth analysis of this simple yet rich model. We show that such a GMM model is able to compete with even the most successful models of natural images in log likelihood scores, denoising performance and sample quality. We provide an analysis of what such a model learns from natural images as a function of number of mixture components — including covariance structure, contrast variation and intricate structures such as textures, boundaries and more. Finally, we show that the salient properties of the GMM learned from natural images can be derived from a simplified Dead Leaves model which explicitly models occlusion, explaining its surprising success relative to other models.


This essay describes a digital, collaboratively designed and interconnected series of essays that were the final project for a first-year class in media and anthropology. These essays were composed using a digital, publically accessible, scholarly publishing platform that allows students to experiment architecturally with arguing related ideas through non-linear text. The result is an intricate, flexible pathway of pages. The assignment is informed by, and attempts to experimentally enact, Felix Guattari's concept of the assemblage, emphasizing movement and process of argument and evidence over static, reified trajectories of traditional essay composition. By examining the periphery of their own ideas, students encounter the interpretations of their classmates and discover alternate readings of key themes, which they can then fold into their own writing networks, ultimately creating a textual flow which challenges the singularity of the author and the boundaries of disciplinary thinking.


We present SmartChoices, an approach to making machine learning (ML) a first class citizen in programming languages which we see as one way to lower the entrance cost to applying ML to problems in new domains. There is a growing divide in approaches to building systems: on the one hand, programming leverages human experts to define a system while on the other hand behavior is learned from data in machine learning. We propose to hybridize these two by providing a 3-call API which we expose through an object called SmartChoice. We describe the SmartChoices-interface, how it can be used in programming with minimal code changes, and demonstrate that it is an easy to use but still powerful tool by demonstrating improvements over not using ML at all on three algorithmic problems: binary search, QuickSort, and caches. In these three examples, we replace the commonly used heuristics with an ML model entirely encapsulated within a SmartChoice and thus requiring minimal code changes. As opposed to previous work applying ML to algorithmic problems, our proposed approach does not require to drop existing implementations but seamlessly integrates into the standard software development workflow and gives full control to the software developer over how ML methods are applied. Our implementation relies on standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods. To learn faster, we use the heuristic function, which they are replacing, as an initial function. We show how this initial function can be used to speed up and stabilize learning while providing a safety net that prevents performance to become substantially worse -- allowing for a safe deployment in critical applications in real life.


Reactive power compensation is an important issue in the control of electric power system. Reactive power from the source increases the transmission losses and reduces the power transmission capability of the transmission lines. Moreover, reactive power should not be transmitted through the transmission line to a longer distance. Hence Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) devices such as static compensator (STATCOM) unified power flow controller (UPFC) and static volt-ampere compensator (SVC) are used to alleviate these problems. In this paper, a voltage source converter (VSC) based STATCOM is developed with Artificial Neural Network Controller (ANNC) and Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System(ANFIS) controllers. The conventional PI controller has more tuning difficulties while the system parameter changes, whereas a trained neural network and ANFIS controllers requires less computation time. They have the ability to generalize and can interpolate in between the training data. The ANNC and ANFIS controllers designed were tested on a 75 V, 100 VA STATCOM in real time environment via state-of-the-art of digital signal processor advanced control engineering (dSPACE) DS1104 board and it was found that ANFIS controller was producing better results than the ANNC.


The precise measurement of the distance of fast laterally moving rough surfaces is important in several applications such as lathe monitoring. A nonincremental interferometer based on two tilted interference fringe systems and a precise phase-difference estimation has been realized for this task. However, due to the speckle effect, the two scattered light signals exhibit different phase jumps and random envelopes causing small correlation coefficients and high uncertainties of the phase difference as well as the distance. In this Letter we present for the first time a method to enhance the signal correlation coefficient significantly. The interference signals are generated by scattered light of a rough surface from two different directions. A matching of illumination and receiving optic is performed. By this novel method, distance measurements with an uncertainty down to 1.2 μm at about 10 m/s lateral moving velocity have been achieved. Together with the simultaneously measured lateral velocity, the shape of rotating objects can be precisely determined.


Biomarkers for prognostication need large randomised controlled trials such as AspECT and BOSS. These trials will deliver surrogates which fulfil the validation criteria necessary for their introduction into the clinic

Barrett's oesophagus (BO) is an acquired premaligant condition that is the only known precursor to oesophageal adenocarcinoma (OA); a malignancy whose incidence has risen steadily in the Western world in the last 20–30 years.1 The lifetime risk of developing an adenocarcinoma in the context of BO is 2–5%,2 and despite recent advances in its treatment the associated morbidity and mortality remain high.3 BO advances through a series of morphological stages: from metaplasia through dysplasia of different grades and finally to adenocarcinoma—the metaplasia-dysplasia-adenocarcinoma sequence (MCS).4,5 Although this genetic process is not as well outlined as in the colon,4 it is thought to be a similar multistep process consisting of genetic and epigenetic mutations, involving the same or a similar group of genes, which over many years leads to increasing genomic instability and ultimately to the formation of an autonomous clone of cells with invasive and metastatic properties.5

Knowledge of the natural history of the adenoma:carcinoma sequence in the colon has translated to clinical medicine, prompting the removal of adenomatous polyps at the premalignant stage, with an associated reduction in the incidence of colorectal cancer.6,7 Regrettably, thus far, such gains have not been made in dysplasia in the context of BO, with the effectiveness of current surveillance strategies yet to be conclusively proven; a matter soon to be addressed by the BOSS (Barrett's Oesophagus Surveillance Study), a study integrated with the AspECT (Aspirin and Esomprazole Chemoprevention Trial of Cancer in Barrett's Oesophagus) (7500 patients in total).8 At present, a patient with BO can only be risk stratified on the basis of either …