OF DISSERTATION LAND USE IMPACT ON SOIL GAS AND SOIL WATER TRANSPORT PROPERTIES The consequences of land use choices on soil water and gas transport properties are significant for gas and water flux in agricultural environments. Spatial and temporal patterns and associations of soil water and soil gas characteristics and processes in different land uses are not well understood. The objectives of this study were to 1) characterize soil structure under crop and grass systems, 2) quantify spatial patterns and associations of soil physical characteristics in crop and grass systems, and 3) quantify spatial and temporal patterns and associations of CO2 and N2O fluxes. The research was conducted in a 60 by 80 m field divided into grass and crop systems. Sixty sampling points were distributed in four transects with 5and 1-m spatial intervals between measurement points. Gas fluxes were measured, at two-week time intervals, 22 times during a year. Pore size distribution was more homogeneous and more continuous pores were found in the grass than in the crop system. The spatial variability of most selected soil physical characteristics was more structured in the crop than in the grass system, which reflected the impact of land use and soil structure on their spatial patterns. CO2 flux was dependent for a longer distance in the grass than in the crop system, however, the two land-use systems exhibited similar spatial ranges of N2O flux. Gas fluxes were temporally dependent for a longer period in the grass than in the crop system. The spatial associations between CO2 and N2O fluxes and selected biochemical and physical factors depended on the flux sampling season and land use. Soil temperature was the dominant controlling factor on the temporal variability of CO2 and N2O fluxes but not on the spatial behavior. Considering the spatial and temporal ranges and dependency strength of soil variables helps identify efficient sampling designs that can result in better time and resource management. Spatial and temporal relationships between the selected soil variables also improve understanding soil management and sampling soil variables. This study provides the baseline and recommendations for future investigations specifically for sampling designs, soil management, and predictions of different soil processes related to gas fluxes.


Identity and agency in emerging adulthood: two developmental routes in the individualization process ABSTRACT: The study of emerging adulthood the prolonged transition to adulthood extending into the 20s is a rapidly growing area of research. Although identity issues are prominent during this period, the role of personal agency and individualization in the identity formation process during these years is not well understood. In an attempt to better understand emerging adulthood as an opportunity for identity development, authors' purpose is to investigate deeper the relationship of individualization and agency to identity formation in emerging adulthood. In particularly, since the ethnic diversity in the United States of America is increasing day by day, the authors purpose to investigate the consistency of the agency-identity relationship across three American ethnic groups as well as to empirically evaluate two opposing developmental routes that takes place during the individualisation process. This study examines three psychological aspects of identity formation (style, status, and process) in relation to personal agency associated with the individualization process. Structural equation modelling analyses suggest that higher levels of agency are positively related to exploration and flexible commitment, unrelated to conformity, and negatively related to avoidance. Cluster analysis was used to examine and support a theorized polarity between developmental and default forms of individualization. Replicated across three U.S. ethnic groups, the results suggest that emerging adults utilize agentic capacities to varying degrees, and that the degree of agency utilized is directly related to the coherence of the emerging adult's identity. The sample has been recruited from undergraduate courses at a public, urban multicultural university designated as a Minority Postsecondary Institution by the U.S. Department of Education.


The Queensland Camera Detected Offence Program (CDOP) covers all modes of camera based traffic enforcement in Queensland including the mobile speed camera program, fixed intersection red light and speed cameras, fixed midblock speed cameras and point to point cameras. This project aimed to develop an evaluation framework for CDOP which measured the overall crash effects of the program as well as the crash effects associated with each enforcement type. An evaluation framework was developed measuring the performance of CDOP in terms of its effect on crashes by considering the likely spatial and temporal effects of each CDOP enforcement type based on the international literature. Efficacy of the developed framework was shown through its application to existing data to estimates of the effects of the CDOP during 2008. It was estimated that the CDOP was associated with an overall 23 percent reduction in all police reported crashes and 24 percent reduction in fatal and hospitalisation crashes across Queensland in 2008. This represents a saving of over 5,700 crashes of all severities and over 1,100 fatal and serious injury crashes. Over 95 percent of the savings associated with the program derive from the mobile speed camera program which is the CDOP element that covers by far the largest proportion of the crash population. Implementation of the CDOP in Queensland was associated with substantial road trauma reductions. Evaluation results highlight the particular importance of a wide-reaching mobile speed camera program in achieving these savings.


Climate change threatens to cause the largest refugee crisis in human history. Millions of people, largely in Africa and Asia, might be forced to leave their homes to seek refuge in other places or countries over the course of the century. Yet the current institutions, organizations, and funding mechanisms are not sufficiently equipped to deal with this looming crisis. The situation calls for new governance. We outline and discuss in this article a blueprint for a global governance architecture for the protection and voluntary resettlement of climate refugeesdefined as people who have to leave their habitats because of sudden or gradual alterations in their natural environment related to one of three impacts of climate change: sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and drought and water scarcity. We provide an extensive review of current estimates of likely numbers and probable regions of origin of climate refugees. With a view to existing institutions, we argue against the extension of the definition of refugees under the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Key elements of our proposal are, instead, a new legal instrument specifically tailored for the needs of climate refugeesa Protocol on Recognition, Protection, and Resettlement of Climate Refugees to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Changeas well as a separate funding mechanism.


The UN climate summit in Paris will bring about a new bottom-up type of agreement based on voluntary emissions reduction pledges by individual states. This marks the end of the top-down policy paradigm dominant for more than two decades. Scientific advisors should use the paradigm shift manifesting itself in UN negotiations as an opportunity to critically reassess their role in international climate policy. In the future, it will become even more difficult to present findings that are both politically viable and scientifically sound. In situations where these standards conflict, advisors and advisory bodies must resist both political pressures and incentives that undermine scientific integrity.


This paper provides a novel method for detecting bottlenecks in manufacturing systems and the shifting of these bottlenecks. All manufacturing systems are constrained by one or more bottlenecks. Improving the bottleneck will improve the whole system. Yet, finding the bottleneck is no trivial task. Furthermore, the system may change over time or due to random events, and subsequently the bottleneck may shift from one machine to another machine. The shifting bottleneck detection method determines the bottleneck based on the duration a machine is active without interruption. The method is very robust, easy to apply and able to detect the primary and secondary bottlenecks in a wide range of production systems. This allows the use of simulation to predict bottlenecks for both steady state and variable systems. The measurement of the likelihood of a machine being the bottleneck aids in the decision-making regarding the allocation of the available resources.


Because crowdsourced translation initiatives rely on volunteer labour to support both for-profit and not-for-profit activities, they lead to questions about how participants are remunerated, how the perception of translation is affected, and how minority languages are impacted. Using examples of crowdsourced translation initiatives at non-profit and for-profit organizations, this paper explores various ethical questions that apply to translation performed by people who are not necessarily trained as translators or financially remunerated for their work. It argues that the ethics of a crowd-sourced translation initiative depend not just on whether the initiative is part of a not-for profit or a for-profit effort, but also on how the project is organized and described to the public. While some initiatives do enhance the visibility of translation, showcase its value to society, and help minor languages become more visible online, others devalue the work involved in the translation process, which in turn lowers the occupational status of professional translators.


Surface modification is a generic term now applied to a large field of diverse technologies that can be gainfully harnessed to achieve increased reliability and enhanced performance of industrial components. Intermetallic compounds find extensive use in high temperature structural applications. The Fe3Al based intermetallic alloys offer unique benefits of excellent oxidation and sulfidation resistance at a potential cost lower than many stainless steels. These are mainly used in heating elements, regenerator disks, wrapping wire, hot gas filters, tooling, and shields. To obtain functional surface coating on machine components exhibiting selected in-service properties, proper combination of processing parameters has to be planned. These combinations differ by their influence on the coating properties and characteristics. Plasma spraying is gaining acceptance as a development of quality coatings of various materials on a wide range of substrates. Coatings made with plasma route exhibit excellent wear, corossion resistance and high thermal shock resistance etc. Iron premixed with 30% aluminium is deposited on mild steel and copper substrates by atmospheric plasma spraying at various operating power level ranging from 11to 21kW . After plasma spraying, the coated materials have been subjected to a series of tests. The particle sizes of the raw materials used for coating (iron with, 30 wt% aluminium powder) are characterized using Laser particle size analyzer of Malvern Instruments make. Thickness of the iron aluminide coatings are measured by using an optical microscope. X-ray diffraction technique is used to identify the different (crystalline) phases present in the coatings. The coating adhesion strength is evaluated by coating pull out method, as per ASTM C- 633 standard. Coated specimens are studied by JEOL JSM-6480 LV scanning electron microscope in order to know the surface and interface morphology. The porosity of the coatings is measured by putting polished cross sections of the coating sample under a microscope using image analyser. Microhardness measurement is done to know the hardness of the optically distinguishable phases by using Leitz Microhardness Tester Solid particle erosion is a wear process where particles strike against a surface and promote material loss. In this work, room viii temperature solid particle (sand) erosion test is carried out by using ASTM G76 standards. Deposition efficiency is evaluated as the important factor that determines the techno-economics of the process. Statistical analysis i.e. Artificial Neural Networks is gainfully employed to simulate property-parameter correlations in a space larger than the experimental domain. It is evident that with an appropriate choice of processing conditions a sound and adherent iron aluminide coating are achievable using iron aluminium powders.


Field enhancement effect of metal probe in evanescent field, induced by using a multi-layers structure for exciting surface plasmon resonance (SPR), is analyzed numerically by utilizing two-dimensional (2D) TM-wave finite difference time-domain (FDTD) method. In this letter, we used a fundamental mode Gaussian beam to induce evanescent field, and calculated the electric intensity. The results show that compared with the nonmetal probe, the metal probe has a larger field enhancement effect, and its scattering wave induced by field enhancement has a bigger decay coefficient. The field enhancement effect should conclude that the metal probe has an important application in nanolithography.


Because illiquid bonds may be relatively poorly priced, the ability to infer investor perceptions of changes in a banking organization's financial health from such bonds may be obscured. To examine the time-series effect of trading frequency on subordinated debt spreads, we consider the liquidity of subordinated debt for large, complex U.S. banking organizations over the 1987:Q2 - 2002:Q4 period. Since trade volumes are unobservable, we construct various measures of weekly trading frequency from observed bond prices. Using these indirect liquidity measures, we find evidence that trading frequency does significantly affect observed subordinated debt spreads. We also provide estimates for the premium of illiquidity.


1. CAMPAIGN FINANCE IN THE UNITED STATES A. The Permitted Framework B. Congress's Attempt to Foster Political Parity 1. Congress's First Attempt 2. Congress's Second Attempt C. The Enumerated Right to Free Speech D. The Court Responds II. CAMPAIGN FINANCE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM A. An Allergy to "Sleaze" B. The Residual Right to Free Speech C. Parliamentary Sovereignty D. Challenges to Parliamentary Sovereignty 1. Implications of the European Convention on Human Rights 2. Implications of the Human Rights Act CONCLUSION Campaign finance reform sits at the junction of two central tenets of modern liberal democracy: political liberty and political equality. On the one hand, political liberty proves indispensable to the discovery (1) and dissemination (2) of political truths--a requisite for genuine consent and participation by the citizenry. (3) On the other hand, political equality remains the standard by which the integrity of a democratic system is measured. (4) At first glance, these tenets do not necessarily collide in opposition: Both principles speak to individual autonomy, and both convey respect for human dignity. In a free-market economy, however, the asymmetrical distribution of wealth can result in unequal opportunities to influence the political process if liberty remains unrestrained. (5) This is particularly true with respect to political liberties that require an investment of capital before they can be exercised with any great effect. (6) The right to political speech is a prime example. Although the ability to voice one's ideas is not dependent on wealth, the ability to reach a wide audience is. What is the point of designing a political cartoon unless you can purchase the paper on which to print it? Speech without resources is sterile. It is deprived of the very thing that gives speech its inherent value as an instrument of individual self-development and democratic participation. (7) Of course, this coupling of speech and capital alludes to the very snarl mentioned above. When wealth is unevenly distributed, as it inevitably is, some individuals will be in a better position than others to exercise their right to effective political speech. These individuals will be in a better position to set the contours of public debate and secure their success at the polls. (8) For any democracy that identifies political equality as something beyond a formal definition of one-man-one-vote, this lopsided arrangement has severe implications since access to political liberty appears to favor affluence but the democracy's legitimacy depends on uniform access to methods of influencing the government. (9) Thus, democratic governments often find themselves traversing a tightrope in the areas of political speech, gauging each step in an attempt to find the optimal balance of free speech and fair play. A government's campaign finance laws represent the legislature's judgment regarding the proper balance between political liberty and political equality. Campaign finance laws represent an assessment of how a society's constitutional principles, organizational choices and political realities shape its democratic priorities. More importantly, these laws work to palliate the government's perceived loss of legitimacy by enabling the citizenry, through their elected representatives, to make a purposeful choice of which principle to indemnify. Any resulting political inequality or inhibitions on liberty are rationalized as a product of the society's democratic values, not a slight against them. Legislatures, however, do not possess unlimited discretion in their choices. In addition to political checks, many democracies structure their constitutions in ways that inhibit majoritarian control over political speech lest that control give way to hegemony by the majority and exclude minorities from access to political power. …


This paper studies the historic trajectory of the especial education in the state of Roraima, North of Brazil. It has a Its main objective to understand the processes involves in the formation of this area and investigates the first initiatives on the implementation of the educational services aimed at the people that were considered deficient on learning at the network of public schools in the decade of 1970, until the structuring of a set of schools and assistance services directed at special educations, established within the managing institutions of the state of Roraima until 2001. It describes the historic routes of the actions and policies of the special education in Roraima and its articulation with the national policies in that area. It concerns the research wich was basically built on the dialetic-historic materialism, adopting as its central axis the perspective once introduced by e Edward Palmer Thompson upon a historic analyses that takes by reference the experience of real men and women that, with their living ways, resistances and practiced actions, in several cases apparently passive, build a flow of situations filled with progress, regresses, conflicts and contradictions: I. E., "a story seen from the bottom". In this study, the so called "a view from the bottom is made up with the catch of the teachers, technicians and family voices involved in the education of the people presenting such deficiencies in Roraima, where those specializes services, regular school spaces count with the direct or indirect presence of the teachers and other specialized professionals. This paper also adopts the voices of these people, among their interviews and reports, as well as among documents daily produced by them, thus originated from institutional activities as a result of such research where we have found the three following development periods: from the beginning of 1970 up until 1983 – the moment of the first arisal of the actions taken on the field of the education for these special people; from 1984 up until 1990, in wich such services were officially recognized and fragmented within the special deficiency areas; and from 1991 to 2001, in wich the federal territory became the state of Roraima, and the existence of specific specialized spaces that generated oscillations on the identification of the constitution of the entities wich, sometimes are identified as school space instead of therapeutically spaces. The regional difference, in contrast with other brazilian states, in the fact that all the services are public (governmental, without the presence of any charity or philanthropic entities. This study comes then to the conclusion that it was the geographic isolation and the borderline that made this region, in its late occupation process, be assumed as a national security area, under supervision of the brazilian army – in this special case, the air force-, what also turned such area into a field of enforcement of the federal; government's prioritary polices and proposal as a similar attitude of the assumed polices for the educational reforms implemented by the military regime of Brazil from then until today. This situation is yet to be considered even more concrete due to the economical dependency Roraima has from the federal resources whose liberation is conditioned to the implementation of the projects on the preconized ways established by the federal government. It is possible to verify this activity as a natural movement to the pertinent activities of the public services, wich should be maintained and enlarged on their achievement measures and results.


This article proposes a U.K. Private Finance Initiative (PFI) holistic and integrative con-ceptual model that integrates a hierarchy of four levels of concepts: government ideology, principles, practices, and tools. The PFI life cycle process, value chain, and value-delivery network are also mapped. PFI is as a novel way to do business, and requires the establishment of a long-term relationship. PFI is an innovative concession as it relates the revenues for the private partner solely to the provision of a service, which in turn is performance related. To assess PFI success or failure is still premature because of the long life cycle of PFI projects, 20 to 30 years, and most projects have not yet been in operation for 10 years. In addition, based on the empirical data from the research and recurring to business information sources and academic studies on PFI (still very limited), the article addresses two important issues that emerged from the introduction of PFI: first the change in organizational culture brought about by a move into the services sector, coupled with the need to deal with long-term issues, followed by the financing structure, that is, the balancing of debt and equity and the hypothesis of considering bond issues to finance senior debt.


This paper is an empirical analysis of employment centres in the Los Angeles region from 1997 to 2014. Most extant work on employment centres focuses on identification methodology or their dynamics during a period of industrial restructuring from 1980 to 2000. We analyse employment centres using point-based, rather than census tract-based employment data and a non-parametric identification method with a single concept of proximity. We focus on changes across five key industries: knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), retail, creative, industrial and high-tech, emphasising changes in centre composition as well as their boundaries. Results show far greater change across centres than previous longitudinal studies. Only 43% of the land area that is in an employment centre is part of one in both 1997 and 2014. Using a persistence score, centres range from stable to highly fluctuating, but emerging, persisting and dying centres are found in core and fringe areas alike. KIBS are most associated with stable centres, while high tech employment is attracted toward emerging areas and retail exists throughout. Emerging centres are more likely to have greater accessibility, while industrial employment becomes far more concentrated in centres by 2014.


A quasi-two-dimensional model for the simulation of temperature, salinity, and density in a reservoir is described. The model is based upon the one-dimensional reservoir simulation model DYRESM, and is extended into two dimensions using a Lagrangian formulation of self-contained parcels within the layer structure of the one-dimensional model. These parcels resolve the horizontal motions and gradients by moving vertically or horizontally and splitting and combining to simulate the various physical processes in the reservoir occurring in response to the prevailing climatological conditions. The model is not a full two-dimensional model, because not all horizontal processes are included. Algorithms to simulate inflow, selective withdrawal, and adjustment of horizontal density gradients are included, however, and the model is therefore quite useful for examining some simple scenarios in which these processes are dominant. The results of simulations of Canning Reservoir in Western Australia showing several inflow and intrusion events at different times of the year, and the return of the reservoir temperature field to a one-dimensional structure after the cessation of inflow, are presented. These results are compared with measurements taken in the field, with good agreement. The usefulness of the model in its present form for following the path and estimating the detention time of various parcels of water is discussed.


We present a novel framework for organizing large collections of images in a hierarchical way, based on scene semantics. Rather than score images directly, we use them to score the scene in order to identify typical views and important locations which we term Geo-Relevance. This is done by relating each image with its viewing frustum which can be readily computed for huge collections of images nowadays. The frustum contains much more information than only camera position that has been used so far. For example, it distinguishes between a photo of the Eiffel Tower and a photo of a garbage bin taken from the exact same place. The proposed framework enables a summarized display of the information and facilitates efficient browsing.


In her new book, The Truth About Obamacare, Sally C. Pipes--president of the Pacific Research Institute and an acknowledged expert on health care reform--reveals what Democrats in Congress and President Obama don't want you to know: Obamacare is even worse than most critics suspect. Debunking the myths that the current administration has touted, Pipes shows exactly what the new health care law will mean for you, your family, your doctor, and your wallet. She also reveals how, contrary to its promises, Obamacare will make health care more expensive, limit your options, lead to deteriorating medical care, and weaken America's already frail economy.


Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline a seven-phase simulation conceptual modelling procedure that incorporates existing practice and embeds a process reference model (i.e. SCOR). Design/methodology/approach – An extensive review of the simulation and SCM literature identifies a set of requirements for a domain-specific conceptual modelling procedure. The associated design issues for each requirement are discussed and the utility of SCOR in the process of conceptual modelling is demonstrated using two development cases. Ten key concepts are synthesised and aligned to a general process for conceptual modelling. Further work is outlined to detail, refine and test the procedure with different process reference models in different industrial contexts. Findings - Simulation conceptual modelling is often regarded as the most important yet least understood aspect of a simulation project (Robinson, 2008a). Even today, there has been little research development into guidelines to aid in the creation of a conceptual model. Design issues are discussed for building an 'effective' conceptual model and the domain-specific requirements for modelling supply chains are addressed. The ten key concepts are incorporated to aid in describing the supply chain problem (i.e. components and relationships that need to be included in the model), model content (i.e. rules for determining the simplest model boundary and level of detail to implement the model) and model validation. Originality/value – Paper addresses Robinson (2008a) call for research in defining and developing new approaches for conceptual modelling and Manuj et al., (2009) discussion on improving the rigour of simulation studies in SCM. It is expected that more detailed guidelines will yield benefits to both expert (i.e. avert typical modelling failures) and novice modellers (i.e. guided practice; less reliance on hopeful intuition)


The incidence of Atrial Septal Defect (ASD) is approximately 3 per 10,000 live births. Ostium secundum ASD is most common type of ASD accounting for 75% of all ASD cases. Patients with irreversible Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) are considered ineligible for shunt closure. It is important to ascertain the cause of PAH particularly to rule out pulmonary cause as in present case. A 56-yearold female patient, known case of Ostium secundum ASD presented with NYHA class IV dyspnea and chest infection. A transthoracic echocardiogram revealed 30 mm ASD with bidirectional shunt, dilated Right Atrium (RA), Right Ventricle (RV), severe Tricuspid Regurgitation (TR) (max PG 85 mmHg) and RV dysfunction. She was intubated and put on mechanical ventilator. CT chest showed right lower lobe bronchiectasis with infective changes. However repeated attempts to wean patient off Bipap support were unsuccessful. Subsequently cardiac catheterization and Balloon Occlusion of ASD revealed Qp/Qs ratio of 8:1 with step up in oxygen saturation of 19%. Mean pulmonary artery pressure was 35 mmHg. Later she underwent successful device closure for ASD with AMPLATZER septal occlude (36 mm) (AGA Medical Corp., Minneapolis, MN, USA). Her physical activity and symptoms were much improved. Follow up transthoracic echocardiography after 5 months revealed normal RV contractility and no PAH. While initially chest infection prevented ASD device closure, underlying bronchiectasis which got worsened by ASD shunt, prevented her from weaning off ventilator. ASD device closure thereby helped to reduce pulmonary blood flow and improvement in lung function enabling her to wean off ventilator support.


The subject of the present research presented in this book is the position of religion and spirituality in a culture characterised by individualism, more specifically expressive individualism, and the narcissism associated with it. On the one hand, it has been argued that, in an expressive- individualistic and narcissistic culture, there exists an aversion against institutions, also the religious ones; on the other hand, there are strong indications that people are adapting religion to individual designs. The emergence of spirituality is supposed to be an expression of this. Linked with this is the question what the position is of religious and spiritual coping, in particular in problems that are associated with the narcissistic habitus: boredom and anxiety. Is there, in managing this kind of problems, still a place for coping with a religious and spiritual character, or not? Losing my religion?


Oral delivery is the most convenient and the most acceptable route. However, insulin by itself is degraded by
intestinal enzymes and is not absorbed intact across the gastrointestinal mucosa. Now, a day gelatin, trypsin coated capsule, pill, pellets may be available. It has some disadvantages; a lot of the insulin will be wasted before it gets where it's going. Insulin taken as a pill is quickly broken down in the stomach, just like the food you eat. That makes it useless for lowering blood glucose levels. Intensified insulin therapy consists of basal insulin given in the form of either twice-daily injections of delayed action - lente or isoplane (NPH) insulin or once-or twice- daily injections of longer acting ultralente Continuous subcutaneous Insulin infusion (CSII) from a portal pump is used for basal insulin. Prandial insulin is given by injection of short-acting insulin given 30 min before meal. E.g. Insulin syringe, pen, an insulin pump. The pulmonary route of administration offers several advantages. First, the lung has a large surface area for drug absorption, ranging from 100 to 140 m2. In addition, the alveolar epithelium has permeability that allows for rapid absorption of solutes. Because the mucociliary
clearance of the alveolar lung tissue is slower than that of the bronchiolar tissues, the alveoli provide a greater opportunity for the absorption of larger molecules (e.g., insulin).


Importance
Generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP) is a chronic, orphan disease with limited epidemiological data.

Objective
To describe the clinical characteristics, treatments, longitudinal disease course, and disease-specific health care utilization among patients with GPP across the United States.

Design, Setting, and Participants
A retrospective longitudinal case series involving 95 adults who met the European Rare and Severe Psoriasis Expert Network consensus definition for GPP and were treated at 20 US academic dermatology practices between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2018.

Main Outcomes and Measures
The primary outcome is to describe the patient characteristics, associated medical comorbidities, treatment patterns complications, and GPP-specific health care utilization.

Results
Sixty-seven of 95 patients (70.5%) were women (mean age, 50.3 years [SD, 16.1 years]). In the initial encounter, 35 patients (36.8%) were hospitalized and 64 (67.4%) were treated with systemic therapies. In total, more than 20 different systemic therapies were tried. During the follow-up period, 19 patients (35.8%) reported hospitalizations at a median rate of 0.5 hospitalizations per year (IQR, 0.4-1.6). Women had a decreased risk of an emergency department or hospital encounter (odds ratio, 0.19; 95% CI, 0.04-0.83).

Conclusions and Relevance
Generalized pustular psoriasis is a rare, chronic disease without standard treatment and is associated with continued health care utilization over time.


Phase Schedule is a Last Planner System practice whose role, both from a practical and theoretical point of view, is still being debated in the construction industry. Thus, there is a need for a better understanding of Phase Schedule implementation practices and the impacts of those on production planning and control. This paper presents the results of the implementation and evaluation of the LPS focusing on the Phase Schedule practices based on two in-depth case studies developed from April 2016 to August 2017 in Salvador-Brazil. The Case Studies involved the implementation of the LPS and the Phase Schedule practices and the analysis of the impact of using those practices on the production planning and control processes. The findings indicated that the cycles of the Phase Schedule improve the constraints analysis, collaboration between those involved, transparency in the planning process, adherence between levels planning by using performance metrics, reliability of plans and commitment to the deadlines. Also, the activities which were initially not analyzed as critical, have strong influence on the performance of the production planning and control.


This paper describes the different steps which lead to the construction of the LIP6 extractive summarizer. The basic idea behind this system is to expand question and title keywords of each topic with their respective cluster terms. Term clusters are found by unsupervised learning using a classification variant of the well-known EM algorithm. Each sentence is then characterized by 4 features, each of which uses bag-of-words similarities between expanded topic title or questions and the current sentence. A final score of the sentences is found by manually tuning the weights of a linear combination of these features ; these weights are chosen in order to maximize the Rouge-2 AvF measure on the Duc 2006 corpus.


This paper describes work extending Princeton WordNet to the domain of geological texts, associated with the time periods of the geological eras of the Earth History. We intend this extension to be considered as an example for any other domain extension that we might want to pursue. To provide this extension, we first produce a textual version of Princeton WordNet. Then we map a fragment of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) ontologies to WordNet and create the appropriate new synsets. We check the extended ontology on a small corpus of sentences from Gas and Oil technical reports and realize that more work needs to be done, as we need new words, new senses and new compounds in our extended WordNet.


As the demographic transition occurs in a global scale, dealing with the consequences of population ageing has emerged as a critical task to modern societies. This has led government entities to pay more and more attention to seniors' concerns, limitations and needs. A deep understand of old citizens, especially those unfamiliar with Internet and smartphone technologies, is also a challenge in order to enable them to fully benefit of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In the light of this issue, personalization and user-centred approaches involving older adults in all development stages may be the key for higher levels of user engagement with such ICT solutions as the interactive television (iTV) platform reported in this paper (+TV4E). The +TV4E is an on-going research project conducted at University of Aveiro, Portugal, based on a social inclusion approach, aiming to take benefit from the television viewing dynamics of senior viewers, by interweaving short and personalized adverts related to public and social services alongside regular broadcast contents. The platform is being designed with a user-centred approach featuring the integration of assistive technologies and multiplemultimedia communication channels. In this paper, a system architecture to deliver the informative contents is stated and a discussion of the potential social impacts of providing such platform is presented.


Public procurement amounts to about 16 per cent of the EU Member States' GDP. A major contribution to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals is possible by enhancing sustainable procurement practices. The 2014 EU Public Procurement Directives (Directives 2014/23/EU, 2014/24/EU and 2014/25/EU) have largely clarified the scope for permissible sustainable procurement decisions, but the adoption of Sustainable Public Procurement (SPP) is still limited. The rules could be more permissive and thoroughly take into account all the different aspects of sustainability. Even more urgent and essential is to push for behavioural and organisational changes in the ways contracting authorities perform their buying functions to maximise positive, sustainable impacts. It is critical to change procurement management practices so that the sustainability demanded in contracts is properly verified along the entire supply chain and remedial actions are taken where non-compliance is detected.

Solution: We make three main proposals:

1. That the EU invest significantly in the professionalisation of contracting officials, procurement strategists and financial auditors by (a) encouraging the institution of SPP knowledge centres at the EU, national and regional levels following the model already provided by various Central Purchasing Bodies; (b) creating a network of knowledge centres working closely together in developing and disseminating best practices on SPP, including through training materials, and in collecting information and data on the adoption of SPP and the difficulties encountered in applying the relevant EU rules, and (c) providing financial and technical assistance targeted to specific SPP formation for ground-level contracting officials.

2. That the EU make it mandatory for contracting authorities to map and monitor their supply chains for risks of breaches of environmental and social rules, including those protecting human rights. That the EU take those breaches seriously, mandating the exclusion from award procedures of those found in violation and appropriate remedial actions in case of violations during contract performance. That the EU make it easier for contracting authorities to know about economic operators that have breached environmental and social rules, including those protecting human rights.

3. That the EU make the legislative environment more 'SPP friendly'. Contracting authorities must be allowed to require suppliers to have effective sustainability policies in place. A shift is needed from enabling the Member States to pursue SPP to requiring them to buy sustainably by increasing the amount of mandatory sectoral legislation and by requiring contracting authority to take into account the life-cycle costs associated with their purchases.

Non-solution: Simply relying on the goodwill of individual procurement officers or policy makers without providing training and networking opportunities on SPP and information and communication tools; leaving the regulatory burden of pushing SPP forward on the shoulders of Member States.
Instruments: The Commission, including DG Devco in its procurement activities in Official Development Assistance (ODA), and other EU institutions should lead by example concerning the professionalisation of procurement officials and the creation of competence centres. The Commission should act as a catalyst for the network of competence centres, and adequate funds should be released to fund the actions recommended under solution point 1 above. The Commission, possibly together with OECD, should collect data on breaches of environmental and social rules, including those protecting human rights, and make that data available to contracting authorities. The other solutions under points 2 and 3 mainly require amendments to Directives 2014/23/EU, 2014/24/EU and 2014/25/EU. Ad hoc rules need to be adopted to enact further sectoral mandatory legislation.


P2X7 is a unique member of the P2X family of membrane receptors for extracellular ATP. As well as being a non-selective cation channel, this membrane receptor is implicated in several biological functions, including cell death and proliferation. P2X7 expression, initially thought restricted to immune cells, also occurs in epithelial and other cell types. I hypothesised that P2X7 is functionally expressed in the renal tract, particularly in situations in which cell turnover is prominent. I have demonstrated expression of P2X7 in both mouse and human kidney. During mouse nephrogenesis P2X7 was detected in the condensing mesenchyme in early metanephrogenesis and was subsequently restricted to derivatives of the ureteric bud i.e. collecting duct and ureter. P2X7 was immunolocalised in regions of cell turnover, consistent with a role for the nucleotide receptor in nephrogenesis. P2X7 was also detected in cystic collecting ducts of both the cpk/cpk mouse model of autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease (ARPKD) and human ARPKD. Next I investigated the potential function of P2X7 in cystogenesis using a 3D suspension culture model from the cpk/cpk mouse. Exposure to agonists of the P2X7 receptor caused a significant reduction in numbers of cysts forming in vitro. This was inhibited by P2X7 antagonists, and was greater than the response to other nucleotides, supporting a specific mediation by the P2X7 receptor. My study did not demonstrate a significant effect on markers of cell proliferation, apoptosis or necrosis correlating with P2X7-mediated reduction in cyst numbers, suggesting an alternative function for the receptor in cyst formation. To further understand the molecular mechanisms by which P2X7 mediates its functions, particularly apoptosis, I have developed an in vitro expression system. Stable transfection of a chicken lymphocytes with rat P2X7 enabled characterisation of the receptor's membrane properties, both ion fluxes and pore potential, and established a novel tool with which to further examine the mechanisms by which P2X7 mediates cell death. Further understanding of the molecular mechanisms of this unique nucleotide receptor, and its functional roles in the kidney, particularly in the setting of polycystic kidney disease may in the future lead to a novel therapeutic target for the manipulation of progression of renal injury, via its apoptotic pathways, or other as yet undefined pathways.


Manuel Castells is most famous for his theory of an "information society" in which the world is "boundaryless," identities shifted, and place-bound social relations transformed by a nebulous "space of flows," of finance, telecommunications, migration, and tourism.[1] Yet, elsewhere, in his book on Finland, he argues that the information society is malleable and can co-exist with strong state and high levels of equality (Castells and Himanen 2002). This raises the question of how the changes he identifies affect other domains, such as welfare states, industrial relations systems, human resources, and so on. Because he has so little to say about the world of work, however, the effect of these new technologies and identities on industrial relations arrangements remains open. [1] Many thanks to Virginia Doellgast, Marco Hauptmeier, Damien Grimshaw, Kyoung-Hee Yu, Ursula Holtgrewe and Nathan Lillie who provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper; thanks as well to the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies, Cornell University's Center for European Studies, Cornell-ILR's International Programs and the German Academic Exchange Service for funding this research.


Abstract Objective The present study investigated whether food package information is legible in a real purchase context; more specifically, it examined the level of legibility of non-mandatory, mandatory and nutritional information as well as the influence of age on legibility. This is an important issue, especially for older consumers who are usually advised to pay attention to their diet. Design An in-store study was conducted in a French hypermarket. Descriptive statistics were used to measure the overall level of legibility and then ANOVA tests were carried out to examine the influence of age on the legibility of information. Complementary results included the influence of level of education. Setting Participants were asked to read information on four food packages when they were food shopping. Subjects The sample included 196 consumers aged 18–82 years. Results An asymmetry was observed between the extremely high level of legibility of non-mandatory information and the low level of legibility of mandatory and nutritional information provided on food packages. Elderly respondents performed significantly worse than their younger counterparts. An interaction effect was found between age and level of education on the legibility of mandatory information. Conclusions Legibility of mandatory information is clearly unsatisfactory. There appears to be a hierarchy between significant, but non-mandatory, company information and important mandatory and nutritional information. The first type of information is promoted on food packages whereas the last two are all but concealed to older and less educated consumers.


Following a 3-year drought from 1998 to 2000, oak decline symptoms began to appear throughout many parts of the Ozark Highland region of Arkansas and Missouri. Changes in down deadwood that occurred at one site during the oak decline event are described and discussed. In 2000, 24 deadwood measurement plots 0.2025 ha (45 m by 45 m) in size were established. The down deadwood on all plots was remeasured in the spring of 2005. Because 6 plots were burned in March of 2004, changes on only 18 of the 24 plots are considered. In each inventory, all down dead woody material with a diameter of 10 cm or greater was measured on each plot. Changes in volume occurred across the site. Overall, median total volume increased from 15.8 m3/ha to 22.9 m3/ha (p = 0.016). Down woody material was further divided into decomposition classes 1 through 5, where class 1 represents the least decomposed and class 5 represents the most decomposed material. Decomposition class 1 increased from a median of 0 m3/ha in 2000 to 0.13 m3/ha in 2005 (p = < 0.001). Class 2 increased from a mean of 2.1 m3/ha in 2000 to 4.7 m3/ha in 2005 (p = 0.013). There were no significant changes in down deadwood volume for decomposition classes 3, 4, or 5. The number of pieces of down deadwood also increased from a mean of 184 pieces per ha in 2000 to 245 pieces per ha in 2005 (p = 0.003). Results show an increase in down deadwood input. However, at this stage increases are generally in the smallest, least decomposed material on this dry and rocky site. The diameters of down deadwood pieces are small because inputs are mostly from branches and small trees. Most large trees that died have remained standing.


Abstract Albania possesses a wide range of ecological systems including coastal zones, estuaries and lagoons, lakes and wetlands, grasslands, middle-low altitude coppice forests, high altitude forests, alpine vegetation and glacial areas. The country possesses about 3,250 species of vascular plants, 165 families and more than 900 genera. Medicinal plants (botanicals) and non-timber forest products have a long history of importance in the culture and traditional knowledge of Albania. Proper legislation and the enforcement of the existing legal and regulatory framework of this developing industry remains lacking. A Strategy of Biodiversity plan developed in 2000 calls for an increase in the Protected Areas system which currently covers some 6 % of Albania's area to a total area of 435,600 ha, approximately 15 % of the country's territory. Changes in the legal and policy framework as well as institutional structures is required to move forward and provide an environment for biodiversity conservation and a sustainable protected areas system. The various threats to biodiversity and constraints to improvement are outlined as well as recommendations for sustainable use, assessment and regulation.


The ambitious and integrated framework of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) demonstrates that complex global problems span the natural and social sciences and that solutions to such problems demand a joint approach of the two. Despite decades of efforts toward better integration, much of society still presumes a stark divide between the disciplines, and most scientists continue to be trained, evaluated, and rewarded in disciplinary silos. The recent merger of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC)—leading international councils of the natural and social sciences, respectively—sends a powerful message that the future of science depends on collapsing the walls between academic disciplines.


Reduced access size in minimally invasive surgery and therapy (MIST) poses several restriction on the design of the dexterous robotic instruments. The instruments should be developed that are slender enough to pass through the small sized incisions and able to effectively operate in a compact workspace. Most existing robotic instruments are operated by big actuators, located outside the patient's body, that transfer forces to the end effector via cables or magnetically controlled actuation mechanism. These instruments are certainly far from optimal in terms of their cost and the space they require in operating room. The lack of adequate sensing technologies make it very challenging to measure bending of the flexible instruments, and to measure tool-tissue contact forces of the both flexible and rigid instruments during MIST. Therefore, it requires the development of the cost effective miniature actuators and strain/force sensors. Having several unique features such as bio-compatibility, low cost, light weight, large actuation forces and electrical resistivity variations, the shape memory alloys (SMAs) show promising applications both as the actuators and strain sensors in MIST. However, highly nonlinear hysteretic behavior of the SMAs hinders their use as actuators. To overcome this problem, an adaptive artificial neural network (ANN) based Preisach model and a model predictive controller have been developed in this thesis to precisely control the output of the SMA actuators. A novel ultra thin strain sensor is also designed using a superelastic SMA wire, which can be used to measure strain and forces for many surgical and intervention instruments. A da Vinci R © surgical instrument is sensorized with these sensors in order to validate their force sensing capability.


Beer, ice cream, and socializing; thighs, abs, and pecs—Japanese fitness clubs combine entertainment and exercise, reflecting the Japanese concept of fitness as encompassing a zest for life as well as physical health. Through an engaging account of these clubs, Working Out in Japan reveals how beauty, bodies, health, and leisure are understood and experienced in Japan today. An aerobics instructor in two of Tokyo's most popular fitness club chains from 1995 to 1997, Laura Spielvogel captures the diverse voices of club members, workers, and managers; women and men; young and old.

Fitness clubs have proliferated in Japanese cities over the past decade. Yet, despite the pervasive influence of a beauty industry that values thinness above all else, they have met with only mixed success . Exploring this paradox, Spielvogel focuses on the tensions and contradictions within the world of Japanese fitness clubs and on the significance of differences between Japanese and North American philosophies of mind and body. Working Out in Japan explores the ways spaces and bodies are organized and regulated within the clubs, the frustrations of female instructors who face various gender inequities, and the difficult demands that the ideal of slimness places on Japanese women. Spielvogel's vivid investigation illuminates not only the fitness clubs themselves, but also broader cultural developments including the growth of the service industry and the changing character of work and leisure in Japan.


We demonstrate that great earthquakes occur predominantly in regions with a strongly negative trench-parallel gravity anomaly (TPGA), whereas regions with strongly positive TPGA are relatively aseismic. These observations suggest that, over time scales up to at least 1 million years, spatial variations of seismogenic behavior within a given subduction zone are stationary and linked to the geological structure of the fore-arc. The correlations we observe are consistent with a model in which spatial variations in frictional properties on the plate interface control trench-parellel variations in fore-arc topography, gravity, and seismogenic behavior.


This paper examines Cameroon's model of forest-management decentralisation by characterising its organisational infrastructure and by assessing - and anticipating - the ecological effects of those policy changes. The essay is based on nvironmental governance research conducted in Cameroon during the last three years. Five Community Forests, one Council Forest and nine forestry fee management committees were covered by the study. Methods of data collection included participant observation, analysis of historical trends, semi-structured interviews at the regional level, focus group meetings, historical transects of landscape and future scenarios. The first section describes the key reforms put in place by the new forest management regime, including the institutional and socio-organisational choices legally prescribed for outlying actors in the decentralised management of forests and their revenues. The mechanisms connecting these institutional and socio-organisational choices to implementation - that is, the management of Community Forests, Council Forests and forestry revenues - are examined in the second part of the essay. The third section assesses the social outcomes of these processes. Ecological risks and uncertainties due to the way decentralised management is conducted at both the local and the regional levels are addressed in the fourth section. The Cameroonian decentralisation model, already registered some positive infra-outcomes. After all, decentralisation is not mechanical. It is not only explainable by laws and institutional arrangements: its implementation depends on many variables. It requires sufficient time to develop due to the complexity of human and institutional behaviour and because of unpredictability, variability, contingency and change, as well as many other stimuli. In sum, it is a 'story' of adaptation, with successes and failures. Policy innovations and reforms are in themselves experiments and should not be perceived as victories or crises, but, instead, as arenas of ongoing lessons and progressive learning.


Pocket Switched Networks (PSNs) offer a means of infrastructureless inter-human communication by utilising Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) technology. However, creating PSNs involves solving challenges which were not encountered in the Deep Space Internet for which DTN technology was originally intended.End-to-end communication over multiple hops in PSNs is a product of short range opportunistic wireless communication between personal mobile wireless devices carried by humans. Opportunistic data delivery in PSNs is far less predictable than in the Deep Space Internet because human movement patterns are harder to predict than the orbital motion of satellites. Furthermore, PSNs require some scheme for efficient neighbour discovery in order to save energy and because mobile devices in PSNs may be unaware of when their next encounter will take place.This thesis offers novel solutions for neighbour discovery and opportunistic data delivery in PSNs that make practical use of dynamic inter-human encounter patterns.The first contribution is a novel neighbour discovery algorithm for PSNs called PISTONS which relies on a new inter-probe time calculation (IPC) and the bursty encounter patterns of humans to set the time between neighbour discovery scans. The IPC equations and PISTONS also give participants the ability to easily specify their required level of connectivity and energy saving with a single variable.This thesis also contains novel distributed spatio-temporal clustering and opportunistic data delivery algorithms for PSNs which can be used to deliver data over multiple hops. The spatio-temporal clustering algorimths are also used to analyse the social networks and transient groups which are formed when humans interact.


Cholesterol has been discussed topic in community. Assosiated with its complications which increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, treatment and prevention efforts even more seriously. One of them is, by using ciplukan plant (Physalis angulata L) that is believed may decrease cholesterol level in blood. This research aimed to know the effect infusa herbs ciplukan on white wistar male rats given high fat diet. We use fourty two white wistar male rats were divided into 7 groups (N=6). The normal group was just given BR-II diet. The negative control group were given diet high fat from the first day to 49th without giving fenofibrat or infusa. The positive control group were given a diet high fat from the first day to 49th and given fenofibrat start until 36 th day to 49 th day. Groups 4, 5, 6, and 7 is that the treatment group were given a high fat diet from the first day to 49 th and given infusa herb ciplukan with each 2,5%; 5%; 10%; and 20% b/v start until 36 th day to 49 th day. Cholesterol level measurements using methods enzymatic colorimetric test. Data obtained on the day to 14, 28, 35, 42, and 49 analyzed by using one-way ANOVA test with a 95% rate trust. Treatment with infusa herb ciplukan 2,5%; 5%; 10%; and20% in 36 days to up to 49 th days can decrease the level of total cholesterol 41,78%, 53,84%, 68,38%, and 79,77%. Results of this research show that infusa herb ciplukan have any significant effect on the decrease of total blood cholesterol level compared with the negative control (p <0.5). Keywords: cholesterol, hiperlipidemia, Physalis angulata L Â


ABSTRACT Deception is an unfortunate staple in group work. Guarding against team members' deceptive tactics and alternative agendas is difficult and may seem even more difficult in technology-driven business environments that have made multitasking during teamwork increasingly commonplace. This research develops a foundation for a nuanced theoretical understanding of deception detection under these conditions. The intersection of information technology multitasking and deception detection theories is shown to produce various and sometimes competing ideas about how this type of multitasking might affect truthfulness assessments in real-time teamwork. A laboratory study involving a collaborative game helped evaluate the different ideas using manipulated deception and multitasking behaviors in a real-time, virtual group environment. The results provide evidence that information multitasking can actually improve deception detection, likely because multitaskers engage less in the team conversation, making themselves less manipulable. As understanding of multitasking benefits increases, managers and designers can incorporate effective multitasking into collaborative processes.


At their essence, feminist epistemologies argue that traditional male epistemologies have systematically removed the voice of women from knowledge production, effectively barring women from being "knowers". How does the gendering of knowledge affect those with a particular perspective of viewing the world? This article explores the merits and limitations of a gendered epistemology by employing standpoint theory as a tool of analysis. Through the lens and context of the intersection of religion, gender, and Western academia, I trace the politics of knowledge production as it relates to Muslim women working within an Islamic paradigm. This article first explores gender as a category of analysis that came out of feminist epistemologies. It discusses the merits of allowing gender to be the primary and focal point of our knowledge, and consequently, how it has been employed within a particular Islamic paradigm. By drawing on the works of postcolonial theory, it then considers the limitations of such a process. The gendered epistemologies associated with Western secular thought – by placing gender as the primary category of analysis – have led to a uni-dimensional and monolithic understanding of what it means to be "gendered" for "Third World women", particularly Muslim women. I interrogate this notion of a gendered epistemology as the only way of knowing by suggesting that a cross-cultural and intersectional "set of perspectives that place the category of gender within the category of other frameworks of 'difference'" (Nye, 2003: 97) – in this case religion – pursues a more nuanced approach that is attune to a variety of epistemologies rather than a single unified gendered epistemology.


Primary succession of plant communities directed toward a climax is not a typical occurrence in wetlands because these ecological systems are inherently dependent on hydrology, and temporal hydrologic variability often causes reversals or setbacks in succession. Wetlands of the Great Lakes provide good examples for demonstrating the implications of hydrology in driving successional processes and for illustrating potential misinterpretations of apparent successional sequences. Most Great Lakes coastal wetlands follow cyclic patterns in which emergent communities are reduced in area or eliminated by high lake levels and then regenerated from the seed bank during low lake levels. Thus, succession never proceeds for long. Wetlands also develop in ridge and swale terrains in many large embayments of the Great Lakes. These formations contain sequences of wetlands of similar origin but different age that can be several thousand years old, with older wetlands always further from the lake. Analyses of plant communities across a sequence of wetlands at the south end of Lake Michigan showed an apparent successional pattern from submersed to floating to emergent plants as water depth decreased with wetland age. However, paleoecological analyses showed that the observed vegetation changes were driven largely by disturbances associated with increased human settlement in the area. Climate-induced hydrologic changes were also shown to have greater effects on plant-community change than autogenic processes. Other terms, such as zonation, maturation, fluctuations, continuum concept, functional guilds, centrifugal organization, pulse stability, and hump-back models provide additional means of describing organization and changes in vegetation; some of them overlap with succession in describing vegetation processes in Great Lakes wetlands, but each must be used in the proper context with regard to short- and long-term hydrologic variability.


The effect of the group-V termination of GaAsSb(100) surfaces on the sharpness of InP/GaAsSb heterointerfaces was investigated. Lattice matched GaAsSb/InP(100)-layers were grown by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE). Contamination free sample transfer from the MOVPE reactor into ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) allowed for the correlation of in-situ reflectance anisotropy/difference (RA/RD) spectra with low energy electron diffraction (LEED) and photoelectron spectra (XPS/UPS). The in-situ RA spectra indicated that the GaAsSb surface was Sb-rich during growth and turned preferably into an As-rich surface after growth. With LEED and XPS the Sb-rich and As-rich surfaces were correlated with (4×3) and c(4×4) symmetries, respectively. These are well known reconstructions from the related binaries GaAs and GaSb. The study of the InP/GaAsSb interfaces compared the two ordered GaAsSb(100) surfaces as templates for InP growth. XPS measurements of InP/GaAsSb interfaces taken in UHV and I-V curves of InP/GaAsSb resonant tunneling diodes indicated that Sb segregation into a subsequent InP layer was significantly lower when the InP film was grown on the c(4×4) reconstructed GaAsSb surface compared to the (4×3) reconstructed surface.


This edition from the best-selling poetry series brings together the most beloved poems for children, from "The Owl and the Pussycat" through "On the Ning Nang Nong" to "I Know Someone Who Can" to "Us Two". The Nation's Favourite Children's Poems will compel and amuse adults and children alike, with poems drawn from themes as diverse as animals, schooldays, summer holidays, fun with friends and family, and fantastic daydreams - whether it is recalling the anxiety of starting school, as in Roger McGough's "First Day at School", the magical visit of a mythical beast in Adrian Henri's "Kate's Unicorn", or the nostalgic realisation that 'mother always knows best' in Pam Ayres's "Oh, I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth". Readers can revisit old favourites by Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc and A.A. Milne, and dip into the modern musings of poets such as Wendy Cope and Allan Ahlberg. Introduced by Spike Milligan and including 30 specially commissioned illustrations, this is the perfect treasury of children's verse and will delight and entertain all generations for years to come.


This thesis explores meaning-making in children's peer-led classroom role-play and considers its contribution to learning during the first year of school. The aims of the research are to understand, firstly, how children of 4-5 years through their lexicogrammatical choices enact social roles and construe role-play scenarios that are reminiscent of real life, and secondly, what opportunities in these peer-led collaborative dialogues there may be for learning language, learning through language and learning about language.

The methodological and analytical approach draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the Vygotskian construct of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). I focus on linguistic and other semiotic data collected from children's interactions in fifteen video- recorded small group classroom role-plays, and ten audio recorded teacher role-play introductions with the whole class.

Classroom role-play is reconceptualised theoretically as a genre (as defined within SFL) enabling a deeper understanding of children's meaning-making in this context. The findings show that the construal of the social scenario is based on the children's dialogic interaction and ability to eo-create individual genre stages. Offering insights into these stages, I show evidence of the children's sophisticated and creative linguistic and other semiotic choices.

Through an interactional analytic framework, I consider how the children are able to extend their ZPD in six learning areas that have been linked to longer term social and academic learning. Findings show that the teacher introductions prime the children's learning which is then consolidated further in serendipitous opportunities forged by the particular nature of the child-led extended dialogic interaction of classroom role-play.

My study emphasises and reinforces the value of considering classroom role-play as a unique pedagogic resource for extending children's meaning-making and learning in their first year at school. As a result, the outcomes of this research have implications for future educational practice in this area.


WHY WE FOUGHT: AMERICA'S WARS IN FILM AND HISTORY Ed. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, University Press of Kentucky, 2008, 624 pp. Eschewing psychoanalytic, formalist, and auteur critical approaches in favor of one that privileges simultaneously the internal and the external contexts of cinematic narratives, Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor have long insisted that films must be read for both their historical and their aesthetic elements. Their recent co-edited collection, Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History, offers a number of essays exemplifying their unique interdisciplinary approach. Its twenty-three selections, most of which were initially presented at the Film and History Conference in 2005, examine a widely disparate though representative selection of important films from the American war film genre through a self-avowed "film and history" lens that views movie, newsreel, and television productions as historical documents that are as deserving of close, scholarly, and contextual analysis as other primary and secondary historical resources. Inspired by the prevailing tenets of film scholarship and social and cultural history, most contributors combine relatively cursory readings of a film's cinematographic and aesthetic elements with more detailed analysis of the historical accuracy of its content and the sociocultural contexts of its production, distribution, and reception. Indeed, whether assessing a film as a propaganda vehicle or determining the role of government sponsorship or censorship in pre- and postproduction, the collection as a whole tends to see war films as cultural texts that not only record events but also influence perceptions about the events depicted while simultaneously reflecting the values, morals, and ideals of both the era in which the events purportedly happened and the era in which the film was produced and released. Thus, depending on its particular mode of historical inquiry, each essay examines the genre's films within a rubric defined by four frameworks identified in the collection's expansive introduction, assessing each as a representation of history, as a document of social or cultural history, as a representation of a particular moment in film history, or as actual historical fact. Though the editors' introduction and John Shelton Lawrence's excellent filmography and bibliography sections are invaluable in their own right for their precision and concision, the collection's true strength lies in its comprehensive assessment of the genre, from feature films and documentaries to newsreels and television miniseries. Extensive and inclusive with respect to content as well, its essays consider mediated depictions of almost every one of the United States' armed conflicts since the Revolutionary War. Indeed, one of its most compelling arguments, written by Frank Thompson, deals with problematic cinematic depictions of the battle of the Alamo; yet another powerful essay assesses the heavily mediated and interpretive "mythic condensation" (443) at the core of Ridley Scott's powerful film adaptation of Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down (2001). This is not to say, of course, that Rollins and O'Connor ignore the nation's involvement in large-scale warfare. In an effort to ensure both breadth and historical context, the editors have adroitly organized their collection into four parts. Part 1 assesses films dealing with the nation's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wars, to include the American Revolution, the MexicanAmerican War, and the Civil War. Part 2 examines cinematic representations of World War I and World War II. Part 3 appraises films dealing with the paradox of limited warfare, to include the Cold War and Vietnam, and Part 4 considers contemporary filmic narratives dealing with the nation's more recent asymmetric conflicts. In addition to O'Connor's and Rollins's lucid contributions, the collection's strongest essays, such as those by Gary Edgerton, Robert Myers, Ian Scott, Robert Brent Toplin, and John Shelton Lawrence and John McGarrahan, clearly and explicitly model the "film and history" approach. …


Objective: The aim of this paper was to evaluate the effects of four final irrigation solutions, on bond strength to radicular dentin of three root canal sealers based on calcium silicate and resin.
Methods: This study used 96 extracted mandibular premolars. The teeth were sectioned transversally to obtain two sections. The resulting 192 samples were randomly divided into four irrigation groups: Group 1 was irrigated with 17% EDTA and 5.25% NaOCl; Group 2 with QMix; Group 3 with 0.2% chitosan solution; and Group 4 with distilled water. After these irrigation procedures, three specimens from each group were randomly chosen for SEM examination. Then, remaining teeth were randomly divided into three subgroups (n=15), according to the sealer used: AH Plus, MTA Fillapex, and Total Fill BC Sealer. A vertical load was applied using a universal testing machine. All statistical analyses were performed with the SPSS (ver. 20.0) software. The results were analysed with a One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and a post-hoc Tukey's test (p ≤ 0.05).
Results: AH Plus and Total Fill BC Sealer provided equal bond strengths to the root canal wall in all the groups except the distilled water group (p 0.05). When chitosan was used, all root canal sealers showed their highest bond strength values.
Conclusions: Chitosan may serve as an alternative chelating agent for use with various root canal sealers.


Learning related tasks in various domains and transferring exploited knowledge to new situations is a significant challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, most RL algorithms are data inefficient and fail to generalize in complex environments, limiting their adaptability and applicability in multi-task scenarios. In this paper, we propose SelfSupervised Mixture-of-Experts (SUM), an effective algorithm driven by predictive uncertainty estimation for multitask RL. SUM utilizes a multi-head agent with shared parameters as experts to learn a series of related tasks simultaneously by Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Each expert is extended by predictive uncertainty estimation on known and unknown states to enhance the Q-value evaluation capacity against overfitting and the overall generalization ability. These enable the agent to capture and diffuse the common knowledge across different tasks improving sample efficiency in each task and the effectiveness of expert scheduling across multiple tasks. Instead of task-specific design as common MoEs, a self-supervised gating network is adopted to determine a potential expert to handle each interaction from unseen environments and calibrated completely by the uncertainty feedback from the experts without explicit supervision. To alleviate the imbalanced expert utilization as the crux of MoE, optimization is accomplished via decayedmasked experience replay, which encourages both diversification and specialization of experts during different periods. We demonstrate that our approach learns faster and achieves better performance by efficient transfer and robust generalization, outperforming several related methods on extended OpenAI Gym's MuJoCo multi-task environments.


This study investigates the relationship between auditor selection, client firm characteristics, and corporate governance measures for firms listed in the ISE for the years 1999- 20042. The argument that varying levels of audit quality are demanded by companies with different firm characteristics constitutes the basis for our research. The paper focuses on determining the degree of association between the client firms' choice of external auditors and the following client firm characteristics: percentage of shares held by foreign investors, percentage of shares open to the public (the float), membership in the finance industry, leverage, size, return on assets, and the market-to-book ratio. In addition, the effect of the client firms' levels of Transparency and Disclosure (T&D) and compliance with local Corporate Governance Principles on the auditor selection process is also investigated.3 Whether the Big-Five4, second tier, and local audit firms are perceived as distinct groups in terms of credibility in the eyes of ISE firms is analyzed. We find that client firm size, level of shareholdings by foreign shareholders, and membership in the finance sector are the firm-specific variables that are positively and significantly associated with the choice of a Big-Five versus the other two types of auditors. This finding is consistent with the findings of extant auditor choice literature in both developed markets and in the emerging market of Athens Stock Exchange. Like Citron and Manalis (2000), we posit and find the positive relationship between foreign shareholding status and the selection of a Big Five auditor is an indication of the role of the Big-Five in providing audit credibility in the eyes of international investors. However, contrary to our expectation that agency costs will be mitigated by widespread public ownership, we find a significant negative association between the level of public shareholdings and selection of a Big-Five auditor. This might be a peculiar finding in the ISE where the managers, in serving the interests of majority family owners, may opt for the non-Big-Five that are more likely to allow managers to use discretionary, if not unethical, accounting methods that would expropriate wealth from minority shareholders and other stakeholders as we have seen in the case of bankrupt family banks. We also find that, although the Big-Five auditors' clients are more profitable than the other types of auditors' clients, the association is not a significant one. This might be a result of the downturn of the Turkish economy in 1998 and in 2001 that have negatively affected the profitability of all ISE companies. We expect the results of this study to be useful for auditors, their clients and the regulators that have an oversight function over both.


Automatic fingerprint classification has received considerable attention over the past
decade. Despite significant progress in this field, there are still rooms for improving
the classification operation by continuing study and research in this field. This thesis
describes a study of fingerprint classification using template matching technique. We
have classified the fingerprints in four groups according to their pattern, which are
Arch, Left loop, Right loop, and Whorl. We have discussed and explained the
specification and the limitations of the fingerprint classification (the effect of
corrupted and rotated input fingerprints on the accuracy of the classification
operation). The thesis has analysed the mentioned technique and evaluated its
strengths and limitation by comparing this technique with the singularities technique.
This research has also included the pre-processing stage, which consist of
enhancement, segmentation, and thinning of fingerprints.


This article is part of an ongoing project on education for social cohesion. The article aims to present the findings of fieldwork carried out in selected primary and secondary schools in four States in Malaysia (Sabah, Sarawak, Selangor, Kelantan). The aspects to be discussed are the views of the student-respondents regarding the meaning of school and benefit of schooling, the subjects that enable them to learn, know about and respect their own religion, community and home state, as well as other religions, communities and other states in Malaysia. Data analysis will be based on a spatial framework to see if there are differences between States, rural-urban, and types of schools. Education and the schooling system in Malaysia are constant agenda in the discourse of nation-building and national unity. This is because education is regarded as an important avenue to inculcate national consciousness and social cohesion among the people. However, in a multi-ethnic country like Malaysia, it is important to have an education system that promotes inclusion and participation of all citizens, where diversity of learners is recognised and acknowledged. An inclusive education aiming to promote social cohesion, that is, greater understanding, respect and interaction among students of diverse backgrounds, should be grounded on these four principles/ pillars of education: learning to know , learning to do , learning to be and learning to live togethe r. As social beings, students need to learn to interact and relate with people from different backgrounds. The school is thus an important avenue to learn about diversity and how to live with such diversity. What is the relevance and effectiveness of the education system if it is unable to provide the basic requirements to train the students about the four learning pillars? The demographic plurality of Malaysia calls for our education system to provide such opportunities for our young generation to learn and know more about themselves and others. In the context of social cohesion, failure to take into account the diversity of the national population, and exclusion of some ethnic populations from the schooling and education system, will give a one-sided picture of the real demographic situation. The school as an important educational institution can be the place to foster respect and sense of responsibility towards others. In short, does the education system produce students who are 'academically-literate' (competent in 3Rs – reading, writing, arithmetic) so as to serve as manpower resource for the labour market? Or, does the education system also play the role of producing 'culturally-literate' students, who are competent in 1R + 3r [Relationship + r ecognise, r espect and r econcile)? The findings of the research project indicate that the education system in Malaysia serves the dual role of providing academic competence (3R) and inter-cultural understanding (1R+3r). Through the responses of the student-respondents, irrespective of type of school (national, national-type, private; primary, secondary; rural, urban), we can say that there is hope for our schools to develop the four learning pillars and the value of 1R+3r among our young generation through the school curriculum.


Connect, First Edition, is a fun, 4-level, multi-skills American English course especially written and designed for young adolescents. Connect Student's Book 2 is a high-beginning-level text for students aged 11-15 who are learning English for the first time. It develops speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. Tasks provide opportunities for students to share their experiences. High-interest topics motivate them to learn. Student's Book 2 contains eight units divided into 2-page lessons. Also included are 8 Learning Logs or self-assessment tests and 8 Theme Projects.


KIDQUEST CHILDHOOD OBESITY PREVENTION PROGRAM: ANALYSIS OF ITS INFLUENCE ON HEALTH OF RURAL SOUTH DAKOTA 5 TH AND 6 TH GRADE CHILDREN NAYEF BUMARYOUM 2015 Obesity is a growing problem throughout the developed world. This project will focus on obesity in rural children by studying those living in an area of South Dakota. Research shows high levels of overweight and obese children in this demographic. The two major objectives of this study are to evaluate the efficacy of the KidQuest (KQ) nutrition and physical activity curriculum in reducing the proportion of children and adolescents who are overweight and obese within participating South Dakota 5 th and 6 th grade children using baseline/post-intervention data and to determine which KQ teacher type is most effective as evaluated by anthropometric, biochemical, blood pressure, dietary choices. The KQ program was shown to provide reinforcement for nutrition and physical education in the school setting. It was also able to help students practice healthy options and improved some of the health parameters that prevent childhood obesity. The Teen Teachers (TT) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program (SNAP-ED) educators were proven to be an effective approach to improving the health outcomes of the children and adolescents; their students showed significant improvements among some health parameters and dietary choices (DC) that prevent childhood obesity.


We present a framework for the certification of compilation and of compiled programs. Our approach uses a symbolic transfer functions-based representation of programs, so as to check that source and compiled programs present similar behaviors. This checking can be done either for a concrete semantic interpretation (Translation Validation) or for an abstract semantic interpretation (Invariant Translation) of the symbolic transfer functions. We propose to design a checking procedure at the concrete level in order to validate both the transformation and the translation of abstract invariants. The use of symbolic transfer functions makes possible a better treatment of compiler optimizations and is adapted to the checking of precise invariants at the assembly level. The approach proved successful in the implementation point of view, since it rendered the translation of very precise invariants on very large assembly programs feasible.


We present a modified upright SURF feature descriptor for mobile phone GPUs. Our implementation called uSURF-ES is multiple times faster than a comparable CPU variant on the same device. Our results proof the feasibility of modern mobile graphics accelerators for GPGPU tasks especially for the detection phase in natural feature tracking used in Augmented Reality applications.


Models are useful when they are compared with data. Whether this comparison should be qualitative or quantitative depends on circumstances, but in many cases some statistical comparison of model and data is useful and enhances objectivity. Unfortunately, ecological dynamic models tend to contain assumptions and simplifications that enhance tractability, promote insight, but spoil model fit, and this can cause difficulties when adopting a statistical approach. Furthermore, the arcane numerical analysis required to fit dynamic models reliably presents an impediment to objective model testing by fitting. This paper presents methods for formulating and fitting partially specified models, which aim to achieve a measure of generality by avoiding some of the irrelevant incidental assumptions that are inevitable in more traditional approaches. This is done by allowing delay differential equation models, difference equation models, and differential equation models to be constructed with part of their structure represented by unknown functions, while part of the structure may contain conventional model elements that contain only unknown parameters. An integrated practical methodology for using such models is presented along with several examples, which include use of models formulated using delay differential equations, discrete difference equations/matrix models, ordinary differential equations, and partial differential equations. The methods also allow better estimation from ecological data by model fitting, since models can be formulated to include fewer unjustified assumptions than would usually be the case if more traditional models were used, while still including as much structure as the modeler believes can be justified by biological knowledge: model structure improves precision, while fewer extraneous assumptions reduce unquantifiable bias.


Science, technology, and innovation are essential to America's continued economic growth, and can help achieve a wide range of national and global policy objectives. One currently underutilized tool for stimulating technological innovation is inducement prizes, which encourage efforts by contestants to accomplish a particular goal. A related policy instrument is an Advanced Market Commitment, under which governments commit to buy a given quantity of a product or service that meets prespecified performance goals. This paper proposes expanding the US government's use of prizes and AMCs in five areas: space exploration, African agriculture, vaccines for diseases of the poor, energy and climate change, and learning technologies. Under certain circumstances, inducement prizes may act as a useful complement to grants and contracts as a way to encourage technological innovation. The government can establish a goal without determining who is in the best position to reach the goal or what the most promising technical approach is. The government only pays the prize money if someone is successful, and may be able to leverage additional funding from foundations, philanthropists, and contestants who value the reputational benefits of winning the competition. Prizes can also generate public excitement and enthusiasm for science and technology, and encourage more young people to pursue careers in science, engineering, or technology-based entrepreneurship. Inducement prizes and AMCs cannot substitute for robust research funding, protection of intellectual property, and development of a world-class workforce, but they can be a powerful complement to those efforts. Although the optimal level of investment in prizes is not clear, it is surely much larger than the government's current very modest investment. We still have much to learn about the strengths and limitations of prizes, but the time to start additional experiments is now. PRIZES FOR TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION WWW.HAMILTONPROJECT.ORG | DECEMBER 2006 3


Objective: To describe the implementation of a rapid response system and adherence to its afferent limb in order to identify key elements for improvement. Implementation: We developed a multifaceted implementation strategy to introduce the Rapid Response System ( RRS ) on a 60-bed surgical ward of a university hospital. The strategy included the use of clear objectives, key leaders, an early warning score (EWS) observation protocol and a two-tiered medical emergency team (MET) warning protocol, a 1-day training program including a before-after knowledge test, mandatory for nurses and optional for ward physicians, reminders and feedback. Study design and methods: We retrospectively analyzed a sample of 10,653 patient days and 101 medical records of patients with a serious adverse event (SAE). Outcome measures were EWS recording rates, the nurse to ward physician and the ward physician to the MET calling rates following abnormal EWS recordings, and the indicators triggering these calls. Results: EWS recordings were present in 90% of the day shifts, 88% of the evening shifts and 80% of the night shifts. EWSs were recorded at least once in 92/101 medical records in the three days before an SAE; in 91/101 records EWSs were abnormal at least once. In case of an abnormal score, the nurse called the ward physician once or more in 87% (79/91). After being called by the nurse, the ward physician called the MET once or more in 75% (59/79). However, in 18% (15/79) there was a delay of one or two days before the ward physician/MET was called. Overall, medical emergency team calls were absent or delayed in over 50%. Conclusions: After RRS implementation, recording of the EWS was high. Adequate warning in case of abnormal scores was suboptimal in nurses as well as ward physicians. Future implementation strategies should therefore be aimed at the interdisciplinary team.


The chitosan(CS)/polyurethane(PU) blend nanofibers have been prepared for the first time by electrospinning. Formic acid (FA) and Hexafluoroisopropanol (HFIP) were found to be the co-solvent for electrospinning. The CS/PU blend solutions in various ratios were studied for electrospinning into nanofibers. The diameter and morphology of the fibers were shown by scanning electron microscope (SEM). It was found that the average diameter of the chitosan/PU blend fibers became larger, and the morphology of the fibers became finer with the content of PU increasing. To show the molecular interactions, CS/PU fibers were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). Moreover, the antibaterial activity of blend nanofibers against Escherichia coil (E.coil) was measured via optical density method. The blend nanofibers exhibited satisfying antibacterial activity against E.coil, even the chitosan concentration was only 5wt%. Therefore, the spun nanofibers are expected to be used in the native extracellular matrix for tissue engineering.


Human rights and intellectual property protection are two distinct fields that have largely evolved separately. Their relationship needs to be re-examined for a number of reasons. First, the impacts of intellectual property rights on the realization of human rights such as the right to health have become much more visible following the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement. Second, the increasing importance of intellectual property rights has led to the need for clarifying the scope of human rights provisions protecting individual contributions to knowledge. Third, a number of new challenges need to be addressed concerning contributions to knowledge, which cannot effectively be protected under existing intellectual property rights regimes. This article examines the different aspects of the relationship between intellectual property rights, human rights, and science and technology related provisions in human rights treaties. It analyzes existing knowledge protection-related provisions in human rights treaties. It also examines some of the impacts of existing intellectual property rights regimes on the realization of human rights. Further, it analyzes the recently adopted General Comment 17 on Article 15(1)(c) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and proposes an alternative broader reading of this provision focusing on traditional knowledge.


This book argues that the global epidemic of HIV/AIDS can be overcome. It draws from three bodies of knowledge: the epidemiology of HIV, public health insights into disease control, and public economics. The report argues that AIDS is a large and growing problem and that governments can and should confront the epidemic by preventing new infections and by mitigating the impact of infections that occur. It finds that some policies will be much more effective than others in reducing the spread of HIV and mitigating its impact, and it provides the framework to help distinguish among activities that can be undertaken by household and the private sector, including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), those that should be initiated by developing country governments, and those that should be most strongly supported by the international development community.


Empire of the Senses introduces new approaches to the history of European imperialism in the Americas by questioning the role that the five senses played in framing the cultural encounters, colonial knowledge, and political relationships that built New World empires.


Hydrogel scaffolds that mimic the native extracellular matrix (ECM) environment is a crucial part of tissue engineering. It has been demonstrated that cell behaviors can be affected by not only the hydrogel's physical and chemical properties, but also its three dimensional (3D) geometrical structures. In order to study the influence of 3D geometrical cues on cell behaviors as well as the maturation and function of engineered tissues, it is imperative to develop 3D fabrication techniques to create micro and nanoscale hydrogel constructs. Among existing techniques that can effectively pattern hydrogels, two-photon polymerization (2PP)-based femtosecond laser 3D printing technology allows one to produce hydrogel structures with 100 nm resolution. This article reviews the basics of this technique as well as some of its applications in tissue engineering.


The last two decades have witnessed a phenomenal expansion of scholarly work on collective memory. Simultaneously, increasing anthropological attention is being paid to collective visions of the future, albeit through a range of disparate literatures on topics including development, modernity and risk, the imagination, and, perhaps ironically, nostalgia. In this introduction to this special section, we bring together analyses of postsocialist visions of pasts and futures to shed light upon the cultural scripts and social processes through which different temporal visions are ascribed collective meaning, employed in the creation of shared and personal identities, and used to galvanize social and political action.