NEW ANTIPHONS REMIND US FROM TIME TO TIME THAT POETRY BEGAN and flourished in songs, ballads, hymns, dirges, outcries of protest, and prayers of thanks. It is my hope that this issue will deepen our understanding of poetry's demotic and artisanal origins, enlarge our sense of the lost variety of Victorian imaginative life, and realign slightly the borders of "the canon" (which still exists). Toward this end, the issue's authors have considered many modes of poetic expression--in songs, epics, chants, broadsides, newspaper-poems and other verse forms in dialects or regional languages, and works sold by subscription or for charity by working-class authors as well as book-length collections taken on by publishers for sale to middle- and working-class audiences. In The Making of the English Working Class (1963), E. P. Thompson argued that such works expressed a historically evolving industrial class-consciousness. Assorted revisionists, however (Patrick Joyce, for example, in Visions of the People, 1991), have long since questioned whether such a consciousness could be identified in the ways and temporal sequences Thompson claimed, and focused on more diffuse and apolitical continua of attitudes and motivations. For the purposes of this collection, a straightforward working characterization of "the British working-class" in the period under consideration might focus on the near-universal absence of formal education beyond the earliest grades before the Education Acts of 1870 and 1872. Poets who lacked such education, for example, or could not provide it for their children, were in all probability "working-class," and it is my personal critical judgment that they and their immediate political allies wrote poems in regional languages such as Scots, "Doric," Scots Gaelic, or Lancashire dialect as well as "standard English," of dramatic power, reflective complexity, and rare haunting beauty. It is obvious that contemporary middle-class editors and patrons mediated much of the rhymed oral narration, humor, satire, individual inspiration, and collective protest in these works. Yet writers of middleclass origins occasionally faced distinctly "proletarian" ends, and the wider boundaries between "working"-class and "middle"-class literature were comparably shifting and traversable. Literary "hacks" of working-class origins wrote a wide variety of original broadside "ballads," for example, but middle-class printers also pirated works by middle-class authors such as Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt," and poor, middle-class and rich folk alike read "folk-ballads" edited by aristocratic patrons such as Lady Caroline Nairne. "Improving" middle-class journal editors such as William and Mary Howitt and W. J. Fox printed many of the poems of working-class poets, but so also did working-class counterparts such as Thomas Cooper, John Bedford Leno, and (the only woman in this category) Eliza Cook. Upper-middle-c lass patrons and anthologizers such as George Gilfillan and D. E. Edwards edited hard-cover collections of working-class poetry, but so also did John Cassell, Ben Brierley, and other editors with keen memories of their working-class origins. The poetry itself, in any case, included religious, anti-clerical, inspirational, instructive, humorous, meditative, reflective, and reflexive poetry in almost every register I mentioned above--"traditional" and narrative ballads, urban broadsides, regional satires, and political protests. Many working-class authors, influenced by the eighteenth-century pastoralism of Cowper, Ferguson, Gray, or Crabbe, appealed to specifically British traditions and antecedents in ballads and popular songs. Others--inspired in part by the reformist romanticism of Burns, Byron, Shelley, and the early Wordsworth--were also ardent egalitarians and heartfelt opponents of the rampant empire's more martial ambitions. The reformist and egalitarian impulses that assimilated these traditions also estranged nineteenth-century working-class poetry later on from some of the paradigms that guided twentieth-century academic taste--Part pour Part, symbolism, imagism, modernism, "new criticism," structuralism, deconstruction, "post-modernism," and the like. …


The General Video Game AI Competition (GVG-AI) invites submissions of controllers to play games specified in the Video Game Description Language (VGDL), testing them against each other and several baselines. One of the baselines that has done surprisingly well in some of the competitions is sampleMCTS, a straightforward implementation of Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). Although it has done worse in other iterations of the competition, this has produced a nagging worry to us that perhaps the GVG-AI competition might be too easy, especially since performance profiling suggests that significant increases in number of MCTS iterations that can be completed in a given time limit will be possible through optimizations to the GVG-AI competition framework. To better understand the potential performance of the baseline vanilla MCTS controller, I perform scaling experiments, running it against the 62 games in the public GVG-AI corpus as the time budget is varied from about 1/30 of that in the current competition, through around 30x the current competition's budget. I find that it does not in fact master the games even given 30x the current time budget, so the challenge of the GVG-AI competition is safe (at least against this baseline). However, I do find that given enough computational budget, it manages to avoid explicitly losing on most games, despite failing to win them and ultimately losing as time expires, suggesting an asymmetry in the current GVG-AI competition's challenge: not losing is significantly easier than winning.


Student performance is commonly measured using summative assessment methods such as midterms and final exams as well as high-stakes testing. Although not as common, there are other methods of gauging student performance. Formative assessment is a continuous, student-oriented form of assessment, which focuses on helping students improve their performance through continuous engagement and constant measurement of progress. One assessment practice that has been in use for decades in such a manner is peer-assessment. This form of assessment relies on having students evaluate the works of their peers. The level of education in which peer-assessment is used may vary across practices. The research discussed here was conducted in a higher education setting. Despite its cross-domain adoption and longevity, peer-assessment has been a practice difficult to utilize in courses with a high number of students. This directly stems from the fact that it has been used in traditional classes, where assessment is usually carried out using pen and paper. In courses with hundreds of students, such manual forms of peer-assessment would require a significant amount of time to complete. They would also contribute much to both student and instructor load. Automated peer-assessment, on the other hand, has the advantage of reducing, if not eliminating, many of the issues relating to efficiency and effectiveness of the practice. Moreover, its potential to scale up easily makes it a promising platform for conducting large-scale experiments or replicating existing ones. The goal of this thesis is to examine how the potential of automated peer-assessment may be exploited to improve student engagement and to demonstrate how a well-designed peer-assessment methodology may help teachers identify at-risk students in a timely manner. A methodology is developed to demonstrate how online peer-assessment may elicit continuous student engagement. Data collected from a web-based implementation of this methodology are then used to construct several models that predict student performance and monitor progress, highlighting the role of peer-assessment as a tool of early intervention. The construction of open datasets from online peer-assessment data gathered from five undergraduate computer science courses is discussed.
Finally, a promising role of online peer-assessment in measuring levels of student proficiency and test item difficulty is demonstrated by applying a generic Item Response Theory model to the peer-assessment data.


We examine whether the likelihood of entrepreneurial activity is related to the prior career experiences of an individual's coworkers, using a unique matched employer--employee panel data set. We argue that coworkers can increase the likelihood that an individual will perceive entrepreneurial opportunities as well as increase his or her motivation to pursue those opportunities. We find that an individual is more likely to become an entrepreneur if his or her coworkers have been entrepreneurs before. Peer influences also appear to be substitutes for other sources of entrepreneurial influence: we find that peer influences are strongest for those who have less exposure to entrepreneurship in other aspects of their lives.


This paper proposes a possible implementation of a compact printed monopole antenna, useful to operate in UMTS and WLAN bands. In order to accomplish that, a miniaturization technique based on the application of chip inductors is used in conjunction with frequency reconfiguration capability. The chip inductors change the impedance response of the monopole, allowing to reduce the resonant frequency. In order to be able to operate the antenna in these two different frequencies, an antenna reconfiguration technique based on PIN diodes is applied. This procedure allows the change of the active form of the antenna leading to a shift in the resonant frequency. The prototype measurements show good agreement with the simulation results.


The obligation to protect individuals against human rights abuses by private and other 'third' parties is an accepted part of the tripartite human rights obligations' classification. Ways of complying with this obligation are, however, not always clear, and some opposition has been voiced to it having reach beyond a state's territorial border. This opposition is largely based on the reluctance of states to exercise their jurisdiction outside their territory. In this article, we address the content and reach of the human rights obligation to protect and how this relates to the exercise of jurisdiction to prevent human rights violations committed by private entities both within and beyond their home state's territory. While the obligation to protect generally relates to the state's obligation to regulate the conduct of any non-state actor, in this article we will use business enterprises as the actors in focus. The obligation to protect does not per se have a territorial limitation. The territorial limitation is brought in when the question of jurisdiction is added to the complexity. By addressing prescriptive jurisdiction, the article challenges the notion that jurisdiction in international human rights law is almost exclusively territorial, and argues that this is a misconception which results in many abuses of human rights that could have been addressed through regulation of conduct beyond a state's border. Not tackling this misconception results in such conduct now being carried out with impunity. Consequently, the article argues that a restricted approach to jurisdiction is a barrier to full compliance with human rights obligations


We formulate an economic time use model and add to it an epidemiological SIR block. In the event of an epidemic, households shift their leisure time from activities with a high degree of social interaction to activities with less, and also choose to work more from home. Our model highlights the different actions taken by young individuals, who are less severely affected by the disease, and by old individuals, who are more vulnerable. We calibrate our model to time use data from ATUS, employment data, epidemiological data, and estimates of the value of a statistical life. There are qualitative as well as quantitative differences between the competitive equilibrium and social planner allocation and, moreover, these depend critically on when a cure arrives. Due to the role played by social activities in people's welfare, simple indicators such as deaths and GDP are insuffcient for judging outcomes in our economy.


The variability of the yield of the intracellular enzyme cytochrome P-450 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae NCYC 754, in closed batch fermentation using a 5-litre computer-controlled stirred-tank fermenter, was investigated using two control strategies: a) Conventional constant set-point control, using previously determined optimal control parameters; b) time-profiled control of three fermenter control parameters, pH, temperature and stirrer speed varied with time according to pre-calculated profiles, computed from a single empirical model using Pontryagin's continuous maximum principle. Cytochrome P-450 was assayed using the reduced carbon monoxide spectrophotometric procedure. The sample treatment and carbon monoxide gassing rate having been optimised before. The accuracy of the fermenter control variables was assessed. The sum of the squared differences (SSD) between the set and actual control values was used. The values of the SSD were related to the enzyme yield. It was found that the enzyme yield was strongly affected by the accuracy of the control, as expected in a near optimal system. It was noted that inaccurate control always gave low enzyme yields, while accurate control gave a range of enzyme yields. It was concluded that yield variability was caused by more than one factor, including the accuracy of control, but that the accuracy of control was overriding. It was found that the accuracy of control of the individual variables depended on the control strategy used. It was concluded that this provides a useful practical method of assessing operational control efficiency, as opposed to analysis of individual control loops, in analysing process efficiency. Analysis of batch to batch variation in components of the complex growth-medium showed that the enzyme yield was affected. Changes in the batch of yeast extract were found to have most effect on the enzyme yield, mycological peptone less so and the glucose and salt virtually none at all. It was concluded that the saving in cost of growth medium, by partially replacing mycological peptone with yeast extract, may be offset by the costs arising from the resulting greater variability in yield. The effect on enzyme yield of the method of sterilising the growth medium indicated that the complex medium contained material which inhibited enzyme production. This material was believed to affect the rheology and the mass-transfer properties of the growth-medium. Analysis of the time interval between the occurrence of the biomass and the enzyme concentration peaks during the fermentation showed that, in this system, the biomass peak always preceded the enzyme peak. In "slower" fermentations the time interval was smaller. This also explained an apparent discrepancy in behaviour between shake-flask and stirred-tank fermentations. In general, the time interval was slightly shorter under time-profile control than with set-point control fermentations. Exhaust gas analysis data showed that the maximum carbon dioxide concentration occurred at the same time as the minimum oxygen concentration. The turning point consistently preceded the enzyme concentration peak by a virtually constant time interval, this time interval was found to be 69 minutes under set-point control and 56 minutes under time-profiled control. This is potentially valuable in enabling the occurrence of the peak enzyme concentration to be predicted accurately, with consequent saving in process time and enzyme yield.


Settlements of ground subjected to foundation load are often due to both natural and/or anthropogenic causes, such as differential consolidation, seepage, periods of drought alternating with heavy rainfalls, growth of tree roots, sewer leaks, vibrations induced by vehicle traffic, excavations, or construction defects. Techniques of soil consolidation and stabilization by means of injection of polyurethane expanding resins have been efficiently used to mitigate or even solve this issue. The efficiency of the resin injection treatment has been well documented also thanks to the develop of a procedure of planning and monitoring which combines traditional geotechnical tests with the application of electrical resistivity tomography, which is strongly sensitive to the presence of water or voids. The combination of these survey methodologies allows to recognize the effect of injection in terms of soil compaction and water migration, a key factor for understanding the phenomenon and planning of resolutive interventions. The present study follows a previous work aimed at evaluating the increase in the geotechnical performance of cohesive soils treated by injection of expanding resins (same soil, resin, at the same site) and integrates it by focusing on the quantification of the effects of consolidation treatments, by means of expanding resins injection, on hydrologic properties of cohesive soils, focusing on saturated hydraulic conductivity measurements. Laboratory permeability test, performed in triaxial cell at different stress conditions and hydraulic gradients, were performed on undisturbed samples collected on "natural (non-treated)" and "treated soils", before and after the injection of resin (MAXIMA ® by GEOSEC ® ) in a full-scale test site characterized by the presence of continuous and homogeneous cohesive soils, (clay and silts). The investigated soil is classified as CH or CL soil, very firm and apparently overconsolidated. The study shows how the treatment is able to modify the characteristics of hydraulic conductivity of the soil. The injected resins partly follow pre-existing weaknesses and partly impregnate homogeneous and continuous masses of soil in a capillary way, giving it, in addition to the already documented greater mechanical strength, a lower hydraulic conductivity. The electrical resistivity investigations allow to appreciate the volumes affected by the treatment to which the variations of the measured properties can be attributed.


The United States, a great power, and Syria, a small state, have both been at the heart of the politics of the Middle East since the end of World War II. The systemic conditions of the international system and the shifting politics of the region brought these states into contact and, at times, confrontation, but these interactions never produced a sustained period of security cooperation. By the beginning of the 1970s, both states had begun to reconsider and reshape their positions in the region. The period from 1973 to 1977 produced a rare period of cooperation between these two states in the case of two regional conflicts: the Arab–Israeli conflict and the Lebanese Civil War. To understand that shift in relations, this thesis explores the question: What accounts for the security cooperation between Syria and the US during this period?
This thesis makes four observations: first, as results of changes in both states' leaderships, realpolitik, alongside ideational considerations, became more pronounced in both states' conceptions of their security environment in the Middle East and their relations with one another. Second, while the Cold War was the predominant context for the US's interactions with Syria at the start of the 1970s, interactions between the US and Syria were also shaped
by local conditions that emerged after the October War. Third, both states, distrustful of the other's intentions, formed temporary alliances based on short-term common interests. Finally, the regional conflicts themselves introduced circumstances that both strengthened and weakened their security cooperation. While their security cooperation achieved limited results, their relations established a
framework for these two states' subsequent relations. The unresolved issues that emerged from this period of their relations served as the main context for their cooperation and conflict in the following decades, even after the death of Hafiz al-Asad in 2000.


Remodeling of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in the tumor microenvironment promotes glioma progression. Chondroitin sulfate (CS) proteoglycans appear in the ECM and on the cell surface, and can be catalyzed by dermatan sulfate epimerase to form chondroitin sulfate/dermatan sulfate (CS/DS) hybrid chains. Dermatan sulfate epimerase 1 (DSE) is overexpressed in many types of cancer, and CS/DS chains mediate several growth factor signals. However, the role of DSE in gliomas has never been explored. In the present study, we determined the expression of DSE in gliomas by consulting a public database and conducting immunohistochemistry on a tissue array. Our investigation revealed that DSE was upregulated in gliomas compared with normal brain tissue. Furthermore, high DSE expression was associated with advanced tumor grade and poor survival. We found high DSE expression in several glioblastoma cell lines, and DSE expression directly mediated DS chain formation in glioblastoma cells. Knockdown of DSE suppressed the proliferation, migration, and invasion of glioblastoma cells. In contrast, overexpression of DSE in GL261 cells enhanced these malignant phenotypes and in vivo tumor growth. Interestingly, we found that DSE selectively regulated heparin-binding EGF-like growth factor (HB-EGF)-induced signaling in glioblastoma cells. Inhibiting epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and ErbB2 with afatinib suppressed DSE-enhanced malignant phenotypes, establishing the critical role of the ErbB pathway in regulating the effects of DSE expression. This evidence indicates that upregulation of DSE in gliomas contributes to malignant behavior in cancer cells. We provide novel insight into the significance of DS chains in ErbB signaling and glioma pathogenesis.


This work includes over 600 exemplary policies, forms, and procedures for college and university libraries. Rebecca Brumley's "Public Library Manager's Forms, Policies, and Procedures Handbook" ("Starred Review", "Library Journal") revolutionized the way public libraries create their policy and procedures manual. Now Brumley brings her winning formula to the academic library with this invaluable collection of expertly vetted sample policies, forms, and procedures for the college or university environment. This new handbook and CD-ROM package is divided into three parts - Student and Faculty Services, Administrative Policies, and Collection Maintenance. Coverage includes: borrowing policies for students, faculty, alumni, visiting researchers, and university staff; guidelines for interlibrary loan, reserves, holds, and recalls; procedures for reference staffing, services, and resource sharing; policies for computer workstation and Internet usage; and, administrative documents for facilities maintenance, fund raising, exhibits and displays and more. The companion CD-ROM reproduces all 600+ forms, procedures, and policies, which can be used as is or customized for a specific library. This time- and labor-saving tool will find great use in college and university libraries of all sizes.


Nickel laterite ores account for over 60% of global nickel supply. They are the product of intensive deep weathering of serpentinites under humid tropical conditions. Nickel is concentrated to over 1.0 wt% and is hosted in a variety of secondary oxides, hydrous Mg silicates and smectites. The formation, mineralogy and grade of the deposits are controlled by the interplay of lithology, tectonics, climate and geomorphology. Most deposits have a multi-phase development, evolving as their climatic and/or topographic environment change. The richest deposits (>3 wt% Ni) formed where oxide-rich regoliths were uplifted and Ni leached downwards to concentrate in neo-formed silicates in the saprolite.


DDoS Attacks: Evolution, Detection, Prevention, Reaction, and Tolerance discusses the evolution of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, how to detect a DDoS attack when one is mounted, how to prevent such attacks from taking place, and how to react when a DDoS attack is in progress, with the goal of tolerating the attack. It introduces types and characteristics of DDoS attacks, reasons why such attacks are often successful, what aspects of the network infrastructure are usual targets, and methods used to launch attacks. The book elaborates upon the emerging botnet technology, current trends in the evolution and use of botnet technology, its role in facilitating the launching of DDoS attacks, and challenges in countering the role of botnets in the proliferation of DDoS attacks. It introduces statistical and machine learning methods applied in the detection and prevention of DDoS attacks in order to provide a clear understanding of the state of the art. It presents DDoS reaction and tolerance mechanisms with a view to studying their effectiveness in protecting network resources without compromising the quality of services. To practically understand how attackers plan and mount DDoS attacks, the authors discuss the development of a testbed that can be used to perform experiments such as attack launching, monitoring of network traffic, and detection of attacks, as well as for testing strategies for prevention, reaction, and mitigation. Finally, the authors address current issues and challenges that need to be overcome to provide even better defense against DDoS attacks.


The author compares the migration policies of the Czech Republic and Slovakia since 1993, including both immigration as well as integration. The text focuses mainly on the autochthonous policies of both countries in regards to labor migration as the main type of migration. Significant immigration is a recent phenomenon in both the Czech Republic as well as Slovakia and neither immigration, nor integration policy belong among the priorities of either state. The Czech Republic seems to be more mature in adopting regulations for better access of foreigners to the labor market. However, when comparing the Czech Republic with the rest of Europe, it belongs to the most restrictive countries in terms of integration as well as in terms of immigration. Given the extremely low ratio of non-EU born adults becoming Czech citizens, the Czech Republic will remain an exclusionary democracy unless it changes either the voting rights or increases the naturalization rates by reducing the conditions for foreigners. Quite interestingly, even though Slovakia lags behind the Czech Republic in terms of integration policies and naturalization rates, it is more inclusive in terms of political rights.


This is the 20. article in our series Trouble on the-Far-Right.
Just a few days ago during a parliamentary session, a Kurdish deputy was violently attacked and injured by members of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP). As if to support Charles Tilly's statement that 'political violence occurs when actors have few opportunities, yet enough resources to mobilize for violence'1, many groups in Turkey are currently involved in a battle against Kurdish, Alevi or left Turkish citizens. The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a political stalemate, uses military and police, but also the Nationalist Movement Party's (MHP) youth organization Grey Wolves as well as Islamist militias like Esedullah Timleri (Arabic for: Lions of Allah) have increasingly resorted to violence as tool of action.
Political violence has been a central characteristic of the Turkish far right, which largely resembles street-based mobilization in Western Europe. Despite the common ultra-nationalist ideology, the Gulen Movement (GM) stands out. AKP's former "soft-power instrument" now appears to be the only reasonable and non-violent player among all of these self-named animal groups. Since the power struggle escalated between Erdogan and Fethullah Gulen in 2013, the GM has been seen as a victim of Erdogan's repressive measures, instead of making itself conspicuous by using violence. How can we explain this exception?


Using a bootstrap panel analysis that allows for cross-country dependence, without requiring the use of pre-tests for a unit root, we study the causality links between energy use and employment for a sample of 16 African countries over the 1991-2010 period (according to availability of countries' data) in a panel Vector AutoRegressive model. Our results indicate that employment and energy use are strongly linked in Africa. Unidirectional causality from employment to energy use in Tunisia, Cameroun, Zambia and Ethiopia is found. A unidirectional causality from energy use to employment is found in DRC and Egypt. We found also bidirectional causality for Algeria, Benin, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania). However, our estimates did not indicate any causality in Big African players like South Africa, Nigeria, Morocco, Ghana and Senegal.


This research aims to understand the experience of asylum-seekers and refugees (ASRs) within the juxtapositional climate of welcome, as promoted by the City of Sanctuary (CoS) movement, and deterrence, as per asylum policies, within a dispersal area that has signed up to support the CoS aims. The literature review highlights that ASRs face many challenges to establishing themselves in their new communities; many of which are institutionalised under the dispersal policy as they are often dispersed to areas of social deprivation. Aside from enabling relationship development between ASRs and local people through sanctuary practices, the literature offers little about the practical ways that CoS benefits ASRs and there is no consensus that the movement mitigates the challenges they face. The research used a phenomenological strategy as it aimed to build a clear picture of how things exist from the perspectives of the participants. It adopted an interpretivist paradigm using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Data was collected from three participants using semi-structured interviews. The participants identified as ASRs in line with policy definitions and were aged between 23 and 42 years. The research revealed that despite the adverse effects associated with dispersal, it is not always perceived negatively by ASRs and suggests that ASRs have some level of confidence in the Home Office's dispersal decision. Liminality emerged as one aspect of the asylum process that adversely impacts both the present and future prospect of ASRs' ability to settle into their community and plan for their future. It has also revealed that the participants' ideal of sanctuary, is more than the notion of safety. It includes being understood and the perceived feeling that they can trust those around them; an ideal of sanctuary contrary to the feeling that the asylum system produces.


Background: A sizeable sector of the population continues to smoke cigarettes despite our efforts to prevent and treat this addiction. We explored the relationships between lifetime comorbidity, psychiatric symptomatology, smoking behavior and treatment outcome to better understand vulnerability to smoking and treatment response. Methods: One hundred and twenty smokers at two sites were enrolled in a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, 10-week smoking cessation trial with fluoxetine and behavioral treatment. The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R and Hamilton Depression Rating Scale were administered prior to treatment initiation. Self-report measures were used to assess psychiatric symptoms throughout treatment and during a 6-month follow-up period. Results: Overall 62.3% of our sample were diagnosed with a lifetime mood, anxiety or substance use disorder despite stringent study exclusion criteria. Lifetime comorbidity was shown to be related to higher smoking rates and nicotine dependence, depressed mood and greater self-report of anxiety and stress. Lifetime comorbidity, however, alone or in combination with treatment condition, failed to predict treatment outcome (at posttreatment or follow-up). Baseline depression scores (Beck Depression Inventory, BDI) were related to treatment outcome only for smokers without a positive history of any psychiatric disorder or depression, with lower BDI scores more frequent in those who were abstinent. Conclusions: High prevalence rates of lifetime psychiatric illness and substance use disorders are reported for chronic smokers. Subsyndromal psychiatric symptoms may play a role in smoking behavior in combination with diagnosable disorders. Clinicians need to carefully assess both psychiatric diagnoses and symptoms in chronic smokers to optimize patient-treatment matching.


Information - regular, systematic, reliable - is the life-blood of democracy and the fuel of effective management. Surely today there is no problem with information, for this is the age of information overload. It pours onto our computer screens and out of our printers. Indeed, many governments claim, often with some justification, to be more open and transparent than ever before. But what if the life-blood is contaminated, or the fuel polluted? Then the body politic sickens and the engine of public management runs rough. It is the vital issue of the quality of the information we receive that this book addresses. Quality Matters compares approaches across different jurisdictional settings and across three different types of information evaluation. The chapters describe and analyze quality assurance in a number of countries and within a variety of international organizations. These have been selected either because they are widely considered to be leaders in evaluating information or because they have experience with assuring quality information that can instruct others. Contributors are from Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States, and the World Bank. They examine and analyze practices for assuring the quality of evaluation, performance auditing, and performance reporting in the face of political, organizational, and technical obstacles. A final chapter addresses the extent to which quality assurance systems become bothersome rituals or remain meaningful mechanisms to ensure quality control. This well-defined volume will be of particular interest to policymakers and adds much to the literature on program evaluation and performance auditing.


Vaucher P, Bischoff T, Diserens EA, et al. Detecting and measuring deprivation in primary care: development, reliability and validity of a self-reported questionnaire: the DiPCare-Q. BMJ Open 2012;2:e000692. Figure 2 reports the DiPCare-Q index combining weights from each of the three sub-indexes. The function below the figure corresponds to the regression function associating subjective social status to the DiPCare-Q sub-indexes from the derivation set. The entered numbers in the table do not fit to the function. The numbers written in the table itself are issued from a first version that had not transformed sub-indexes before computing the final index. They are therefore erroneous. Please refer to the corrected figure below.


The valuable role that investigative journalism plays in a democratic society, in as much as the public is informed of matters in which they may have a legitimate interest, must never be underestimated. Yet, in performing this role, the media often comes into conflict with the law of contempt. No responsible journalist or member of the public wants to see a trial conducted by the media, but it must always be recognised that conflicting interests may be present. It is therefore indeed conceivable that there may be circumstances where the possibility of prejudice to a litigant may be required to yield to superior considerations, for example the right of the public to be informed of a matter which is of vital public interest (and not merely of interest to the public). It is submitted that in this respect a distinction can be drawn between pending criminal proceedings and pending civil proceedings in so far as the freedom of the individual is not at stake in the latter case. There is no final or foolproof method to distinguish between a mala fide plaintiff in defamation proceedings and a bona fide one. In the author's view the recognition of a ground of justification based on the public interest, excluding the unlawfulness of publication of information regarding a pending defamation case, will at least confine the extent to which the law is presently open to abuse.


Abstract. The presented study aims to resolve the upper mantle structure around the Trans-European Suture Zone (TESZ), which is the major tectonic boundary in Europe. The data of 183 temporary and permanent seismic stations operated during the period of the PASsive Seismic Experiment (PASSEQ) 2006–2008 within the study area from Germany to Lithuania was used to compile the data set of manually picked 6008 top-quality arrivals of P waves from teleseismic earthquakes. We used the TELINV nonlinear teleseismic tomography algorithm to perform the inversions. As a result, we obtain a model of P wave velocity variations up to about ±3% with respect to the IASP91 velocity model in the upper mantle around the TESZ. The higher velocities to the east of the TESZ correspond to the older East European Craton (EEC), while the lower velocities to the west of the TESZ correspond to younger western Europe. We find that the seismic lithosphere–asthenosphere boundary (LAB) is more distinct beneath the Phanerozoic part of Europe than beneath the Precambrian part. To the west of the TESZ beneath the eastern part of the Bohemian Massif, the Sudetes Mountains and the Eger Rift, the negative anomalies are observed from a depth of at least 70 km, while under the Variscides the average depth of the seismic LAB is about 100 km. We do not observe the seismic LAB beneath the EEC, but beneath Lithuania we find the thickest lithosphere of about 300 km or more. Beneath the TESZ, the asthenosphere is at a depth of 150–180 km, which is an intermediate value between that of the EEC and western Europe. The results imply that the seismic LAB in the northern part of the TESZ is in the shape of a ramp dipping to the northeasterly direction. In the southern part of the TESZ, the LAB is shallower, most probably due to younger tectonic settings. In the northern part of the TESZ we do not recognize any clear contact between Phanerozoic and Proterozoic Europe, but further to the south we may refer to a sharp and steep contact on the eastern edge of the TESZ. Moreover, beneath Lithuania at depths of 120–150 km, we observe the lower velocity area following the boundary of the proposed paleosubduction zone.


Abstract Although most of the notothenioid fishes have geographic distributions restricted to the Southern Ocean, several species with inferred Antarctic origins have come to permanently inhabit the warmer waters around New Zealand and southern South America. However, it remains unknown whether the Antarctic ancestry of these secondarily temperate species continues to influence their modern heat tolerance. We investigated the heat tolerance of one such secondarily temperate nototheniid, Notothenia angustata, which is now endemic to the waters around the South Island of New Zealand. Their heat tolerance was determined using the critical thermal maximum (CTMax) both when acclimatized to their winter water temperatures (7.9°C), and warm acclimated (15°C) near the summer water temperatures in Otago Harbour. When compared to equivalently acclimated specimens of the basal New Zealand notothenioid Bovichtus variegatus, N. angustata have consistently lower CTMaxs, though they are significantly greater than those determined from 10°C acclimated specimens of its endemic Antarctic congener, N. coriiceps. While this shows greater heat tolerance in the secondarily temperate N. angustata than in endemic Antarctic species, it also suggests that some of its ancestral intolerance to heat persists.


This chapter connects the grammar of the first person collective pronoun in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador with its use in interaction for collective reference and social category membership attribution, addressing the problem posed by the fact that non-singular pronouns do not have distributional semantics ("speakers") but are rather associational ("speaker and relevant associates"). It advocates a cross-disciplinary approach that jointly considers elements of linguistic form, situated usages of those forms in instances of interaction, and the broader ethnographic context of those instances. Focusing on large-scale and relatively stable categories such as racial and ethnic groups, it argues that looking at how speakers categorize themselves and others in the speech situation by using pronouns provides empirical data on the status of macro-social categories for members of a society.


Over the years, the tourism and hospitality industry in Nigeria has been underdeveloped since the nation is a mono economy, depending on the oil and gas industry for the revenue needed for national development. The industry is only recently emerging as an alternative source for generating revenue and Cross River State is now ranked as the tourism hops in Nigeria. There is very little indigenous literature available about how the industry manages to create a balance between achieving productive efficiency and effectiveness and customers' satisfaction. Exploring customers' perception of pricing of hotel service offerings in Calabar Metropolis will add significantly to the bourgeoning industry literature. The study investigated the attributes that affected hotel room pricing based on customers' perception in Calabar Metropolis, Cross River State, Nigeria. The study was carried out through a critical review of existing paltry literature and personal interviews conducted among purposively selected segment of customers. The methodology is therefore exploratory and narrative. Findings showed that the availability of regular electricity and water supply, among other factors were perceived highly by customers in their decisions about pricing of hotel offerings. The study recommended among others, the adoption of the L.E.A.R. (learning, empathizing, asking questions, and responding) approach, and prompt response by industry operators to customers' complaints.


Introduction: The call for increasing interprofessional education requires institutional support for educators in the clinical environment. Innovative ideas, such as partnering with multiple universities and programs to facilitate an interprofessional workshop, have the opportunity to reach a broader group of clinical educators. The purpose of this study was to examine the attitude of healthcare professionals towards interprofessional learning, familiarity with concepts of interprofessional teaching, and interprofessional practice, and to examine the influence of an interprofessional faculty development workshop on participant familiarity with concepts of interprofessional teaching and learning. Methods: The occupational therapy, physical therapy, and physician assistant programs from two universities collaborated to implement an all-day inter-institutional, interprofessional clinical faculty development workshop. Community clinical educators who participated in the event were surveyed pre- and post-workshop to examine their attitude, readiness, and knowledge of interprofessional learning and teaching. Using the revised version of the Readiness of Interprofessional Learning Scale, the following subscales were measured and analyzed: 1) Teamwork and Collaboration, 2) Negative Professional Identity, 3) Positive Professional Identity, and 4) Roles and Responsibilities. Results: Forty-three participants representing six different healthcare professions completed pre- and post-course surveys. Forty-four percent reported participating in interprofessional education. Overall, the attendees reported the value of the workshop as a 4.6 on a 5.0 point Likert scale, with 5.0 being the highest rating. Self-reported familiarity of the fundamental concepts of interprofessional teaching, interprofessional practice, and interprofessional education improved up to 32% following participation in the workshop. The highest increase in familiarity was in the area of knowledge of interprofessional practice and education. Participants reported high levels of agreement about the value of teamwork, collaboration, and positive professional identity. Conclusion: Integrating the Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice into educational programs and clinical practice can facilitate improved understanding of professional roles and improved collaborative practice.


BACKGROUND
Although epinephrine is the treatment of choice for anaphylaxis, it remains underused.

OBJECTIVE
This study was designed to describe anaphylactic events and epinephrine autoinjector (EAI) use in U.S. schools enrolled in the EpiPen4Schools program.

METHODS
This exploratory, cross-sectional, Web-based survey of 6019 schools that participated in the EpiPen4Schools program assessed anaphylactic events and EAI use at responding schools during the 2013-2014 school year.

RESULTS
A total of 919 anaphylactic events were reported in 607 schools. Of the 852 anaphylactic events with data on those who experienced an event, most 88.8% (n = 757) occurred in students, and 21.9% of events (n = 187) occurred in individuals with no known allergies. Of the 851 events with data on EAI use, 74.7% (n = 636) were treated with EAIs and 8.5% (n = 54) received a second epinephrine injection. Of the 204 individuals not treated with an EAI, 77.0% (n = 157) received antihistamines, 12.7% (n = 26) received another treatment, and 8.3% (n = 17) received no treatment. Of the 850 events with data on hospital transport, 79.6% of individuals (n = 677) were transported to the hospital. Common triggers varied seasonally, with food listed most frequently overall (62.5%).

CONCLUSION
More than one in ten schools that participated in the EpiPen4Schools survey reported an anaphylactic event. Approximately 25% of individuals with anaphylactic events were not treated with EAIs, and 20.4% of patients were not taken to the hospital after an anaphylactic event. Analysis of these data supports the value of stocking EAIs and of providing continuing education regarding the recognition and proper treatment of anaphylaxis for school personnel.


The misuse and abuse of prescription medications in the United States continues to increase despite interventions by health care professionals, regulatory, and law enforcement agencies. Opioid analgesics are the leading class of prescription drugs that have caused unintentional overdose deaths. Benzodiazepines when taken alone are relatively safe agents in overdose. However, a 5-fold increase in deaths attributed to benzodiazepines occurred from 1999 to 2009. Emergency department visits related to opioid analgesics increased by 111% followed by benzodiazepines 89%. During 2003 to 2009, the 2 prescriptions drugs with the highest increase in death rates were oxycodone 264.6% and alprazolam 233.8%. Therefore, benzodiazepines have a significant impact on prescription drug unintentional overdoses second only to the opioid analgesics. The combination prescribing of benzodiazepines and opioid analgesics commonly takes place. The pharmacokinetic drug interactions between benzodiazepines and opioid analgesics are complex. The pharmacodynamic actions of these agents differ as their combined effects produce significant respiratory depression. Physician and pharmacy shopping by patients occurs, and prescription drug-monitoring programs can provide important information on benzodiazepine and opioid analgesic prescribing patterns and patient usage. Health care professionals need to inform patients and work closely with regulatory agencies and legislatures to stem the increasing fatalities from prescription drug unintentional overdoses.


This text examines the range of European courts, showing how they relate to each other, the development of their powers and how this represents the beginnings of a court structure for Europe. Coverage is given to the European Court of Justice, the Court of First Instance and the EFTA Court of Justice, all three of which are closely intertwined. Also covered are the European Court and the Commission of Human Rights. Topics covered by the book include the international judicial context, the national judicial context and a European judicial overview. Structures, procedures, powers, authority, politics, information sources and reform proposals are also covered, and the national legal scene is discussed, as are the people who work in the courts.


In contrast to many decades of research on oral code-switching, the study of written multilingual productions has only recently enjoyed a surge of interest. Many open questions remain regarding the sociolinguistic underpinnings of written code-switching, and progress has been limited by a lack of suitable resources. We introduce a novel, large, and diverse dataset of written code-switched productions, curated from topical threads of multiple bilingual communities on the Reddit discussion platform, and explore questions that were mainly addressed in the context of spoken language thus far. We investigate whether findings in oral code-switching concerning content and style, as well as speaker proficiency, are carried over into written code-switching in discussion forums. The released dataset can further facilitate a range of research and practical activities.


The rapid development of multimedia devices such as computers, network technologies, and cell phones have made it easier for users to create, broadcast, convey, share, store, and distribute multimedia data including images, videos and audio files on a daily basis. However, the availability of image processing software in the public domain has facilitated illegal copying and distribution of digital images with unnoticeable quality changes. Thus, security and identification of media content has become an important and demanding area for research. Perceptual hashing is one of the recent technologies used for multimedia content security. A perceptual image hash function is a hash function that is robust against content-preserving operations (CPOs), such as noise, JPEG lossy compression and rotation.

This aim of this research is to study and investigate existing techniques and then contribute to the development of new perceptual image hashing techniques in the transform domain for image identification and copy detection applications. The design requirements for any perceptual image hashing system are robustness, discriminative capability (uniqueness), and unpredictability (security). The feature extraction stage plays a key role in ensuring the system output is robust and discriminative. This thesis mainly focuses on the robust feature extraction stage and the analysis of the proposed system's security. The following contributions have been made: A new perceptual hashing technique using pseudo-random sub-images in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain for extracting features has been developed. The idea employs a recent dimension reduction technique, referred to as non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) in the literature, for enhancing the robustness and security of the hash. This approach is proposed to select the most stable coefficients under various content-preserving operations, compact. The robust image hashes are generated by applies DWT and NMF into image. The proposed sub-images-DWT technique has been shown to yield good performance under image processing operations, but it still suffers from geometric attacks.

A new rotation-invariant FMT-based hashing technique incorporating the Fourier-Mellin transform and using overlapping blocks to improve the robustness against rotation attacks has also been proposed. The robust FMT-based image hashing is proposed to improve its performances under rotation, translation attacks and achieve better overall robustness. The invariance property to rotation, scaling and translation of FMT makes it more suitable for image hashing. Based on our experimental results, it has been shown that the proposed FMT-based image hashing technique is robust to a large class of image processing operations and geometric attacks.

A new robust and secure DCT overlapping block-based hashing technique incorporating the discrete cosine transforms (DCT) to combat image processing attacks has been investigated. An improved DCT sign-based hashing technique robust against image processing attacks and well as small geometric manipulations developed. From the experimental results, it was observed that the low frequency coefficients for DCT sign based-image hashing were robust to a large of content-preserving operations (CPOs). The main idea was to exploit the energy compaction property of the DCT and its ability to carry information of edges and texture in DCT sign values. From the experimental results, it was observed that the low frequency coefficients for DCT sign-based image hashing were robust to a large class of content-preserving operations (CPOs). The main idea was to exploit the energy compaction property of the DCT and its ability to carry information of edges and texture in DCT sign values. Finally, the security of the proposed image hashing systems are discussed and analysed in the light of the corresponding design requirement. The DCT sign-based image hashing scheme has hash also been shown to be the most secure technique compared to other techniques proposed in this research as it offers the highest rate of bit independence in a hash.


All-new clinical resource to help primary caregivers take a lead role in the diagnosis, evaluation, and management of children with learning disabilities. Developed by a leading child and adolescent psychiatrist and a noted pediatrician, this all-new clinical resource is purpose-built to help primary caregivers take a lead role in the diagnosis, evaluation, and management of children with learning disabilities. Turn here for:
 Clear, concise overviews of the full range of learning disorders, Expert management recommendations and valuable clinical pearls, Clinical interventions and related psychiatric disorders. Contents: Part I: Learning and Related Disorders, Learning Disorders vs. Learning Disabilities,
 Learning Disabilities, Diagnosing Learning Disabilities, Language Disabilities, Motor Disabilities, Confirming a Learning, Language or Motor Disability. Part II: The Related Disorders: The Secondary Emotional, Social, and Family Problems, The Related Neurologically-based Disorders, ragmatic Social Skill Disabilities. Part III: Clinical Interventions: The Public School System, The Public School: Laws and Policies, The Public School: Assessment and Interventions. Part IV: Clinical Interventions: The Related Psychiatric Disorders, Interventions for the Primary, Comorbid Disorders, Intervention for the Secondary Emotional, Social, and Family Problems. Part V: Resources, Organizations and Resources.


The display charts the origins and
development of Liverpool Century Road
Club one of the oldest cycling clubs in the
region and forms part of Our City, Our
Stories - the Museum of Liverpool's
ongoing partnership programme. The
display combines a variety of exhibits
including manufactured goods, images,
textiles and the written word in a
celebration of cultural memory over the
last century.


In his insightful article, "The Dangers of Surveillance," 126 Harvard Law Review 1934 (2013), Neil Richards offers a framework for evaluating the implications of government surveillance programs that is centered on protecting "intellectual privacy." Although we share his interest in recognizing and protecting privacy as a condition of personal and intellectual development, we worry in this essay that, as an organizing principle for policy, "intellectual privacy" is too narrow and politically fraught. Drawing on other work; we, therefore, recommend that judges, legislators, and executives focus, instead, on limiting the potential of surveillance technologies to effect programs of broad and indiscriminate surveillance.


In this study, we attempted to develop a wireless real-time continuous observation device for penile tumescence and/or stiffness for veri cation of nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) and for diagnosis and classi cation of erectile dysfunction (ED). Unlike conventional mechanically wired method, the patient is not constrained by the device and is able to use the device by himself in his own living environment. A soft silicone ring that ts the penis is equipped with a built-in variable inductance, variable frequency oscillator and a onetime use micro-battery. The inductance (hence oscillating frequency) is responsible for the internal stress of the ring, which represents the tumescence and/or stiffness. A non-contact leakage ux coupled to the variable inductor allows proximity telemetry of the phenomenon overnight, or up to the battery life. Our prototype device was successfull in a feasibility test using a desktop model and in a simulated ex vivo test. Now, preparation for pre-clinical trial in healthy volunteer(s) is underway.


Training load monitoring in team sports is important in order to plan and evaluate training strategies and ensure optimal performance. Integration of internal and external training load measures into a single training efficiency metric reduces the effect of confounding variables on training loads. The purpose of this study was to generate a training efficiency metric to evaluate in-season field hockey training. Further, the relationship between players' perceived wellness the training efficiency metric was determined. Internal (training impulse and session rating of perceived exertion; TRIMP and sRPE) and external (total distance, high-speed distance, acceleration load, high-power distance, metabolic work, mechanical work, and impulse) training load was collected over a 6-week period for 11 male national level field hockey players (21.1 ± 1.2 years, 178.7 ± 8.6 cm, 4.6 ± 6.3 kg). The relationships between internal and external training load were assessed, and two training efficiency models were generated through mixed model analyses using sRPE and TRIMP. Subsequently, the relationships between training efficiency and perceived wellness were examined. The statistical analyses determined that total distance, high-speed distance, high-power distance, and metabolic work (r = 0.311-0.573) were included in the TRIMP training efficiency model. The sRPE training efficiency model included total distance, high-speed distance, high-power distance, metabolic work, and mechanical work (r = 0.329-0.757). Moreover, neither of the training efficiency models were related to daily cumulative wellness scores (TRIMP: r = -0.046; p = 0.336; sRPE: r = -0.034; p = 0.370). The study showed that the sRPE training efficiency model provided a better reflection of in-season field hockey training demands than the TRIMP model. Additionally, practitioners are not advised to adjust training based on acute changes in players' perceived wellness.


OBJECTIVE
The authors examined the interface between visual impairment and depressive symptoms on health behaviors, self-care, and social participation among adults ages 65 and older.

METHOD
The authors analyzed data from the 1997-2004 National Health Interview Survey on visual impairment and depressive symptoms for 49,278 adults ages 65 and older, comparing visually impaired adults (n = 8,787) with and without depressive symptoms with a reference group of adults with neither condition (n = 3,136) for outcome measures: physical health, health behaviors, and difficulties with self-care and social participation.

RESULTS
Adults with visual impairment and severe depressive symptoms were more likely than adults with neither condition to smoke (14.9%, adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.6), be obese (28.2%, AOR = 1.9), be physically inactive (80.5%, AOR = 3.0), have fair-poor health (76.0%, AOR = 26.5), and have difficulties with self-care (27.9%, AOR = 11.8) and social participation (52.1%, AOR = 10.9).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Older visually impaired adults with depressive symptoms are vulnerable to health decline and further disablement without timely interventions that target smoking cessation, healthy eating, and increased physical activity.


Minority carrier recombination is studied in multicrystalline ingot cast silicon solar cells. The normalized recombination strength Γ of dislocations is obtained by correlating topograms of the internal quantum efficiency (IQE) with those of the dislocation density ρ. Γ is obtained by fitting an extended theory of Donolato to the experimental data. The measured Γ‐values vary significantly between adjacent dislocation clusters and correlate with the spatial pattern of the dislocations. All Γ‐values are strongly dependent on the parameters of the solar cell process. The influence of phosphorus diffusion and hydrogenation is shown. After solidification of the silicon, impurities from the crucible enter the ingot and deteriorate its border regions during cooling to room temperature. These deteriorated border regions can be significantly improved by an additional low temperature anneal that is applied after phosphorus diffusion. The experiments indicate that the mechanism of the anneal is external phosphorus gettering into the emitter.


Point of view:  I'm a contagiously enthusiastic hacker, scholar, and teacher with an industry background in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. As a teenager at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, I loved storytelling and cinematography and wanted to major in the arts. That wasn't an option for my family of immigrants, so I took up electrical and computer engineering at Olin College (BS), where I arrived thinking that a breadboard was for baking (it's for electronics). I am Deaf and have always been a strong visual thinker; this piece was written and drawn during my first semester as a PhD student in engineering education at Purdue University. I'm intrigued by how multiple interacting curricular cultures in higher education can deconstruct our notions of engineering, education, and just about everything else.
Value: This work is a playful contribution to engineering education ontologies (as a subset of philosophy), which explores questions of reality and being - what "is." It challenges the high consensus culture of engineering, especially the tendency to seek clearly defined and fixed meanings for terms. In this case, the notion of "engineering" itself is called into question. It also explores what graphical/non-textual scholarship in and about higher education might look like.
Summary:  This graphic essay was made when I was a first-semester engineering education graduate student. This past self was naive regarding "scholarly" and "academic" writing conventions, and frustrated both by the limitations of text as a standalone medium and the engineering disciplinary tendency to seek clearly defined and fixed meanings for terms rather than exploring their possibilities. I am now a slightly more seasoned scholar seven years down the line with a desire to engage in discussion and revision of the piece.
Note to readers:  This document consists of a comic submission which is meant to be experienced visually: What is Engineering?. Each page of the comic is presented separately here, followed by text descriptions for that page. Text descriptions are provided for acces.


A method for exploiting nonuniform ultrahigh spatial-frequency relief gratings as space-variant polarization elements is presented. In this method the local direction of the gratings determines the polarization angles, while the period of the gratings is controlled to ensure continuity of the grating function for any desired polarization operation. We illustrate the method with a specific space-variant half-wave plate for laser radiation of 10.6 μm.


The principal's leadership style is one of the most common ways of conceptualizing school leadership behaviors. We lack understanding, however, of how the effectiveness of school leadership styles varies across degrees of challenging circumstances. Data obtained from a quantitative survey of primary school teachers in Israel (N = 570) and from the Ministry of Education database were used to account for principals' leadership styles and their effectiveness in schools facing more challenging circumstances (N = 15) and in those facing less challenging circumstances (N = 46). Differences were found in the relations between principals' transactional behaviors on one hand, and relationships between the teaching dimension of school culture and principals' perceived effectiveness on the other, as a function of challenging school circumstances. The study also found a difference in the relations of principals' transformational behaviors and the safety dimension of school culture, by level of challenging school circumstances. The data also revealed that in schools facing less challenging circumstances, principals' passive behaviors were related to students' achievements and principals' perceived effectiveness, but not in schools facing more challenging circumstances. The findings and their implications are discussed.


One of the fastest growing renewable electricity technologies has been wind energy, in both large-scale wind farms as well as in smaller distributed and community wind applications. Small wind turbines have traditionally been designed for rural areas over open terrain as off-grid system. There has, however, been an increasing trend towards the installation of wind turbines in non-open terrain, such as in urban areas and in mountainous regions as on-grid system, where the turbulence levels are higher and wind speeds are lower. The design, installation and performance of small wind turbines in urban areas are areas lacking in guidelines and procedures, despite evidence of failure of small wind turbines at urban sites and concerns over reliability and safety.

This thesis is designed to address this lack of guidelines and procedures and can be considered as an investigation in two distinct but related parts. Firstly, it is an investigation of aspects related to wind resource assessment in urban areas through both wind monitoring programs and computational flow simulation. This research was designed in order to make a contribution to a document planned by the International Energy Agency (IEA Task 27) entitled 'Recommended Practice for Design of Small Wind Turbines in the Built Environment'. Secondly, it is an investigation of the turbulence models currently used in the design standard for small wind turbines (IEC61400-2), their relevance for urban sites and their prediction of small wind turbine loads. This research was designed in order to make a contribution to the next revision of IEC61400-2, planned for 2019.

In the first part of the study, the impact of sampling rate and averaging period on a study of the turbulent wind regime in the built environment was investigated. It was shown that choice of sampling rate did not significantly influence the values of turbulence intensity and power spectral density. Unlike sampling rate, changing the parameter of averaging period significantly affected the results of calculated turbulence intensity, including the value of the characteristic intensity I15. Generally, the results of this study showed that the turbulence intensity and power spectra of the longitudinal and lateral components of wind over a rooftop are sensitive to the choice of averaging period. Due to this sensitivity, an averaging period of at least 10 minutes was suggested for rooftop wind monitoring to avoid underestimating values of turbulence intensity and turbulence power spectra. In summary, a 10 Hz sampling rate and a 10 minute averaging period yield upper estimates for values of turbulence intensity and turbulent power spectral density. Taking this conservative approach may be the best strategy if looking to ensure that the wind resource assessment accurately captures the inflow to the wind turbine so that the turbine can be designed to handle both the loading and resonance due to turbulent gusting.

The first part of the study also focused on the assessment of the combination of a ANSYS CFX computational fluid dynamics software with wind atlas software (WAsP) to form a wind energy resource assessment tool to test the feasibility of installing small wind turbines on the roof of a building. The roof of the Bunnings Ltd warehouse at Port Kennedy, Perth Australia was chosen as the test site. The results of the study showed that the combination of ANSYS CFX with WAsP proved to be a promising tool for wind resource assessments for small wind turbines on the roofs of buildings. As the Bunnings Ltd. warehouse building is surrounded by different obstacles in terms of shape and height, the results were strongly wind direction dependent. Also, the output of the wind stochastic simulator TurbSim was applied to predict the wind velocity and Turbulent Kinetic Energy (TKE) profile at the inlet of the CFD domain. The results showed that use of TurbSim can improve ANSYS CFX predictions for wind direction sectors where the terrain is not so complex as to cause blockage, separation and recirculation of wind flow.

The second part to the thesis investigated the extent to which the von Karman and Kaimal turbulence spectral models, as presented in IEC61400-2, are appropriate for use in the design of small wind turbines installed on the rooftop of a building. Research presented in this thesis shows that Kaimal spectra predicted the trends of all wind components better than the von Karman model. This was particularly true at high frequencies which, the literature suggests to be the important frequencies when it comes to fatigue loading on wind turbines. The results from this thesis suggested that there are some key parameters, such as hub-height, atmospheric stability and wind direction, which influence the shape and scale of the turbulence power spectra over the rooftop of a building and need to be taken into account when considering the inflow of a small wind turbine installed on a roof. A sensitivity study with respect to length scale showed that prediction of spectra at high frequencies could be improved by using smaller length scales in the current Kaimal model. As an approach to modelling turbulence power spectra for a rooftop site in the built environment, an adapted Kaimal approach was proposed that incorporates typical length scale ratios for that environment. The approach showed good agreement with measured data from the Port Kennedy site for all heights where there was sufficient measured data.

The second part of the thesis also compared turbine blade load statistics for inflow turbulence fields based on the open terrain standard Kaimal spectra and measured turbulence spectra from a built environment site. The most frequently occurring winds in the built environment had low mean wind speeds and low turbulence and the predicted loads from measured spectra were less than that predicted by the standard. In this sense the current standard would appear to be a conservative estimate of loads at least for the majority of the time. But for extreme, high turbulent intensity winds, use of the measured spectra predicted isolated loading events around twice the magnitude of loads predicted by use of the standard spectra. The work suggested the need for improvements to the standard in order to model the non-Gaussian wind statistics that occur in extreme events such as sudden strong gusts.


The relative importance of extreme events in the long-term exhumation of landscapes is difficult to determine; the degree to which modern records capture long-term mean process rates is therefore commonly unknown. In September 2013, a massive precipitation event in the Front Range of Colorado (USA) triggered over 1100 landslides and debris flows in a historically sedate landscape. Here we employ topographic differencing, utilizing repeat aerial lidar, to quantify net sediment transport volumes in 120 of these mass movements within an area of 102 km 2 west of Boulder, Colorado. Comparing our results against published long-term erosion rates, we find that these mass movements evacuated the equivalent of hundreds to thousands of years of hillslope weathering products. We conclude that (1) rare debris flows perform the majority of sediment transport and channel erosion within steep channels along the eastern edge of the Front Range, potentially explaining discrepancies between modern sediment yields and long-term erosion rates in such settings, and (2) the high spatial density of debris flows along the corridors bounding steep canyons suggests that the landscape switches to debris-flow dominance as knickpoints pass headward along the canyons.


All material supplied via JYX is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user. Participation in job-related lifelong learning among well-educated employees in the Nordic countries Tikkanen, Tarja; Nissinen, Kari


To understand the occurrence and distribution of carbide minerals in ordinary chondrites, thirty meteorites were examined, twenty-eight ordinary chondrites and two iron meteorites. The occurrence of carbide, textures, and chemical compositions were examined in the 7 carbide-bearing meteorites. Two formation methods for carbide have been presented in previous research. These are aqueous alteration and shock heating, and they are examined for validity in this thesis. Additionally, one other formation method for carbide formation through impact and brecciation is put forth and examined. Textural differences between the carbide-magnetite assemblages (CMAs) observed by Krot et al., (1997) and those seen in this study are compared regarding possible evidence for aqueous alteration. Different carbide minerals (haxonite and cohenite) were distinguished using a correction method on linescan data obtained through a scanning election microscope. Cooling rates, formation temperatures, and closure temperatures from carbide associated taenites closely match that of petrographic type 3 material from ordinary chondrites. Carbide is not found in shock melt, and shock blackened areas are less likely to contain carbide. It is unlikely that the heat source that formed carbides exceeded that of petrographic type 3 as too much heat would equilibrate the type 3 material as well as carbide minerals or prevent them from forming.


A new medium-access protocol is proposed for sharing a high-speed radio channel among a number of small wireless packet-access units, some of which may be stationary and some of which may be within moving vehicles. Such a system could provide fixed-point pedestrian and remote users with wireless access to CPU and database resources of an underlying asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) wireline network, essentially extending the ATM bandwidth-upon-demand interface directly to the wireless units and enabling delivery of multimedia services (albeit at the lower peak rate afforded by the radio channel). A primary goal of the proposed medium-access protocol is the pre-delivery of a signal from each packet-access unit as needed to rapidly compute the weights needed by a base station's adaptive array processor or a space-time processor, thereby protecting the packet flow in each direction from the effects of both multipath propagation and adjacent channel interference arising in neighboring radio cells. An impairment-robust direct sequence spread-spectrum-based polling signal is invoked to stimulate a pilot tone from a given remote immediately prior to packet transfer in either direction, thereby permitting the base station to determine a good set of antenna element combining or power splitting weights to be used for that packet. Reasonable approximations are invoked to study the performance of the proposed protocol and the link utilization efficiency and average message delay are found. By proper choice of protocol parameters, a radio resource utilization efficiency of about 95% is readily achieved. The accuracy of the approximations is confirmed by extensive computer simulations.


The IETF has chartered a Virtual World Region Agent Protocol Working Group (VWRAP WG). This article briefly describes the history of virtual worlds, the architecture, protocols, and operation of Second Life (a currently prominent virtual world), and the emergence of standards efforts within the virtual world space. The authors detail the current efforts and timeline of the VWRAP WG.


Ocean surface algal blooms (OSABs) are an emerging and progressively more important phenomenon in many regional waters. Current techniques perhaps delineate the spatial distributions of OSABs from the above-atmosphere spectral radiances or Raleigh corrected radiances, so far optical spectral characterization of the OSABs has been impossible due to the inability of the atmospheric correction algorithm to account for their enhanced radiances at the near-infrared (NIR) bands. An innovative algorithm, referred as the "OSABT", is developed to provide essential data for detection and optical spectral characterization of OSABs in coastal and open ocean waters. The algorithm is applied to MODIS-Aqua imagery from the Arabian Sea and its results are systematically studied with regard to the spectral characteristics of OSABs, its evolution stages, sub-pixel variability, and atmospheric correction issues. The effectiveness of the OSABT is tested for several other regional waters on MODIS-Aqua data, where spatial bloom characteristics are previously known, and their optical spectra are featured with enhanced radiance at the NIR bands and reduced radiance at the red bands. The spectral signatures differ for each OSABs, and correlate to their evolution stages as well. These results support future applicability of this algorithm to derive the water-leaving radiance and new indices from the OSAB pixels for qualitative and quantitative assessment of the optical and biological OSAB properties as well as their associated ecological activities (e.g., growth, aggregation, density and impacts). The advantage of the OSABT is that it can be applied rather generally to other satellite-based sensors with no short-wave infrared bands, provided that suitable radiometric calibration coefficients are determined for using the OSABT.


The computation of shortest paths in a graph is a well-known problem in graph theory. One of the most obvious practical applications is route planning in a road network, i.e., finding an optimal route from a start location to a target location. We assume that a given road network does not change very often and that there are many source-target queries on the same network. Therefore, it pays to invest some time for a preprocessing step that accelerates all further queries. We present a new speedup technique for route planning that exploits the hierarchy inherent in real-world road networks. In a preprocessing step, we investigate the given road network in order to extract and prepare a hierarchical representation. Our route planning algorithm then takes advantage of this data. It is an adaptation of the bidirectional version of DIJKSTRA's algorithm, massively restricting its search space. In several experiments, we concentrate on the computation of fastest routes in Western Europe and the USA. Both networks consist of about 20 million nodes each. Our algorithm preprocesses these networks in a few hours using linear space. Queries then take around eight milliseconds to produce optimal routes. This is more than 2 000 times faster than using DIJKSTRA's algorithm. There are numerous possibilities to further improve and extend our approach.


An interaction between the IgG receptor FcγRIIb and β-amyloid contributes to the neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease. The pathological features of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are associated with the toxic accumulation of β-amyloid (Aβ) in the brain. Using cells, AD-model mice, and human AD brain tissue, Kam et al. found that the IgG Fcγ receptor IIb (FcγRIIb) mediated Aβ toxicity in neurons. Compared with controls, the abundance of FcγRIIb was increased in the brains of adult AD-model mice and in the hippocampus of human AD brain tissue, where it colocalized in situ (and coprecipitated in homogenates) with endogenous Aβ. In human SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells and wild-type, but not Fcgr2b-knockout, mouse cortical neurons, Aβ increased the mRNA and protein abundance of FcγRIIb and activated the c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) and its target the transcription factor c-Jun (known to transcriptionally activate FCGR2B). In vitro, both cell-derived and synthetic Aβ oligomers bound to immobilized FcγRIIb ectodomain (ED), and treating SH-SY5Y cells or mouse cortical neurons with FcγRIIb-ED inhibited Aβ-induced JNK activation and Fcgr2b expression, indicating that FcγRIIb functions as a receptor for Aβ. Additionally, pharmacological inhibition revealed that JNK was essential for Aβ-induced expression of Fcgr2b and an Fcgr2b promoter-linked reporter in SH-SY5Y cells, indicating that FcγRIIb activates JNK to trigger a positive transcriptional feedback that increases the abundance of the receptor. In wild-type, but not Fcgr2b-knockout, cortical neurons, oligomeric Aβ also increased the abundance of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress response proteins, which were also increased, along with Aβ-induced cell death, by overexpression of FcγRIIb in HT22 human hippocampal cells. Salubrinal, an ER stress inhibitor, prevented Aβ-induced cell death in wild-type and FcγRIIb-overexpressing HT22 cells. Hippocampal slices and primary cortical and hippocampal neurons from Fcgr2b-knockout mice were resistant to Aβ-induced neurotoxicity [manifested by cell death and decreased long-term potentiation (LTP), synapse stability, and spine density]. Fcgr2b knockout by cross-breeding restored synaptic function and memory retention in AD-model mice. Treatment with synthetic peptides targeting the Aβ-FcγRIIb interaction at specific amino acids in either protein (predicted by a docking simulation) inhibited Aβ-induced neurotoxicity in primary mouse cortical and hippocampal neurons and Aβ-induced memory impairment in AD-model mice. Together, the data suggest that targeting the Aβ-FcγRIIb interaction may treat Aβ pathology in Alzheimer's disease. T.-I. Kam, S. Song, Y. Gwon, H. Park, J.-J. Yan, I. Im, J.-W. Choi, T.-Y. Choi, J. Kim, D.-K. Song, T. Takai, Y.-C. Kim, K.-S. Kim, S.-Y. Choi, S. Choi, W. L. Klein, J. Yuan, Y.-K. Jung, FcγRIIb mediates amyloid-β neurotoxicity and memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease. J. Clin. Invest. 123, 2791–2802 (2013). [PubMed]


Most of process control systems are based on PID controllers, because of their remarkable effectiveness, simplicity and robustness, As PID controller design theory and practical procedures are well developed, it is necessary to pay attention on fuzzy logic controller design and its applications in combinations with PID controllers. There is also necessity to develop adaptive fuzzy PID Controllers, which can automatically retune itself to match the current process characteristics. In particular, focus of the work presented here is mainly on two problems: replacing an operator's control of PID regulators with fuzzy PID controller and to develop a structure for self tuning Fuzzy PID Controller and to develop a structure for self tuning fuzzy PID as modified PID adaptive Fuzzy Controller.


Abstract Cinema and the railway are intimately connected; the train window view mirrors the kinetic representation of everyday life on film. While pre-war filmmakers used the train to symbolize Japan's rapid modernization, after 1945 train imagery began to take on new meanings as the railway became associated with horrors perpetrated during the Asia Pacific war. The Yamanote line in contemporary film symbolizes this confluence of modernity, technology, possibility and historical trauma. Its circular nature constitutes a blockage in the context of the historical design of Japanese cities to favour flow, and so the Yamanote line often functions as a static holding space, a space in which protagonists contemplate and work through obstacles or trauma. From the art-house to the blockbuster, recent films have employed the line as a metaphor for blockage, transformation and the eventual overcoming of obstacles. In Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumiere (2003), a young woman considers her unplanned pregnancy on the Yamanote line, while the Korean–Japanese production 26 Years Diary (2007) uses the space to depict a young Korean student coming to terms with Korean–Japanese history. The Yamanote line is an explicitly international space in these films, in which human relationships allegorize Japan's relation to its ex-colonies. Material cultural exchange is facilitated by the variety of international spaces the circular track passes through. The enclosed line is therefore a metaphor for Japan's engagement with its neighbours within its own national sphere, as well as a space in which protagonists consider solutions to problems at once personal, cultural, political and national.


Beyond black and white, native and alien, lies a vast and fertile field of human experience. It is here that Eric Liu, former speechwriter for President Clinton and noted political commentator, invites us to explore. In these compellingly candid essays, Liu reflects on his life as a secondgeneration Chinese American and reveals the shifting frames of ethnic identity. Finding himself unable to read a Chinese memorial book about his father's life, he looks critically at the cost of his own assimilation. But he casts an equally questioning eye on the effort to sustain vast racial categories like "Asian American." And as he surveys the rising anxiety about China's influence, Liu illuminates the space that Asians have always occupied in the American imagination. Reminiscent of the work of James Baldwin and its unwavering honesty, The Accidental Asian introduces a powerful and elegant voice into the discussion of what it means to be an American.


This study examined the incidence of extreme sensory modulation behaviors in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and investigated the consistency of sensory information across measures. Parent report of sensory behaviors in 101 toddlers with ASD was compared with 100 toddlers who were typically developing matched on chronological age and 99 additional infants or toddlers matched on mental age. Measures included the Infant/Toddler Sensory Profile, Infant-Toddler Social Emotional Assessment, Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised, and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Generic. Toddlers with ASD were most distinct from typically developing groups in their high frequency of underresponsiveness and avoiding behaviors and their low frequency of seeking. Within the toddlers with ASD, there were significant associations across sensory parent report measures, but parent report was not correlated with clinical observation. Findings point to the early onset of an extreme sensory profile in ASD. Occupational therapists need to assess multiple domains of sensory behaviors to accurately identify the needs of toddlers with ASD.


The purpose of this investigation was to describe gadopentetate-dimeglumine-enhanced MR findings in metastatic disease to the pial lining of the spinal cord. Correlation was made with clinical data, other radiologic studies, and pathologic findings. Eighty-six patients with a known malignancy and unexplained neurologic signs or symptoms were studied with pre- and postcontrast T1-weighted images. In seven of these patients, abnormal enhancement of the pial lining of the cord was seen on the sagittal postcontrast T1-weighted images. This appeared as a thin rim of enhancement along the surface of the cord in six patients and as a focal, thick rim of enhancement in addition to the thin rim of enhancement in the seventh patient. Axial images confirmed the location along the pial lining in each case. Precontrast T1-weighted images in all seven cases and precontrast T2-weighted images in five cases failed to detect any focal abnormalities of the pial lining of the cord. Pathologic confirmation was available in five of the seven patients. Primary malignancies in these patients included breast carcinomas (two), lymphoma (one), leukemia (one), adenocarcinoma of the lung (one), prostate carcinoma (one), and malignant melanoma (one). Three of seven patients had metastatic disease evident only within the CNS, while four patients had widespread disease outside the CNS. We conclude that contrast-enhanced MR imaging is useful in the diagnosis of pial spread of metastatic disease in patients with a known primary malignancy and unexplained neurologic signs or symptoms.


While recent research suggests that some animal species may possess 'cultural' traditions, much of the current evidence for wild populations remains contentious. This is largely due to the difficulty of demonstrating a fundamental prerequisite for the existence of culture: social learning. As the only case where social learning has been demonstrated conclusively, and subsequently linked to spatial or temporal trait variation, avian vocal dialects are the best studied, and most widely accepted, form of animal culture. Here, we investigate the potential for vocal culture in one of the few animals for which material culture has been suggested: the New Caledonian crow Corvus moneduloides. We show that this species: (1) possesses the capacity for social learning of vocalizations (experimental evidence in the form of a captive subject that reproduces human speech and other anthropogenic noises); and (2) exhibits significant large-scale, population-level variation in its vocalizations (cross-island playback experiments, with analyses controlling for a substantial set of potentially confounding variables). In combination, this provides strong evidence for the existence of 'culture' in these birds. More specifically, our findings reveal that the species exhibits sufficient social learning mechanisms, and within-population structuring, to generate and perpetuate cultural variation in at least one behavioural domain. This is a critical first step towards demonstrating cultural transmission in other behaviours, including tool manufacture and tool use, opening the door for the simultaneous investigation of vocal and material culture in a nonhuman species. © 2010 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2010, 101, 767–776.


Activity- Fest Is an application that will allow users to book a wide variety of fun leisure activities and events in their local area and in their country.

The idea behind the concept of this project was chosen arose from an experienced that was encountered during work placements. After a long week of work undergrads found it challenging to find fun activities to do in the little free time they had. The traditional drinks and nights out were becoming a boring routine and repeated cycle. After research online was carried out for activities to do in Ireland, it was soon realized that there was not a real platform that specifies in satisfying this need for people in providing activities for people.

This encouraged me to take on this project in creating a detailed requirement specification document which tackles a real life business need and also satisfies the business analysis project of my course that I am required to do.

The project involves me gathering and documenting requirements to be implemented for the activity fest activity provider app. Initially this involves outlining all the key stakeholders involved in the application. Once the stakeholders are identified, a variety of elicitation techniques will be used in gathering requirements effectively. The main techniques that will be used are brainstorming sessions, multiple interviews with 2-3 stakeholders. 2 prototypes, document analysis, requirement workshop and a survey. This requires plenty of research behind each technique and research on how their used and when is best to use it.

The stakeholders of the project will be identified in the initial planning of the project. Their importance to the project will be illustrated in a detailed matrix.

Following the identification of the proposed techniques, they will be carried out amongst the most relevant stakeholders participating in a series of elicitation session with the aim to generate requirements from different viewpoints of each stakeholder.

The requirements will then be recorded, documented and analysed. After this process, they will be prioritized with different analysis tools which will help determine which of the key requirements will be implemented in app.

The results will be used to formulate a highly detailed IEEE requirement specification document. Within the document functional and non-functional requirements are formed and documented in detail. The results will be used by a development team to construct the Activity-Fest App


Public Health requires a trans-disciplinary approach to tackle the breadth and depth of the issues it faces. Public health decisions are reached through the compilation of multiple data sources and their thoughtful synthesis. The complexity and importance of these decisions necessitates a variety of approaches, with simulations increasingly being relied upon. This dissertation describes several research efforts that demonstrate the utility of highly detailed simulations in public health decision-making. Simulations are frequently used to represent dynamic processes and to synthesize data to predict future outcomes, which can be used in cost-benefit and course of action analyses. The threat of pandemic influenza and its subsequent arrival prompted many simulation-based studies. This dissertation details several such studies conducted at the federal policy level. Their use for planning and the rapid response to the unfolding crisis demonstrates the integration of highly detailed simulations into the public health decision-making process. Most analytic methods developed by public health practitioners rely on historical data sources, but are intended to be broadly applicable. Oftentimes this data is limited or incomplete. This dissertation describes the use of highly detailed simulations to evaluate the performance of outbreak detection algorithms. By creating methods that generate realistic and configurable synthetic data, the reliance on these historical samples can be reduced, thus facilitating the development and improvement of methods for public health practice. The process of decision-making itself can significantly influence the decisions reached. Many fields use simulations to train and evaluate, however, public health has yet to fully adopt these approaches. This dissertation details the construction of highly detailed synthetic data that was used to build an interactive environment designed to evaluate the decision-making processes for pertussis control. The realistic data sets provide sufficient face validity to experienced public health practitioners, creating a natural and effective medium for training and evaluation purposes. Advances in high-performance computing, information sciences, computer science, and epidemiology are enabling increasing innovation in the application of simulations. This dissertation illustrates several applications of simulations to relevant public health practices and strongly argues that highly detailed simulations have an essential role to play in Public Health decision-making.


A trade‐off between current reproduction and future performance is a key component of life‐history theory, but the shape of this trade‐off for any specific fitness component remains elusive. We induced three to five levels of reproductive effort (RE) by manipulating fruit set of a long‐lived orchid in two populations that differed in the length of the growing season and local climate and examined survival, size and fecundity the following year. Natural fruit set was 72% higher in the long‐season population, but was not associated with a significant survival cost in any population. Survival decreased linearly with experimentally increased RE in the short‐season population. In both populations, natural RE incurred growth and fecundity costs, and growth costs increased nonlinearly with diminishing costs at high RE. Fecundity costs increased linearly with RE in the long‐season population, but nonlinearly with diminishing costs at high RE in the other. The results demonstrate that the shape of the cost function may be nonlinear with context‐dependent intercept, slope and curvature. They are consistent with the prediction that survival costs appear only when RE exceeds natural levels, while growth and fecundity costs are evident at natural RE. Synthesis. We suggest that studies inducing multiple levels of RE are required to understand life‐history trade‐offs and their context dependence. This kind of information is fundamental for an understanding of the link between environmental heterogeneity, adaptive differentiation and life‐history evolution.