We describe a system called Overton, whose main design goal is to support engineers in building, monitoring, and improving production machine learning systems. Key challenges engineers face are monitoring fine-grained quality, diagnosing errors in sophisticated applications, and handling contradictory or incomplete supervision data. Overton automates the life cycle of model construction, deployment, and monitoring by providing a set of novel high-level, declarative abstractions. Overton's vision is to shift developers to these higher-level tasks instead of lower-level machine learning tasks. In fact, using Overton, engineers can build deep-learning-based applications without writing any code in frameworks like TensorFlow. For over a year, Overton has been used in production to support multiple applications in both near-real-time applications and back-of-house processing. In that time, Overton-based applications have answered billions of queries in multiple languages and processed trillions of records reducing errors 1.7-2.9 times versus production systems.


Humans constantly contact objects to move and perform tasks. Thus, detecting human-object contact is important for building human-centered artificial intelligence. However, there exists no robust method to detect contact between the body and the scene from an image, and there exists no dataset to learn such a detector. We fill this gap with HOT ("Human-Object conTact"), a new dataset of human-object contacts in images. To build HOT, we use two data sources: (1) We use the PROX dataset of 3D human meshes moving in 3D scenes, and automatically annotate 2D image areas for contact via 3D mesh proximity and projection. (2) We use the V-COCO, HAKE and Watch-n-Patch datasets, and ask trained annotators to draw polygons around the 2D image areas where contact takes place. We also annotate the involved body part of the human body. We use our HOT dataset to train a new contact detector, which takes a single color image as input, and outputs 2D contact heatmaps as well as the body-part labels that are in contact. This is a new and challenging task, that extends current foot-ground or hand-object contact detectors to the full generality of the whole body. The detector uses a part-attention branch to guide contact estimation through the context of the surrounding body parts and scene. We evaluate our detector extensively, and quantitative results show that our model outperforms baselines, and that all components contribute to better performance. Results on images from an online repository show reasonable detections and generalizability. Our HOT data and model are available for research at https://hot.is.tue.mpg.de.


Today, total hip replacement surgery can be performed at many Vietnamese hospitals. However, all total hips in Vietnam are now imported from foreign countries. These hips are expensive and their designs do not accurately match with most Vietnamese patients. Designing total hips for Vietnamese patients is a demand at the moment. This paper presents a method to get some important geometrical parameters of Vietnamese proximal femur by using reverse engineering. In this method, the CT images of the femur were use as input data for 3D modelling in Mimics to get the 3D model of the femur. CATIA V5 was used to determine the geometric parameters of the proximal femur. The measured data can be used to design femoral stem in the standardized size set of total hip for Vietnamese patients.


Conventional wisdom is that teachers have a model of teaching that they enact in the classroom. We studied middle school science teachers and found that the conventional wisdom does not explain large variations in practices for the same teachers in different contexts. During a study of PhET simulations, we observed two teachers in their regular (non-sim) classes and then in after-school classes in which they used PhET sims and activities developed by the PhET group. These activities were designed to be student-centered and inquiry-based. We find that one teacher led student-centered, inquiry-based activity in their regular classes but, in the after-school classes, controlled the classroom so that the sim activities were teacher-centered. The other teacher led teacher-centered regular classes, while enacting the sim activities in student-centered ways. We observe that teachers' practices can be significantly different across contexts, suggesting a sophisticated view of teacher practice is needed.


Using the average nitrogen/carbon ratio (N/C) of sedimentary organic matter, coal, and volcanic/metamorphic gases, existing models of the carbon cycle have been used to calculate the fluxes of nitrogen to and from the atmosphere via the weathering, burial, and metamorphic/volcanic decomposition of organic matter. Results indicate no appreciable change, less than one percent of that present, in the mass of atmospheric N 2 over Phanerozoic time. This is in sharp contrast to atmospheric O 2 , which shows notable variations. Variation of the mass of O 2 , but not that of N 2 , must have led to variation in total atmospheric pressure with time. Results are not altered by considering N/C ratios ten times higher than the average for sedimentary rocks nor by considering nitrogen release from silicate weathering. The residence time of N 2 in the atmosphere, relative to exchange with and storage in crustal rocks, is estimated to be about one billion years.


This study explores emerging collaborative songwriting models specifically in respect to commercially successful New Zealand contemporary artists. Biographies of popular songwriting partnerships fill gossip magazines, featuring the artist's private lives, but little has been written about the creative process of co-writing from the practitioners' point of view. As a musician and songwriter, my strategy was to look from the 'inside out', rather than from the audience's 'outside in' view at the contemporary songwriting process.

The theoretical framework for this study was provided by Toynbee's social authorship theory (which in turn draws on Bourdieu's notions of habitus and field) and Bennett's discussion of collaborative songwriting practice. These theories were applied to interpret case studies, consisting of structured retrospective interviews with commercially successful New Zealand contemporary songwriters and musicians.

The study found that your co-writer hears ideas that you normally wouldn't. What's more, contemporary song doctors and collaborators are fast becoming masters of technology and with this merging of songwriting and production, collaborative songwriting is a back and forth process of manifestation, communication and updating of ideas.

It was concluded that collaborative songwriting models are functions of the required stimulus needed to create songs. Further to this, when co-writing commercially successful songs, there exists a willingness to understand the field of works, and also to work within the many and varied constraints that exist in the field.


Abstract Artificial photosynthetic antenna systems have been synthesized based on carotenoid polyenes and polymer-polyenes covalently attached to tetrapyrroles. Absorption of light in the blue/green region of the spectra excites the polyenes to their S2 state, and ultrafast singlet energy transfer to the tetrapyrroles occurs when the chromophores are in partial conjugation. The additional participation of other excited states of the polyene in the energy-transfer process is a requirement for perfect antenna function. Analogs of photosynthetic reaction centers consisting of tetrapyrrole chromophores covalently linked to electron acceptors and donors have been prepared. Excitation of these constructs results in a cascade of energy transfer/electron transfer which, in selected cases, forms a final charge-separated state characterized by a giant dipole moment (>150 D), a quantum yield approaching unity, a significant fraction of the photon energy stored as chemical potential, and a lifetime sufficient for reaction with secondary electron donors and acceptors. A new antenna-reaction center complex is described in which a carotenoid moiety is located in partial conjugation with the tetrapyrrole π-system allowing fast energy transfer (<100 fs) between the chromophores. In this assembly, the energy transduction process can be initiated by light absorbed by the polyene.


Conflicts of interest, misrepresentation of clinical trials, hospital price-fixing, and massive expenditures for procedures of dubious efficacy--these and other critical flaws leave little doubt that the current U.S. health-care system is in need of an overhaul. In this essential guide, preeminent physician Nortin Hadler urges American health-care consumers to take time to understand the existing system and to visualize what the outcome of successful reform might look like. Central to this vision is a shared understanding of the primacy of the relationship between doctor and patient. Hadler shows us that a new approach is necessary if we hope to improve the health of the populace. Rational health care, he argues, is far less expensive than the irrationality of the status quo.Taking a critical view of how medical treatment, health-care finance, and attitudes about health, medicine, and disease play out in broad social and political settings, Hadler applies his wealth of experience and insight to these pressing issues, answering important questions for Citizen Patients and policy makers alike.


The need for thermal stability in a test chamber is a well-established requirement to maintain the accuracy and repeatability sought for high frequency planar near-field (PNF) scanner measurements. When whole chamber thermal control is impractical or unreliable, there are few established methods for maintaining necessary precision over a wide temperature range. Often the antenna under test (AUT) itself will require a closed-loop thermal control system for maintaining stable performance due to combined effects from transmission heat dissipation and the environment. In this paper, we propose a new approach for nearfield system design that leverages this AUT stability, while relaxing the requirement of strict whole chamber thermal control. Fixed reference monuments strategically placed around the AUT aperture perimeter, when measured periodically with a sensing probe on the scanner, allow for the modeling and correction of the scanner positioning errors. This process takes advantage of the assumed stability of the reference monuments and attributes all apparent monument position changes to distortions in the scanner structure. When this monument measurement process is coupled with a scanner structure that can tolerate wide thermal variations, using expansion joints and kinematic connections, a robust structural error correction model can be generated using a bilinear mapping function. Application of such a structure correction technique can achieve probe positioning performance similar to scanners that require tightly controlled environments. Preliminary results as well as a discussion on potential design variations are presented.


This paper explores the role migration has played in development studies, and in debates on economic growth and poverty. It argues that, despite a recent surge of interest in international migration and remittances, research on human mobility particularly for labour within poor countries does not have the place it deserves, and that it used to have in the classical development literature.


The conditions required for generating white marbles are investigated in the contact aureole of the Adamello Pluton in northern Italy, where grey limestones pass into white marbles with increasing metamorphic grade. The grey-level or whiteness of the carbonate rocks is quantitatively measured using an integrating sphere, and values are linked to the mineralogical components and textural features. Nearly pure calcite rocks (> 99 wt % CaCO 3 ) undergo a transition from dark and light-grey very-low-grade metamorphic limestones to white and dull white marbles close to the intrusive contact. The grey colour of the limestones is caused by as little as 0.05 wt % of finely dispersed organic carbon. Approaching the pluton, the organic carbon content decreases with increasing metamorphic grade, producing a pure white to dull white marble with less than 0.02 wt % of organic carbon. Grain size and grain-boundary width have a secondary control on the appearance of high-grade white marbles by controlling light absorption, and thus brightness as well. The photon path is longer leading to higher absorption in coarse-grained marbles, thus explaining their dull appearance. Otherwise, changes in refractive index caused by wide grain boundaries are believed to enhance the light reflection in statically recrystallised marbles compared with very-low-grade metamorphic limestones which appear darker. Secondary phases such as silica or ore minerals, or significant fluid flow, do not induce colour changes.


We describe a new multiscale keypoint detector and a set of local visual descriptors, both based on the efficient Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform. The detector has properties and performance similar to multiscale Forstner-Harris detectors. The descriptor provides efficient rotation-invariant matching. We evaluate the method, comparing it to a previous wavelet based approach and to several conventional detectors and descriptors on a new dataset designed for the automatic evaluation of 3D viewpoint invariance. The dataset contains over 4000 images of toy cars on a turntable under accurately calibrated conditions. Both it and the evaluation software are publicly available. Overall the method gives performance competitive with existing Harris-like detectors.


The history of analyses of scale and the conventional reductionist
methodology are briefly recounted in the first chapter of the thesis. A
detailed examination is then made of the theory of economies of scale
and its development since the days of Adam Smith. A comprehensive survey
shows that the description provided by conventional economic theory is
quite unrealistic, and has been dictated by the demands of Neoclassical
ideas of equilibrium. It is shown that the available empirical evidence
does not easily allow conclusions to be drawn about the optimal scale of
plants or enterprises.
A simple simulation model then demonstrates that static economies of
scale alone are insufficient to determine "optimal" scale - dynamic
diseconomies depend upon environmental context and uncertainties of
forecasting future demand.
The question of technological change is closely bound up with issues of
scale. The principle of bounded rationality is applied to deduce some
conditions about the nature of technical change using Heiner's
"Reliability Condition". The existence of "technological heuristics"
(such as a bias in favour of scale-augmenting innovations) is predicted.
The argument is illustrated with the use of a computer simulation of
successive process innovations in a stylised chenical plant.
Conflicting ideas about "optimal" scale in electricity generation,
papermaking, brewing and cement manufacture are examined. These views
are found to be explicable by borrowing the theory of fourfold cultural
bias from the field of social anthropolgy.
An Evolutionary Model of Increasing Returns (EMIR) is developed as a
computer simulation. This model demonstrates that the restrictions
imposed by conventional economic theory can be overcome in a dynamic
economic model; economies of scale and technical change are married with
plural rationalities to provide a range of findings on industry
structure. Market share is found to be a more important determinant of
industrial success than economies of scale.
EMIR is used to demonstrate the phenomenon of technological "Lock-In";
important policy choices may be determined by small random events as
critical points. Market selection mechanisms cannot be relied upon to
optimise, whether in scale decisions or other important policy choices.
The thesis concludes with a discussion of the use of plural models to go
with plural rationalities in the analysis of policy issues.


This research comes from result of interview early researcher at PT Pertamina UP V Balikpapan. Found that one of activity of liaison practitioner that is analysing information at all of media print related to positive news and negative news at company, and researcher not yet known do the mentioned is liaison duty in running its function. Researcher wish to know how liaison function in PT Pertamina UP V Balikpapan and what have as according to liaison function concept according to Cutlip and Center. Target of this research for descriptioning of function institute of liaison of PT Pertamina UP V in taking care of and looking after company vision and also analyse liaison function with liaison function concept according to Cutlip and Center. Liaison function is how usefulness of liaison in reaching the target of company. Target of that company was referred as with vision which is such as those which told by Mulyadi and of Setiawan ( 2001,333) that is " vision is condition picture to be realized by organization in period to come". Liaison function if executed better hence one of them can be made as a means of which is useful in forming image which are positive, solving a problem of company, supporting activity of management and reach the target of specified company as vision company itself. This research use approach of description qualitative and data collecting technique use interview technique, observation, and documentation. obtain to be data to be analysed to use technique analyse domein, that is function and type. Determination of research subject, researcher use technique of purposive or sampling of sample with aim to, with Criterion which have been specified. Data which have been collected and analysed will be checked by authenticity of its data use technique of trianggulasi the source of. Result of research find that liaison function of PT Pertamina UP V in taking care of and looking after its vision that is watering down communications and get real correct information, taking care of positive image of company, and construct good relation with its his, and also execute activitys related to factory operational. Result of analysis between UP V hupmas with liaison concept according to Cutlip and Center show many similary. This means that function of hupmas UP V have as according to liaison concept according to Cutlip and Center. Thereby can be concluded that PT Pertamina UP V Public Relations have applied its function better in taking care of and looking after its vision and have as according to liaison function according to Cutlip and Center. To the the result, can be recommended to PT Pertamina UP V Balikpapan specially Public Relations in taking care of and looking after company vision to be can continue to be improved and morrow day have to be more be good than today. Because liaison in a company assumed more is knowing is condition of company of that moment and to to the fore its. Also can be recommended to enthusiast of communications study specially area of Public relations to liaison functions, so that can reference to similar research a period of to come. Keyword : Fungsi Humas; Visi Perusahaan Link terkait : http://skripsi.umm.ac.id/files/disk1/257/jiptummpp-gdl-s1-2008-abdisatyan-12829-PENDAHUL-N.pdf


Science festivals (or just "festivals") are currently ascendant in the United States with more than 40 new initiatives emerging in just the past 5 years, but their story is not so easily told. The schedule of any one individual festival may contain a staggering array of events, and each festival is different both from year to year, and from other festivals. One multi-festival evaluation points to potential strengths of the format, as well as the importance of the participation of STEM practitioners. Collaboration and social identity formation are considered as powerful festival impacts, and potential challenges for festivals are discussed.


In this article the authors explore the use of "California," its translations, and associated phrases in the nine languages collected in the Google Books corpora since 1525. The article graphs the use across time, analyzes the data, and considers some of the reasons behind the peaks and troughs of the usage of "California" and related phrases. For those new to computational corpus analysis, this article introduces the techniques and concepts of corpus analysis, explains the strengths and weaknesses of large-scale, longitudinal studies of language, and describes the specific methods applied in this analysis. Across all languages, the frequency of "California" increases steadily until the late 1990s. The article also examine the use of the notable but infrequently used phrase "California dream." Visualizations of the analyses accompany the article, as well as additional graphs comparing the use of Los Angeles to San Francisco and Northern California to Southern California since 1800.


A differential screening approach was used to identify seven ovule-specific cDNAs representing genes that are expressed in a stage-specific manner during ovule development. The Phalaenopsis orchid takes 80 days to complete the sequence of ovule developmental events, making it a good system to isolate stage-specific ovule genes. We constructed cDNA libraries from orchid ovule tissue during archesporial cell differentiation, megasporocyte formation, and the transition to meiosis, as well as during the final mitotic divisions of female gametophyte development. RNA gel blot hybridization analysis revealed that four clones were stage specific and expressed solely in ovule tissue, whereas one clone was specific to pollen tubes. Two other clones were not ovule specific. Sequence analysis and in situ hybridization revealed the identities and domain of expression of several of the cDNAs. 039 encodes a putative homeobox transcription factor that is expressed early in the differentiation of the ovule primordium; 040 encodes a cytochrome P450 monooxygenase (CYP78A2) that is pollen tube specific. 0108 encodes a protein of unknown function that is expressed exclusively in the outer layer of the outer integument and in the female gametophyte of mature ovules. 0126 encodes a glycine-rich protein that is expressed in mature ovules, and 0141 encodes a cysteine pmteinase that is expressed in the outer integument of ovules during seed formation. Sequences homologous to these ovule clones can now be isolated from other organisms, and this should facilitate their functional characterization.


Pyochelin (PCH) is a siderophore (extracellular chelator) produced by the pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PAO). PCH is implicated in iron (Fe3+) transport to PAO, and is crucial for its metabolism and pathogenicity. Due to the chemical similarity with Fe3+, gallium (Ga3+) interferes with vital iron-dependent processes in bacterial cells, thereby opening new perspectives for the design of specific metal-based antibacterial drugs. However, the structural basis for the Fe3+-mimetic properties of Ga3+ complexed with the PCH siderophore is still lacking. A precise knowledge of the coordination chemistry at the metal site is one of the topmost issues in the production of novel biomimetic metal-based drugs. Elucidation of this issue by means of a deep structural spectroscopic investigation could lead to an improved interference with, or a specific inhibition of, relevant biological pathways. For this reason, we applied Synchrotron Radiation induced X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (SR-XPS) and X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) to probe the electronic nature and coordination chemistry of Fe3+ and Ga3+ coordinative sites in PCH metal complexes. Combined XAFS and SR-XPS studies allow us to demonstrate that both Fe and Ga have the same valence state in Fe-PCH and Ga-PCH, and have the same octahedral coordination geometry. Moreover, a similar next neighbour distribution for Fe and Ga, resulting from the EXAFS data analysis, strongly supports similar coordination chemistry at the origin of the biomimetic behaviour of Ga.


The Geothermal Communities (GEOCOM) project (www.geothermalcommunities.eu) was launched in 2010 with a vision to increase the visibility of direct heat applications of geothermal energy throughout Europe, where most attention has been paid to power generation alternatives of the same source recently. This 11 million Euro project, funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7), demonstrates a wide array of research and demonstration components to provide not only firsthand experience for the communities involved in the project, but also to feed the international scientific community with valuable results related to the currently pressing geothermal matters such as reinjection into sandstone reservoirs and trans-boundary utilisation of geothermal aquifers. Demonstration actions, including geothermal district heating system development, integration of geothermal heating with other renewable energy sources (RES) and energy efficiency measures such as complementary retrofitting actions on selected buildings, are implemented at three demonstration sites in Hungary, Italy and Slovakia. This broad geographical coverage enables us to implement different technologies which suit the local needs the best and at the same time increases the replication potential of the project's actions. The innovative elements range from complete utilisation of the inherent natural gas content of the thermal water (520l/m @85% CH4) via CHP engines in Hungary through upgrading and extending a 30-year-old geothermal district heating system to modern standards in Slovakia to building a brand new geothermal loop to supply the citizens of the medieval village of Montieri in the heart of the Larderello area in Italy. Additional municipalities from Poland, Macedonia, Romania and Serbia with geothermal energy potential participate in GEOCOM as observer communities and are keeping a close eye on the project's progress and getting prepared to initiate their own geothermal programs based on GEOCOM's results. This aspect helps to spread direct geothermal applications further and into countries and regions with traditional geothermal features (e.g. hot springs) but lacking the knowledge to exploit them for their own benefits. All the demonstration actions of the project are supported by socio-economic research, which runs in parallel with them in order to monitor the public acceptance of such interventions and the public opinion in general about geothermal energy. Without fully understanding the key driving factors at communities with such potential, the results cannot be hoped to spread and become popular. Also a full scale monitoring campaign has been introduced (with staggering results) in order to gather data on the delivered technical components, thus ensuring the availability of tangible data on the operation and savings achieved. Later on, such data can support decision makers who are willing to engage such ventures to make solid and justified decisions for the good of their community.


This symposium essay argues that workers must face up and wake up to the emerging real world of perpetual employment vulnerability. Clinging to the faith that those who govern us will abide by simple moral codes simply will not do in this world. Workers must resist forces promoting vulnerability and internalize a steely and clear-eyed ethic of self-defense in response to the smash mouth truth of this challenging new environment. Workers and dissidents must not shrink when their frank opposition to the status quo is cabined and marginalized as "incivility." The law — and I focus in the essay on American labor law — can be of some help at the margins to the cause of worker resistance; but one cannot lose sight of the implacability of the adversary or the ineluctability of the situation. As Chinua Achebe once said with his customary penetrating wisdom:"To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is."However, the dire predicament remains full of possibilities. And many such possibilities along the way are beautiful and ennobling. Workers need not lose their humanity, or their values, when confronting the moral insouciance of owners and employers. In the end, I am convinced and argue (from the context of my own life) that both my law students and their former-blue-collar, Teamster law professor (and perhaps others) can learn to appreciate, and even venerate, the sometimes beautiful incivility of human resistance. Whether in Ferguson, Missouri or in the workplace, the human spirit fights on.


The increase in greenhouse gas emissions and degradation of water quality and quantity in waterways due to dairy farming in New Zealand have become of growing concern. Compared to traditional sheep and beef cattle farming, dairy farming is more input intensive and more likely to cause such environmental damage. Our study uses choice modeling to explore New Zealanders' willingness to pay for sustainable dairy and sheep/beef cattle farming. We investigate respondents' level of awareness of the environmental degradation caused by dairy farming and their willingness to make trade-offs between economic growth and improvements in the level of ecosystem services associated with pastoral farming.


From the traditional perspective, the system design process of data mining should be continuously broke through, based on web platform, making further analysis of model build. This paper combine four parts of whole web mining system to make discussion, making data mining models of the web meet scientific requirements and making relevance and effectiveness of the data mining process are fully guaranteed. Hoping through the research process of this article, the majority of business users can get a positive impact on their development, and at the same time, hoping that it can provide scientific and effective theory and model evidence for further study of data mining system.


The need for pest and pathogen management will increase as the intensification of food production proceeds to feed the burgeoning human population. Climate is a significant driver of pest population dynamics, so climate change will require adaptive management strategies to cope with the altered status of pests and pathogens. A hierarchy of analytical tools is required to conduct risk assessments, inform policy and design pest management on scales from regions to landscapes and fields. Such tools include models for predicting potential geographical distributions, seasonal phenology, and population dynamics at a range of spatial and temporal scales. The level of sophistication of such models and databases will be determined by the economic importance of specific species. Many obstacles remain in the way of designing reliable adaptation strategies, and several issues that ensure continuing uncertainty are discussed. Holistic approaches that include nonclimatic drivers of change are needed to address the combination of global change variables. Changed patterns of crop production will determine the pests and pathogens that require greater effort to control. Linked crop‐pest models offer the best opportunities for management of important pests and pathogens. Examples of risk assessments for pests and pathogens are illustrated mostly with cases from Australia, and guidelines for adaptation of pest and pathogen management are reviewed. The plethora of species and strains of pests and pathogens demands a parsimonious approach to risk assessment and adaptation, based on identified needs to inform management. Due to some intractable issues the best approach may often be scenario planning to design systems which will be resilient under any global change. WIREs Clim Change 2011 2 220–237 DOI: 10.1002/wcc.102


A study of the refractory-gate metallization schemes had been undertaken to provide a low-resistivity metallization for LSI and VLSI. In this paper, we describe an overview of the efforts made in this direction and present two different metallization schemes which lead to a resistivity of ≤20 and 40 µΩ.cm at the gate level. These schemes involve formation of titanium and tantalum silicides on polysilicon gates, respectively. The recommended structure is a metal or a cosputtered alloy/polysilicon/gate oxide/substrate which, when sintered, gives the desired structure silicide/polysilicon/gate oxide substrate. By the use of 1000-Å Ti or Ta, the sheet resistance of nearly 1 or 2 Ω/□, respectively, can be routinely obtained. The silicides are mechanically strong and can be dry etched using radial-flow or barrel-type plasma reactors. The Ta silicide structure is found to be very stable throughout standard processing and can be retrofitted in the present processing sequence. Ti silicide structures are similarly stable except for the reactivity of the silicide with HF-containing reagents. The Ti silicide metallization scheme can therefore be employed in processing with changes incorporated to avoid HF-silicide contact.


Whilst assisted dying remains topical, a number of courts and committees have considered the potential legalisation of active voluntary euthanasia, and/or physician-assisted suicide, but concluded that legalisation should not occur. Significantly this conclusion is attributed not simply to concern to uphold the sanctity of life, but more commonly the reasons given stress that it would simply not be possible to legalise assisted dying whilst incorporating sufficient safeguards within the legislation to protect the vulnerable. This article considers the way in which the principle of dignity has been asserted to demand both that a person has a right to die with dignity (where dignity is constructed as entailing a choice to die with medical assistance) and that the prohibition of assisted dying be maintained in order to ensure the dignity of the person, regardless of whether that person is disabled or terminally ill. It assesses the validity of that argument by evaluating the safeguards incorporated into the Assisted Dying Bill 2013 and reflecting upon the experience of the statutory regulation of assisted dying in other jurisdictions: the Netherlands, Belgium and Oregon. It is concluded that it is possible to construct legislation authorising assisted dying in strictly controlled circumstances and that far from exposing the vulnerable to the risk of abuse, such regulation would provide much greater protection of all lives than the current system based upon an absolute prohibition of killing.


In the last decade, state and local governments have passed thousands of laws attempting to regulate immigrants within their boundaries. These regulations have been the subject of much litigation, as well as media attention and legal scholarship. Legal scholars have written extensively on the criminal and employment provisions of such laws, as well as on the general question of whether states can or should have any role to play in immigration law. Missing from most accounts, however, is attention to another common focus of these state and local regulations: property law. When we look at the role that property plays in state immigration regulation, we uncover some surprising and troubling truths. The area is a legal muddle, characterized by incoherent and inconsistent court rulings. These inconsistencies leave significant gaps in the protection of non-citizen property rights, not only for unauthorized immigrants but also for legally resident ones. This article draws much-needed attention to these gaps. It compares the two major areas of state regulation of non-citizen property: real estate and landlord/tenant law. A comparison of case law in these two areas demonstrates that the courts have failed in the last century to create a coherent framework for the assessing the relationship between non-citizens, property, and state power. I argue that the resulting inconsistencies stem, in part, from the failure of the courts to take into account a property perspective. I suggest what a property perspective would look like, drawing in particular on the core principles of alienability, equality and non-discrimination. This article posits that alienage law is a property outlier, since few of the norms of modern property law have been applied to non-citizens. We should be concerned about this fact, not only because of what it says about the weakness of non-citizen rights but also because of its implications for the failed modernization of property law.


Consider a bipartite network where N consumers choose to buy or not to buy M different products. This paper considers the properties of the logistic regression of the N × M array of "i-buys-j" purchase decisions, [Y ij ] 1≤i≤N,≤j≤M , onto known functions of consumer and product attributes under asymptotic sequences where (i) both N and M grow large and (ii) the average number of products purchased per consumer is finite in the limit. This latter assumption implies that the network of purchases is sparse: only a (very) small fraction of all possible purchases are actually made (concordant with many real-world settings). Under sparse network asymptotics, the first and last terms in an extended Hoeffding-type variance decomposition of the score of the logit composite log-likelihood are of equal order. In contrast, under dense network asymptotics, the last term is asymptotically negligible. Asymptotic normality of the logistic regression coefficients is shown using a martingale central limit theorem (CLT) for triangular arrays. Unlike in the dense case, the normality result derived here also holds under degeneracy of the network graphon. Relatedly, when there "happens to be" no dyadic dependence in the dataset in hand, it specializes to recently derived results on the behavior of logistic regression with rare events and iid data. Sparse network asymptotics may lead to better inference in practice since they suggest variance estimators which (i) incorporate additional sources of sampling variation and (ii) are valid under varying degrees of dyadic dependence.


Integrated assessment models are in general not constrained by mineral resource supply. In this paper, we introduce a material accounting method as a first step toward addressing the raw materials gap in the TIMES integrated assessment model (TIAM‐FR version). The method consists of attributing process‐based life cycle inventories (LCIs) taken from the ecoinvent 3.3 database to the TIAM‐FR technology processes constituting the global energy system. We demonstrate the method performing a prospective exercise on the electricity‐generating sector in a second shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP2) baseline scenario on the 2010–2100 time horizon. We start by disaggregating the LCIs into three separate life phases (construction, operation, and decommissioning) and coupling them to their respective TIAM‐FR electric outputs (new capacities, electricity production, and end‐of‐life capacities) in order to estimate the annual mineral resource requirements. Prospective uses of fossil fuels and metallic and nonmetallic mineral resources are quantified dynamically at the life phase and regional levels (15 world regions). The construction of hydropower, solar power, and wind power plants generate increasing use of metallic and nonmetallic mineral resources in successive peak and valley periods. However, the use of fossil fuels is much higher than the use of mineral resources all along the horizon. Finally, we evaluate how sensitive the global material use is to the allocation of a share of infrastructure activities to the decommissioning phase. This approach could be extended to other integrated assessment models and possibly other energy sectors.


The field of energy textiles is growing but continues to face two main challenges: (1) flexible energy storage does not yet exist in a form that is directly comparable with everyday fabrics including their feel, drape and thickness, and (2) in order to produce an "energy textile" as part of a garment, it must be fabricated in a systematic manner allowing for multiple components of e-textiles to be integrated simultaneously. To help address these issues, we have developed textile supercapacitors based on knitted carbon fibers and activated carbon ink. We show capacitances as high as 0.51 F cm−2 per device at 10 mV s−1, which is directly comparable with those of standard activated carbon film electrodes tested under the same conditions. We also demonstrate the performance of the device when bent at 90°, 135°, 180° and when stretched. This is the first report on knitting as a fabrication technique for integrated energy storage devices.


Combining both, state-of-the art natural language processing (NLP) algorithms and semantic information offered by a variety of ontologies and databases, efficient methods have been proposed that assist system designers in automatically translating text-based specifications into formal models. But due to ambiguities in natural language, these approaches usually require user interaction. Following these achievements, we consider natural language as a further input language that is used in the design flow for systems and software. Consequently, concepts from integrated development environments (IDE) as they can be found for programming languages such as Java need to be made available for natural language specifications as well. In this paper, we propose lips, an integrated development environment that is seamlessly implemented on top of Eclipse. It contains recent NLP algorithms that extract formal models suited for the Eclipse Modeling Framework and therefore provide a starting point for an ongoing implementation. Whenever user interaction is required, lips makes use of well-known IDE concepts such as markers and quick fixes thereby enabling a holistic user experience.


This article draws on original research with Irish-born return migrants from the United States to consider how the concept of 'home' is understood by this returnee cohort. Specifically, it focuses on the late 1980s and early 1990s emigrant cohort who went to live and work in the United States, and have recently returned to 'Celtic Tiger' Ireland. It examines how their various understandings of this elusive spatial imaginary compares with ideas of home as articulated in recent public debates on Irish migration, return and the diaspora. Through analysis of the interview transcripts, it is argued that home – while featuring as a significant anchoring referent in returnees' lives – is by no means an unambiguously located place. Rather, home – and the return home – for this returnee cohort is a Janus-faced experience that cannot easily be mapped onto traditional cartographies of belonging.


Boiling is one of the most effective heat transfer methods due to its high heat transfer coefficient. Therefore, boiling heat transfer plays a very important role for various applications in many technological and industrial areas. However, a very complex mechanism of boiling, especially bubble nucleation, is still not sufficiently understood. On the other hand, numerous experiments have revealed the existence of soft domains that called nanobubbles at the solid-liquid interface. In this study, to investigate the influence of the solid-liquid interface nanobubbles on the bubble nucleation, an atomic force microscope (AFM) is used to characterize the morphology of nanobubbles. In order to separate the effect of wettability of a solid surface from that of surface structure, a very flat hydrophobic surface was prepared. 1H,1H,2H,2H-Perfluoro-n-octylphosphonic acid (FOPA) formed the interface of hydrophobic self-assembled monolayers (SAMs). As the result of AFM measurement, many nanobubbles about 100 nm in diameter and 30 nm thick are observed at the interface of the FOPA surface and the pure water. In addition, to prove the existence of gaseous phase, the heat conductance measurement by time-domain thermoreflectance method (TDTR) was introduced. TDTR is an ultrafast optical pump probe technique well suited for thermal measurement of thin films. It enables to resolve the thermal conductivity of the thin film and the thermal conductance of the interface. If nanobubbles are the gaseous phase, the big change of interface heat thermal resistance will be seen and the TDTR signal should also change. The effectiveness of a TDTR to confirm the existence of nanobubbles is shown by the model simulation of TDTR. A clear difference is seen in TDTR signal by the existence of only 1 nm gaseous phase. After confirming the existence of nanobubbles by AFM measurement, it can be proved that the nanobubbles are truly gaseous phase of the TDTR measurement.© 2013 ASME


Due to the increasing proportion of distributed photovoltaic (PV) production in the generation mix, the knowledge of the PV generation capacity has become a key factor. In this paper, we propose to compute the PV plant maximum power starting from the indirectly estimated irradiance. Three estimators are compared in terms of ability to compute the PV plant maximum power, bandwidth, and robustness against measurements noise. The approaches rely on measurements of the DC voltage, current, and cell temperature, and on a model of the PV array. We show that the considered methods can accurately reconstruct the PV maximum generation even during curtailment periods, i.e., when the measured PV power is not representative of the maximum potential of the PV array. Performance evaluation is carried out by using a dedicated experimental setup on a 14.3 kWp rooftop PV installation. Results also proved that the analyzed methods can outperform pyranometer-based estimations with a simple sensing system. We show how the obtained PV maximum power values can be applied to train time series based solar maximum power forecasting techniques. This is beneficial when the measured power values, commonly used as training, are not representative of the maximum PV potential.


This study was conducted to evaluate reproductive growth, oil and protein accumulation in seeds, and some yield components of 8 groundnut genotypes in 2001 and 2002. The number of flowers, pegs, and pods per plant during the reproductive period were determined with periodic counts starting from flowering. The percentage of flowers turned to pegs and pods, and the percentage of pegs turned to pods were calculated at the end of the growing period. After pod setting, 6 plants per plot were harvested at 15-day intervals to determine oil and protein content of seeds. At final harvest pod yield and some yield components were determined, and correlations between reproductive growth parameters and pod yield were calculated. Genotypes had significantly different reproductive growth parameters. Total number of flowers per plant was negatively correlated with the percentage of flowers turned to pegs and pods, whereas the percentage of flowers turned to pegs and pods was positively correlated with pod yield. The highest pod yield was obtained from cv. Osmaniye 2005, which had the lowest number of flowers per plant and the highest percentage of flowers turned to pods. The results of the current study showed that percentage of flowers turned to pegs and the percentage of pegs turned to pods were the most promising generative plant characteristics that could contribute to seed yield increase in groundnut production in a typical eastern Mediterranean climate. Seed oil content of the groundnut genotypes increased rapidly until initiation of first maturity (R7) and then declined in the later growth stages, whereas protein content generally increased gradually until physiological maturity (R8) in all genotypes.


OBJECTIVE
To help improve treatment for incarcerated veterans, the study examined exposure to trauma, symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), functional status, and treatment history in a group of incarcerated veterans.

METHODS
A convenience sample of 129 jailed veterans who agreed to receive outreach contact completed the Life Event History Questionnaire, the PTSD Checklist-Civilian Version (PCL-C), and the Addiction Severity Index. Participants who had scores of 50 or above on the PCL-C, designated as screening positive for PTSD, were compared with those whose scores were below 50, designated as screening negative for PTSD.

RESULTS
Some 112 veterans (87 percent) reported traumatic experiences. A total of 51 veterans (39 percent) screened positive for PTSD, and 78 veterans (60 percent) screened negative. Compared with veterans who screened negative for PTSD, those who screened positive reported a greater variety of traumas; more serious current legal problems; a higher lifetime use of alcohol, cocaine, and heroin; higher recent expenditures on drugs; more psychiatric symptoms; and worse general health despite more previous psychiatric and medical treatment as well as treatment for substance abuse.

CONCLUSIONS
The findings encourage the development of an improved treatment model to keep jailed veterans with PTSD from repeated incarceration.


Many people with disabilities face considerable barriers while shopping in grocery stores.  One such barrier is that they cannot find their way around easily, especially when they visit the grocery store for the first time and have not yet built a cognitive map in their memory. They may also experience delays in finding the right product or waiting for assistance from store employees, thus leading them to rely on family, friends, relatives, or volunteers to help them with their shopping. Problems start when these people are not available, in which case the individual is forced to cancel their visit to the grocery store and reschedule the trip. Grocery stores include many different zones and services, the aisles area being one of the main barriers to access for people with different disabilities. This area features many different sections such as canned goods, dry packaged goods, spices, drinks and snacks, baking supplies, baby items, cereals, cleaning products, pet supplies, and health and beauty items. For visually impaired individuals, however, it can be hard to reach these various sections and find the relevant products. The objective of this research is to design an inclusive and innovative wayfinding system in grocery stores for visually impaired shoppers in order to help them find the center zone, orient between different aisles, decide where to go, move easily between different sections, and select products with ease. The research approach will be based on the literature review and the application of the Delphi method.


If you want to know whether a property is true or not in a specific algebraic structure, you need to test that property on the given structure. This can be done by hand, which can be cumbersome and erroneous. In addition, the time consumed in testing depends on the size of the structure where the property is applied. We present an implementation of a system for finding counterexamples and testing properties of models of first-order theories. This system is supposed to provide a convenient and paperless environment for researchers and students investigating or studying such models and algebraic structures in particular. To implement a first-order theory in the system, a suitable first-order language .( and some axioms are required. The components of a language are given by a collection of variables, a set of predicate symbols, and a set of operation symbols. Variables and operation symbols are used to build terms. Terms, predicate symbols, and the usual logical connectives are used to build formulas. A first-order theory now consists of a language together with a set of closed formulas, i.e. formulas without free occurrences of variables. The set of formulas is also called the axioms of the theory. The system uses several different formats to allow the user to specify languages, to define axioms and theories and to create models. Besides the obvious operations and tests on these structures, we have introduced the notion of a functor between classes of models in order to generate more co~plex models from given ones automatically. As an example, we will use the system to create several lattices structures starting from a model of the theory of pre-orders.


When the United States Supreme Court uses the Constitution to decide a case how should the court apply the document? Should the justices look at the Constitution as a stable historical written document and only apply the text as written? What if the text does not speak to the exact situation? Should the court try to discern the intent of the framers of the Constitution and interpret from that intent to the present situation? Suppose the situation the court is trying to resolve does not lend itself to either of these methods of constitutional interpretations. Should the Supreme Court then resolve the situation based on the values explicit and/or implicit in the Constitution? Maybe the needs of society should be considered when interpreting the Constitution in its modern day setting. Should the judges create constitutional law on the basis of contemporary value judgments? One way of framing the issue of constitutional interpretations is to ask: Should constitutional law be viewed as law generating from the text of the Constitution or should it be viewed as the written document elaborated by various Supreme Court decisions? This article attempts to answer these questions focusing on the interpretation problem and interpretivists-originalists or value analysis, while defining and analyzing the Constitution.


This piece presents systematically the contributions that the EU courts have made to the understanding of the notion of restriction of competition over the years. It examines, first, the issues around which there is consensus among commentators. It is undisputed, for instance, that a restriction cannot be established without considering the economic and legal context of which a practice is part. This assessment comprises the evaluation of the counterfactual. Secondly, the paper focuses on the issues that remain controversial. In this regard, it appears that the case law is more consistent and sophisticated than commonly conceded. In particular, the EU courts have followed a clear line when examining whether a practice is restrictive by object. Similarly, the relevant case law sheds sufficient light about the elements that are relevant in the context of an analysis of effects.


The aim of this thesis is to investigate the acquisition of different elements of
process control skills and how the transfer between task elements contributes to
the acquisition of the overall task. Process control tasks are very complex
cognitive tasks consisting of a number of subordinate task elements such as
procedure-following, diagnosis, & monitoring, whose execution must be planned
carefully in order to meet the system goal. In the past, research emphasis has
focused upon training these subordinate tasks separately, ignoring the
possibility that performance at one element would benefit from or interfere
with mastery of another. Understanding these possible 'internal transfer'
phenomena will influence training design. It would also influence issues of
work design, including allocation of functions, since tasks designed to enable
practice of the constituent elements to support each other would counterbalance
problems associated with infrequent use of skills in automated plants. This
thesis has focused upon the development of training methods to optimise
transfer of knowledge and skills, assisting trainees to integrate different task
elements within the overall process control task they need to master.
The transfer of training literature was reviewed in order to identify major
variables influencing transfer. To provide a framework for utilising previous
empirical findings in examining transfer of complex process control skills, a
model of Hierarchical Task Analysis was developed which described the task in
terms of a limited number of operations and plans. A major hypothesis put
forward in the thesis is that 'task elements with similar forms of plans and
operations may prompt an individual to adopt similar cognitive processes and
transfer will be observed'. The size of transfer, however, would be determined
by the learning conditions under which the original task elements were
acquired. To examine the influence of learning conditions upon transfer of
task elements, four training methods were developed based upon a theoretical
model of transfer which was integrated with the hierarchical task analysis.
A large scale experiment was conducted in order to investigate the effects of
the four training methods upon learning two similar tasks, in the context of
starting-up a distillation column. This task was simulated in a microcomputer.
The two tasks were designed to share common task elements but were different
in terms of the required product specifications.
Twenty-eight postgraduate students took part in a training course which lasted
for eight hours approximately. The subjects were assigned to the following
four experimental conditions: (i) the procedures-group which was provided
with efficient procedures; (ii) the analysis-group which received additional
explanations about the interaction of goals described in the procedures; (iii)
the model-group which was provided with a structural model of the plant, but
with no procedures; and (iv) the practice-group which learned the tasks by
practice and which was used as a control condition. The model of learning was
used to make transfer predictions and generate five experimental hypotheses
which were tested in the main study; one hypothesis was concerned with the
acquisition of the original task, two of them with the transfer of task elements
and the other two with nonspecific transfer effects.
For a number of performance measures such as speed, control performance and
economy of operation, the procedures- and analysis- groups performed the
original task better than the other groups. The model-group was faster than the
practice-group; however, their control and economy aspects of performance
were equivalent. An 'in-depth' analysis of the control actions and verbal
protocols showed that the model-group continued to experiment with' the
process, putting into practice the theory of plant which was taught to them.
Performance at the transfer task indicated that all groups performed better
than the practice-group, which provides support for the hypothesis that 'task
elements similar in form may prompt an individual to adopt similar cognitive
processes and transfer may occur'. However, the procedures-group degraded its
performance and appeared to be inferior to both the analysis- and modelgroups,
which may indicate that some kind of extrinsic information in the form
of planning or conceptual knowledge would be required to optimise transfer.
On the other hand, the analysis-group was faster than the model-group, but no
significant differences were reported with respect to other measures of
performance.
On practice with a successive transfer task of the same kind, the observed
patterns of performance changed. Only the analysis-group was significantly
better than the practice-group, the other groups having scored in between these
two groups. This finding has highlighted the role of practice in an
interactive learning environment provided by the plant simulator.
Although the experimental design attempted to control for nonspecific transfer
effects by maximising the number of 'common' task elements between the
original and transfer tasks, the individual differences observed and the changes
in the kind of plans developed by trainees have indicated that such transfer
effects have actually taken place. This was expected to occur to a certain
extent, and two hypotheses had been formulated in order to examine this issue
by looking into the types of planning and conceptual knowledge which
supported transfer.

As it was expected, the analysis- and model- groups achieved higher nonspecific
transfer scores than the other groups which were measured in terms of the
amount of disturbance caused to previously established parameters and the
number of questions answered in a questionnaire administered in the end of the
study. An interesting result, however, was that the practice-group appeared to
be better than the procedures-group in this respect; this may be accounted for
by the fact that the former group was more actively engaged in learning the
original task.
Finally, the thesis has investigated the transfer of the three subordinate goals
common to both the original and transfer tasks. An important factor which
has influenced the different degrees at which these goals were transferred was
the degree of flexibility entailed in their performance. The thesis concludes
with an evaluation of its own approach and suggestions for future research.


British scientists are celebrating a $1.7 billion windfall, announced last week by the U.K. government, to shore up deteriorating facilities and raise stipends for Ph.D. students. The 2-year spending boost is intended to keep the pool of British science well stocked, both by attracting more talented students into the field and stemming the flow of scientists out of the country. But the benefits are not spread evenly across the research spectrum.


In organic-rich sediments laid down in fresh water, much less diagenetic pyrite is formed than in analogous marine sediments because of the much lower concentrations of dissolved sulfate found in most fresh waters as compared to seawater. As a result, modern organic-rich freshwater sediments exhibit a much higher organic carbon-to-pyrite sulfur ratio (C/S) than marine sediments with similar organic contents. On this basis, C/S ratios can be used to distinguish ancient marine from freshwater (or slightly brackish) sedimentary rocks. This is demonstrated here for several Carboniferous shales and siltstones. The C/S technique cannot distinguish brackish-water sediments deposited under salinities greater than half that of seawater from marine sediments, as demonstrated by analyses of modern Chesapeake Bay sediments. Also, the method is not applicable to nearly pure limestones or to rocks low in organic matter (less than about 1% organic carbon). Saline (high sulfate) phases of ancient lakes can be distinguished from nonsaline phases using the C/S method.


Spin-orbit coupling in inversion-asymmetric magnetic crystals and structures has emerged as a powerful tool to generate complex magnetic textures, interconvert charge and spin under applied current, and control magnetization dynamics. Current-induced spin-orbit torques mediate the transfer of angular momentum from the lattice to the spin system, leading to sustained magnetic oscillations or switching of ferromagnetic as well as antiferromagnetic structures. The manipulation of magnetic order, domain walls and skyrmions by spin-orbit torques provides evidence of the microscopic interactions between charge and spin in a variety of materials and opens novel strategies to design spintronic devices with potentially high impact in data storage, nonvolatile logic, and magnonic applications. This paper reviews recent progress in the field of spin-orbitronics, focusing on theoretical models, material properties, and experimental results obtained on bulk noncentrosymmetric conductors and multilayer heterostructures, including metals, semiconductors, and topological insulator systems. Relevant aspects for improving the understanding and optimizing the efficiency of nonequilibrium spin-orbit phenomena in future nanoscale devices are also discussed.


Forced migration, often resulting from violent conflict, imposes large economic costs on both sending and receiving countries, on those agencies that coordinate humanitarian services and most importantly upon the forced migrants themselves. Programs encouraging the return of refugees are therefore potentially crucial interventions, which can result in all parties benefiting. In this paper, we assess the UNHCR post-return shelter assistance program in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011, the country most affected by refugee movements, where no less than one-third of the population is a returnee. We are motivated by the fact that the resolution of lost housing and property is commonly understood as a key ingredient in sustainable return and reintegration. Given the infeasibility of randomizing shelter assistance to those repatriated, we implement a variety of matching techniques to insulate our results from selection biases. Adopting a multidimensional approach, our results show that shelter assistance reduces multidimensional poverty by around six percent. This reduction in poverty is driven by particular indicators of deprivation including dietary diversity, food security and heating, all of which are shown to fall by five to six percent depending on the matching specification. The former results are particularly encouraging in the context of Afghanistan given the prevalence of chronic malnutrition in the country.


knowledge economy and information economy under the guidance of the global economy has developed into the center of the economy, the world has entered a new era of knowledge economy, so the knowledge management as a core part of the enterprise survival, in order to improve the competitiveness of the enterprises, the role of enterprise knowledge management platform cannot be ignored. In this paper, it is under the support of this theory to establish the model of small and medium-sized enterprises knowledge management platform, and has carried on the system for the model of fuzzy evaluation, put forward the main influence factor, respectively is the enterprise knowledge base, knowledge workers, system platform and enterprise management. CAI self-study the five general users, by using fuzzy evaluation after finally got the evaluation result for the better level, to prove the rationality of this model, but also proved in this paper, the established design and development of small and medium-sized enterprise knowledge management platform will play a role for future research.


Disability and Contemporary Performance presents a remarkable challenge to existing assumptions about disability and artistic practice. In particular, it explores where cultural knowledge about disability leaves off, and the lived experience of difference begins. Petra Kuppers, herself an award-winning artist and theorist, investigates the ways in which disabled performers challenge, change and work with current stereotypes through their work. She explores freak show fantasies and 'medical theatre' as well as live art, webwork, theatre, dance, photography and installations, to cast an entirely new light on contemporary identity politics and aesthetics. This is an outstanding exploration of some of the most pressing issues in performance, cultural and disability studies today, written by a leading practitioner and critic.


This paper summarizes the electrical characteristics of two Polycrystalline silicon PV Modules. Tests are operated in outdoor exposure and natural sunlight located in Gurgaon Region of Haryana (India) as specific composite climate environment, characterized by high irradiation and temperature levels. PV modules performance evaluation was performed according to International Standard as diagnostic test of data, manufacturer. Data acquired by Environmental Operating Conditions (EOC) was converted into Solar Module Output characteristics at Standard Test Conditions (STC) by using method suggested by A.J. Anderson and G. Blaesser. Then, based on the investigation results of the conversion equations, these methods of translation are distinguished by the type of Solar cell Technology and the application range. A difference between the tests in indoor situation and in natural environment exists, attributed to various factors including effect of spectral changes over time, module temperature, effect of reflection by PV incident angles and also light induced degradation in crystalline silicon.


The article considers examples of the post-1989 Polish prose exposing the results of a long-term subaltern condition. These results get activated in relations with the Other. They are asymmetrical because they concern unequal subjects. The article posits that the phantasm of the motherland (that which is the most 'self') has a constructing form and selective character. It poses the thesis that the problem of the Polish petrified dominant narration with the motherland at the center of attention and subject identity marked with a specific relation to the Other is that it does not want to admit that cultural authority is created by the present time and not the past. There is a constant interchange in meaning – from forgetting to remembering and back – that takes place between them.


The benthic and fish communities of the central portion of the Guanica, Puerto Rico shelf edge were studied to determine species abundance, distributions and species overlap between two depth stratifications, 20 and 45 m, at eight sites. A total of 67 fish species belonging to 21 families were identified. Similar species richness estimates were observed between depths, though fish assemblage composition differed significantly, with observable changes in feeding guild contributions of herbivore and omnivore (20 m) to a deeper assemblage composed of piscivores and planktivores (45 m). Coral assemblages consisted of 31 species at 20 m and 11 species at 45 m, accounting for 17.0% (±1.76 SE) and 2.6% (±0.89 SE) benthic cover for the altiphotic and mesophotic surveys, respectively. The altiphotic and mesophotic coral reef communities support different scleractinian coral assemblages with minimal species overlap. Altiphotic surveys of sponges yielded a higher species richness than mesophotic, with 60 and 54 species respectively, and an overall total of 71 species identified from both depths, with 45 species overlapping (63.0%). The percent cover of sponges surveyed at altiphotic reefs accounted for 9.0% (±1.04 SE), while the percent cover of sponges surveyed at mesophotic reefs was 14.0% (±1.96 SE). Our data show fish, coral, and sponge assemblages are differentiated between 20 and 45 m along thes provides an annotated species list of the local sponge fauna. Combined, these results highlight the need for con Guanica shelf edge offshore of the Guanica Biosphere Reserve. This study represents the first observations for species distributions of adjacent altiphotic and mesophotic coral reef habitats along the Guanica shelf edge, as well atinued environmental stewardship and conservation in the area.


The expressive moment is that point in time when we grasp a situation and respond quickly, even before we are aware of it. In this book, Marc Leman argues that expression drives this kind of interaction, and he proposes a general framework for understanding expressive interactions. He focuses on the dynamic, fast, and pre-reflective processes underlying our interactions with music -whether we are playing an instrument, dancing, listening, or using new interactive technologies. Music offers a well-established domain for studying these fast and interactive processes, and Leman argues that understanding the power of expressive interaction through music may help us understand cognitive processing in other domains, including language, human action coordination, human-animal interaction, and human-machine interaction.Leman regards expressive interactions with music as energizing and empowering. He argues that music is based on patterns that intervene with a reinforcing loop in the human brain, strengthening learning, motivation, and reward. He argues further that the reinforcing effect is influenced by the interaction flow, by fast processes that handle expressive qualities on the fly.Leman sets out the framework in which expressive interaction is situated, describing, among other things, a pragmatic model of communication in which the fundamental components are enactment and dynamics. He looks in more detail at the cognitive-motivational architecture, discussing sensorimotor and motivational schemes. Finally, he discusses applications for the concepts behind expressive motivation in such fields as sports, entertainment, rehabilitation, multimedia art, and music education.


Sustainable agriculture practices are known as the best techniques by which to cultivate crops. To ensure the continuity of such practices, farmers should accept and apply this method on their yield. There is an abundance of international studies which have found that attitude, knowledge and support are the main factors to impinge on the acceptance of sustainable agriculture among farmers, but studies on the same scenario are lacking for Malaysia. Filling this research gap is the main objective of this study, which seeks to elucidate the relationship between attitude, knowledge and support towards the acceptance of sustainable agriculture among contract farmers in Malaysia. This is a quantitative study, and a total of 326 respondents were involved in the data collection process. The data were gained through a developed questionnaire. The resulting analysis proves that there is a significant relationship between contract farmers' attitudes and their acceptance of sustainable agriculture (r=0.498, p=0.00).Contract farmers' knowledge and their acceptance of sustainable agriculture are also shown to demonstrate a significant relationship (r= 0.348, 0.00).Additionally, there is support for a significant correlation between knowledge and acceptance of sustainable agriculture (r=0.365, p=0.00). In conclusion, farmers should have positive attitudes and adequate knowledge, and should obtain support from several parties to encourage them to embed sustainable agriculture within their farming practices.


This paper presents a discrete-time adaptive current controller for grid-connected pulse width modulation voltage source converters with LCL filter. The main attribute of the proposed current controller is that, in steady state, the damping of the LCL resonance does not depend on the grid characteristic since the adaptive feedback gains ensure a predefined behavior for the closed-loop current control. An overview of model reference adaptive state feedback theory is presented aiming to give the reader the required background for the adaptive current control design. The digital implementation delay is included in the model, and the stability concerning the variation of the grid parameters is analyzed in detail. Furthermore, current distortions due to the grid background voltage are rejected without using the conventional stationary resonant controllers or the synchronous proportional-plus-integral controllers. Simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the analysis and to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed controller for grid-connected converters subjected to large grid impedance variation and grid voltage disturbances.


Alternative materials represent an important potential source of aggregates for road construction. At present, their use remains limited owing to the abundance and low cost of high quality natural aggregates, low costs of landfill disposal and generally restrictive specifications for pavement materials. Nevertheless, their influence in relation to the primary aggregates is likely to increase in the future with the enforcement of more strict environmental regulations at national and European levels. The objective of this research project was to investigate a wide range of alternative materials and provide a practical framework for their assessment enabling pavement engineers to deal with most applications in road construction.

Initially secondary materials were assessed according to the present UK specifications and were found to fail the requirements in most cases. However, the current approach does not assess fundamental properties such as stiffness, resistance to permanent deformation, tensile strength, resistance to fatigue and the development of these with time, leading to an inadequate assessment of these materials. To advance towards the development of performance-based specifications repeated load triaxial and indirect tensile tests were used. For their performance the Nottingham 150x300 mm triaxial apparatus was used and an indirect tensile apparatus developed which evolved from the Nottingham Asphalt Tester used for bituminous materials. In triaxial testing, models used to study the resilient behaviour of granular materials were found to give good results for unbound but not for lightly-treated secondary materials. For these, a new resilient model was developed.

Testing and specimen preparation techniques together with performance classification systems were developed for both tests and recommendations for an overall methodology for the evaluation of secondary materials are presented. An application of this methodology was made to the study of thirteen mixtures to be considered for full-scale trials. The application of secondary materials in pavements was evaluated using analytical methods of pavement design which demonstrated the potential of these at levels in the pavement as high as the roadbase and the overall thickness reduction that may result.


Hydrostatic machines often have multiple hydrodynamic bearing interfaces, which also serve as a sealing interface. In axial piston machines, the bearing and sealing interface between the barrel and the port plate is a well known example. At reasonably high operating speeds, hydrodynamic effects create an oil film between the barrel and the port plate. This oil film will then, to a certain extend, lift the barrel from the port plate, thereby avoiding metal-to-metal contact.
 The disadvantage of hydrodynamic bearings is, that they need a relatively high velocity of the sliding components, in order to reduce the friction. Below a certain speed, mixed lubrication and finally solid friction will occur. This results in strongly increased friction losses and wear.
 Low speed operation has always been of interest for hydrostatic motors, which are often operated at close to zero speed or at low rotational speeds. But low and near zero speed operation has also become of importance for pumps when being operated in electro-hydraulic actuators (EHAs). Many of the existing pump principles are not allowed to be operated below a certain minimum speed, due to excessive wear which results from coulomb friction conditions. Furthermore, the stick-slip-behaviour creates additional nonlinear behaviour of the EHA-operation, and makes it difficult to control EHAs.
 In order to overcome the disadvantages of hydrodynamic bearings, a new hydrostatic bearing has been developed [1]. In the new bearing, the sealing land of the barrel is divided into three concentric rings. In the middle ring, so called pockets are created. Each pocket has a direct connection with the corresponding port by means of a small groove. The new bearing not only lifts the barrel to a certain height, but also helps to counteract the tilting torque of the barrel.
 The size of the pocket grooves determines the height of the oil film, and therefore also the leakage and viscous friction of the bearing and sealing interface. In a recent research project, INNAS has performed a number of experiments to measure the influence of the groove size on the overall efficiency, as well as on the leakage and torque loss. Measurements have been performed on a 24 cc floating cup pump in a speed range between 500 and 4000 rpm and a pressure range between 100 and 400 bar. At the end of the project, the range has been extended to a speed range between 0.23 and 4400 rpm, and a pressure range between 50 and 450 bar.
 This paper describes some of the results of these experiments. The measured width of the pocket grooves is taken as a characteristic parameter for the size of the flow area and resistance of the pocket grooves.


Exploring Washington's Past tells the state's story in terms of where to go and what to see. With words, photographs, and maps, the authors evoke the cultural landscape and portray Washington's people and events from the days of the fur trade and pioneer settlement to the recent past. Capsule descriptions of small communities -- from Altoona to Zillah -- are interwoven with those of better known cities, and eastern and western Washington receive equal attention. More than two hundred photographs portray our historical landscape through images of today intermixed with a sampling of the past. This book will be an indispensable guide for residents, tourists, and armchair travelers.


This paper explores the joint effect of aggregate productivity shocks and capital market liberalization on the optimal bailout (or liquidation) policy of banks towards defaulted borrowers. It suggests that in bad times both good and bad firms default on their obligations, it is harder for the bank to distinguish between the two and therefore it is less costly to bail out defaulted firms. Therefore, the optimal liquidation rate in a closed economy may be substantially lower in recessions than in booms. In an economy with open capital markets, however, the corporate rate of return has to be raised at least up to the world rate of interest by improving the composition of the corporate sector through higher liquidation in order to prevent an outflow of capital and the subsequent financial crisis. As a result, the optimal liquidation rate (bailout rate) during recessions may be much higher (lower) in an economy with liberalized capital markets than in a closed economy. The model in this paper explains why liquidation rates of defaulted firms have risen significantly and structural reform to facilitate more liquidation has been purchased after the financial crisis in those East Asian countries with more liberalized capital markets.


This work describes a process-oriented, microphysical-chemical model to simulate the formation and evolution of aerosols and ice crystals under the conditions prevailing in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. The model can be run as a box model or along atmospheric trajectories, and considers mixing, gas phase chemistry of aerosol precursors, binary homogeneous aerosol nucleation, homogeneous and heterogeneous ice nucleation, coagula-tion, condensation and dissolution, gas retention during particle freezing, gas trapping in growing ice crystals, and reverse processes. Chemical equations are solved iteratively using a second order implicit integration method. Gas-particle interactions and coagulation are treated over various size structures , with fully mass conserving and non-iterative numerical solution schemes. Particle types include quinternary aqueous solutions composed of H 2 SO 4 , HNO 3 , HCl, and HBr with and without insoluble components, insoluble aerosol particles , and spherical or columnar ice crystals deriving from each aerosol type separately. Three case studies are discussed in detail to demonstrate the potential of the model to simulate real atmospheric processes and to highlight current research topics concerning aerosol and cirrus formation near the tropopause. Emphasis is placed on how the formation of cirrus clouds and the scavenging of nitric acid in cirrus depends on small-scale temperature fluctuations and the presence of efficient ice nuclei in the tropopause region, corroborating and partly extending the findings of previous studies.


Firing patterns differ between subpopulations of vestibular primary afferent neurons. The role of sodium (NaV) channels in this diversity has not been investigated because NaV currents in rodent vestibular ganglion neurons (VGNs) were reported to be homogeneous, with the voltage dependence and tetrodotoxin (TTX) sensitivity of most neuronal NaV channels. RT-PCR experiments, however, indicated expression of diverse NaV channel subunits in the vestibular ganglion, motivating a closer look. Whole cell recordings from acutely dissociated postnatal VGNs confirmed that nearly all neurons expressed NaV currents that are TTX-sensitive and have activation midpoints between -30 and -40 mV. In addition, however, many VGNs expressed one of two other NaV currents. Some VGNs had a small current with properties consistent with NaV1.5 channels: low TTX sensitivity, sensitivity to divalent cation block, and a relatively negative voltage range, and some VGNs showed NaV1.5-like immunoreactivity. Other VGNs had a current with the properties of NaV1.8 channels: high TTX resistance, slow time course, and a relatively depolarized voltage range. In two NaV1.8 reporter lines, subsets of VGNs were labeled. VGNs with NaV1.8-like TTX-resistant current also differed from other VGNs in the voltage dependence of their TTX-sensitive currents and in the voltage threshold for spiking and action potential shape. Regulated expression of NaV channels in primary afferent neurons is likely to selectively affect firing properties that contribute to the encoding of vestibular stimuli.


We show that encapsulation of states in objectoriented programs hinders the search for test data using evolutionary testing. In a well-designed objectoriented program the encapsulated or hidden state is accessible only through exported or public methods. As client code is oblivious to the internal state of a server object, no guidance is available to test the client code using evolutionary testing. In particular, it is difficult to determine the fitness or goodness of test data, as it may depend on the hidden internal state. However, evolutionary testing is a promising new approach whose effectiveness has been shown by several researchers. We propose a specification-based fitness function for evolutionary testing of object-oriented programs. Our approach is modular in that fitness value calculation doesn't depend on source code of server classes, thus it still works even if the server implementation is changed or no code is available—-which is frequently the case for reusable object-oriented class libraries and frameworks. Our approach works for both black-box and white-box based testing.


Abstract Since the beginning of 2020, the world has been hit by the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus that causes Covid‐19. To hamper its spread, policymakers of many countries have put in place strong countermeasures, including lockdowns, that have led to significant changes in people's lifestyles and daily routines. This article aims at assessing the changes caused by Covid‐19 in sustainable consumer behavior under multiple perspectives, contributing to advance knowledge at the intersection between consumer dynamics and sustainable consumer behavior literature. A survey was conducted on 1.535 Italian consumers between December 2020 and February 2021. Respondents were asked to assess the extent to which their consumption behavior—purchase frequency, willingness to pay a premium price, sense of moral duty to purchase, social influence to purchase—related to several categories of sustainable products changed due to the pandemic, as well as the extent to which the pandemic impacted on many other aspects, including their environmental awareness, concern, and habits. Results show that Covid‐19 generated relevant changes. Consumers have increased their purchase frequency and willingness to pay for sustainable products, show growing attention to environmental issues, and behave more sustainably. Further, the extent of change is strongly affected by socio‐demographic variables, such as gender, age, income, and education. For instance, women reported a higher shift towards sustainable consumption and behavior than men. Understanding these changes is important to guide marketers and policymakers to respond promptly and effectively to them and to leverage on them to foster a transition towards a more sustainable society.


Abstract Many terrestrial and aquatic animals jump to escape predators. Most terrestrial animals use robust hindlimbs to produce the power needed to lift their bodies off the ground. This paper explores an alternative jump mechanism used by the lungless salamander, Desmognathus ochrophaeus. Previous work on this jump mechanism suggested that lungless salamanders invoke rapid torso flexion to hurl themselves into the air with minimal hindlimb contribution. The current study was designed to investigate how salamanders pushed off the ground to jump and to determine whether elastic structures contribute to jump power amplification. Specifically, we focused on trunk action, hip rotation, limb placement, and jump power production. We used high speed cameras to film salamander jumps and used these videos to conduct a subsequent motion analysis. Our results demonstrate that prior to jumping, the trunk flexes laterally into a C-shape while the hindlimb (inside of the bend) is planted in front of the hips. Next, the salamander rapidly undulates, rotating the pelvic girdle toward the planted hindfoot. At this point, the planted hindlimb acts like a strut that allows the salamander to pole-vault over the planted hindfoot and into the air. We estimate that the trunk axial muscles are the main contributors to jump power, but they must be aided by elastic structures that amplify jump power output. Future studies should focus on identifying the elastic structures responsible for power amplification as well as possible neurological connections between the salamander jump and the C-start escape strategy of fishes.


This essay introduces the SUNY Buffalo Law School 2012 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture. The Lecture featured distinguished scholars Hendrik Hartog, Jennifer Klein, and Peggie R. Smith, who each contributed an essay to this volume. These three scholars give a richly detailed picture of home caretakers' struggles to gain visibility and support for their important work. Legal rulings and policy choices have made care workers distinctly vulnerable, treating care services as an expression of love rather than contract (as Hartog describes), or as social rehabilitation for marginal citizens rather than as skilled health care provision (as Klein explains), or as informal "companionship" exempt from labor standards (as Smith criticizes). Our introduction draws on Martha A. Fineman's theory of the vulnerable subject, which grounds law in the inevitable interdependency resulting from the embodied human condition. That vision centers justice on law's responsiveness to the vulnerabilities of those bodies, so that intimate caretaking work is not seen as an exceptional or burdensome need of "special" populations. Instead, government support for caretaking is a beneficial and productive instance of law's normal provision of collective protection essential to individual power and responsible citizenship. That perspective can help challenge the law's treatment of caretaking work as naturally and necessarily requiring special personal sacrifice, subordination, and hardship on the part of intimate caretakers.


Laboratory studies have repeatedly replicated the phenomenon of exclusion responding, which has been assumed as one of the mechanisms by which children learn to relate novel words to objects or events. The present study, conducted with six children, aimed to investigate exclusion responding in a play setting, with stimuli that could be manipulated, and to verify whether the play setting would favor learning of the relationships between names and objects after a single exclusion trial. In several trials the experimenter spoke the name of a familiar toy and the child's task was to pick this toy up and throw it into a box, placed in front of the child. Three exclusion probes were interspersed among these trials (the spoken name was novel and there was a novel toy available); three other probes verified whether the relationships between the novel name and the toy had been learned. All children responded by exclusion but only one of them demonstrated learning the relationships in a single trial.


Organisms sometimes appear to use extravagant traits, or "handicaps", to signal their quality to an interested receiver. Before they were used as signals, many of these traits might have been selected to increase with individual quality for reasons apart from conveying information, allowing receivers to use the traits as "cues" of quality. However, current theory does not explain when and why cues of individual quality become exaggerated into costly handicaps. We address this here, using a game‐theoretic model of adaptive signalling. Our model predicts that: (1) signals will honestly reflect signaler quality whenever there is a positive relationship between individual quality and the signalling trait's naturally selected, non‐informational optimum; and (2) the slope of this relationship will determine the amount of costly signal exaggeration, with more exaggeration favored when the slope is more shallow. A shallow slope means that a lower quality male would pay only a small fitness cost to have the same trait value as a higher quality male, and this drives the exaggeration of signals as high‐quality signalers are selected to distinguish themselves. Our model reveals a simple and potentially widespread mechanism for ensuring signal honesty and predicts a natural continuum of signalling strategies, from cost‐free cues to costly handicaps.


The critical role of the Ag–Pd ligand effect (which is tuned by changing the number of Pd atomic layers) in determining the dehydrogenation and dehydration of HCOOH on the bimetallic Pd/Ag catalysts was elucidated by using the spin-polarized density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Our calculations suggest that the selectivity to H2 production from HCOOH on the bimetallic Pd/Ag catalysts strongly depends on the Pd atomic layer thickness at near surface. In particular, the thinnest Pd monolayer in the Pd/Ag system is responsible for enhancing the selectivity of HCOOH decomposition toward H2 production by reducing the surface binding strength of specific intermediates such as HCOO and HCO. The dominant Ag–Pd ligand effect by the substantial charge donation to the Pd surface from the subsurface Ag [which significantly reduce the density of state (particularly, dz2–r2 orbital) near the Fermi level] proves to be a key factor for the selective hydrogen production from HCOOH decomposition, whereas the expan...


Summary This thesis' sets out to analyse and present the purpose and meaning of safety, maintenance functions and management, maintenance indicators, barrier management and the importance and dependency between those. In addition, this is done in relation to the petroleum industry in Norway, and in collaboration with DNV GL, to develop an improved concept of barrier management. The analyses, discussions and conclusions are done at the basis of earlier accident reports and relevant literature. Safety is the overall process of ensuring a safe environment for every included and associated object. A function that is designed and developed to maintain safety is dependent on frequent maintenance in order to maintain its functionality and capability. One of the four top priorities in the Petroleum Safety Authority Norway's future development program is the improved integration of barriers and barrier management. Barriers are often defined as an obstacle, or a function, to prevent any form of hazardous energy to penetrate at an unwanted area, process or situation. The present situation in the industry indicates deviations in the common understanding and usage of barriers, and there are several areas of potential improvement. In barrier management and the phase of monitoring and improving existing solutions, maintenance has a significant role of making the barriers more relevant, efficient and resilient due to changes, time dependent wear and modifications in the systems. To utilize and control the barriers at the highest level possible, the need for an organised management is required. This includes maintenance, which is an essential process in barrier management of proactively ensure the barriers' continuous improvement and resilience. Maintenance indicators in accordance to barriers could be integrated in barrier management with the purpose of revealing weaknesses and areas of improvement. Backlogging is a maintenance indicator, which reveals if planned and preventive maintenance activities are performed in accordance with the scheduled plan. Backlogging is often measured in days or weeks. Another maintenance indicator is number of errors revealed during maintenance and testing. This indicator measures the ratio of errors in a barrier, after performing a test or maintenance operation. A barrier function often consists of several barrier elements, in which the barrier elements could be both technical, operational and organisational. Thus, maintenance functions and indicators are necessary to maintain and improve the elements. It is important to note, however, that maintenance is not regarded as a direct barrier element in itself. This survey has developed a concept suggestion in cooperation and relation to DNV GL, with the focus at future barrier management guidelines. The emphasis has been on implementing maintenance activities and potential maintenance procedures in the barrier management within areas where earlier/present weaknesses are identified. More specific, a DNV GL concept of internal cooperation and exchange of experience is presented.


We investigate the fluid flow through a finite length, axisymrnetric tube when the elastic wall is subject to either a prescribed external pressure or a prescribed motion. The prescribed wall forcing is assumed to consist of a forward travelling wave together with a reflected travelling wave. The dimensionless diameter variation of the tube is taken to be small and perturbation techniques are used to solve the weakly non-linear problem. Particular attention is given to the steady streaming flow that is induced through the non-linear convective acceleration terms. The results are applied to the flow of blood in the umbilical vein (UV), which has important physiological implications.