Multidistrict litigation ("MDL") has, in recent years, become so central a device in complex litigation as to be almost routine. As authorized by federal statute, the Multidistrict Litigation Panel of federal judges regularly transfers cases which may share no more than one common issue from federal districts all over the nation into a single transferee district. The transferee court is then in charge of all pre-trial procedure for all of the cases on a collective basis. This includes conduct of discovery as well as pre-trial motions, including summary judgment. While the transferee district is not permitted to adjudicate the merits of the individual suits at trial (other than in the form of several test cases, binding only on the specific litigants involved), as a practical matter cases return to their transferor districts very rarely. Instead, there is constant pressure to form a global settlement. While individual claimants may opt out of that settlement, the settlement usually effectively ends the process. The claimants' pre-trial cases are controlled by an appointed steering committee of selected attorneys.Although much has been written on the subject of multidistrict litigation, none of that scholarship to this point has directly challenged the constitutionality of the process. This Article, in contrast to all prior scholarship, conducts a frontal assault on the constitutionality of MDL as a stark violation of the individual claimant's due process right to her day in court. In so doing, the Article explores the underlying political and constitutional theory of a litigant's right to her day in court, and explains how current MDL practice unambiguously undermines that right. MDL amounts to a strange cross between The Wild West and political smoke-filled rooms of the twentieth century — hardly a combination that augurs well for either due process or the rule of law. The Article considers and rejects the supposed utilitarian values of efficiency attained by use of MDL as an asserted justification for the serious interference with the individual's control of her own case. In making its case against the constitutionality of MDL, the Article contrasts the methods by which class action procedure — itself subject to several challenges over the years on due process grounds — seeks to protect the due process rights of absent class members. The Article concludes that whatever due process problems impact class actions pale in comparison to the dangers deriving from the crude form of procedural collectivization imposed by MDL. The Article ends with an exploration of ways in which MDL's constitutionality might be salvaged through important modifications in its processes.


In the upland hardwood forests of the southern Appalachians, management tools are needed based on the characteristics of the site to quantify the site quality where no accurate maps of site quality exist. Three studies were conducted to achieve this objective. The first study tested if independent measures of forest productivity, based on vegetation and environment, in a sixcounty study area in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina would correlate with measures of forest productivity obtained from U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory Analysis (FIA) data. Specific hypotheses included: FIA measures of forest productivity are related to one another; FIA measures of forest productivity are related to FIA-measured landscape parameters; and FIA measures of forest productivity are related to independent measures of forest productivity based on landscape parameters and soil characteristics. Four predictive indices of forest productivity were used; three were generated in a geographic information system (GIS). FIA measures of forest productivity were not significantly correlated to FIA measured landscape parameters. FIA site productivity classes were significantly correlated to FIA measures of site index. Independent measures of forest productivity, particularly the Moisture Regime Index (MRI) and the Forest Site Quality Index (FSQI), were significantly correlated to FIA measures of site index. Topography can be used to delineate site quality, but the addition of soil depth can prove to be useful in the estimation. The second study was designed to develop methods, based on field and digital data, to identify colluvial soils in the central Ridge and Valley of southwestern Virginia. Two hypotheses were tested. First, on the linear side slopes of the study area, where site quality is low in stands with subxeric to xeric moisture regimes, vegetation and topography can indicate colluvial soils. A second hypothesis tested if the topographic signature of colluvial soils could be identified geospatially with a digital elevation model. Results indicated that the MRI and the Terrain Shape Index predicted the presence of colluvial deposits in the study area. The basal area of yellow-poplar was positively associated with colluvial soils. A GIS-based model found the slope difference of colluvial soils to be less steep than residual soils as the size of the neighborhood increased. The final study determined if measures of site quality in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina were related to the water budget. Specifically,the hypothesis that site index could be predicted by variables that represented the inputs, usage, and supply of water was tested. A second hypothesis questioned if site quality classes could be predicted by a combination of topography and the annual water budget. Regression models predicted site index to be a function of topography, available water supply, and the annual water budget, but the accuracy was low (R 2 =0.11 and 0.13). A classification approach yielded better results. Incorporating the annual water budget into the FSQI increased classification accuracy of predicted site index by 50%, and decreased the number of sites misclassified by one class by 8%. Where accurate maps of site quality do not exist, the MRI, the abundance of yellow-poplar, and the modified FSQI may be used to delineate site quality for site-specific management and, ultimately, greater return on investment for the landowner.


This study examines issues of online identity and language use among male and female teenagers who created and maintained weblogs, personal journals made publicly accessible on the World Wide Web. Online identity and language use were examined in terms of the disclosure of personal information, sexual identity, emotive features, and semantic themes. Male and female teenagers presented themselves similarly in their blogs, often revealing personal information such as their real names, ages, and locations. Males more so than females used emoticons, employed an active and resolute style of language, and were more likely to present themselves as gay. The results suggest that teenagers stay closer to reality in their online expressions of self than has previously been suggested, and that these explorations involve issues, such as learning about their sexuality, that commonly occur during the adolescent years.


Abstract This paper outlines the basic facts of Swedish clause-level word order, in particular the distribution of the verb-second (V2) phenomenon. A sample of other (Germanic and non-Germanic) V2 languages is discussed, and possible correlates of embedded V2 are explored. Finally, it is claimed that cross-linguistic facts suggest that embedded V2 does not involve recursion of a discrete category C (the prototypical complementizer position), but rather that what is referred to as C in the generative V2 literature is a trivial clustering of syntactic features onto a single (unlabelled) head.


Future in-vehicle information systems may overload drivers, compromising driving safety and product usability. Suggestions of overload appear in (1) statistics from Japan, the United States, and Kuwait for mobile phone-related crashes, (2) statistics from Japan for navigation system-related crashes, and (3) human performance data. From most to least frequent, tasks associated with crashes were receiving a call, dialing, talking (on a phone), looking at a (navigation) display and operating an interface (for navigation). To optimize driver performance for future interfaces, developers should comply with design guidelines (JAMA, SAE J2364), work more closely with human factors experts, expand usability testing, and implement workload managers.


In The Embodied Text Matthias L. Richter demonstrates how early Chinese manuscript texts can reliably be established on the basis of their material representation rather than on grounds of similarities with other texts.


In this article we present a corpus-based statistical approach to measuring translation quality, more particularly translation acceptability, by comparing the features of translated and original texts. We discuss initial findings that aim to support and objectify formative quality assessment. To that end, we extract a multitude of linguistic and textual features from both student and professional translation corpora that consist of many different translations by several translators in two different genres (fiction, news) and in two translation directions (English to French and French to Dutch). The numerical information gathered from these corpora is exploratively analysed with Principal Component Analysis, which enables us to identify stable, language-independent linguistic and textual indicators of student translations compared to translations produced by professionals. The differences between these types of translation are subsequently tested by means of ANOVA. The results clearly indicate that the proposed methodology is indeed capable of distinguishing between student and professional translations. It is claimed that this deviant behaviour indicates an overall lower translation quality in student translations: student translations tend to score lower at the acceptability level, that is, they deviate significantly from target-language norms and conventions. In addition, the proposed methodology is capable of assessing the acceptability of an individual student's translation – a smaller linguistic distance between a given student translation and the norm set by the professional translations correlates with higher quality. The methodology is also able to provide objective and concrete feedback about the divergent linguistic dimensions in their text.


Exposure to environmental pollutants is considered to be detrimental to the larval development of various fish species. The liver is thought to be a target organ for many chemicals because of its high lipid content which bioaccumulates lipophilic contaminants. Common impacts of dioxins found in fish livers include lipidosis and glycogen depletion. However, very few studies have been conducted to show these developmental issues in the early stages of long-lived species such as sturgeon. Given their bottom dwelling nature, sturgeon are more vulnerable to environmental pollutants such as dioxin which have long half-lives in aquatic sediments. This study sought to determine the impacts of the persistent organic pollutant, dioxin, on the hepatic development of the 25 larval shortnose sturgeon (Ascipenser brevirostrum). The average area and numbers of vacuoles located in livers of larval sturgeon exposed to different dioxin concentrations including 50 ppb, 0.5 ppb, and 0.005 ppb, as well as a treatment (water) and a vehicle (acetone) control, were examined. There were no significant differences between the concentration of dioxin exposure and the average area and numbers of vacuoles in the livers of larval sturgeon examined in this study. In the future, larger sample sizes should be used to determine the effects of dioxin on liver development and other organs should be examined to determine overall developmental impacts.


Why do leaves have such varied sizes and shapes? Part of the answer lies in physiological and biomechanical demands imposed by different habitats; selective forces that are now reasonably well understood. In contrast, the im pact of herbivores on the evolution of leaf size and shape has rarely been investigated and is poorly understood. There are at least six ways in which herbivores, particularly vertebrates and insects, may have influenced the evolution of leaf size and shape, favouring leaf morphologies that differ from those dictated by physiological and biomechanical constraints acting on plants. They are mimicry, not only of leaves of other plant species but also grazed leaves and inanim ate objects; crypsis; physical barriers to being eaten; interspecific differences in leaf morphology to reduce recognition by herbivores; very small or highly divided and dissected leaves that reduce feeding efficiency; and different adult and juvenile foliages. There is an urgent need for studies specifically designed to investigate the im pact of herbivores on leaf size and shape.


This study explores the role and place of Lesotho Sign Language (LSL) in the education of deaf learners. It seeks to determine how the present language-in-education policy and language practices at home and in the schools for the deaf impact on education of deaf learners. For this purpose, the research focuses on the schools for the deaf as the sites where policy is to be implemented. The study also investigates the attitude of policy makers towards the inclusion of LSL in the current national language-in-education policy. A qualitative approach to research was adopted for this study. Data was collected mainly through interviews with policy makers, deaf children, teachers and parents of deaf learners. To complement this data, observations were conducted in schools where deaf children in Lesotho are taught. The study is a language policy study and as such, language planning and bilingual education theories are interrogated. Rationale choice theory is applied to explain which factors policy makers in Lesotho consider in language planning. This is an attempt to understand reasons that may enable or hinder the inclusion of LSL in the national language-in-education policy. Additionally, based on Cummins' theoretical framework for minority student intervention and empowerment, the study suggests the adoption of bilingual model for the schools of the deaf to teaching deaf learners. Bilingual education does not only encourage instruction through LSL, it also provides an opportunity for deaf learners to decide on the language that best meets their learning needs. The analysis of data revealed that education of deaf learners in Lesotho is not satisfactory. This is due to three main reasons. First, Lesotho Sign Language is not sufficiently used in the schools for the deaf. The situation brings about discrepancy between the mother tongue policy and its implementation. Secondly, teachers are neither adequately proficient in LSL nor are they conversant with Deaf culture. Coupled with all these, teachers lack skills suitable to teach deaf children. Thirdly, parents are not actively involved in the education of their children. All these impact negatively on the education of deaf learners in Lesotho. Finally, although policy makers showed a positive attitude towards the inclusion of LSL in the current national language-in-education, they expressed a lot of skepticism on whether the government would be wiling to financially ready for the implementation of such policy. Based on these findings, this research is an important contribution to describing the situation of Deaf education in Lesotho and the inherent difficulties that Deaf learners experience due to the current language practices in the schools for the Deaf. The study is also of great value since in Lesotho, most people are not aware of deafness as a phenomenon or of the existence of Sign Language. Literature on Lesotho language policy and minority languages focuses on spoken languages. The ostensible avoidance of LSL in both academic and policy circles is therefore the main focus of this study.


The Formation of the French Anti-Globalization
Movement
Neither totally new nor simply the reconversion of existing
organizations, the French anti-globalization movement is studied in this
article from the perspective of four processes. The first is the transformation
of French social movements during the 1990s due to the emergence of new
organizations formed to fight against the increasing instability of French
society. The second is the creation of various anti-globalization think tanks.
The third is the definition of the frontiers separating the movement from
political parties and trade unions. Last but not least is the question of the
international image and impact of a movement still closely linked to the
national context in which it is involved and acts.


To whom do the Earth's riches belong all of mankind, the nations in which those riches are found, or individuals? Why should a relatively small number of Arabs own most of the world's oil reserves? Why should South Africans own most of the world's gold and diamond resources? Or why should the Americans and Canadians own the agriculturally rich Great Plains? Shouldn't these resources and the environment be treated as endowments available to all mankind?Long ago, the international community agreed to a system of national ownership of natural resources, giving states sovereignty over their respective territories. In recent years, however, environmentalists have raised questions about this distribution of property rights with respect to global environmental issues, such as atmospheric disposal of waste gases, preservation of the Earth's genetic material, and the destruction of tropical rain forests. When environmental impacts are global, international action may be warranted to ensure that individual nations are complying with transnational standards. In this book, part of the Brookings Integrating National Economies series, Richard N. Cooper evaluates the need for international policy action in natural resource and environmental management. Using numerous examples, he illustrates the issues that cause conflict in environment and resources policies. Cooper divides the use of natural resources into three categories and examines the rationale for international action in each. He discusses the use of resources not yet subject to national jurisdiction, such as Antarctica, open oceans, and outer space, and analyzes the effects of national action on other nations via both market and environmental externalities. Taking into account the diversity of individual states' circumstances and priorities, Copper concludes that stiff environmental regulations generally are not the best answer to environmental management. He explains that developing countries are not likely to take actions to improve environmental hazards if those actions risk slowing their economic growth. Instead, policies that provide incentives for compliance with international standards are needed. The book outlines past internatioal actions, what has worked and what has not, and provides recommendations for future actions. A volume of Brookings' Integrating National Economies Series


A new approach to autonomously detect and track a moving object in a video captured by a moving camera (possibly mounted on a unmanned vehicle, UxV) is proposed in this paper. It is based on a combination of the recently introduced recursive density estimation (RDE) approach and the well-known scale invariant feature transformation (SIFT). The new approach involves building a model of the background using RDE in video sequences captured by a moving camera. RDE was robust in many videos with moving background in the absence of image registration (pixel position alignment). The output of RDE is a cluster of foreground pixels which can be associated with the object of interest. After the moving object is detected, the foreground pixels are enclosed in a rectangular region of interest (ROI). The approximate size and location of the rectangular region is then sent to the object tracking algorithm. The tracking algorithm uses the rectangular search area to detect and match SIFT keypoints across successive video frames. If and when the tracking fails, the RDE algorithm is started again to detect the moving object. The proposed algorithm does not require any human involvement and it operates in real-time. The tracking algorithm is also computationally efficient because only a small ROI is processed in each video frame. In the future we aim to substitute the SIFT approach with speeded-up robust features (SURF) for higher accuracy in tracking and for faster processing speed. Additionally, the case of multiple objects can be addressed using clustering in the spatial domain and is a subject of current research.


This paper presents qualitative findings from an experiment designed to investigate breaks in presence. Participants spent approximately five minutes in an immersive Cave-like system depicting a virtual bar with five virtual characters. On four occasions the projections were made to go white to trigger clearly identifiable anomalies in the audiovisual experience. Participants' physiological responses were measured throughout to investigate possible physiological correlates of these experienced anomalies. Analysis of subsequent interviews with participants suggests that these anomalies were subjectively experienced as breaks in presence. This is significant in the context of our research approach, which considers presence as a multilevel construct ranging from higher-level subjective responses to lower-level behavioral and automatic responses. The fact that these anomalies were also associated with an identifiable physiological signature suggests future avenues for exploring less intrusive ways of studying temporal fluctuations in presence during the course of the mediated experience itself. The findings also reveal that breaks in presence have multiple causes and can range in intensity, resulting in varying recovery times. In addition, presence can vary in intensity within the same space, suggesting that presence in an immersive virtual environment can fluctuate temporally and that spatial behavior is consistent with what would be expected in an equivalent real environment.


While Bactrian and Persic languages differ in terms of knowledge based on historical, geographical, and comparative-historical linguistics, Pamir languages occupy a prominent position among Bactrian languages. Pamir languages are known to have originated in the mountainous region of Aryan land. Since then, these languages have prospered in this area and come to maintain their stronghold in Pamir and its immediate vicinity. In terms of linguistic relationship and intercourse, the gathering of all Pamir languages in a single group is one expression. It is still unclear if all the Pamir languages originated from an ancient source and then branched out into different groups or were left untouched by the Aryan languages, with each one maintaining its stability as a separate branch. Margin Stern, a specialist in Pamir languages do not consider one center of origin for Pamir languages: He says, "Finding a single phonologic system for all Pamir languages is impossible since they have similarities only in a few phonetics characters". Despite these similarities, sometimes they are separated and stacked with other languages such as Pashtu. Here, it is noteworthy to mention that it has been a long time since Mr. Margin Stern gave this idea and as such, this is not a recent theory. During those times, fewer studies on Pamir languages were carried out, and that too with poor materials. For instance, the Yazgolyami language was almost not investigated while phonological borders among Pamir languages were not identified and the specifically voiced items were not even differentiated. The later linguists and researchers collected many items and consequently, voice borders were selected. Such profound and in-depth studies and classification assure the researchers that these languages originated from one tree and later developed into different branches. Keywords: Pashtu, Pamir, Language


Lateral Resistance of Pipe Piles Near 20-ft Tall MSE Abutment Wall with Strip Reinforcements Jason James Besendorfer Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, BYU Master of Science Full scale lateral load testing was performed on four 12.75x0.375 pipe piles spaced at 3.9, 2.9, 2.8, and 1.7 pile diameters behind an MSE wall which was constructed for this research to determine appropriate reduction factors for lateral pile resistance based on pile spacing behind the back face of the wall. The load induced on eight soil reinforcements located at various transverse distances from the pile and at different depths was monitored to determine the relationship between lateral load on the pile and load induced in the reinforcement. Each pile was loaded towards the wall in 0.25 in. increments to a total deflection of 3.0 in. Additionally, wall panel displacement was also monitored to determine if it remained in acceptable bounds. The results of the research indicate that pile resistance tends to decrease as spacing decreases. P-multipliers for the 3.9, 2.9, 2.8, 1.7D tests were found to be 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, and 0.5, respectively using back-analysis with the computer model LPILE. However, these multipliers are higher than expected based on previous testing and research. Piles spaced further than 3.8D can be assumed to have no interaction with the wall. The resistance of piles spaced closer to the wall than 3.8D can be modeled in LPILE using a p-multiplier less than 1.0. The reinforced backfill can be modeled in LPILE using the API Sand (1982) method with a friction angle of 31o and a modulus of approximately 60 pci when a surcharge of 600 psf is applied. If no surcharge is applied, a friction angle of 39o and modulus of 260 pci is more appropriate. Maximum wall panel displacement was highest for the 2.8D test and was 0.35 in. at 3.0 in. of pile head displacement. For all the other tests, the maximum wall displacement at 3.0 in. of pile head displacement was similar and was approximately 0.15 inches. Induced load in the soil reinforcement increases with depth to the 2nd or 3rd layer of reinforcement after which it decreases. Induced load in the reinforcement increases as pile spacing decreases. Induced load in the reinforcement decreases rapidly with increased transverse distance from the pile. Induced load in the reinforcement can be estimated using a regression equation which considers the influence of pile load, pile spacing behind the wall, reinforcement depth or vertical stress, and transverse spacing of the reinforcement.


The concentrations of dimethyl sulfide in air were obtained during a cruise between the United Kingdom and the Antarctic in the period October 1992 to January 1993 using a method of sampling and analysis optimized to avoid interferences from oxidants. In equatorial regions (30°N to 30°S) the atmospheric DMS concentration ranged from 3 to 46 ng (S) m−3, with an average of 18 ng (S) m−3. In the polar waters and regions south of the Falkland Islands, concentrations from 3 to 714 ng (S) m−3 were observed, with a mean concentration of 73 ng (S) m−3. The concentrations of a range of DMS oxidation products were also obtained. No clear relationships between reactant and product concentrations were seen. Information on particle number concentration, Fuchs surface area and the thermal volatility characteristics of the ambient aerosol was obtained, but again no clear relationships with sulfur concentrations were observed. Accumulation mode particle concentrations averaged 25 cm−3 in the clean marine and polar air masses south of 58°S while background condensation nuclei (CN) concentrations were of the order of 400–600 cm−3. Simplistic calculations suggest that a particle source strength of about 20–60 particles cm−3 d−1 is required to sustain this background CN concentration. It is not clear whether boundary layer nucleation of new CN or entrainment from the free troposphere provided the source of CN. Periods of elevated CN concentrations (>4000 cm−3) were regularly observed in the boundary layer over the Weddell Sea and were attributed to "bursts" of new particle formation. However, shortly after these nucleation events the CN concentration rapidly decayed to the background level through coagulation losses, suggesting little impact on the background CN or cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) concentration.


Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an open and challenging problem in machine learning. While NAS offers great promise, the prohibitive computational demand of most of the existing NAS methods makes it difficult to directly search the architectures on large-scale tasks. The typical way of conducting large scale NAS is to search for an architectural building block on a small dataset (either using a proxy set from the large dataset or a completely different small scale dataset) and then transfer the block to a larger dataset. Despite a number of recent results that show the promise of transfer from proxy datasets, a comprehensive evaluation of different NAS methods studying the impact of different source datasets has not yet been addressed. In this work, we propose to analyze the architecture transferability of different NAS methods by performing a series of experiments on large scale benchmarks such as ImageNet1K and ImageNet22K. We find that: (i) The size and domain of the proxy set does not seem to influence architecture performance on the target dataset. On average, transfer performance of architectures searched using completely different small datasets (e.g., CIFAR10) perform similarly to the architectures searched directly on proxy target datasets. However, design of proxy sets has considerable impact on rankings of different NAS methods. (ii) While different NAS methods show similar performance on a source dataset (e.g., CIFAR10), they significantly differ on the transfer performance to a large dataset (e.g., ImageNet1K). (iii) Even on large datasets, random sampling baseline is very competitive, but the choice of the appropriate combination of proxy set and search strategy can provide significant improvement over it. We believe that our extensive empirical analysis will prove useful for future design of NAS algorithms.


of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb. No. of page in text. (138) With the increased security requirements in a variety of applications and advances in sensor technology, emerging biometric technologies, including using some lesser known biometrics, have become important research topics. This is due to the potential benefits they may provide as independent biometric markers or as compliments to existing biometric systems. In this work, our aim is to explore new biometric technologies for person identification. We consider three different biometrics, namely, Three Dimensional (3D) and Two Dimensional (2D) ear biometrics, 3D face recognition, and human identification based on dental X-Ray images. For the ear biometrics component, we propose a novel 3D shape descriptor, termed Histogram of Categorized Shape (HCS), to robustly encode range images within a 3D object detection framework. For the 3D ear detection task, this feature, employed in conjunction with a linear SVM classifier and sliding window technique, produces a robust and efficient 3D ear detection system. Afterwards, we extend the HCS descriptor to an object-centered 3D surface feature descriptor, termed Surface Patch Histogram of Indexed Shape (SPHIS), for local surface patch representation. The SPHIS feature descriptor is evaluated for its effectiveness in real world scenarios where a database may contain ears of highly similar shape. The ear surface is also voxelized to construct a holistic representation. Based on the novel SPHIS feature and the voxelization representation, a unified approach incorporating local and holistic surface features is proposed to improve both the robustness and efficiency of the 3D ear shape matching subsystem, while simultaneously improving the performance of the recognition system. In the 2D domain, a complete, automatic ear biometric system based on 2D images is developed. The color Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptor is exploited as the feature representation, which in conjunction with a feature fusion method, maximizes the robustness of the recognition system. For the 3D face recognition component, we propose a method using AdaBoost to determine the geodesic distances between anatomical point pairs that are most discriminative for 3D face recognition. Through a method that establishes a dense set of correspondences between face surfaces, the discriminating potential of geodesic distances between anatomical points is investigated. For the dental biometrics component, we present a content-based image archiving and retrieval system for assisting in human identification using dental radiographs. The system includes processes for dental image classification, automatic segmentation of bitewing dental X-Ray images, and teeth shape matching.


Various chondrogenic growth factors have been shown to promote proliferation, matrix production and early chondrogenesis of intervertebral disc (IVD). The objective of this study is to reconstruct IVD via tissue engineering technique and to evaluate in-vitro chon-drogenesis of chondrocytes cultured in basic growth medium with chondrogenic growth factors (FDGFs) and without chondrogenic growth factors (FD). The annulus fibrosus (AF) and nucleus pulposus (NP) were aseptically dissected from the lumbar discs of sheep and the tissues enzymatically digested and cultured in-vitro. Passage 1 cells were used to form in-vitro construct with autologous fibrin as the biomaterial. All constructs were stabi-lized for 14 days in their respective growth media. Histological and sulphated-glycosaminoglycan (sGAG) analysis were performed at the end of the experiment. The AF cells showed greater growth kinetic profile and higher viability in FDGFs while the NP cells showed no differences for both medium. The construct of AF and NP in FDGFs showed a bigger size construct compared to FD. The qualities of both constructs were simi-lar as evidence by Safranin O staining in both groups. In conclusion, FDGFs increase the viability and quantity of cells for AF and not in NP. However, FDGFs supplementation improved in-vitro constructs formation for both cells type.


Abstract In this review, I discuss the use of galaxy-galaxy weak lensing measurements to study the masses of dark matter halos in which galaxies reside. After summarizing how weak gravitational lensing measurements can be interpreted in terms of halo mass, I review measurements that were used to derive the relationship between optical galaxy mass tracers, such as stellar mass or luminosity, and dark matter halo mass. Measurements of galaxy-galaxy lensing from the past decade have led to increasingly tight constraints on the connection between dark matter halo mass and optical mass tracers, including both the mean relationships between these quantities and the intrinsic scatter between them. I also review some of the factors that can complicate analysis, such as the choice of modeling procedure, and choices made when dividing up samples of lens galaxies.


Private sector innovation – whether it is fintech, biotechnology, the platformisation of the economy, or other developments – is the single most profound challenge that regulators confront today. Financial innovations, which are intangible and fast-moving, are especially challenging. Financial regulators are at the operational front line of making sense of the promise and the risks associated with fintech, and helping to ensure it operates for public benefit.

Faced with such a changeable and fast-moving problem, how can regulators "future proof" themselves?

This chapter outlines a road-map for financial regulators who confront fast-moving and profound change in their sectors. It argues that regulators' first question in any decision-making context should be, "how is private sector innovation, in this case fintech, undermining my assumptions, changing relationships, denaturing products and markets, and seeping around regulatory definitions and boundaries, right now?" The chapter sets out the four basic questions that regulators should consider. It proposes regulatory responses based on better data collection and analysis, innovation research, network theory, and regulatory design. It considers how to make regulation more adaptable and more resilient, and examines the strategic choices regulators can make in framing fintech innovations.


"A uniquely charming and enticing journey through a remarkable life. Coward's own record is made all the more delightful by the wise and helpful interpolations of Barry Day, the soundest authority on the Master that there is." Stephen Fry "A far more complex figure than the one we thought we knew. Here you get the truly private Noel" Sheridan Morley With virtually all the letters in this volume previously unpublished - this is a revealing new insight into the private life of a legendary figure. Coward's multi-faceted talent as an actor, writer, composer, producer and even as a war-time spy(!), brought him into close contact with the great, the good and the merely ambitious in film, literature and politics.With letters to and from the likes of: George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Greta Garbo (she wrote asking him to marry her), Marlene Dietriech, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, FD Roosevelt, the Queen Mother and many more, the picture that emerges is a series of vivid sketches of Noel Coward's private relationships, and a re-examination of the man himself. Deliciously insightful, witty, perfectly bitchy, wise, loving and often surprisingly moving, this extraordinary collection gives us Coward at his crackling best. A sublime portrait of a unique artist who made an indelible mark on the 20th century, from the Blitz to the Ritz and beyond.


INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: To demonstrate the steps involved in the vaginal repair of a large neobladder to vagina fistula. METHODS: A 56 y old woman underwent a neobladder reconstruction after radical cystectomy. Despite an uneventful recovery, she developed severe post-operative urinary incontinence not controlled by an indwelling urinary catheter. A definitive repair was offered transvaginally. Fistula exposure can be obtained with a Lonestar retractor and headlights. Following catheterization of the fistula with a large council-tip catheter over a guide wire, the edges of the fistula were circumscribed. Vaginal flaps were raised, including posteriorly in search for the omentum which had been brought down at the time of the cystectomy. An omental flap was identified and fully mobilized. The fistula was closed with running absorbable sutures starting at each corner, with a final knot at the midpoint once the guidewire was removed. The water tightness of the repair was checked by filling the neobladder via a large 22 Fr urethral catheter (to allow mucus drainage secondarily). Then the omental flap was advanced as tissue interposition. The vaginal flaps were then re-approximated over the underlying repair with running and interrupted reinforcing absorbable sutures. The vagina was packed and belladonna and opium suppository was administered to minimize postoperative spasms. RESULTS: At 4 weeks post-repair, a cystogram was obtained to confirm neobladder integrity and definitive repair of the fistula. Patient resumed voiding efforts. At 8 months post-operatively, no recurrence has been noted. Patient has resumed sexual activity and her recent CT scan indicates no pelvic recurrence. CONCLUSIONS: Vaginal repair of a neobladder to vagina fistula can be attempted. Following the principles of fistula closure, a tension free repair can be obtained followed by tissue interposition. A satisfactory outcome can be attained, obviating the need for a more morbid open repair. Source of Funding: None


From the point of view of physical impedance, vibration intensity carried by a bending wave propagating along a beam can be decomposed into two components: One is the component owing to a mechanical impedance Z, and the other is owing to a bending moment impedance Mz. To control intensity, both components must be taken into consideration, though it causes some difficulties in execution, such as a complex cost function, many sensors, etc. However, a one‐dimensional bending wave consists of four waves. Two of them are decaying waves and these can be negligible in the far field, which means far from the edge of the beam. In the far field, Z becomes the reciprocal of Mz. Using this relationship, three simple ways were found to control intensity as follows: (1) control amplitude at one point; (2) control of amplitude gradient, and (3) direct intensity control in the frequency domain. Computer simulations have been performed in these cases. The results were that case (3) showed the slowest convergence of parame...


Electronic banking services such as internet banking offer bank clients substantial benefits over traditional banking channels. Although internet banking has been around for many years, increasing the use of the service by bank clients remains a priority for many managers of internet banking services. To address this managerial concern, the study investigates the factors that contribute to the enhanced use of internet banking by bank clients. Based on a literature review, internet-banking factors that could influence bank clients' actual use of internet banking were identified. Data were collected from 1 156 users of internet banking. The results of the study showed that two factors influence internet banking usage, namely internet banking facilitating conditions and internet banking risk beliefs. The more favourable internet banking facilitating conditions are perceived to be, the more likely bank clients are to increase their use of internet banking. On the other hand, the greater the perceived risks associated with internet banking, the less the chances are that clients will do their banking through the internet. On the basis of these results, recommendations are provided to enhance the use of internet banking.


While most first language acquisition research to date has focused on the development of children's linguistic competence, a number of research teams have also investigated the mechanisms children employ to process sentence-level and word-level information in real time, by applying experimental techniques familiar from the adult processing literature to children. This chapter presents an overview of different kinds of behavioral tasks for investigating both morphological and syntactic processing in children focusing on three techniques that we have explored in our own research on children's on-line language processing: self-paced listening, cross-modal priming, and speeded production.


Industrial assets or fixed capital stocks are at the core of the transition to a low‐carbon economy. They represent substantial accumulations of capital, bulk materials, and critical metals. Their lifetime determines the potential for material recycling and how fast they can be replaced by new, more efficient facilities. Their efficiency determines the coupling between useful output and energy and material throughput. A sound understanding of the economic and physical properties of fixed capital stocks is essential to anticipating the long‐term environmental and economic consequences of the new energy future. We identify substantial overlap in the way stocks are modeled in national accounting, dynamic material flow analysis, dynamic input‐output (I/O) analysis, and life cycle assessment (LCA) and we merge these concepts into a common framework for modeling fixed capital stocks. We demonstrate the usefulness of the framework for simultaneous accounting of capital and material stocks and for consequential LCA. We apply the framework to design a demand‐driven dynamic I/O model with dynamic capital stocks, and we synthesize both the marginal and attributional matrix of technical coefficients (A‐matrix) from detailed process inventories of fixed assets of different age cohorts and technologies. The stock modeling framework allows researchers to identify and exploit synergies between different model families under the umbrella of socioeconomic metabolism.


"A Man of Salt and Trees" is the first full-length biography of Joy Morton (1855-1934), founder of The Morton Arboretum - an internationally acclaimed outdoor museum of woody plants - and Morton Salt - the brand that for over a century has been a household name in the United States. Joy Morton's story begins in the pre - Civil War Nebraska Territory and concludes in the midst of the Great Depression in Chicago, the city in which he lived for over a half century. Using the voluminous correspondence of the Morton family, Ballowe tells the story of the Nebraska farm boy who grew up to be a small town banker who became a leading citizen of Chicago and Illinois and a major figure in the nation's economic and technological development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Morton left his mark in several areas, from business and city planning to transportation and environmental preservation. He was a contributor to the development of Daniel H. Burnham and Edward Bennett's 1909 Plan of Chicago, which continues to affect the way Chicagoans protect the Lakefront and approach transportation and park issues throughout the region. During the last three decades of his life, Morton served on the Chicago Plan Commission. His interest in transportation led him to become an investor and a director in railroad transportation and a champion of inland waterway traffic. He also single-handedly financed early advancements of the teletype, a technology that advanced the economic and cultural development of the 20th century. Toward the end of his life, Morton funded the University of Chicago's explorations of Mississippian Indian culture in central Illinois and traveled throughout the world visiting ancient as well as modern cultures and gardens. The Morton Arboretum stands today as a natural expression of a desire Joy Morton had from childhood, when he learned from his father, the founder of Arbor Day, and his mother, a dedicated gardener, that a necessary complement to a good life is the cultivation and preservation of the environment. This is the first-ever biography of the man who founded Morton Salt and the Morton Arboretum.


We describe several new species of the previously monotypic Panjange lanthana species group from the Philippines and document their extraordinary morphology. Some species show strong male genital asymmetry, a phenomenon that seems to be exceedingly rare in spiders. Males of most species have eye stalks, and in two species these eye stalks are among the longest ever recorded in spiders. Some species show a tendency for male genital (pedipalp) elongation, and one species has the longest and thinnest palps ever recorded in Pholcidae. A cladistic analysis is performed including all described and several undescribed species of Panjange (except for one "problem species"), supporting the lanthana group and its close relationship with members of the possibly paraphyletic cavicola group. The following eight new species are described: Panjange malagos Huber sp. nov.; Pa. casaroro Huber sp. nov.; Pa. camiguin Huber sp. nov.; Pa. hamiguitan Huber sp. nov.; Pa. isarog Huber sp. nov.; Pa. dinagat Huber sp. nov.; Pa. marilog Huber sp. nov.; Pa. bukidnon Huber sp. nov.


In the ocean of Web data, Web search engines are the primary way to access content. As the data is on the order of petabytes, current search engines are very large centralized systems based on replicated clusters. Web data, however, is always evolving. The number of Web sites continues to grow rapidly (over 270 millions at the beginning of 2011) and there are currently more than 20 billion indexed pages. On the other hand, Internet users are above one billion and hundreds of million of queries are issued each day. In the near future, centralized systems are likely to become less effective against such a data-query load, thus suggesting the need of fully distributed search engines. Such engines need to maintain high quality answers, fast response time, high query throughput, high availability and scalability; in spite of network latency and scattered data. In this tutorial we present the architecture of current search engines and we explore the main challenges behind the design of all the processes of a distributed Web retrieval system crawling, indexing, and query processing.


In common practices, heteroscedasticity and non-normality are frequently encountered when fitting linear regression models. Several methods have been proposed to handle these problems. In this research, we applied four different estimation methods: ordinary least squares (OLS), transform both sides (TBS), power of the mean function (POM) and exponential variance function (VEXP), dealing with three different forms of the non-constant variances under four symmetric distributions. In order to study the performance of the four methods in estimating the studied model parameters, a simulation study with sample sizes of 20, 50 and 100 was conducted. Relative bias, mean squared error (MSE) and coverage probability of the nominal 95% confidence interval for regression parameters were accessed. The simulation results and application to real life data suggest that each estimation method performed differently on different variance structures and different distributions whereas the sample size did not give much effect on each estimation method. In overall, the TBS method performed best in terms of smallest bias and MSE, especially under extreme heteroscedasticity. On the other hand, the OLS method was very accurate in maintaining the nominal coverage probabilities although it had relatively poor performance in terms of bias.


We study the time-independent free-surface flow which forms when a fluid drains out of a container, a so-called bathtub vortex. We focus on the bathtub vortex in a rotating container and describe the free-surface shape and the complex flow structure using photographs of the free surface, flow visualizations, and velocity measurements. We find that the velocity field in the bulk of the fluid agrees with predictions from linear Ekman theory for the boundary layer at the bottom, and we discuss the limitations of linear Ekman theory for the source–sink flow in the experiment. We introduce a radial expansion approximation of the central vortex core and reduce the model to a single first-order equation. We solve the equation numerically and find that the axial velocity depends linearly on height whereas the azimuthal velocity is almost independent of height. We discuss the model of the bathtub vortex introduced by Lundgren (J. Fluid Mech. vol. 155, 1985, p. 381) and compare it with our experiment. We find that the measured velocities and surface profiles are described well by the model when Ekman upflow and surface tension effects are included.


We report a copper-catalyzed enantioselective hydroboration of 1,3-enynes with the catalyst generated from Cu(OAc) and (S,S)-Ph-BPE. A wide range of alkyl- and aryl-substituted 1,3-enynes undergo this asymmetric hydroboration with pinacolborane, yielding the corresponding allenes in good yields with high to excellent enantioselectivities (up to 99% ee). This asymmetric transformation tolerates a variety of reactive groups, such as chloro, bromo, trifluoromethyl ether, siloxy, carboxylic ester and imido functionalities.


African-American reparations have the potential to deconstruct racial privilege, promote racial reconciliation, and heal the psychic injuries of the African-American community. However, many models of reparations have given up on the promise of reparations in exchange for the slim possibility of short-term progress. A subversive dialogue on African-American reparations, however, will inevitably critique equal opportunity, individualism, and white innocence and privilege. Embraced by the majority, and internalized by the African-American community, the principles of individualism, equal opportunity, and meritocracy reinforce white innocence and privilege to the extent that future, current and past inequality are cast as the natural and inevitable result of poor personal choices. African-American reparations is a subversive concept to the extent that it has the potential to deconstruct and reveal privileging legal and political principles. More importantly, the discussion will necessitate an outsider understanding of historical events which has the potential to nurture the spirit injuries of the African-American community. As such, the benefits of a struggle for African-American reparations lie primarily in the dialogue itself rather than any negotiated economic compromise. Deconstructing and addressing white privilege is the only way to avoid the perpetuation of social inequality in the African-American community. Furthermore, spiritual healing without confronting privilege is necessarily impossible as future patterns of inequality, legitimized under the guise of equal opportunity, will serve to reinforce a cultural deficit story. Finally, community cohesiveness cannot be achieved until privilege is revealed and the African-American community heals their spiritual injuries. These interdependent concepts must be pursued simultaneously in order to achieve substantive, long-lasting change.


The intention was to develop a live tool with which one could explore the progress of the markets within a 3D environment in real time or over any arbitrary segment of history. The impression was to give the observer the sensation of travelling down or around a time tunnel. No external data was utilised and a very precise mapping of data to visuals was attempted. The key attribute of the tunnel is the radius, the average radius is determined by the DJ Industrial Average. As the index shrinks the sense of constriction heightens. The length of the tunnel is the time segment under study. The companies are evenly distributed around the tunnel, this approach scales well since the radius only increases by the square root of the number of companies. Each companies stock is represented as a track made up of spheres, the radius of the sphere is determined by the volume of shares traded. The colour of each sphere is determined by the price of the shares, ranging from blue (low) to red (high). In both cases the ranges (volume and price) can be chosen to be local to the company and time segment being explored, global over the history of the company, or global over time and companies. Data range selection and reduction is one of the requirements for a meaninful visualisation of large volumes of data. When showing the whole period of the data set provided it is straightforward to create short time windows and average the company stock values within that period. This is not possible with the news items which cannot be meaningfully averaged. The solution is to only show the items within a sliding window, even then it is sometimes overwhelming. In the images and animations provided that window is related to the camera position but the center of the sliding window could equally be user controlled. Where possible, each news item is related radially to the stock it is associated with.


CytK is a pore-forming toxin of Bacillus cereus that has been linked to a case of necrotic enteritis. PCR products of the expected size were generated with cytK primers in 13 of 29 strains. Six strains were PCR-positive for the related gene hly-II, which encodes haemolysin II, a protein that is 37 % identical to the original CytK. Five of the strains were positive for both genes. The DNA sequences of putative cytK genes from three positive strains were determined, and the deduced amino acid sequences were 89 % identical to that of the original CytK. The authors have designated this new cytK variant cytK-2, and refer to the original cytK as cytK-1. The CytK-2 proteins from these three strains were isolated, and their identity was verified by N-terminal sequencing. blast analysis using the cytK-2 gene sequences revealed very high homology with two cytK-2 sequences in the genomes of B. cereus strains ATCC 14579 and ATCC 10987. The differences between CytK-1 and the CytK-2 proteins were clustered to certain regions of the proteins. The isolated CytK-2 proteins were haemolytic and toxic towards human intestinal Caco-2 cells and Vero cells, although their toxicity was about 20 % of that of CytK-1. Both native and recombinant CytK-2 proteins from B. cereus 1230-88 were able to form pores in planar lipid bilayers, but the majority of the channels observed were of lower conductance than those created by CytK-1. It is likely that CytK-2 toxins contribute to the enterotoxicity of several strains of B. cereus, although not all of the CytK-2 toxins may be as harmful as the CytK-1 originally isolated.


Report of a joint British Sedimentological Research Group/Petroleum Group meeting held on 21 and 22 April 1987 at the Geological Society of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly. The meeting was organized by M. K. G. Whateley and K. T. Pickering. This successful international meeting was convened to fill a considerable hiatus which has occurred since the flurry of conferences on deltaic sedimentation took place in the early and mid-1970s. It was felt that significant advances have been made in our understanding of deltas as sites and tra for fossil fuels and a timely forum was required to enable workers to disseminate their knowledge. The two-day meeting included 27 papers and 8 posters covering modern and ancient deltas in marine to fresh-water environments. Topics included: processes, facies models, petroleum, gas and coal related deltaic environments, together with general case studies. A Special Publication of the Geological Society of London will be published within about a year from the date of the meeting. The meeting attracted about 180 speakers and delegates from Germany, France, Norway, Canada, Italy, Denmark, USA and Britain. Following the two days of plenary sessions, there was a two-day field trip led by Professor Trevor Elliot to the Westphalian of North Devon, and a two-day field trip led by Professor John Collinson to the Namurian of the Pennines. At the weekend following the field trips, there was a one-day core workshop in Edinburgh, organized by the British Geological Survey, looking at the Jurassic Brent cores from the northern North Sea.


Official support for financing exports has become a complex, highly-subsidized form of assistance to promote foreign sales, especially of manufactures and capital goods. Spurred on by sharper competition among industrialized countries, the evolution in export finance has important implications for developing countries. One is the availability of a growing source of external capital on terms below prevailing market costs. Another is the emergence of the more advanced developing countries as providers of subsidized finance to promote their own rising exports of manufactures.


The water meniscus condensed between a nanoscale tip and an atomically flat gold surface was examined under humid conditions using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. The molecular structure of the meniscus was investigated with particular focus on its width and stability. The capillary force due to the meniscus showed a dampened oscillation with increasing separation between the tip and surface because of the formation and destruction of water layers. The layering of water between the tip and the surface was different from that of the water confined between two plates. The humidity dependence of the capillary force exhibited a crossover behavior with increasing humidity, which is in agreement with the typical atomic force microscopy experiment on a hydrophilic surface.


This is an engaging retelling of an Anansi story, written for children just learning to read. Anansi, the African trickster spider, tells Elephant and Rhino he can beat them both in a tug of war. To their astonishment, he does...or does he? This title features easy reading text that is brought to life with delightful illustrations. There are puzzles at the back of the book that consolidate learning. It is part of the successful "Usborne First Reading" series, developed in consultation with Alison Kelly, Principal Lecturer in Education and reading specialist at Roehampton University.


This manuscript is part of an ongoing debate over the fundamental principles that govern the bankruptcies of multinational companies. Essentially three positions have emerged. Universalists assert that the bankruptcy of a multinational company should take place in the courts of the company's "home country" and the law of the home country should govern the distribution. Contractualist Robert K. Rasmussen asserts that the bankruptcy of each constituent entity of the company should take place in the courts of the country selected by that entity in its articles of incorporation and the law of the selected country should govern the distribution. This manuscript argues for a separate bankruptcy proceeding in each country where the multinational has assets. International cooperation should be achieved by agreement among the representatives of the bankruptcy estates, in the shadow of a default rule under which the law of the country where the asset is located would govern the distribution of that asset. Universalism must be rejected because it is not in fact a workable system. Universalist theory depends upon the assumption that each multinational company has an easily recognizable "home country." But universalists are unable to specify a rule or standard for identification of that home country when the debtor's place of incorporation, headquarters, principal operations, and principal assets are located in different countries, or to specify whether, in the case of a corporate group the home country would be that of the group, or of particular entities within the group. Absent such specification, forum shopping for favorable law would destabilize and destroy the system. Contractualism would be inefficient because (1) the costs of contracting would be huge, (2) debtors would externalize much of their costs by shopping for fora that would deny recovery to tort and other insufficiently adjusting creditors, and (3) the complexity of the system would make it vulnerable to fraud and mistake.


Buildings are becoming an increasingly active part of the power system due to the ongoing deployment of decentralized energy resources. To reap the added value that may be realized by zero emission neighbourhoods, it is important that the regulatory framework promotes an efficient development with buildings as an integrated and active part of the power system. When considering energy resources at the neighbourhood level and energy flows within neighbourhoods in Norway, the regulatory framework is challenged by innovative technical solutions. Therefore, it is necessary to explore how deployment of energy resources in neighbourhoods fit together with existing regulations and market mechanisms. Challenges concerning decentralized energy resources are identified based on discussions with stakeholders in Norway and a review of relevant literature in the scientific and regulatory domain. Key challenges for the deployment of energy resources in ZEN are identified, explained through examples, and related to ongoing projects in Norway. It is found that incentives regarding decentralized energy resources are highly dependent on the ownership structure, and therefore a distinction between two major classes of ZEN is made.


Energy redistribution between two subpicosecond laser pulses of 2.5 eV photon energy is observed and studied in congruent, nominally undoped LiNbO3, aiming to reveal the underlying coupling mechanisms. The dependences of pulse amplification on intensity, frequency detuning and pulse duration point to two different contributions of coupling, both based on self-diffraction from a recorded dynamic grating. The first one is caused by a difference in pulse intensities (transient energy transfer) while the second one originates from a difference in pulse frequencies. The latter appears when chirped pulses are mutually delayed in time. A quite high coupling efficiency has been observed in a 280 µm thin crystal: one order of magnitude energy amplification of a weak pulse and nearly 10% net energy enhancement of one pulse for the case of equal input intensities.


Skeletal degeneration due to aging, also known as osteoporosis, is a major health problem worldwide. Certain dietary components confer protection to our skeletal system against osteoporosis. Consumption of olives, olive oil and olive polyphenols has been shown to improve bone health. This review aims to summarize the current evidence from cellular, animal and human studies on the skeletal protective effects of olives, olive oil and olive polyphenols. Animal studies showed that supplementation of olives, olive oil or olive polyphenols could improve skeletal health assessed via bone mineral density, bone biomechanical strength and bone turnover markers in ovariectomized rats, especially those with inflammation. The beneficial effects of olive oil and olive polyphenols could be attributed to their ability to reduce oxidative stress and inflammation. However, variations in the bone protective, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects between studies were noted. Cellular studies demonstrated that olive polyphenols enhanced proliferation of pre-osteoblasts, differentiation of osteoblasts and decreased the formation of osteoclast-like cells. However, the exact molecular pathways for its bone health promoting effects are yet to be clearly elucidated. Human studies revealed that daily consumption of olive oil could prevent the decline in bone mineral density and improve bone turnover markers. As a conclusion, olives, olive oil and its polyphenols are potential dietary interventions to prevent osteoporosis among the elderly.


Pressed by the difficulty of writing asynchronous, event-driven code, mainstream languages have recently been building in support for a variety of advanced control-flow features. Meanwhile, experimental language designs have suggested effect handlers as a unifying solution to programmer-defined control effects, subsuming exceptions, generators, and async--await. Despite these trends, complex control flow---in particular, control flow exhibiting a bidirectional pattern---remains challenging to manage.
We introduce bidirectional algebraic effects, a new programming abstraction that supports bidirectional control transfer in a more natural way. Handlers of bidirectional effects can raise further effects to transfer control back to the site where the initiating effect was raised, and can use themselves to handle their own effects. We present applications of this expressive power, which falls out naturally as we push toward the unification of effectful programming with object-oriented programming. We pin down the mechanism and the unification formally using a core language that generalizes to effect operations and effect handlers.
The usual propagation semantics of control effects such as exceptions conflicts with modular reasoning in the presence of effect polymorphism---it breaks parametricity. Bidirectionality exacerbates the problem. Hence, we set out to show the core language, which builds on the existing tunneling semantics for algebraic effects, is not only type-safe (no effects go unhandled), but also abstraction-safe (no effects are accidentally handled). We devise a step-indexed logical-relations model, and construct its parametricity and soundness proofs. These core results are fully mechanized in Coq. Preliminary experiments show that as a first-class language feature, bidirectional handlers can be implemented efficiently.


The number of patients surviving ≥5 years after initial cancer diagnosis has significantly increased during the last decades due to considerable improvements in the treatment of many cancer entities. A negative consequence of this is that the emergence of long-term sequelae and endocrine disorders account for a high proportion of these. These late effects can occur decades after cancer treatment and affect up to 50% of childhood cancer survivors. Multiple predisposing factors for endocrine late effects have been identified, including radiation, sex, and age at the time of diagnosis. A systematic literature search has been conducted using the PubMed database to offer a detailed overview of the spectrum of late endocrine disorders following oncological treatment. Most data are based on late effects of treatment in former childhood cancer patients for whom specific guidelines and recommendations already exist, whereas current knowledge concerning late effects in adult-onset cancer survivors is much less clear. Endocrine sequelae of cancer therapy include functional alterations in hypothalamic-pituitary, thyroid, parathyroid, adrenal, and gonadal regulation as well as bone and metabolic complications. Surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy all contribute to these sequelae. Following irradiation, endocrine organs such as the thyroid are also at risk for subsequent malignancies. Although diagnosis and management of functional and neoplastic long-term consequences of cancer therapy are comparable to other causes of endocrine disorders, cancer survivors need individually structured follow-up care in specialized surveillance centers to improve care for this rapidly growing group of patients.


Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) based-therapies are currently one of the most successful strategies to treat immune disorders, cancer and infectious diseases. Vectors derived from adenoassociated virus (AAV) are very attractive to deliver the genes coding the mAbs because they allow long-term expression thus, reducing the number of administrations. They can also penetrate biological barriers such as the blood-brain-barrier to transduce cells localized in immunoprivileged organs. Recent animal studies with AAV have demonstrated the capacity of AAV to deliver sufficient quantity of antibodies to confer an efficient immunoprotection against chronic and infectious diseases for several months to years. The treatment was successfully applied either for prophylaxis or therapeutic use, depending on the disease and its progression. In this review, we discuss the advantages and the limitations of AAV for mAb and immunoadhesin delivery. Recent advances in vector design and antibody engineering are also presented. Optimization of the vector design can improve the kinetic and the level of mAbs expression whereas protein engineering can enhance transgene product properties. Furthermore, an exhaustive review of pre-clinical studies for chronic diseases including Alzheimer disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and cancer is presented as well as for infectious diseases.


A radial flow between two parallel disk shape plates, which simulates a flow in the disk shape planar-type solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), was experimentally investigated. A temperature distribution in the planar-type SOFC is strongly affected by the gas flow behavior, and hence we tried to clarify flow pattern at various flowrates by using particle image velocimetry (PIV). It was found that optimum flow condition in the fuel channel was attained in the case of the Reynolds number of about 5. For this operating condition, a flow field near the anode surface shows uniform velocity distribution. On the other hand, in the upper air channel, non-uniform flow distribution was enlarged and large-scale vortex appears with increase of flow rate. In the lower air channel, local high velocity region exists at a high flow rate. For the present disk channel the optimum flow field in the air channel was obtained around the Reynolds number of 30. These results suggest the necessity of improvement of the channel shape and injection method of air.


Incontinence-associated dermatitis (IAD) is a common problem in patients with faecal and/or urinary incontinence. Urine alters the normal skin flora and increases permeability of the stratum corneum and faecal enzymes on the skin contribute to skin damage. Faecal bacteria can then penetrate the skin, increasing the risk of secondary infection. However, IAD can be prevented and healed with timely and appropriate skin cleansing and skin protection. This includes appropriate use of containment devices. This article also looks at HARTMANN incontinence pads that have been developed to absorb the fluids that cause IAD and maintain the skin's acidic pH. The acidic pH of the skin contributes to its barrier function and defence against infection. Therefore, maintaining an acidic pH will help protect the skin from damage.


Since the end of Cold War, processes of regionalisation have developed in a world experiencing globalisation. The Tumen River Area Development Project (TRADP) is an UNDP-initiated multilateral sub-regional scheme for economic cooperation that emerged in 1992 and was institutionalised by the establishment of the Tumen Secretariat in 1995. It is based on 'North-South' cooperation as well as a socialist-capitalist division of labour among six neighbouring countries (China, Russia, DPRK, ROK, Mongolia, and Japan), involving certain adjacent areas in the Tumen River region - which serves as a natural border for China, Russia, and North Korea. Arguing that the project has a significance that is more political than economic, the thesis will explore the significance of regionalism as an element of China's security and foreign policy. China was the project's most active supporter, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. This thesis will argue that China developed the Tumen project not only as part of its own pursuit of domestic development, but also in order to take the initiative in regional economic development and to alter the distribution of power in Northeast Asia, in particular, the Korean Peninsula. The thesis will also attempt to explain why China has found it so difficult to bring the project to fruition. The Chinese government did not provide proper infrastructure and give the project high priority in its national development policy. As a result, the project could not be attractive to the private sector, which was to be the major source of international investment. Further, the participating countries were concerned about Chinese motives and the economic and political-security implications of the project for the region. Thus, the project came to be regarded as a political ploy and was treated accordingly. This research hopes to make a contribution in two major ways. One is to understand the characteristics and trends of regionalism in East Asia; and the other is to delineate the scope and limits of China's seemingly more interdependent, cooperative, and multilateral foreign behaviour since the late 1980s.


VEMAP Members 1 Abstract. We compare the simulations of three biogeography models (BIOME2, Dynamic Global Phytogeography Model (DOLY), and Mapped Atmosphere-Plant Soil System (MAPSS)) and three biogeochemistry models (BIOME-BGC (BioGeochemistry Cycles), CENTURY, and Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (TEM)) for the conterminous United States under contemporary conditions of atmospheric CO2 and climate. We also compare the simulations of these models under doubled CO2 and a range of climate scenarios. For contemporary conditions, the biogeography models successfully simulate the geographic distribution of major vegetation types and have similar estimates of area for forests (42 to 46% of the conterminous United States), grasslands (17 to 27%), savannas (15 to 25%), and shrublands (14 to 18%). The biogeochemistry models estimate similar continental-scale net primary production (NPP; 3125 to 3772 x 10 2 gC yr ') and total carbon storage (108 to 118 5 x 10 gC) for contemporary conditions. Among the scenarios of doubled CO2 and associated equilibrium climates produced by the three general circulation models (Oregon State University (OSU), Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), and United Kingdom Meteorological Office (UKMO)), all three biogeography models show both gains and losses of total forest area depending on the scenario (between 38 and 53% of conterminous United States area). The only consistent gains in forest area with all three models (BIOME2, DOLY, and MAPSS) were under the GFDL scenario due to large increases in precipitation. MAPSS lost forest area under UKMO, DOLY under OSU, and BIOME2 under both UKMO and OSU. The variability in forest area estimates occurs because the hydrologic cycles of the biogeography models have different sensitivities to increases in temperature and CO2. However, in general, the biogeography models produced broadly similar results when incorporating both climate change and elevated CO2 concentrations. For these scenarios, the NPP estimated by the biogeochemistry models increases between 2% (BIOME-BGC with UKMO climate) and 35% (TEM with UKMO climate). Changes in total carbon storage range from losses of 33% (BIOME-BGC with UKMO climate) to gains of 16% (TEM with OSU climate). The CENTURY responses of NPP and carbon storage are positive and intermediate to the responses of BIOME-BGC and TEM. The variability in carbon cycle responses occurs because the hydrologic and nitrogen cycles of the biogeochemistry models have different sensitivities to increases in temperature and CO2. When the biogeochemistry models are run with the vegetation distributions of the biogeography models, NPP ranges from no response (BIOME-BGC with all three biogeography model vegetations for UKMO climate) to increases of 40% (TEM with MAPSS vegetation for OSU climate). The total carbon storage response ranges from a decrease of 39% (BIOME-BGC with MAPSS vegetation for UKMO climate) to an increase of 32% (TEM with MAPSS vegetation for OSU and GFDL climates). The UKMO responses of BIOME-BGC with MAPSS vegetation are primarily caused by decreases in forested area and temperature-induced water stress. The OSU and GFDL responses of TEM with MAPSS vegetations are primarily


A numerical model describing the behavior of flexible fibers under inertial flows was developed by coupling a discrete element solver with a finite volume solver.Each fiber is discretized into several beam segments, such that the fiber can bend, twist and rotate. The equations of the fiber motion were solved usinga second order accurate explicit scheme (space and time). The three dimensional Navier-Stokes equations describing the motion of the fluid phase was discretizedusing a fourth th order accurate (space and time) unstructured finite volume scheme. The coupling between the discrete fiber phase and the continuous fluid phasewas obtained by a pseudo immersed boundary method as the hydrodynamic force on the fiber segments were calculated based on analytical expressions.Several hydrodynamic force models were analyzed and their validity and short-comings were identified. For Reynolds numbers (Re) at the inertial regime(0.01 < Re < 100, Re defined at the fiber scale), non linear drag force formulations based on the flow past an infinite cylinder was used. For rigid fibers in creeping flow, the drag force formulation from the slender body theory was used. A per unit length hydrodynamic torque model for the fibers was derived from explicit numerical simulations of shear flow past a high aspect ratio cylinder. The developed model was validated against several experimental studies and analytical theories ranging from the creeping flow regime (for rigid fibers) to inertial regimes. In the creeping flow regime, numerical simulations of semi dilute rigid fiber suspensions in shear were performed.The developed model wasable to capture the fiber-fiber hydrodynamic and non-hydrodynamic interactions. The elasto-hydrodynamic interactions at finite Reynolds was validated with against two test cases. In the first test case, the deflection of the free end of a fiber in an uniform flow field was obtained numerically and the results were validated. In the second test case the conformation of long flexible fibers in homogeneous isotropic turbulence was obtained numerically and the results were compared with previous experiments. Two numerical studies were performed to verify the effects of the suspended fibers on carrier phase turbulence and the numerical model was able to reproduce the damping/enhancement phenomena of turbulence in channel and pipe flows as a consequence of the micro-structural evolution of the fibers.


Ideally, the users of spoken dialogue systems should be able to speak at their own tempo. Thus, the systems needs to interpret utterances from various users correctly, even when the utterances contain pauses. In response to this issue, we propose an approach based on a posteriori restoration for incorrectly segmented utterances. A crucial part of this approach is to determine whether restoration is required. We use a classification-based approach, adapted to each user. We focus on each user's dialogue tempo, which can be obtained during the dialogue, and determine the correlation between each user's tempo and the appropriate thresholds for classification. A linear regression function used to convert the tempos into thresholds is also derived. Experimental results show that the proposed user adaptation approach applied to two restoration classification methods, thresholding and decision trees, improves classification accuracies by 3.0% and 7.4%, respectively, in cross validation.


We consider the applicability of terms extracted from anchortext as a source of Web page descriptions in the form of tags. With a relatively simple and easy-to-use method, we show that anchortext significantly overlaps with tags obtained from the popular tagging portal del.icio.us. Considering the size and diversity of the user community potentially involved in social tagging, this observation is rather surprising. Furthermore, we show by an evaluation using human-created relevance assessments the general suitability of the anchortext tag generation in terms of user-perceived precision values. The awareness of this easy-to-obtain source of tags could trigger the rise of new tagging portals pushed by this automatic bootstrapping process or be applied in already existing portals to increase the number of tags per page by merely looking at the anchortext which exists anyway.


A robust, extensible architecture is critical to open source projects that have a distributed developer and user base. The MapWindow 6.0 project is using a new architectural paradigm where extensibility is handled from several different plug-in points, rather than a single, application wide design. This allows new kinds of extensibility to be explored such as tools and data providers in addition to the more conventional application wide extensibility. This presentation outlines some of the improvements in the built in cartography, but primarily addresses the .Net architectural decisions that permit run-time discovery of new kinds of custom symbology. Improvements include layering of different kinds of symbols to make a compound symbol as well as establishing cartographic sub-categories based on vector attributes or raster values. The open ended framework allows for an extremely flexible system of run-time discovery so that the core libraries do not have to be recompiled each time an external cartographic improvement is developed.


In this paper, we present an automatic extraction of goal events in soccer videos by using audio track features alone without relying on expensive-to-compute video track features. The extracted goal events can be used for high-level indexing and selective browsing of soccer videos. The detection of soccer video highlights using audio contents comprises three steps: 1) extraction of audio features from a video sequence, 2) event candidate detection of highlight events based on the information provided by the feature extraction Methods and the Hidden Markov Model (HMM), 3) goal event selection to finally determine the video intervals to be included in the summary. For this purpose we compared the performance of the well known Mel-scale Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) feature extraction method vs. MPEG-7 Audio Spectrum Projection feature (ASP) extraction method based on three different decomposition methods namely Principal Component Analysis( PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). To evaluate our system we collected five soccer game videos from various sources. In total we have seven hours of soccer games consisting of eight gigabytes of data. One of five soccer games is used as the training data (e.g., announcers' excited speech, audience ambient speech noise, audience clapping, environmental sounds). Our goal event detection results are encouraging.


Agricultural markets offer opportunities for households to access incomes and food. Efficient food marketing systems assume a competitive structure thus enabling food distribution from surplus to deficit areas. Liberalization of agricultural markets in developing countries, Kenya included in the late 1980"s and early 1990"s aimed at achieving a market oriented economy. Earlier studies on agricultural market reforms have reported varied impacts on market efficiency, thus the need to analyze efficiency of rural markets in the eastern central highlands of Kenya so as to inform policy makers. This study analyzes the efficiency of maize and beans markets in the central highlands of Kenya by examining causality, market integration, asymmetric price transmission, structure and performance of the markets. The study used both primary and secondary data. Secondary data consisted of monthly retail prices for maize and beans for a period of fifteen years from nine markets. The results from time series price data analysis was used to determine whether price movements between the maize and beans markets exhibit integration which was used as an indicator of market efficiency. Primary data was from a survey of 252 traders in Mbeere and Tharaka-nithi sub counties who were selected using multistage sampling. These traders were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire in august 2009. Information from the survey was used to evaluate the activity of traders and unearth the factors that promote or inhibit efficiency of the markets. Data processing and analysis used the following techniques: Survey data was analysed using SPSS 16 while time series data was analysed using Eviews 7. The results from price analysis showed that there is a long run relationship between the markets in the study area. Causality between markets revealed that Siakago and Ishiara were the central markets for maize and beans respectively. The markets were cointegrated with stronger cointegration relationships observed between markets closer to each other and between markets located in different production potential areas. However, short run price adjustments were found to be very slow for all the markets, ranging between 8 and 39 months for maize and between 2 and 59 months for beans. There are asymmetries in price transmission, with markets far apart recording higher asymmetries. An analysis of the structure and performance of traders showed that the markets are efficient, as evidenced by the low trader concentration levels for retailers and medium concentration for the wholesalers. Although there was no collusive behavior among retailers, some wholesaler reported that they set prices collusively. The study concluded that although the markets are integrated, efficiency was still low. There was a clear indication of lack of improved market infrastructure, market information and credit facilities which may have contributed to low efficiency. A more organized market infrastructure and provision of market information may improve price transmission and encourage efficiency of the supply chain thereby raise rural income and food supply.


Deep inertial sequence learning has shown promising odometric resolution over model-based approaches for trajectory estimation in GPS-denied environments. However, existing neural inertial dead-reckoning frameworks are not suitable for real-time deployment on ultra-resource-constrained (URC) devices due to substantial memory, power, and compute bounds. Current deep inertial odometry techniques also suffer from gravity pollution, high-frequency inertial disturbances, varying sensor orientation, heading rate singularity, and failure in altitude estimation. In this paper, we introduce TinyOdom, a framework for training and deploying neural inertial models on URC hardware. TinyOdom exploits hardware and quantization-aware Bayesian neural architecture search (NAS) and a temporal convolutional network (TCN) backbone to train lightweight models targetted towards URC devices. In addition, we propose a magnetometer, physics, and velocity-centric sequence learning formulation robust to preceding inertial perturbations. We also expand 2D sequence learning to 3D using a model-free barometric g-h filter robust to inertial and environmental variations. We evaluate TinyOdom for a wide spectrum of inertial odometry applications and target hardware against competing methods. Specifically, we consider four applications: pedestrian, animal, aerial, and underwater vehicle dead-reckoning. Across different applications, TinyOdom reduces the size of neural inertial models by 31× to 134× with 2.5m to 12m error in 60 seconds, enabling the direct deployment of models on URC devices while still maintaining or exceeding the localization resolution over the state-of-the-art. The proposed barometric filter tracks altitude within ±0.1m and is robust to inertial disturbances and ambient dynamics. Finally, our ablation study shows that the introduced magnetometer, physics, and velocity-centric sequence learning formulation significantly improve localization performance even with notably lightweight models.


The British effort in the Second World War required massive external financing which depended on Lend‐Lease and the accumulation of sterling balances. Indebtedness in sterling balances corresponded to almost 38 per cent of this total at the end of the war. Portuguese sterling balances, although a small share of the total, were important because of pre‐emptive purchases, especially of wolfram, and because of the 'gold clause' which was to be applied to outstanding balances. Portugal's willingness to finance British purchases contrasts with the requirement of German payments in goods or cash for their purchases in Portugal. The settlement of Portuguese sterling balances in August 1945 was singular as it preceded the Anglo‐American settlement of December 1945 which had important consequences for sterling balance holders, as the US insisted that the US$3.75 billion loan should not be used to settle British war debts. Postwar settlement of British debt through a long‐term loan from Portugal to Britain contrasts with settlements that involved the sale of British assets. Salazar's concerns about the postwar international position of Portugal, the Portuguese Empire, and the survival of the Portuguese regime are relevant in explaining his pro‐British stance during and after the war.


In 2004, the African Gender Institute ran a continental research project, Mapping Sexualities, among the objectives of which was the development of a research methodology suited to carrying out in-depth case studies of the dynamics of gender and contemporary sexual cultures in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda. This book is the result of that research. The chapters cover broad-ranging issues and include questions about what it means to research topics that are unpopular or fraught with the sense of the taboo that underpins much work in sexualities and gender studies. Overall, the diverse pieces within the collection offer the opportunity to see qualitative research not as the 'poor cousin' of quantitative studies but as a zone which raises intellectual and political challenges.


: The drift theory of fossil fuel production is associated with the plant material transported with stream of water from one place to another, and finally get deposited in a place of swamp having the suitable condition like sediments. The evidence of drift theory is provided by the sedimentary deposits of coal and other fossil fuels. To trace the origin of formation of fossil fuels in the earth's crust, we consider the application of laws of thermodynamics using the Hess's Law, Gibb's free energy, heat enthalpies, and particularly the deoxygenation parameters to study the transformation of plant materials into the fossil fuels. Here, I elucidate the concept of thermodynamics linked intricately with the development of fossil fuels and the phenomena of photosynthesis, a prerequisite in the thermal analysis of fossils.


Article 67 of the proposed Common European Sales Law (CESL) stipulates that usage and practices are binding on traders. It follows that, if such customs can be referred to in the interpretation of contracts, they create flexibility in the understanding of contractual agreements and therefore introduce a factor of uncertainty in commercial dealings. One may wonder whether a flexible rule like this is appropriate for the context in which CESL is meant to operate – B2B contracts in which at least one of the parties is a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME). A particular concern for the European market, in which many businesses are SMEs, is that local usage is likely to be unknown or even unknowable to one or both of the parties. The appeal of the CESL as an alternative contract regime therefore may be diminished.This paper addresses the question whether the CESL's reference to trade usage in contract interpretation is indeed a weakness. A comparison is made with US literature in which two theories – the plain meaning rule and the incorporation theory – support different views on the role of usage in trade contracts. Applied to two existing uniform regimes for commercial contracts, the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) and the Vienna Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), these theories reveal the strengths and shortcomings of the application of usage in specific market contexts. Distilling a number of parameters from earlier studies on these instruments, a comparison is made to test whether the CESL can safely make use of trade usage as a means of contract interpretation.It will be argued that the particular context in which the CESL operates – i.e. cross-border contracts involving SMEs – implies that the role of usage should be clarified in order to guarantee legal certainty. Such clarification can either mean that usage is only referred to in a very limited sense (e.g. only international usage widely observed in the particular area of trade in which the parties operate and which could be known to both parties to the contract), or that other means are created by which parties can become aware of trade usage in a particular market or area (e.g. databases of guidelines or trade practices).


Generation expansion planning (GEP) is a classical problem that determines an optimal investment plan for existing and future electricity generation technologies. GEP is a computationally challenging problem, as it typically corresponds to a very large-scale problem that contains several sources of uncertainties. With the advent of demand response (DR) as a reserved capacity in modern smart power systems, recent versions of GEP problems model DR as an alternative for the expansion of generation, transmission and distribution networks. This adds extra uncertainties, since the availability of this resource is not known at the planning phase.In this paper, we model demand response uncertainty in a large-scale multi-commodity energy model, called ETEM, to address the GEP problem. The resulting model takes the form of an intractable multi-period adjustable robust problem which can be conservatively approximated using affine decision rules. To tackle instances of realistic size, we propose a Bender's decomposition scheme that exploits valid inequalities and favors Pareto robustly optimal solutions at each iteration. The performance of our new robust ETEM is evaluated in a realistic case study that surveys the energy system of the Swiss "Arc Lémanique" region. Our results show that an adjustable robust capacity expansion strategy can potentially reduce the expected total cost of the energy system by as much as 33% compared to a deterministic approach when accounting for electricity shortage penalties Moreover, an adjustable procurement strategy can be responsible for a 9 billion Swiss francs cost reduction compared to a naive static robust strategy. Finally, the proposed decomposition scheme improves the run time of the solution algorithm by 31% compared to the traditional Bender's decomposition.


Populations of cells live in uncertain environments, where they encounter large variations in nutrients, oxygen and toxic compounds. In the fluctuating environment, cells can sense their surroundings and express proteins to protect themselves against harmful substances. However, if the stressor appears infrequently or abruptly, sensing can be too costly or too slow, and cells cannot rely solely on it. To hedge against the sudden appearance of a stressor, cell populations can also rely on phenotypic diversification through bet-hedging. In bet-hedging, cells exploit noise in gene expression or use multistable genetic networks to produce an heterogeneous distribution of resistance-conferring protein levels. In this thesis, we analyze novel roles of noise in biological systems. Through a combination of modeling and stochastic simulations, we find that noise can coordinate multi-component stress response mechanisms in a subset of the population with no extra cost. In addition, we use evolutionary algorithms to analyze the conditions where the benefits provided by noise in gene expression are equivalent to those of a more complicated, bistable distribution of protein levels. Our results show that for cells living in noisy fluctuating environments, both noise in gene expression and bistability show similar growth rates, meaning that noise in gene expression can be an effective bet-hedging strategy.