General Game Playing agents are required to play games they have never seen before simply by looking at a formal description of the rules of the game at runtime. Previous successful agents have been based on search with generic heuristics, with almost no work done into using machine learning. Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have shown it to be successful in some two-player zero-sum board games such as Chess and Go. This work applies deep reinforcement learning to General Game Playing, extending the AlphaZero algorithm and finds that it can provide competitive results.


Essential consideration doctors (PCPs) assume a significant part in the advancement of solid dietary conduct. To investigate the perspectives towards and factors related with the normal arrangement of dietary directing in Germany utilizing information from the across the country, agent test of the Physician Survey on Cardiovascular Disease Prevention. A sum of 4074 arbitrarily chose PCPs (reaction rate: 33.9%) gave information on dietary guiding to avoidance of cardiovascular illness in light of the 5 A's (Assess, Advise, Agree, Assist, Arrange), mentalities towards dietary directing and patients' and practice attributes. While most of PCPs (86%) detailed having elevated levels of fitness in giving dietary guidance.


We use recruitment into a laboratory experiment in Kolkata, India to analyze how social networks select individuals for jobs. The experiment allows subjects to refer actual network members for casual jobs as experimental subjects under exogenously varied incentive contracts. We provide evidence that some workers, those who are high ability, have useful information about the abilities of members of their social network. However, the experiment also shows that social networks provide incentives to refer less qualified workers, and firms must counterbalance these incentives in order to effectively use existing employees to help overcome their screening problem.


Namahn, a Belgian User Centered Design consultancy, describes the approach it took in radically renewing its methods and techniques to tackle interaction design for critical systems. At the heart of its effort, lies the tension between research and practice and the challenge of transforming research findings into a market-worthy methodology. Namahn chose an inherently distributed approach, grounded in the company's experience, using the appropriate communication tools. The article describes a two-year project for the regional government's research and innovation program. During the first phase of the project, Namahn discovered a number of important new concepts and methodological hypotheses. These concepts, which grew out of a review of the research literature on models, theories, and frameworks in Human-Computer Interaction, are becoming part of Namahn's extended vocabulary, aimed at enhancing the company's internal communication about the design process. The initial methodological hypotheses on risk assessment and design rationale form the basis of its new methodology, which will be constructed in a bottom-up fashion based on case studies in the project's second phase. Namahn presents concerns and opens issues that arose during the project, which it is exploring as a way to go forward in integrating research findings into the practice of user-centered design (UCD).


In time series prediction, modelling neural networks poses multiple challenges in specifying suitable input vectors, network architectures, and training parameters depending on the underlying structure of the time series data. The data properties are often determined by the frequency in which the time series is measured, such as low frequency data of yearly, quarterly or monthly observations, or high frequency data of weekly, daily, hourly or even shorter time intervals. As different time frequencies require distinct modelling heuristics, employing neural networks to predict a set of time series of unknown domain, which may exhibit different characteristics and time frequencies, remains particularly challenging and limits the development of fully automated forecasting methodologies for neural networks. We propose a methodology that unifies proven statistical modelling approaches based upon filters and best practices from previous forecasting competitions into one framework, providing automatic forecasting without manual intervention by inferring all information from the data itself to model a diverse set of time series of varying time frequency, like the ESTSP'08 dataset.


The philosophical and scientific literature on play is extensive and the approaches to the study, description, and explanation of play are diverse. In this paper I intend to provide an overview of approaches to play. My interest is in describing the most fundamental categories in terms of which play is characterized, explained, and evaluated. Insofar as these categories attempt to describe what kind of reality we are talking about when we make claims about play, I hope to clarify the metaphysics of play. Once this categorical scheme is made clear, we will be in a better position to evaluate the task of definition, claims about the relation of sport and play, and assertions about the significance of play. First, I place the discussion in the context of Bernard Suits's account of play and some other recent approaches to play. Next, I distinguish the following approaches to play: (a) play as behavior or activity; (b) play as motive, attitude, or state of mind; (c) play as form or structure; (d) play as meaningful experience; (e) play as an ontologically distinctive phenomenon. There is a natural progression in the way the analysis unfolds. In the final section I argue that my analysis generates a pluralist, nonreductive account of play.


Arts-informed inquiry has attracted a great deal of controversy in recent times as it has gained popularity as an educational research methodology in teacher education. As with other innovative approaches and methodologies, there have been lively debates about its rigour, authenticity and appropriateness. This article suggests principles for its use in exploring relevant questions in teacher education research and examines some of the issues that have been used to challenge its integrity. Several recent teacher education research projects undertaken by staff and research higher degree graduates at the University of Sydney are discussed initially as exemplars and to provide a context for the discussion. The authors demonstrate how research using arts-informed inquiry contributes perspectives and understandings that are distinctive from other methodologies and so can offer new understandings about some of the liminal issues in teacher education.


ABSTRACT The current study examined the role of item-specific, relational, and elaborative processing on adaptive memory. Younger and older adults received the standard survival processing, a survival-short, or a pleasantness processing instruction. The survival-short condition was specifically included to lead to fewer possibilities to engage in elaborative processing. Furthermore, half of the presented words were categorized words to boost relational processing. Younger adults demonstrated the typical survival recall advantage in that standard survival processing instructions resulted in superior free recall performance than that of the survival-short and the pleasantness processing groups. Among older adults, no mnemonic benefit of standard survival processing relative to the survival-short or pleasantness processing groups was found. Furthermore, reducing the probability of elaborative processing (i.e., through the survival-short processing instructions) abolished the survival recall advantage. Our results thus provide further evidence for the role of item-specific, relational, and elaborative processing in the survival processing advantage.


Unpredictable ML model behavior on unseen data, especially in the health domain, raises serious concerns about its safety as repercussions for mistakes can be fatal. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using state-of-the-art out-of-distribution detectors for reliable and trustworthy diagnostic predictions. We select publicly available deep learning models relating to various health conditions (e.g., skin cancer, lung sound, and Parkinson's disease) using various input data types (e.g., image, audio, and motion data). We demonstrate that these models show unreasonable predictions on out-of-distribution datasets. We show that Mahalanobis distance- and Gram matrices-based out-of-distribution detection methods are able to detect out-of-distribution data with high accuracy for the health models that operate on different modalities. We then translate the out-of-distribution score into a human interpretable CONFIDENCE SCORE to investigate its effect on the users' interaction with health ML applications. Our user study shows that the \textsc{confidence score} helped the participants only trust the results with a high score to make a medical decision and disregard results with a low score. Through this work, we demonstrate that dataset shift is a critical piece of information for high-stake ML applications, such as medical diagnosis and healthcare, to provide reliable and trustworthy predictions to the users.


In the scope of the study of low-frequency electrostatic microinstabilities in tokamak plasmas, attention has been focused on the effect of trapped ions. The ballooning transform has been applied to the gyrokinetic equation, for the case of a large aspect ratio plasma with circular magnetic surfaces. A new eigenvalue code has been developed to solve the resulting integral equation, for the case of adiabatic electrons and full ion dynamics, thus taking into account both circulating and trapped ions. The goal has been to assess the validity of the ballooning transform for trapped ion modes. A scan over the parameter k(theta)rho(L) has been carried out to determine a lower threshold for applicability of the ballooning representation. Illustrative results of trapped ion modes (TIM) are presented, together with the comparison with the ones obtained using a global gyrokinetic code, for low toroidal wave numbers, and a local kinetic dispersion relation. (C) 2000 American Institute of Physics. [S1070-664X(00)01204-0].


Representation learning is widely applied for various tasks on multimedia data, e.g., retrieval and search. One approach for learning useful representation is by utilizing the relationships or similarities between examples. In this work, we explore two promising scalable representation learning approaches on video domain. With hierarchical graph clusters built upon video-to-video similarities, we propose: 1) smart negative sampling strategy that significantly boosts training efficiency with triplet loss, and 2) a pseudo-classification approach using the clusters as pseudo-labels. The embeddings trained with the proposed methods are competitive on multiple video understanding tasks, including related video retrieval and video annotation. Both of these proposed methods are highly scalable, as verified by experiments on large-scale datasets.


The generation of an octave spanning supercontinuum covering 488-978 nm (at -30  dB) is demonstrated for the first time on-chip. This result is achieved by dispersion engineering a 1-cm-long Si3N4 waveguide and pumping it with an 100-fs Ti:Sapphire laser emitting at 795 nm. This work offers a bright broadband source for biophotonic applications and frequency metrology.


Simulation methods like DSMC are an efficient tool to compute rarefied gas flows. Using supercomputers it is possible to include various real gas effects like vibrational energies or chemical reactions in a gas mixture. Nevertheless it is still necessary to improve the accuracy of the current simulation methods in order to reduce the computational effort. To support this task the paper presents a comparison of the classical DSMC method with the so called Finite Pointset Method. This new approach was developed during several years in the framework of the European space project HERMES. The comparison given in the paper is based on two different testcases: a spatially homogeneous relaxation problem and a 2-dimensional axisymmetric flow problem at high Mach numbers.


Abstract. The annual and the monthly mean values of the land-surface air temperature anomalies from 1880–2011, over both hemispheres, are used to investigate the existence of long-range correlations in their temporal evolution. The analytical tool employed is the detrended fluctuation analysis, which eliminates the noise of the non-stationarities that characterize the land-surface air temperature anomalies in both hemispheres. The reliability of the results obtained from this tool (e.g., power-law scaling) is investigated, especially for large scales, by using error bounds statistics, the autocorrelation function (e.g., rejection of its exponential decay) and the method of local slopes (e.g., their constancy in a sufficient range). The main finding is that deviations of one sign of the land-surface air temperature anomalies in both hemispheres are generally followed by deviations with the same sign at different time intervals. In other words, the land-surface air temperature anomalies exhibit persistent behaviour, i.e., deviations tend to keep the same sign. Taking into account our earlier study, according to which the land and sea surface temperature anomalies exhibit scaling behaviour in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, we conclude that the difference between the scaling exponents mainly stems from the sea surface temperature, which exhibits a stronger memory in the Southern than in the Northern Hemisphere. Moreover, the variability of the scaling exponents of the annual mean values of the land-surface air temperature anomalies versus latitude shows an increasing trend from the low latitudes to polar regions, starting from the classical random walk (white noise) over the tropics. There is a gradual increase of the scaling exponent from low to high latitudes (which is stronger over the Southern Hemisphere).


Using firm level data, the authors examine how global industrial concentration has changed over the last decade in relation to the rise of China. Between 2006 and 2014, global concentration has declined in most industries and is falling on average across all industries, while firms at the top of the distribution are experiencing significant churning. The resulting enhanced industrial competition is partly attributable to the rising market shares of firms from China and other emerging markets at the expense of incumbent industry leaders. The authors further show evidence of global allocative efficiency — highly productive firms tend to be larger and grow faster. Global concentration has, however, risen significantly in several industries where Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) dominate, and China's SOEs are on average too large and expanding too fast given their low levels of productivity.


Bioremediation of some polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) present in soil were studied using bacterial strain under aerobic conditions. PAHs used in this study were Anthracene (Anth), Benzo (a) anthracene (B(a)A), Benzo(a)pyrene (B(a)P). The degradation of selected PAHs was assessed by bioaugmentation process by using Sphingobium indicum, Sphingobium japonicum and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia as bacterial strain and biostimulation proceed by cosubstrate. Effect of various parameters such as temperature, concentration and co substrate were studied. Maximum biodegradation was found at 30 0 C for B(a)A, B(a)P and Anth. The percentage of biodegradation was maximum with bacterial strain and co-substrate. Percentage biodegradation was found to be increased with increase in concentration of PAHs.


The diversity and abundance of cleaner species have been frequently associated with ectoparasite load and ecological wealth of tropical fish communities. Cleaning behaviour in temperate regions has received less attention, with few labrid species being described as cleaners. The context and frequency of cleaning behaviour by juvenile white seabream Diplodus sargus are described. Surface observations from pontoons in yachting marinas were carried out based on a method used in a recent first report of cleaning behaviour by this northeastern Atlantic and Mediterranean sparid. A total of 51 h of observations revealed that these juveniles (<10 cm total length [TL]) display similar or higher cleaning rates (13.1 cleaning events per hour) compared to other temperate cleaners. The high cleaning rates, high abundance of young D. sargus on rocky shores along their distribution area and preferential targeting of adults by coastal fisheries highlight the ecological importance of D. sargus. The most common client species include grey mullets (Mugilidae), which represent 93.5% of total cleaning events registered. Regarding TL, clients were 4.6 to 6.6 times larger than cleaners. Environmental factors such as water temperature (14.0−24.0°C), wave exposure (6.0−17.0 s) and wind speed (2.0−8.0 m s−1) influence white seabream cleaning rates. Thus, a combination of factors may affect the health of temperate client fish communities. On a different perspective, these results also highlight the potential of juvenile D. sargus in integrated multitrophic aquaculture. In conclusion, white seabream cleaning behaviour plays an important role in temperate fish communities and its relevance in different habitats should be further assessed.


This dissertation developed and tested a phytoplankton index of biotic integrity (P-IBI) to assess the ecological conditions of German lowland rivers, and simulated the daily phytoplankton biomass (as indicated by chlorophyll a) dynamics for the purpose of water quality forecasting and watershed management. Prior to that, this study determined whether phytoplankton assemblages generated by the two sampling protocols were related to different environmental variables and therefore might yield different bioassessment, and investigated the relationships between phytoplankton and environmental variables. The study catchment of Kielstau catchment (50 km²) is located in the North German lowlands. It is characterized by low hydraulic gradients, shallow groundwater, and flat topography. Sandy, loamy and peat soils are characteristic for this catchment. The water quality is not only influenced by the predominating agricultural land use in the catchment as cropland and pasture, but also by municipal wastewater treatment plants and drainage systems.
At first, phytoplankton assemblages generated by two sampling protocols in the Kielstau catchment were compared to select a better sampling protocol for phytoplankton based bioassessment. Plankton net (PLNET) protocol was a better method compared with sedimentation (SEDIM) protocol because algal data collected by PLNET protocol had higher relationship with environmental variables. Then the spatial and temporal dynamics of phytoplankton community and its relationship with environmental variables were investigated. Phytoplankton community in the Kielstau catchment was a typical riverine diatom-dominated community and prevailed by species of Achnanthes, Cocconeis, Cyclotella, Fragilaria, Navicula and Tabellaria. Remarkable spatial and temporal variations of phytoplankton community were observed and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) indicated that physical factors (e.g. hydrological variables) and major nutrients (e.g. total phosphorus, dissolved inorganic nitrogen) were of equal importance controlling the variation in structure of riverine phytoplankton assemblages.
To assess the ecological conditions of German lowland rivers, a phytoplankton index of biotic integrity (P-IBI) was developed and tested in the Kielstau catchment. It consisted of six metrics (out of 36 original metrics) based on Cumulative_R2 and correlation index (CoI) between biotic metrics and environmental variables. The developed P-IBI and its six metrics were indicative for ecological integrity and water quality and it could be a useful tool to measure the long-term status of streams and the effectiveness of various watershed managements. By implementing the developed P-IBI in the study area, the ecological status varied seasonally and the general ecological status was 'Moderate' regardless of seasonal variations, which was lower than the requirement ('Good' status) of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) by 2015. The relative lower ecological status was probably caused by human disturbances such as point sources, diffuse sources emissions and artificial drainage systems.
Thereafter, based on a 1.5-y measured data set of chlorophyll a and environmental variables, two modeling approaches (artificial neural networks, ANN and multiple linear regression, MLR) were developed to simulate the daily chlorophyll a dynamics. In general, the developed ANN and MLR models achieved satisfactory accuracy in predicting daily dynamics of chlorophyll a concentrations. The predicted and the observed data matched closely by MLR model with coefficient of determination (R2) and Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NS) of 0.53 and 0.53 for calibration period and 0.63 and 0.62 for validation period. Likewise, the results of ANN model also illustrated a good agreement between observed and predicted data during calibration and validation periods, which was demonstrated by R2 and NS values (0.68 and 0.68 for calibration period, 0.55 and 0.66 for validation period). For watershed management, combined with an automatic water quality monitoring device and a telemetry system, the developed models can be used as a real-time forecasting system. The results of prediction can help to assess the future changes of ecological status and develop efficient water management policy.


Non-ionic surfactants Brij 56 and Igepal CO 720, containing hydrophilic poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) segments, expanded smectite from 1.5 nm to 1.7 nm at room temperature. The surfactant-smectite composites had larger layer spacings than Ca-smectite after heat treatment. The surfactant-smectite composites were solvated and expanded to 1.8–1.9 nm by polar solvents, glycerol and water, but were not affected by the non-polar or weakly polar solvents, toluene, hexane or octanol. The hydrophilic PEO segments of non-ionic surfactants would logically access the interlayer spaces of smectite whereas the hydrophobic segments extend away from the mineral. The molecular structure and solvation properties suggest that the surfactant molecules are probably concentrated in the margin area of the interlayer galleries forming an annular ring structure between two neighboring silicate sheets. Only two layers or less of the surfactants could access the interlayer galleries of smectite and layer spacings did not exceed 1.8 nm even where excess surfactant was introduced into the composites. The layer spacings of the surfactant-smectite composites were well preserved during water or electrolyte solution washings, indicating stability of most non-ionic surfactant molecules in the interlayer galleries even though ∼30% of the adsorbed Igepal CO 720 was desorbed by exhaustive washing. The non-ionic surfactant treatment preserved >80% of the CEC of the smectite. The interlayer cations of the resulting surfactant-smectite were exchangeable as in the untreated smectite. Therefore, the non-ionic surfactant-smectite was much more efficient at removing heavy metal ions than activated carbon or cationic surfactant-treated smectite. The surfactant-smectite composites effectively removed aromatic chlorophenols from a pH 4.9 acetate buffer solution while untreated smectite did not adsorb these molecules. The enhanced adsorption of the aromatic compounds is attributed to the aliphatic segments of the two surfactants.


Ebola virus (EBOV) is an enveloped, ssRNA virus from the family Filoviridae capable of causing severe hemorrhagic fever with up to 80–90% mortality rates. The most recent outbreak of EBOV in West Africa starting in 2014 resulted in over 11,300 deaths; however, long-lasting persistence and recurrence in survivors has been documented, potentially leading to further transmission of the virus. We have previously shown that exosomes from cells infected with HIV-1, HTLV-1 and Rift Valley Fever virus are able to transfer viral proteins and non-coding RNAs to naïve recipient cells, resulting in an altered cellular activity. In the current manuscript, we examined the effect of Ebola structural proteins VP40, GP, NP and VLPs on recipient immune cells, as well as the effect of exosomes containing these proteins on naïve immune cells. We found that VP40-transfected cells packaged VP40 into exosomes, and that these exosomes were capable of inducing apoptosis in recipient immune cells. Additionally, we show that presence of VP40 within parental cells or in exosomes delivered to naïve cells could result in the regulation of RNAi machinery including Dicer, Drosha, and Ago 1, which may play a role in the induction of cell death in recipient immune cells. Exosome biogenesis was regulated by VP40 in transfected cells by increasing levels of ESCRT-II proteins EAP20 and EAP45, and exosomal marker proteins CD63 and Alix. VP40 was phosphorylated by Cdk2/Cyclin complexes at Serine 233 which could be reversed with r-Roscovitine treatment. The level of VP40-containing exosomes could also be regulated by treated cells with FDA-approved Oxytetracycline. Additionally, we utilized novel nanoparticles to safely capture VP40 and other viral proteins from Ebola VLPs spiked into human samples using SDS/reducing agents, thus minimizing the need for BSL-4 conditions for most downstream assays. Collectively, our data indicates that VP40 packaged into exosomes may be responsible for the deregulation and eventual destruction of the T-cell and myeloid arms of the immune system (bystander lymphocyte apoptosis), allowing the virus to replicate to high titers in the immunocompromised host. Moreover, our results suggest that the use of drugs such as Oxytetracycline to modulate the levels of exosomes exiting EBOV-infected cells may be able to prevent the devastation of the adaptive immune system and allow for an improved rate of survival.


An atomic absorption method for the determination of osmium has been developed. The method is applicable in the concentration range of 1 to 300 ppm of osmium with a relative error of ±4%. It is applicable to both aqueous and nonaqueous osmium solutions and, with slight modification, can be applied to the determination of osmium in its thiourea complex. The results are not affected by the valence state of osmium. A sensitivity of 1 ppm is readily achieved by the atomic absorption method and this is comparable to that obtained by spectrophotometry and x-ray fluorescence. The method is rapid and requires less than 5 min of operator time per sample.


Ecology is the study of the interrelationships between organisms and their environment, including the biotic and abiotic components. There are at least six kinds of ecology: ecosystem, physiological, behavioural, population, and community. Specific topics include: acid deposition, acid rain revisited, biodiversity, biocomplexity, carbon sequestration in soils, coral reefs, ecosystem services, environmental justice, fire ecology, floods, global climate change, hypoxia, and invasion. This new book presents new research on ecology from around the world.


The project outcome is to design a control system for quadruped robot (4-legged
robot). Early 2007, a quadruped robot was built by an UTP graduate; Mr. Tnay Chiat
Siang (Matric No. 6114). The quadruped robot is well constructed in mechanicalwise;
however, it has never been able to move as there is no motor driver and control
system being developed for it. Therefore, the author has decided to come in on Mr.
Tnay Chiat Siang's quadruped project and continue his work to develop a control
system which will eventually drive the quadruped robot to perform crawling gait on
flat and horizontal ground. The control system of quadruped involves gait control,
stability control and motor control. This project is split to three phases. The timeline
of each phase is that phase 1 is carried out at semester FYP 1 while phase 2 begins
during the year-end semester break. Phase 3 is commenced during FYP 2. The work
aspect of phase 1 is on schematic design and crawling gait planning of quadruped. A
preliminary simulation is used to demonstrate the planned crawling gait. The focus of
phase 2 is more on learning how to manipulate PIC microcontroller and servomotors.
At last, phase 3 is the prototype fabricating and testing stage with the presence of
servomotors and circuit board. At the end of project, the quadruped prototype is
meant to perform forward crawling gait on flat and horizontal ground.


This paper will discuss the importance of reliable and repeatable performance of molded case circuit breakers in today's power distribution systems. The paper will review existing standards for maintenance of molded case breakers including procedures outlined in NEMA AB4 and IEEE1458. Common misconceptions and system application issues regarding these devices will be discussed. Several examples of on-line infrared scans of circuit breakers over the course of a five year period will be presented and reviewed. Experiences at an integrated paper mill located in Longview, Washington USA explains documented cases where infrared thermography has been used as a predictive maintenance tool in determining potential problems with breakers while in service. Follow-up analysis by the circuit breaker manufacturer has generally validated mill maintenance decisions to remove a breaker from service and replace it, based on infrared scan results. Periodic infrared scanning used as a tool in identifying potential problems with sealed molded case circuit breakers will be discussed. This and other breaker off-line testing methods used at this site will be reviewed. Finally, overall reliability improvement and impact on the results of the existing mill-wide safety compliance programs will be summarized.


Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) allows users to perform secure computation on platforms that run untrusted software. To validate that the computation is correctly initialized and that it executes on trusted hardware, SGX supports attestation providers that can vouch for the user's computation. Communication with these attestation providers is based on the Extended Privacy ID (EPID) protocol, which not only validates the computation but is also designed to maintain the user's privacy. In particular, EPID is designed to ensure that the attestation provider is unable to identify the host on which the computation executes. In this work we investigate the security of the Intel implementation of the EPID protocol. We identify an implementation weakness that leaks information via a cache side channel. We show that a malicious attestation provider can use the leaked information to break the unlinkability guarantees of EPID. We analyze the leaked information using a lattice-based approach for solving the hidden number problem, which we adapt to the zero-knowledge proof in the EPID scheme, extending prior attacks on signature schemes.


The incentives-for-authors formulation of copyright's purpose is so deeply ingrained in our discourse and our thought processes that it is astonishingly hard to avoid invoking, even when one is consciously trying not to do so. Yet avoiding that formulation is exactly what we ought to be doing. Everything we know about creativity and creative processes suggests that copyright plays very little role in motivating creative work. In the contemporary information society, the purpose of copyright is to enable the provision of capital and organization so that creative work may be exploited. And the choice of copyright as a principal means of promoting cultural production has consequences for the content of culture as well.This reframing has four important consequences for debates about copyright law and policy. First, abandoning the incentives-for-authors story requires us to talk about cultural progress differently. The incentives-for-authors story has functioned as a smokescreen, enabling scholars, judges, and legislators to conflate economic and creative motivation. Severing the motivational link between creativity and economics requires us to come up with a better understanding of how cultural progress emerges, and a more accurate account of how the economic incentives that copyright provides affect progress more generally. Second, an account of copyright as incentives-for-capital suggests a different approach to conceptualizing the kind of "property" that copyright represents. Copyright scholars habitually compare copyright to property in land, a conceptual move that passes over an important stage in the evolution of economic activity and associated economic rights. There are important benefits to be gained from comparing post-industrial, information property to industrial, corporate property, and copyright law more explicitly to corporate law. Specifically, copyright law in the post-industrial era works to separate authorship from control of creative works so that a set of coordination and governance problems closely associated with information resources can be solved. Third, comparing copyright more explicitly to industrial, corporate property and legal regimes governing its use suggests some different ways of thinking and talking about problems of social welfare that so often bedevil regimes of property law. Fourth, comparing copyright more explicitly to industrial, corporate property foregrounds copyright law's (largely unrealized) potential to function as a tool for ensuring accountability to the authors without whom the copyright system could not function.


We present a combined theoretical and experimental analysis to describe the interplay between polarization field, charge screening, and radiative and nonradiative recombinations in AlGaN/GaN-based nanostructures. We perform the study of photoluminescence (PL) in both stationary and time-resolved PL (TR-PL) conditions, considering also the effect of temperature on the different recombination mechanisms, and especially on nonradiative recombinations. The theoretical analysis is obtained by coupling a complete self-consistent solution of Schrodinger and Poisson equations to determine the electronic states in the nanostructure with a rate equation model to account for time-dependent effects of charge rearrangement. We review the topic of polarization field screening taking into account the most recent results on the evaluation of the very strong coefficients for spontaneous and piezoelectricpolarizations that have recently been predicted for III–V nitride semiconductors with natural wurtzite symmetry, and we show how the screening influences both static and dynamic recombination mechanisms. Experimental results are obtained for high-quality GaN/AlGaN multiple quantum wells by means of both continuous-wave (cw) and TR-PL techniques. The case of single quantum well is also considered. The PL measured decays show a time dependence that is not only controlled by radiative lifetimes, which depend on the fields inside the GaN wells, but also on the carrier recombinations through nonradiative channels. We demonstrate that PL emission is influenced by charge accumulation in the well, and a loss of carriers from the ground level induced by an interplay between radiative and nonradiative recombination processes. Moreover, from the analysis of the temperature dependence of the TR-PL decays, we deduce important confirmations of a thermally activated detrapping mechanism that strongly affects the nonradiative recombination processes.


Type material of calcareous nannofossil index species Coccolithus crassus and two geographically widespread species Toweius magnicrassus and T. callosus have been studied by both light and SEM microscopy and morphometric measurements were made. Coccolithus crassus resembles Coccolithus pelagicus but has a raised cycle of elements around the centre of the distal shield. It probably evolved from C. pelagicus. Both T. magnicrassus and T. callosus have three cycles of elements in distal view, which is a characteristic of Toweius. Toweius magnicrassus is larger than T. callosus. Differentiation of T. magnicrassus from T. callosus is possible and useful because there is generally a size gap between them in a given sample and they have different stratigraphic ranges. However, both T. callosus and T. magnicrassus appear to increase in size from high to low latitudes. Toweius callosus most probably evolved from Toweius pertusus in the latest Palaeocene and gave rise to T. magnicrassus in the early Eocene.


A secure channel is a cryptographic protocol that adds security to unprotected network connections. Prominent examples include the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and the Secure Shell (SSH) protocols. Because of their large-scale deployment, these protocols received a lot of attention from academia. Starting with the seminal work of Bellare, Kohno, and Namprempre (BKN; CCS 2002) on the security of SSH, numerous authors analyzed channel protocols using the same approach of BKN to model a channel as a stateful authenticated encryption scheme. However, deployed protocols such as TLS and SSH are inherently complex, and a single mathematical abstraction can hardly capture all aspects that are relevant to security.

In this thesis we reconsider the suitability of the stateful authenticated encryption abstraction for the analysis of real-world channel protocols. In particular, we highlight that such an abstraction is too restrictive, in a sense that we clarify next, to capture three important aspects that do not appear in existing cryptographic models for secure channels.

Firstly, we question the common approach that treats secure channels using atomic encryption and decryption interfaces to transport a sequence of messages. This approach ignores that many real-world protocols, including TLS and SSH, offer a streaming interface instead. To formalize the non-atomic behavior of these protocols we initiate the study of stream-based channels and their security. We formalize notions of confidentiality and integrity by extending the BKN model for stateful authenticated encryption to take the peculiarities of streams into account. Inspired by the TLS 1.3 protocol we present a generic construction of a stream-based channel from any authenticated encryption scheme with associated data (AEAD), and prove its security.

Secondly, we note that while TLS, SSH, and many other channel protocols are typically used for bidirectional interaction, cryptographic models assessing the security of these protocols exclusively account for unidirectional communication, from one sender to one receiver. We correspondingly ask: Do security results for unidirectional channels extend to the bidirectional case? And, in the first place, what does security in the bidirectional setting actually mean? How does all this scale when more than two participants are involved? To answer these questions we conduct a rigorous study of security notions for bidirectional channels and their generalization to the broadcast setting with more than two participants. In a broadcast scenario, confidentiality and integrity need to capture aspects related to the causality of events in distributed systems that have no counterpart in the much simpler unidirectional case. The causality between exchanged messages is particularly relevant, both in terms of functionality and of security, in the context of instant messaging protocols such as TextSecure. Furthermore, we provide generic constructions of broadcast channels from AEAD. We also analyze and validate a traditional heuristic (used, among others, in TLS) of combining two unidirectional channels to realize a bidirectional one.

Finally, we look at forward security, which strengthens regular security by demanding that even if an adversary eventually obtains the secret key in use (by corruption), past uses of the cryptosystem are not compromised. While being a standard requirement for authenticated key exchange, so far, providing forward security was not considered a goal of cryptographic channels in the BKN model and its follow-ups. However, it is considered folklore that forward-secure authenticated encryption schemes can be constructed in a modular way by replacing the key generation procedure with one that produces a sequence of forward-secure keys and then using these keys for re-keying the encryption and decryption routines in use. This approach may also be applied for realizing forward-secure channels. Following this idea, in the last part of the thesis we leave the domain of channels and focus on building forward-secure key generation mechanisms. Secure solutions for the latter primitive have been proposed already in the past. In this thesis we complement the current picture by contributing certain efficiency improvements for sequential key generators. In particular, we illustrate that our solutions find a natural application in the authentication of log files. Implementations of one of our schemes are installed on millions of computers world-wide.


This paper presents a comprehensive approach to automatic theory refinement. In contrast to other systems, the approach is capable of modifying a theory which contains multiple faults and faults which occur at intermediate points in the theory. The approach uses explanations to focus the corrections to the theory, with the corrections being supplied by an inductive component. In this way, an attempt is made to preserve the structure of the original theory as much as possible. Because the approach begins with an approximate theory, learning an accurate theory takes fewer examples than a purely inductive system. The approach has application in expert system development, where an initial, approximate theory must be refined. The approach also applies at any point in the expert system lifecycle when the expert system generates incorrect results. The approach has been applied to the domain of molecular biology and shows significantly better results then a purely inductive learner.


This paper presents the results of measurements by the Senarmont compensator method of the dc electro-optic coefficients at a wavelength of 6328 A and observations of electro-optic modulation at radio frequencies in single-domain crystals of lithium niobate (LiNbO3), a trigonal crystal of point group 3m. Tables of electro-optic properties and measurements are included, as well as a series of optical interference figures for various static field conditions. The magnitudes of the dc coefficients were found to be r22=2.0×10−7 cm/statvolt and |0.9r33−r13|=5.2×10−7 cm/statvolt.


The stars and their movements have always captivated the human imagination. In all cultures, people have studied the sky to learn about the complicated relationships between celestial bodies and terrestrial affairs. In all cultures, too, people have invented elaborate visual systems to document and organise their findings on the influence of the planets and stars. ASTROLOGY PICTURES provides a rich collection of the most interesting and compelling astrological imagery from a wide variety of cultural traditions. The collection comprises images and depictions of the planets, the elements and the zodiac. This book contains portraits of astrologers both real and imagined, and a sample of the visual systems devised to organise astrological knowledge, such as celestial maps and hand charts, chosen for their rarity and their visual impact. With imagery originating from Egypt, Japan and China, from both classical antiquity and the Western tradition, ASTROLOGY PICTURES truly provides an all-encompassing and accessible overview of a rich and stimulating heritage.


Trait variation in plant communities is thought to be constrained by two opposing community assembly processes operating at discrete spatial scales: habitat filtering and limiting similarity between coexisting species. Filtering processes cause convergence in ecological strategy as species are excluded from unsuitable sites, whilst limiting similarity leads to the divergence of trait values between co-occurring species in order to alleviate competition for finite resources. Levels of alpha (within-site) and beta (among-site) trait variation can be indicative of the strength of these community assembly processes. We used trait-gradient analysis to explicitly compare evidence of community assembly patterns in lianas (woody vines) and trees. These two growth forms exhibit striking differences in carbon capture and regeneration strategies, yet trait-based mechanisms that maintain their coexistence remain understudied. Using data for four functional traits – leaf mass per area, leaf nitrogen content (N mass), leaf area and seed mass – we partitioned interspecific trait variation in lianas and trees into alpha and beta components. Our three key findings were: 1) lianas and trees exhibit divergent patterns of trait-based habitat filtering, due to differences in the relationship between leaf size and the other three traits examined (LMA, N mass and seed mass), 2) on average, liana species possess smaller seeds, lower LMA and higher N mass than do trees, but there was no clear difference in leaf area between the two growth forms, and 3) soil fertility was correlated with trait variation (leaf area, seed mass) at the site-level in trees, but not in lianas. These results provide evidence that dominant growth forms can be filtered into the same habitat on the basis of different combinations of traits. Our findings have important implications for community assembly and co-existence theory and for more pragmatic matters such as using trait-based principles to inform community restoration.


As companies have increasingly sought to outsource their non-essential activities, there has been a dramatic rise in the use of the services of external companies (often referred to as Third Party Logistics Companies or 3PLs) to organize transportation logistics. Little is known about the degree to which their choice of carriers differs from that of traditional end-shippers. Because this sector is expected to grow in the future and thereby to exert more influence on the way freight is shipped, understanding any differences that they might manifest in carrier choice is useful in itself, but also potentially critical in evaluating the potential for rail to increase its share of freight. This paper presents some findings of a unique shipper carrier-choice stated preference survey of shippers in the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor. The survey was conducted during the fall of 2005. The survey was designed explicitly to evaluate shipper preferences for the carriage of intercity consignments, and particularly their preferences for carriers that contract the services of rail companies to carry these shipments via trailer on flat car (TOFC). Preliminary analysis suggests that 3PLs behave differently from other end-shippers, and in particular, are even more mistrustful of the use of rail to move their consignments than other end shippers. Among other things, this suggests that increasing rails share of freight faces tremendous challenges.


The intimate, and often underappreciated, relationship between political parties, the presidency, and the administrative state has profound consequences for the functioning of these three institutions at the heart of American political life. Failure to draw out and illuminate this connection has led to an incomplete understanding of administrative law — both descriptively in what the law does and can do, and normatively in what it should do. In particular, courts and commentators have not grappled with the fundamental shift experienced by political parties over the past several decades — from traditional party organizations that were locally focused and ideologically diverse to today's high-tech, polarized, and nationally oriented parties. This transformation was strongly influenced by the growth of administrative agencies and the modern presidency, and has important implications for the practical realities of presidential control over agencies, for the normative justifications supporting the President's prominent role in the administrative state, and for the struggle over control of agencies between the President and Congress. This Article maps out the intersection of President, administration, and contemporary parties and proposes "responsible party administration" as a normative framework to evaluate how well institutional arrangements and judicial doctrines forward administrative values such as expertise, coherence, and legality while accommodating a system of regulated rivalry in which two programmatically distinct parties compete for the reins of the administrative state.


The ultimate objective of the present paper is to empirically investigate the effectiveness of competition policy in developed and developing countries. Although its importance is continuously increasing, the effectiveness of competition policy still seems to lack the attention that it would deserve. At the present state of art, the number of academic contributions that attempts to estimate its impact on relevant economic variables appears very limited, in particular for the less developed countries. However, an empirical literature aimed at measuring in objective terms the effect of competition policy on economic growth is emerging, starting from narrow variables of interest, such as Gross Domestic Product and Total Factor Productivity. As a result, the principal aim of the current work is to contribute to this branch of research, focusing on broader indicators of market performance, in order to understand whether the presence of an antitrust authority has a significant impact, thus an effective utility, on the level of competition of a country.


When analyzing the complex biochemical and physical processes responsible for ammonia and dinitrogen gas emission in the animal waste treatment lagoons, surficial oxygen transfer plays an important role. This research 1) reviews and analyzes research conducted during the last 5 decades on oxygen and other gas transfer into non-moving, open water bodies, 2) presents the synthesis of a new, unified equation for oxygen mass transfer coefficient, and 3) discusses the potential nitrogen pathways responsible for the dinitrogen gas emissions observed from the treatment lagoons based on the surficial oxygen transfer rate. Both theoretically and empirically derived oxygen coefficients were evaluated using data derived from investigations in controlled wind tunnels, floating reaeration devices in open waters, and natural open waters. To facilitate the analysis, gas transfer coefficient correlations for other gases were normalized to oxygen, and wind speeds were normalized to 10-m height. Wind was the major turbulence agent facilitating the gas transfer processes. Generally, low wind speed did not significantly influence the transfer coefficients. However, the transfer coefficients increased, even exponentially, with higher wind speeds. Initial attempts to obtain reliable estimates of surficial oxygen transfer rates into treatment lagoons under relevant environmental conditions were not successful, primarily due to large variations among existing transfer coefficients. As a result, a new unified equation for predicting wind-driven gas transfer coefficients was synthesized. The new empirical equation is a function of Schmidt number and wind speed. With this new equation, the maximum surficial oxygen fluxes into the treatment lagoons were estimated. The stoichiometric amounts of the maximum dinitrogen gas production per unit mass of O2 transferred were calculated based on three most likely biochemical pathways for ammonia removal in the treatment lagoons. These were compared with observed dinitrogen gas emission data.


Over the past few decades, giant strides have been made in the field of vaccinations, the range of vaccines available has been broadened, with a higher degree of safety and effectiveness. Paradoxically, distrust towards childhood immunization has also increased in the public opinion, a significant share of which sees not so much its advantages as the possibility of potentially serious side-effects. Vaccinations pose an issue as to the reconciliation of interests pertaining, on the one hand, to the safeguard of health, spelled out in art.13 of the Italian Constitution, and to the freedom of personal choice, protected in art.13, on the other. Therefore, the question to which the authors of this paper have sought to answer reads as follows: should immunization, and childhood immunization in particular, be deemed mandatory treatment, or is it best left up to the parents to choose? The legislation on the subject appears outdated and untimely, and the dichotomy between "mandatory vaccination" and "recommended vaccination" only adds to the sense of confusion in the public opinion. It appears necessary to improve the quality of vaccination counseling practices in childcare, but such activities need to take place within the framework of a broader strategy, centered on the fostering of a culture of prevention, backed by scientific research to the fullest extent possible. The paper's authors point to the absolute necessity for a new, updated set of national regulations aimed at overcoming current inconsistencies and the discrepancies in guidelines set forth by each region.


This paper presents a novel method to determine the maximum stack memory used in preemptive, shared stack, real-time systems. We provide a general and exact problem formulation applicable for any preemptive system model based on dynamic (run-time) properties. We also show how to safely approximate the exact stack usage by using static (compile time) information about the system model and the underlying run-time system on a relevant and commercially available system model: a hybrid, statically and dynamically, scheduled system. Comprehensive evaluations show that our technique significantly reduces the amount of stack memory needed compared to existing analysis techniques. For typical task sets a decrease in the order of 70% is typical


Two cases of complications secondary to the use of microwave ablation (MWA) in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) are discussed herein. The first case involves a 62-year-old man with stage IB NSCLC who declined surgery and pursued MWA. Within 7 months, he had residual disease at the MWA treatment site, and surgery was performed. The patient was found to have pleural and chest wall involvement, making complete resection impossible. The second case involves an 86-year-old woman with a second local recurrence of NSCLC and previous treatment including surgery and chemoradiation therapy. She was initially a surgical candidate but declined surgery and pursued MWA. Within 6 months, she had residual disease at the MWA treatment site. A second MWA was performed, and she developed a large cavitary abscess at the MWA site and had subsequent clinical decline. Less invasive ablation therapies and stereotactic radiosurgery are being developed for patients with inoperable lung cancer. Because these modalities have recently been developed, trials that clearly show efficacy and survival benefit are yet to be completed. Ablation procedures can result in complications, including residual disease and cavitary lesions susceptible to infection. These cases highlight the caution that should still be observed when recommending lung ablation strategies and the importance of selecting appropriate patients.


ABOUT THIS BOOK Media interest in food has intensified in recent years, leading to a contemporary food landscape where 'alternative' food practices are increasingly visible. Concerns that were once exclusively the domain of activist movements motivated by environmental, animal rights, health and anti-corporate agendas are now central to primetime television cooking shows, mobile apps and social media. This book is the first to explore the impact of popular media and culture on contemporary food politics. Through examination of a range of media and cultural texts, including news, digital media, advertising and food labelling, it brings together leading and emerging scholars in food studies, media and communications, sociology, law, policy studies, business, and geography. The book explores the practices of alternative food movements, the marketing techniques of conventional and alternative food producers, and the relationships between food industries, media, and the public. Covering topics ranging from agtech start-ups and social justice projects, to new ways of mediating food waste, celebrity, and 'ethical' foods, Alternative Food Politics reveals the importance of media as a driver of food system transformation. This is a pivotal time for media and food industries, and this book is essential reading for scholars and students seeking to better understand the futures, possibilities and limits of food politics today.


The number of computing devices that people use is growing. To gain a better understanding of why and how people use multiple devices, we interviewed 27 people from academia and industry. From these interviews we distill four primary findings. First, associating a user's activities with a particular device is problematic for multiple device users because many activities span multiple devices. Second, device use varies by user and circumstance; users assign different roles to devices both by choice and by constraint. Third, users in industry want to separate work and personal activities across work and personal devices, but they have difficulty doing so in practice Finally, users employ a variety of techniques for accessing information across devices, but there is room for improvement: participants reported managing information across their devices as the most challenging aspect of using multiple devices. We suggest opportunities to improve the user experience by focusing on the user rather than the applications and devices; making devices aware of their roles; and providing lighter-weight methods for transferring information, including synchronization services that engender more trust from users.


Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) can be used to
control a wide variety of technologies. In some of these technologies,
network elements and links may impose additional routing constraints
such as asymmetric switch connectivity, non-local label assignment,
and label range limitations on links. This document provides
efficient, protocol-agnostic encodings for general information
elements representing connectivity and label constraints as well as
label availability. It is intended that protocol-specific documents
will reference this memo to describe how information is carried for
specific uses.


[1] Much of our knowledge about oceanic rainfall comes from spaceborne sensors. These sensors provide direct or indirect information used for precipitation retrievals through various algorithms. A thorough understanding of rain frequency and intensity and its regional distribution, which is especially important in a warming climate, requires an evaluation of the performance of rain-measuring sensors and identification of strengths and limitations offered by each sensor. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) has enabled significant advancement in quantification of moderate to intense rainfall. However, a common limitation of the current suite of rain-measuring sensors is their lack of sensitivity to light rainfall, especially over subtropical and high-latitude oceans. Among various spaceborne sensors, CloudSat enables superior retrieval of light rainfall and drizzle. By using 3 years (2007–2009) of rainfall data from CloudSat and the precipitation radar aboard TRMM, it was determined that the quasi-global (60°S–60°N) oceanic mean rain rate is about 3.05 mm/d, considerably larger than that obtained from any individual sensor product. In the deep tropics, especially within 20°S–20°N, the sensors show the highest agreement, with a large fraction of total rain volume captured by the majority of sensors. However, toward higher latitudes and within the subtropical high-pressure regions, a significant fraction of rainfall, which can exceed 50% or more of total rain volume, is missed by the majority of the sensors.


The authors explored through semistructured interviews the interrelationships of religion, spirituality, and career development in a sample of 12 African American undergraduate students. Using consensual qualitative research methodology (C. E. Hill, B. J. Thompson, & E. N. Williams, 1997), they identified 6 primary domains or themes related to these students' experiences in this regard, including (a) degree of identification as religious and/or spiritual, (b) parents' influence on religious and spiritual beliefs, (c) roles of religion and spirituality in participants' career development, (d) challenges in dealing with academic and career-related issues, (e) religious and spiritual strategies to deal with academic and career-related challenges, and (f) indicators of success in future career or occupation. Research regarding the influence of cultural issues on the career development of college students has primarily emphasized the importance of racial, ethnic, and gender issues and has given little attention to other multicultural variables. There is some evidence suggesting that the cultural variables of religion and spirituality play vital roles in many individuals' career decision-making processes (Bogart, 1994; Colozzi & Colozzi, 2000; Fox, 2003; Seaward, 1995). However, few studies have explored the unique roles of religion and spirituality in the career development process of the general college population (Howard & Howard, 1997; Lips-Wiersma, 2002; Walker & Dixon, 2002), especially their roles in the career development process of African American college students. Many researchers (Christian & Barbarin, 2001; Constantine, Lewis, Conner, & Sanchez, 2000) have reported that African Americans tend to have higher baseline rates of religious participation in comparison with the broader U.S. population. Some religious and spiritual beliefs and practices of African Americans derive from African worldviews, such as communalism (i.e., emphasizing the importance of human relationships and the interrelatedness of people), unity, cooperation, harmony, balance, creativity, and authenticity (Constantine, Gainor, Ahluwalia, & Berkel, 2003; Jackson & Sears, 1992; Myers, 1993; Utsey, Adams, & Bolden, 2000). In particular, religious, spiritual, and communal values are reflected in the context of many African Americans' daily activities and lives. For example, aspects of communalism and collectivism can be noted in the fact that religious participation has been linked to civic participation, volunteerism, philanthropic giving, and other forms of altruistic behavior among African Americans ( Billingsley & Caldwell, 1991 ; Mattis, Fontenot, Hatcher-Kay, Grayman, & Beale, 2004; Mattis et al., 2000). In addition, religion has been documented to play a role in shaping African Americans' cognitive outcomes (i.e., interpretations and appraisals of events), including a role in framing such events in times of adversity (Brodsky, 2000; McAdoo, 1995). Prior literature concerning religious and spiritual issues among African Americans has focused primarily on religious participation via religious institutions and African Americans' private beliefs and behaviors in connection to such institutions (Neighbors & Jackson, 1996). Despite the ever-growing number of studies focusing on religious and spiritual issues in the lives of African Americans, little information is known about how such issues relate to academic and vocational domains of African American college students. Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to explore the roles of religion and spirituality in regard to the career development process of African American college students. For the purposes of this study, we examined both religious and spiritual issues (and their possible interplay and intersections) because religion is often viewed as subsuming spirituality for many African American college students (Constantine, Wilton, Gainor, & Lewis, 2002). …


Described as an "invaluable reference work" (Classical Philology) and "a tool indispensable for the study of early Christian literature" (Religious Studies Review) in its previous edition, this new updated American edition of Walter Bauer's Worterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments builds on its predecessor's staggering deposit of extraordinary erudition relating to Greek literature from all periods. Including entries for many more words, the new edition also lists more than 25,000 additional references to classical, intertestamental, Early Christian, and modern literature. In this edition, Frederick W. Danker's broad knowledge of Greco-Roman literature, as well as papyri and epigraphs, provides a more panoramic view of the world of Jesus and the New Testament. Danker has also introduced a more consistent mode of reference citation, and has provided a composite list of abbreviations to facilitate easy access to this wealth of information. Perhaps the single most important lexical innovation of Danker's edition is its inclusion of extended definitions for Greek terms. For instance, a key meaning of "episkopos" was defined in the second American edition as overseer; Danker defines it as "one who has the responsibility of safeguarding or seeing to it that something is done in the correct way, guardian." Such extended definitions give a fuller sense of the word in question, which will help avoid both anachronisms and confusion among users of the lexicon who may not be native speakers of English. Danker's edition of Bauer's Worterbuch will be an indispensable guide for Biblical and classical scholars, ministers, seminarians, and translators.


www.scienceinschool.org 67 Science in School Issue 7 : Winter 2007 This short book describes the development of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species and examines its wider impact. Janet Browne is the author of a large and highly acclaimed two-volume biography of Charles Darwin. Her new volume is slightly different – it is a biography of Darwin's most famous book, rather than the story of Darwin's life or indeed the development of evolutionary ideas. At times, the distinction is blurred because to understand the genesis of The Origin it is necessary to understand Darwin's personal journey. The book therefore includes much of the material from Browne's earlier works, but in far less detail. Curiously, it does not mention the meticulous way in which Darwin promoted The Origin, by sending copies and carefully worded covering letters to influential people. Also missing is any mention of the purchase of a substantial proportion of the first edition by Mudie's Select Circulating Library, which did much to encourage readership of the (then expensive) book in Victorian England. The final chapter deals with The Origin's fall from grace in the early part of the 20 century, only to be revitalised in the 1940s by the modern synthesis of genetics and natural selection. It also describes the somewhat surprising resurgence of opposition to Darwinism by fundamentalist religious groups in the United States. As Browne points out, although Darwin's ideas were hotly debated in Victorian England, organised opposition from fundamentalist religious groups is very much a late 20 century phenomenon. This an enjoyable book which a teacher could read from cover to cover, but if you've read Janet Browne's biography of Darwin it might prove disappointing; I suspect that the format of this short book is more to blame than the author.


Under the teeming metropolis that is present-day New York City lie the buried remains of long-lost worlds. The remnants of nineteenth-century New York reveal much about its inhabitants and neighbourhoods, from fashionable Washington Square to the notorious Five Points. Underneath there are traces of the Dutch and English colonists who arrived in the area in the seventeenth century, as well as of the Africans they enslaved. And beneath all these layers is the land that Native Americans occupied for hundreds of generations from their first arrival eleven thousand years ago. Now two distinguished archaeologists draw on the results of more than a century of excavations to relate the interconnected stories of these different peoples who shared and shaped the land that makes up the modern city. In treating New York's five boroughs as one enormous archaeological site, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall weave Native American, colonial, and post-colonial history into an absorbing, panoramic narrative. They also describe the work of the archaeologists who uncovered this evidence - nineteenth-century pioneers, concerned citizens, and today's professionals. In the process, Cantwell and Wall raise provocative questions about the nature of cities, urbanisation, the colonial experience, Indian life, the family, and the use of space. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Unearthing Gotham offers a fresh perspective on the richness of the American legacy.


Mass-produced 'fast fashion' has changed our relationship with clothing – cheap and easy to acquire, we are unlikely to take time to undertake simple repairs or address issues of maintenance, often caused or exacerbated by poor construction and low quality materials (see for example Goworek et al., 2012; You Gov, 2012; Fletcher, 2008; Birtwistle & Moore, 2007). Through complete lifecycle assessment, extending the useful life of clothes has been identified as the most significant intervention in reducing the impact of the clothing industry (Wrap, 2012). However, academic research emerging from both the UK and Scandinavia has identified practical, social, socioeconomic, systemic and psychological barriers that prevent consumers from performing even the most basic of repairs, and as a result damaged or worn items are discarded or taken out of active use (see for example Armstrong et al., 2014; Middleton, 2014; Cooper et al., 2014; Fletcher, 2013; Goworek et al., 2012; Laitala & Boks, 2012). This paper explores the barriers to mending, different perspectives on the reasons behind them, suggested solutions and contemporary approaches to overcoming them. As textile designers and academics whose work is embedded in sustainable principles, we discuss the findings of our own practice-based approaches in relation to these, in order to consider the role fashion and textile designers can play in enabling solutions. Research has been gathered through participatory design workshops and public engagement events, informed by review of historical, existing and emerging repair practices, and personal craft-led design praxis. We have explored ways to address the barriers, add value to the acts of repair by re-framing them as social design-led sharing activities, and discuss the potential of participatory craft praxis as a tool to motivate greater public engagement in repair practice.


Our setting is a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process with continuous state, observation and action spaces. Decisions are based on a Particle Filter for estimating the belief state given past observations. We consider a policy gradient approach for parameterized policy optimization. For that purpose, we investigate sensitivity analysis of the performance measure with respect to the parameters of the policy, focusing on Finite Difference (FD) techniques. We show that the naive FD is subject to variance explosion because of the non-smoothness of the resampling procedure. We propose a more sophisticated FD method which overcomes this problem and establish its consistency.


The terms of trade are subject to both permanent and transitory shocks. Particularly for commodity-producing small open economies, it is sometimes argued that the inability of agents to determine which of these shocks are permanent and which are transitory leads to more macroeconomic volatility than would be the case if agents had perfect information about the persistence of these shocks. I set up a small open economy model in which agents have imperfect information about the persistence of terms of trade shocks and estimate the parameters of the model using Australian data. The results point to the existence of large informational frictions. In fact, agents' beliefs about the future path of the terms of trade following transitory and permanent shocks are almost identical. However, the results also suggest that incomplete information causes agents to respond more cautiously to terms of trade shocks. Consequently, consumption, output and the trade balance are less volatile under incomplete information than they are under full information.


Transactional Memory (TM) has been proposed as an alternative concurrency mechanism for the shared memory parallel programming model. Its main goal is to make parallel programming for Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) easier than using the traditional lock synchronization constructs, without compromising the performance and the scalability. This topic has received substantial research attention and several TM designs have been proposed using various TM benchmarks. We believe that the evaluation of TM proposals would be more solid if it included realistic applications, that address on-going TM research issues, and that provide the potential for straightforward comparison against locks.
 In this paper, we introduce RMS-TM, a Transactional Memory benchmark suite composed of seven real-world applications from the Recognition, Mining and Synthesis (RMS) domain. In addition to featuring current TM research issues such as nesting and I/O and system calls inside transactions, the RMS-TM applications also provide a mix of short and long transactions with small/large read and write sets with low/medium/high contention rates. These characteristics, as well as providing lock-based versions of the applications, make RMS-TM a useful TM tool. Current TM benchmarks do not explore all these features. In our evaluation with selected STM and HTM systems, we find that our benchmark suite is also scalable, which is useful for evaluating TM designs on high core counts.


This thesis examines dystopian apocalyptic writing from a comparative perspective through the analysis of six literary texts taken from the last five decades: Har (2006) by Murat Uyurkulak, Animal's People (2007) by Indra Sinha, Galapagos (1985) by Kurt Vonnegut and the MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013) by Margaret Atwood. These texts can all be considered loosely "dystopian" and all follow the traditional religious model of "the apocalypse" to varying degrees, but the thesis concentrates on secular reworkings which problematise apocalyptic configurations of man, nation and progress. It argues for a new interpretation of the apocalypse as neither a nihilistic embrace of total disorder nor an over-investment in the order of social and literary constructs. The first chapter contextualises the notions of dystopia and apocalypse, both as eschaton and telos, by way of the diverse but not unrelated theories of narratology, postmodernism and ecocriticism. It aims to reflect the versatility and openendedness of what has been termed the "apocalyptic paradigm," and develops a comic understanding of apocalypse. Subsequent chapters provide close readings of the novels. Chapter Two focuses on Har and examines how a national narrative can distort, if not exclude, the stories of its ethnic "other." The third chapter discusses Sinha's Animal's People, which tells the story of an environmental apocalypse and its ongoing effects on the less advantaged. The novel revisits the idea of distortion by portraying Animal's physically deformed body as a site of contested narratives. Chapter Four shifts from distorted humans and narratives to the end of humanity and story as depicted by Vonnegut in Galapagos. Vonnegut invests in the power of words to challenge destructive human potential, and thus represents "nothingness," or the post-apocalyptic disappearance of words, as only a pseudo eutopia. The MaddAddam trilogy, the focus of the fifth and final chapter, also plays with the idea of human extinction brought about by hyper-capitalism. Atwood imagines both grim and humorous alternatives to humanity's unsustainable ways, but simultaneously acknowledges the problems inherent in final solutions. Identifying the common ground opened up by these texts for constructive social critique, the thesis shows how their authors adopt novel ways of tackling the idea of the end, and the possibility of future betterment. This eutopian desire is manifest in their comic and counter-apocalyptic representations of the end, and their endeavours to reach beyond the end of representation.


Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a mostly lethal disease which represents the fourth common cause of all deaths related to cancer. The nucleoside analogue gemcitabine constitutes a currently widely used treatment standard both in a palliative and adjuvant setting. However, variability in response to gemcitabine is high with a substantial impact of genetic variations assumed. Two previously identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with the overall survival of gemcitabine treated patients suffering from PDAC were characterized in this thesis concerning the underlying molecular mechanisms: Rs11644322 pertinent to the tumor suppressor gene WWOX, and rs1130609 pertinent to the ribonucleotide reductase RRM2.
A panel of 89 lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) with publicly available genotype information was used as model system to study genomic causes of variable gemcitabine sensitivity. Cytotoxicity of gemcitabine was assessed by flow cytometry-based measurement of proliferation inhibition, and gene expression was determined by quantitative real-time PCR. For extended experiments the pancreatic cancer cell lines AsPC1, MiaPaca-II, PaTu8988t, PancI, and L3.6 were used. Modification of gemcitabine response upon WWOX knock-down by siRNA and shRNA (verified by Western Blotting) or upon WWOX overexpression was ascertained. As the transcription factor SP1 bound to the WWOX rs11644322, overexpression of this factor was conducted and the consequences on WWOX transcription with and without gemcitabine, 5-fluorouracil and irinotecan were studied. Whole transcriptome analysis was determined for gemcitabine effects in AsPC1 and MiaPaca-II cells, in PaTu8988t upon shRNA-mediated WWOX knock down, and in pooled LCLs defined by homozygous wild type and variant allele at the WWOX index SNP site, respectively.
Regarding the molecular mechanisms behind the RRM2 polymorphism, electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA) were performed to discern allele-specific transcription factor binding at rs1130609. An in vitro coupled Transcription/Translation system was utilized to study allele-specific differences regarding protein translation.
In LCLs, cytotoxicity of gemcitabine was reduced in dependence of the number of A alleles at WWOX rs11644322, consistent with the worse prognosis of patients with this allele. No transcripts were detected in close vicinity to rs11644322. However, homozygosity for the AA allele at rs11644322 was accompanied by lower WWOX expression of both, the core coding region and of the last exon, separated by 730 kb. A specific gemcitabine-related correlation was identified in LCLs between transcription of WWOX and the growth arrest and DNA damage-inducible gene GADD45A, which was correlated with increased gemcitabine cytotoxicity.
Whole transcriptome analysis in AsPC1 and MiaPaca-II cells revealed that RRM2 expression increased more strongly than any other protein-coding transcript upon gemcitabine exposure. Quantitative relations of the two RRM2 transcripts differing in the noncoding 5' sequence length revealed the major one amounting to 96 to 99 % of the entire transcript numbers, depending on the cell type. This major RRM2 transcript isoform was also increased upon gemcitabine exposure in LCLs and in peripheral blood of patients subjected to gemcitabine-containing chemotherapy. In EMSA experiments stronger protein binding at the RRM2 rs1130609 G allele (the same allele which was associated with worse prognosis) was identified. However, no impact of this SNP on the transcription of the major RRM2 isoform was seen. In contrast, increased expression of the minor isoform with an extended 5'-region was observed in presence of the T variant allele at rs1130609, intensified upon gemcitabine treatment. Preliminary results for cloned RRM2 suggested less translation efficacy for the T compared to the G allele.
Based on previous data and those of my thesis, mechanistic hypotheses for WWOX and RRM2 are suggested: The variant A allele at the WWOX index SNP might bind SP1 to a lesser extent, resulting in decreased expression probably mediated via interaction with the promoter region by looping. By that, epithelial-mesenchymal transition may be increased resulting in reduced cell proliferation and enhanced resistance to gemcitabine, finally providing a mechanistic basis for worse clinical outcome. Regarding RRM2, phosphorylated gemcitabine can block physiological DNA synthesis resulting in RRM2 transcription induction, primarily of the major variant isoform. In case of the T variant allele at the RRM2 index SNP site, RRM2 protein synthesis is presumed to be impaired, what might stimulate transcription of the minor isoform.
The obtained data provide new insights in functional mechanisms. By corroborating the clinical associations, these data further supported the two predictive SNPs in WWOX and RRM2 as valid biomarkers for gemcitabine-based chemotherapy in PDAC.


This paper explores the process of international cooperation within a scientific community in wartime, focusing on Felix König. He was an Austrian participant in the "Second German Antarctic Expedition" (1911–1912) led by Wilhelm Filchner. Later, he organised his own Antarctic expedition which had much support from leading polar explorers of his time including Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Nordenskjöld and Roald Amundsen. Because of the war, however, König was not allowed to begin his expedition. Instead, he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army, serving in Galicia (Poland). As a result, König became a prisoner of war in Siberia, prompting his mother to contact many of the polar explorers to help her free him. Her attempts, which failed, were not random futile pleadings from a worried mother since she was aware that the science community assisted in attempting to free prisoners. Transnational support of scientists across enemy boundaries was a further example of a civilised attempt to maintain contact despite the war. Members of the international scientific community sent books and other material into camps so that the officers could organise lectures and improve their studies. This became a welcome sign of civilisation for the prisoners who were often surrounded by circumstances of barbarism, food shortages and inadequate medical care. The sources for this study are the original letters, which are now in a private collection, written by the science community and Felix König himself.


Movement has an effect upon the perceived spatial position of moving objects, such that they are not perceived at their instantaneous spatial position. Vision scientists named this phenomenon motion-induced position shift (MIPS). The reason, neural loci, and the mechanisms causing the positional illusion have challenged scientists over the last century.

Nowadays, many vehicles, such as cars, planes and submarines are equipped with onboard computers containing touchscreens. Active controls of those on-board computers require visuomotor-actions, which could be affected by perceptual illusions, but also require time, and attention. Hence, it is becoming more crucial to fully understand how the visual system generates visuomotor-guided actions, and how it copes with visual illusions. Human-machine interactions could be designed such that perceptual illusions would be 1) avoided, or 2) predicted, and considered in human actions, or such that 3) the user interacted with visuomotor actions that resisted visual illusions.

One alternative to finger points towards on-board computers is saccadic eye movements. The saccadic system is very fast, and therefore, would not require as much time and attention as a finger point task towards the touch screen. Saccades are constantly facing the challenge of localising objects, which makes it interesting to study how they cope with visual illusions like the motion-induced position shift.

The purpose of this thesis was to establish if the saccadic system was affected by the motion-induced position shift in the same manner as the perceptual system was affected. I confirmed that movement had an effect upon the perceived spatial position of moving objects in perception-tasks and in volitional saccades. A previous study showed that reflexive saccades resisted the illusion, indicating that they were more accurate than other visually guided actions. I replicated these results, but claimed that the results are not representative. As a consequence, there is no evidence that reflexive saccades do escape the visual illusion while volitional saccades do not.


Evaluation of oral implants involves at least three major components: statistical methods, study design and success criteria. The aims of the current thesis were to investigate how different statistical methods affect the outcome of oral implant treatment and to statistically determine if any dependence among implants placed in the same jaw exists. If so how would that affect the outcome and the type and amount of missing data (withdrawn patients)? Furthermore, the aims were to evaluate patient, implant and treatment characteristics to find possible prognostic factors for implant failure and to study the impact of variances with or without handling dependence using the Jackknife technique. Four prospective multi-centre studies, involving 487 patients and 1738 implants, were pooled to create a database for these elaborations. The database was divided into subgroups based on significant different outcomes regarding implant failures. Four jaw-bone combinations (Combination I-IV) were established, and in study IV Combinations I-III were pooled and compared with Combination IV. Statistical methods used were: life table analyses, confidence intervals, chi tests, step by step multivariate analyses, post hoc analyses, log rank tests and the Jackknife technique. The result of the current statistical investigations demonstrated that dependence among implants placed in the same jaw existed. The impact of missing data was shown to depend on, if the patients were selectively or randomly withdrawn. A random selection could reach at the most 50% without affecting the CSR. However, if the selection was based on e.g. treated jaw, the outcomes were significantly different. Patient characteristics such as jaw, jaw-bone quality, jaw-shape and combination of these factors, and also on implant length and treatment protocol, showed significant differences. Patients with jaw shape D or E and bone-quality 4 were e.g. identified with a significantly higher risk for implant failure than all of the other combinations. Both life table analyses, using CI and log rank tests, demonstrated after the variances were calculated via the Jackknife technique significantly lower success rates for Combination IV. The p-values were "inadequately" stronger, however, when using a log rank test and ignoring the established dependence. Based on these results it was stated that, following established dependence among implants within the same jaw, this should never be ignored when evaluating oral implant outcomes. Two methods were found possible to use to handle this dependence, the "one implant per patient" or the Jackknife technique if variances are part of the evaluation. Missing data is inevitable and will affect the outcome, and therefore a description of the characteristics of withdrawn patients should be presented. Jawcombination IV showed the lowest success rate and would therefore be the most appropriate population to use, when evaluating new improved oral implant systems in order to prove significantly different follow-up outcome.


The objective of the paper is to achieve full utilization of Fructus Choerospondiatis resources, and optimize the extraction process of polyphenols, the active constituents in Fructus Choerospondiatis. Extraction was performed by enzymatic method with total polyphenol content as the investigation indicator, process conditions were optimized using orthogonal design, and the content of gallic acid after enzymatic extraction was determined by HPLC. As results, optimal extraction process of total polyphenols was as follows: extraction time of 2 h, temperature of 65°C, enzyme dosage of 1.5%, pH of 6.0, liquid-solid ratio of 45, and total polyphenol extraction rate of 9.923%. In conclusion, the method presented is simple and feasible, which is superior to conventional solvent extraction methods, and thus can be used as the extraction process of total polyphenols in Fructus Choerospondiatis.


This paper presents Virtual Ring Routing (VRR), a new network routing protocol that occupies a unique point in the design space. VRR is inspired by overlay routing algorithms in Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) but it does not rely on an underlying network routing protocol. It is implemented directly on top of the link layer. VRR provides both raditional point-to-point network routing and DHT routing to the node responsible for a hash table key.VRR can be used with any link layer technology but this paper describes a design and several implementations of VRR that are tuned for wireless networks. We evaluate the performance of VRR using simulations and measurements from a sensor network and an 802.11a testbed. The experimental results show that VRR provides robust performance across a wide range of environments and workloads. It performs comparably to, or better than, the best wireless routing protocol in each experiment. VRR performs well because of its unique features: it does not require network flooding or trans-lation between fixed identifiers and location-dependent addresses.


Abundant, well‐preserved specimens of spheroidal organic‐walled microfossil Yurtusia uniformis are reported from the basal Cambrian Yanjiahe Formation in the Changyang area of Hubei Province, South China. Thin and hollow processes extend between the double walls of the vesicle. The single to multiple internal bodies within the vesicle cavity are observed in the genus for the first time, representing reproductive structures (dividing daughter cells). A small circular perforation may occur on the vesicle wall to release the internal bodies. Morphological analyses of specimens preserved at various life stages reveal that processes gradually became longer as the vesicle grew in size. The internal bodies (daughter cells) underwent several successive divisions within the vesicle, which was accompanied by the simultaneous growth of both vesicle and processes. The regular growth of cells, formation and release of daughter cells, and the remarkable morphological similarity between extant algae and the studied microfossils suggest that Yurtusia uniformis is probably a green microalga that may be closely related to the Trebouxiophyceae or even Chlorellales (Chlorophyta). The growth and reproductive mode of individuals indicates that Y. uniformis is an actively growing vegetative cell of microalgae, rather than a metabolically inert cyst or resting spore. A life cycle involving vegetative growth and asexual reproduction is proposed for Y. uniformis on the basis of the life histories of modern chlorophytes. The multiple internal cells may represent autospores produced by a mature autosporangium during asexual reproduction, which subsequently developed into separate young vegetative cells after their release from the opened autosporangium.


Ten male well trained athletes (mean ± SD; age 35.8 ± 11.3 yrs, stature 176 ± 7.1 cm, total mass 73.8 ± 9.3 kg, VO2peak 4.59 ± 0.8 l/min) not on a weight/fat loss regime (mean energy intake 9.16 ± 2.76 MJ/d) and meeting their daily calcium requirements (mean calcium intake 757 ± 102.07 mg/d) were recruited. Participants were tested using a randomised, single blind, test-retest intervention trial design. After baseline measurements (10TTC1) they were given 1000 mg/d of elemental calcium for 4 weeks and retested (10TTC2). Four out of the ten athletes were retested the following year in the same month without supplementation at baseline (10TTP1) and 4 weeks later (10TTP2) to account for changes in body composition due to training seasons. Body composition was determined using air-displacement plethysmography (Bod Pod Express, Life Measurement Inc. Concord, USA). Mean changes in body composition in both trials are presented in table 1. These changes support previous data on the positive association between calcium intake and fat loss.


This issue of The Future of Children explores childhood disability--its prevalence, nature, treatment, and consequences. With unprecedented numbers of U.S. children now being identified as having special medical and educational needs and with the nation's resources for addressing those needs increasingly constrained, the topic is timely. Public discussion of childhood disability, by the media, parents, scholars, and advocates alike, tends to emphasize particular causes of disability, such as autism, asthma, cystic fibrosis, or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In this volume, however, we focus not on individual disabilities, but rather on cross-cutting themes that apply more broadly to the issue of children with disabilities. To this end, we commissioned a group of experts to review research on childhood disability, including its definition (itself a challenge), its prevalence and trends over time (likewise), and the costs it imposes both on the individual child and on the child's family. Our contributors also consider disability within the context of the nation's educational, health insurance, and medical systems; the impact of emerging technologies on the experience of disability; and the definition of health care quality. The volume concludes with a discussion of the prevention of childhood disability. Themes of the Volume Out of the research presented in this volume, five broad themes emerge. These themes are related to defining and measuring disability; trends in disability; the growing importance of mental relative to physical health; the importance of families; and the fragmentation of services for children with disabilities. Defining Disability and Other Measurement Issues First, it is remarkably difficult to point to a consensus definition of disability. In the opening article of the issue Neal Halfon and Kandyce Larson, both of the University of California-Los Angeles, and Paul Newacheck and Amy Houtrow, both of the University of California-San Francisco, make the case for a definition that highlights the relationship between health, functioning, and the environment. Specifically, the authors propose that a disability be defined as "an environmentally contextualized health-related limitation in a child's existing or emergent capacity to perform developmentally appropriate activities and participate, as desired, in society." Defining disability as a limitation rather than a health condition per se highlights the social and technological context of the individual. In a world with electric wheelchairs, for example, a child with impaired mobility will be less disabled than he or she would be otherwise. It follows then that home and school environments can shape disability and that new technologies can either mitigate or exacerbate disability, as Paul Wise, of Stanford University, discusses in his article on the role of technology. The definition proposed by Halfon, Houtrow, Larson, and Newacheck also emphasizes that disability exists along a continuum and varies across children's ages and functional domains. Until now empirical work on the prevalence of childhood disability has been based on a variety of simpler and more concrete definitions. National surveys that collect information about childhood disabilities, for example, generally ask questions about limitations on activities of daily living; they also usually classify children as disabled if they are receiving services for their limitations. Although the logic behind this latter definition is apparent, it can mean that the number of children counted as having disabilities may expand or contract along with the provision of services. In a similarly problematic way, expanding the number of children with disabilities who are covered by insurance may increase the number of children who have been diagnosed with a particular condition without actually changing the number who suffer from the condition. …