The correlation of Australian output with that of the OECD, and the United States in particular, has been well documented. This paper explores foreign linkages by looking at the production side of the national accounts for Australia and the United States, which is often characterised as the country at the technological frontier. Industrial structures in the two countries are broadly similar, and about two-thirds of Australian output is found to be linked to that of the United States. The US links in the agricultural and mining sectors seem to be related to aggregate demand in the United States, in both the short and long run. But in manufacturing – and notably in goods for which production is technology intensive and changing over time – there are persistent, long-run links with the corresponding sector in the United States. Combined with other evidence, the conjecture is that the US links in manufacturing are driven by the supply-side: technological change, innovation and new products are transmitted from the United States and elsewhere to Australia, mostly within two to three years. Domestic demand seems to dominate service sectors, although US aggregate demand can be relevant, as, for example, in the finance and property sector. While links with the United States are pervasive, domestic events and policies are shown to be important to economic outcomes, particularly in the short to medium term.


Taiwan's legalization of same-sex marriage is an event of international importance concerning the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals and partners; further, it constitutes an opportunity to examine the state of LGBTQ+ equality in Taiwan and elsewhere. To this end, through theoretical and comparative lenses, this Article asks what equality for LGBTQ+ means and what comes after marriage. It offers perspectives on the past, present, and future of the intersection of same-sex marriage and equality. Looking at the path to same-sex marriage in Taiwan, the Article argues that the Taiwanese Constitutional Court's ruling legalizing same-sex marriage maintained a line between domesticated liberty for LGBTQ+ people, on the one hand, and limits on that population's liberty to form families, on the other. The law that implemented the ruling kept this tension; hence, it enfolds discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals, especially in the area of family formation. But Taiwan is not exceptional in holding onto parentage discrimination after legalization of same-sex marriage. The European perspective teaches that discrimination in parentage remains after legalization but disappears over time. Experience from elsewhere also clarifies that the fight for equal parental rights can be difficult, and that much opposition to LGBTQ+ equality is embedded in biases related to LGBTQ+ parenting and in racism.

Finally, moving to explore future paths to parity, the Article contends that, for various reasons including those indicated above, marriage cannot serve as the final frontier of LGBTQ+ equality. Substantive equality in Taiwan requires, at the least, the repeal of adultery as a grounds for divorce and for civil remedies. A broader view of equality and autonomy also warrants adopting a regime in which marriage is not the only mechanism to access rights and benefits that are linked to relationships of interdependency. Likewise, creating more options for legal recognition of relationships is imperative for individuals in diverse types of relationships, and for LGBTQ+ individuals in particular. Lastly, the Article suggests that discrimination that currently exists in the area of obligations toward parents-in-law has a liberating aspect.

The Taiwanese experience is a teaching moment for LGBTQ+ movements and scholars around the globe. It calls on other scholars to avoid generalizations in framing paths to liberty and equality by being sensitive to local differences, and to reconsider the place of marriage as the golden standard of LGBTQ+ equality.


This thesis is based on a number of theoretical studies of molecular processes in which non-adiabatic effects play a crucial role. The main part is devoted to the photophysics and photochemistry of five-membered aromatic heterocyclic compounds, with particular focus on furan and thiophene. These species absorb light in the UV region of the spectrum, but exhibits neither fluorescence nor phosphorescence. A plausible explanation for this is the presence of very fast radiationless deactivation mechanisms that depopulate the excited states before emission can occur. In the present thesis, several possible such mechanisms are considered based on the results of static electronic structure calculations as well as mixed quantum-classical dynamics simulations. A common feature of the investigated pathways is the presence of easily accessible conical intersections (surface crossings) through which non-adiabatic population transfer to the electronic ground state may take place. Also considered in the present work are the bond-breaking/bond-forming processes that are expected to follow once the ground state has been reached. Another prominent example of non-adiabatic processes is charge recombination reactions involving either two oppositely charged ions or a cation and an electron. Here, the reactants and products belong to different electronic states of the system as a whole and therefore a non-adiabatic transition is necessary for the recombination to occur. Two such processes are considered in the present thesis; mutual neutralization of oppositely charged hydrogen ions and dissociative recombination of the formyl and iso-formyl cations. The cross sections (rate coefficients) and underlying mechanisms of these reactions are investigated at a fully quantum mechanical level.


Concrete, both precast and in situ, is frequently the first choice, and sometimes the only choice, for the designers of civil engineering projects. In the residential sector however, concrete experiences stronger competition from other materials such as masonry, steel and timber. Although precast concrete is a mature and developed industry, in the residential sector in particular it is frequently categorised as a MMC, or Modern Method of Construction. This categorisation has both positive and negative effects for precast as a construction technique for the residential sector. Historical events have also shaped the image and perception of reinforced concrete for housing amongst the public as well as the design fraternity.
This paper discusses the relative position and image of precast concrete in the residential sector amongst clients (including the public), designers, producers, contractors and other stakeholders in the construction supply chain. Historical events such as the Ronan Point collapse are outlined. The results of a recent market survey by Loughborough University1 on the views of the supply chain regarding offsite applications (including precast concrete) are compared and contrasted with a similar study undertaken by Robert Gordon University2. Results presented and discussed include the demand for offsite, the limitations to expansion and the different industry sectors perception of the advantages and disadvantages (both perceived and real) of offsite compared with traditional construction.


Recent NATO funded research on methods for detection and interpretation methodologies for damage detection in aircraft panel structures has motivated work on low-order nonlinear analytical modelling of vibrations in cracked isotropic plates, typically in the form of aluminium aircraft panels. The work applies fundamental aspects of fracture mechanics to define an elliptical crack, and the local stress field and loading conditions, arbitrarily located at some point in the plate, and then derives an analytical expression for this that can be incorporated into the PDE for an edge loaded plate with various possible boundary conditions. The plate PDE is converted into a nonlinear Duffing-type ODE in the time domain by means of a Galerkin procedure and then an arbitrarily small perturbation parameter is introduced into the equation in order to apply an appropriate solution method, in this case the method of multiple scales. This is used to solve the equation for the vibration in the cracked plate for the chosen boundary conditions, which, in turn, leads to an approximate analytical solution. The solution is discussed in terms of the perturbation approximations that have been applied and highlights the phenomenology inherent within the problem via the specific structures of the analytical solution.


In March 2009,Oxford Archaeology (OA), in conjunction with Time Team, excavated a series of Archaeological Trenches within the grounds of Hampton Court Palace. The work was commissioned by Videotext in advance of the production of a Time Team Special concerning Henry VIII's Palaces.
A total of eight trenches were excavated. These were located through a combination of documentary research and the results of geophysical survey. The first three
trenches were targeted on the assumed site of Henry VIII's northern bowling alley.
The subsequent five trenches investigated the likely positions of four 'lost' towers within the area of Henry's Tiltyard. The eastern foundation wall of Henry's bowling alley was revealed running through Trenches 1, 2 and 3 with later, additional buttress foundations uncovered in both
Trenches 1 and 3. In Trench 1 a possible western wall to the structure was also identified beneath the existing garden wall. Evidence for the demolition and robbing
of material from the bowling alley structure prior to re-landscaping of the area wasfound throughout the three trenches.
In the Tiltyard area, the remains of two of the historic Tiltyard Towers were identified. In Trench 4, A north-south aligned foundation wall was recorded on the postulated site of the North-East Tower, the twin to the sole surviving South-East Tower. The foundation had been re-used for the extant garden wall. Trench 6 yielded the north-south alignment of a further Tower foundation, possibly that of the South-West Tower. The facing of this foundation had been removed in a robbing episode and the area re-landscaped.. Trenches 2 and 6 revealed evidence of later, possibly 17th-18th-century garden
features in addition to Tudor structural features. Trenches 7 and 8 revealed only evidence of probable 17th-18th-century garden features in the form of planting
beds. Trench 5 contained no significant archaeological features or deposits.
©


Many geographical parameters have to be taken into account when choosing the site for a solar thermal power plant. The direct normal radiation level should be high. The wind climatology is acceptable if the percentage of strong winds is low. To provide the back up energy, the plant should be close to the existing natural gas distribution network. Proximity of the national grid is also required to transport the electric energy production to the consumers. A flat land with an area of at least 150 ha with road access is required for a 80 MW solar plant. The availability of water for the cooling of the Rankine cycle should be checked. We present here a decision support tool based on a GIS software that takes into account these geographical parameters. We applied the methodology in Tunisia to validate the siting of a new solar power plant at Skhira and to study the variation of the electricity cost.


For over a decade, contracts literature has focused on standardization. Scholars asked how terms become standard, and why they change so rarely. This line of inquiry painted a world where a standard term persists until it is dislodged by another standard term, perhaps after a brief window of ferment before the second term takes hold. It also overshadowed the early insights of boilerplate theories, which described contracts as a mix of standard and customized terms, and asked why the mix might be suboptimal. This article brings the focus back to the mix. It examines the development of selected provisions in sovereign bond contracts after a widely publicized boilerplate shift in 2003. The adoption of collective action clauses in sovereign bonds five years ago moved the documentation standard in New York closer to the prevailing practice in London. However, contrary to expectations, the shift away from old boilerplate did not lead to convergence around new boilerplate. Issuers in London and, to a lesser extent, in New York, have been experimenting with diverse formulations and institutional arrangements, including trustees and creditor committees. The contracts we study, as well as our interviews with practitioners and officials, suggest that standardization may be a matter of degree, that the degree of standardization may vary across different markets, and that a shock of the sort that led the 2003 shift may dislodge a previously standard term without replacing it with a new standard - erstwhile boilerplate becomes a platform for customization.


One of the most well-known binary (discrete) versions of the artificial bee colony algorithm is the similarity measure based discrete artificial bee colony, which was first proposed to deal with the uncapacited facility location (UFLP) problem. The discrete artificial bee colony simply depends on measuring the similarity between the binary vectors through Jaccard coefficient. Although it is accepted as one of the simple, novel and efficient binary variant of the artificial bee colony, the applied mechanism for generating new solutions concerning to the information of similarity between the solutions only consider one similarity case i.e. it does not handle all similarity cases. To cover this issue, new solution generation mechanism of the discrete artificial bee colony is enhanced using all similarity cases through the genetically inspired components. Furthermore, the superiority of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by comparing it with the basic discrete artificial bee colony, binary particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm in dynamic (automatic) clustering, in which the number of clusters is determined automatically i.e. it does not need to be specified in contrast to the classical techniques. Not only evolutionary computation based algorithms, but also classical approaches such as fuzzy C-means and K-means are employed to put forward the effectiveness of the proposed approach in clustering. The obtained results indicate that the discrete artificial bee colony with the enhanced solution generator component is able to reach more valuable solutions than the other algorithms in dynamic clustering, which is strongly accepted as one of the most difficult NP-hard problem by researchers.


Validity of self-reported body mass index among middle-aged participants in the norwegian Women and Cancer study guri skeie 1 nicolle Mode Background: Body mass index (BMI) based on self-reported height and weight has been criticized as being biased because of an observed tendency for overweight and obese people to overestimate height and underestimate weight, resulting in higher misclassification for these groups. We examined the validity of BMI based on self-reported values in a sample of Norwegian women aged 44–64 years. Methods: The study sample of 1,837 participants in the Norwegian Women and Cancer study self-reported height and weight, and then, within 1 year, either self-reported anthropometric again, or were measured by medical staff. Demographic and anthropometric were compared using t-tests and chi-square tests of independence. Misclassification of BMI categories was assessed by weighted Cohen's kappa and Bland–Altman plot. Results: On average, the two measurements were taken 8 months apart, and self-reported weight increased by 0.6 kg (P,0.05), and BMI by 0.2 kg/m 2 (P,0.05). The distribution of BMI categories did not differ between self-reported and measured values. There was substantial agreement between self-reported values and those measured by medical staff (weighted kappa 0.73). Under-reporting resulting in misclassification of BMI category was most common among overweight women (36%), but the highest proportion of extreme under-reporting was found in obese women (18% outside the 95% limits of agreement). The cumulative distribution curves for the measured and self-reported values closely followed each other, but measurements by medical staff were shifted slightly toward higher BMI values. Conclusion: While there was substantial agreement between self-reported and measured BMI values, there was small but statistically significant under-reporting of weight and thus self-reported BMI. The tendency to under-report was largest among overweight women, while the largest degree of under-reporting was found in the obese group. Self-reported weight and height provide a valid ranking of BMI for middle-aged Norwegian women.


BACKGROUND
Several case series and reports describe paraphilia as occurring after brain damage, mostly in the frontal lobes and diencephalic structures. Hypersexuality and paraphilic behaviors are also documented in a variety of other neurologic disorders, (e.g., Kluver Bucy syndrome, and more rarely in multiple sclerosis). In multiple sclerosis, hypersexual behavior and paraphilias have been associated with various focal brain lesions in the frontal and temporal lesions when inflammatory demyelination involves the hypothalamus and septal regions.

CASE REPORT
A case of a patient who developed a particular and progressive sexual deviant behaviour after a head trauma. This men felt sexually aroused from seeing sleeping women as well as from taking care of their hands and nails while they were asleep. The patient was diagnosed with a moderate dysexecutive syndrome characteristic of a frontal disorder and a very specific parietal-related bodily self image disorder characterized by an incomplete mental image of his hands. The clinical hypothesis was that the paraphilia might be related to his post-traumatic disturbed bodily self image and more specifically to its related impulsive needs to complete his hands representation.

CONCLUSIONS
This case report highlights the potential link between paraphilia, deviant and aggressive sexual behaviour, neurological disturbance and self-representation. The treatment of paraphilias remains very complex, and requires taking into account not only the social and psychological aspects of the disease, but also its organic dimensions.


Current psychological accounts of causal representation and reasoning do not capture phenomena related to causation by omission (e.g., "The absence of breathing causes death"), with one exception (Wolff, Barbey, & Hausknecht, 2010). We describe a novel theory of omissive causation that posits that people build discrete mental simulations – mental models – of causal relations (Goldvarg & Johnson-Laird 2001). The theory states that causes by omission refer to a set of temporally ordered models of possibilities. Reasoners tend to focus on only one of those models, i.e., the possibility in which breathing does not occur and death subsequently does. Likewise, the theory posits that reasoners distinguish between omission in the context of causation, enabling conditions, and prevention. We describe some initial predictions made by the model-based account, contrast it with an alternative psychological theory based on the transmission of causal forces, and set out directions for further research.


Detailed studies have been carried out for various dopants on the coupling length (L) of the two fundamental modes of orthogonal polarization to preserve a state of linear polarization over long lengths. Theoretical calculations indicate that L < 2.3 mm is essential to maintain good polarization. Two fundamental single polarization fibers, the elliptical-core and elliptical-clad fibers, have been prepared by CVD. Experimental results show that a B2O3 dopant yields a substantially large anisotropic birefringence than does GeO2 and P2O5. The effects of noncircularity and normalized frequency of the fiber on L have been experimentally considered.


The impact of the sharpness of the AlGaN/GaN interface in high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) is investigated. Two structures, one with an optimized AlGaN/GaN interface and another with an unoptimized, were grown using hot-wall metal-organic chemical vapor deposition. The structure with optimized sharpness of the interface shows electron mobility of 1760 cm2/V · s as compared with 1660 cm2/V · s for the nonoptimized interface. Gated Hall measurements indicate that the sharper interface maintains higher mobility when the electrons are close to the interface compared with the nonoptimized structure, indicating less scattering due to alloy disorder and interface roughness. HEMTs were processed and evaluated. The higher mobility manifests as lower parasitic resistance yielding a better dc and high-frequency performance. A small-signal equivalent model is extracted. The results indicate a lower electron penetration into the buffer in the optimized sample. Pulsed-IV measurements imply that the sharper interface provides less dispersive effects at large drain biases. We speculate that the mobility enhancement seen AlGaN/AlN/GaN structures compared with the AlGaN/GaN case is not only related to the larger conduction band offset but also due to a more welldefined interface minimizing scattering due to alloy disorder and interface roughness.


Junk e-mail or spam is rapidly choking off e-mail as a reliable and efficient means of communication over the Internet. Although the demand for human attention increases rapidly with the volume of information and communication, the supply of attention hardly changes. Markets are a social institution for efficiently allocating supply and demand of scarce resources. Charging a price for sending messages may help discipline senders from demanding more attention than they are willing to pay for. Price may also credibly inform recipients about the value of a message to the sender before they read it. This article examines economic approaches to the problem of spam and the results of two laboratory experiments to explore the consequences of a pricing system for electronic mail. Charging postage for e-mail causes senders to be more selective and to send fewer messages. However, recipients did not interpret the postage paid by senders as a signal of the importance of the messages. These results suggest that markets for attention have the potential for addressing the problem of spam but their design needs further development and testing.


Successful Supply Chain Management (SCM) depends on how well an organization performs internal and external communications with trading partners, executes the logistics component, and understands/monitors related costs of conducting its business. The use of information technology (IT) is considered a prerequisite for the effective control of today's complex supply chains. Increased communication technology has redefined how businesses work together, raised customer expectations, and placed new demands on supply chain performance. IT components with proven and rapid return-on-investment are favored to support critical supply chain processes such as leaner manufacturing processes, consumer-driven supply chains, and customer responsiveness. The use of IT in the digital era has become critical and it is treated as a major competitive tool for success. Complex and comprehensive IT infrastructures support the firm's communications network, databases, and operating systems. Information technology facilitates the creation of value. However, the creation of value is defined by the different groups of stakeholders. Therefore, stakeholders must be integrated into this process of change management that uses IT as the enabler.
Supply chains are due to change when higher levels of performance and/or adaptation are required as mandated by changes in the business structure and/or benchmarking and/or regulations. One of the major problems for any supply chain executive is to understand and manage these changes. These changes usually require the implementation of an IT project. Therefore, the successful design, execution, and completion of these IT projects are important for the supply chain. SCM is now a strategic function addressed at the highest levels of the organization in concert with multiple stakeholders on both the supplier and customer side of the table.
The aim of this dissertation is to develop a value mapping framework involving stakeholders to improve supply chain performance when implementing IT projects. The framework has components that help define the supply chain, measure the size of the issues, identify necessary changes in the metrics to improve performance, measure the organizational consequences of these changes, and develop and follow a plan to implement IT projects to achieve the new goals of performance. Through this new framework, these IT projects will be able to bring the supply chain from a current state "As is" to a future state "To be"; capturing the existing and desired states of the proposed changes which are aligned with the objectives and goals of the organization. Therefore, the IT project can be designed, executed, and completed. One unique component of this framework is the inclusion of the stakeholders at different stages. This framework identifies the group of stakeholders to be taken into consideration in order to define the future "To be" state. In addition, the framework identifies the value creation of the "To be" system as seen by the stakeholders.


We present a systematic comparison of the main figures of merit for an open‐air radio telescope and two different types of enclosed antennas: (1) an ordinary radome, with a metal space frame providing the required mechanical rigidity and a dielectric membrane, and (2) an "astrodome," i.e., a corotating rigid dome with a large window covered by a tensile membrane structure. The analysis is limited to submillimeter and millimeter wavelengths and large (≳30 m) antenna/enclosure systems, where the window tensile structure is very unlikely to be removable and is supported by either a metal space frame or cable networks. As compared with previous studies of this type, here we concentrate on the specific effects that these large metallic support structures have on sensitive astronomical observations. In particular, we critically discuss how the wind‐induced random motions of the metal space frame can limit the sensitivity of continuum observations, as a result of fluctuating shadowing and spillover effects combined with various beam‐chopping techniques. Using the Large Millimeter Telescope as a benchmark, we provide baselines for future projects where a similar comparison is needed.


Background speech is annoying and distracting when working on tasks that require focus, and according to previous research, background speech is a common cause of reduced work performance. According to the interference-by-process theory, distraction is a function of the similarity between the processes involved in the involuntary analysis of the background speech and the voluntary processes involved in the task. In view of this theory, a similarity in language—between the produced language and the language that is listened to—may increase the magnitude of distraction by background chatter in comparison with when the language which is produced is different from the language that is perceived. The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate whether work performance—as indexed by writing fluency (WF)—varies depending on the similarity between the language that is heard in the background and the language that is produced. The experiment had a within-participants design with two factors: language to-be-produced (Swedish vs. English) and language of the background speech (Swedish vs. English). The sample constituted of 43 university students, with Swedish as native language. The result showed a main effect of language to-be-produced: WF increased when the participants produced text in their native language compared to text production in their second language. No main effect of language of background speech was found, and no interaction between these two factors was revealed.


When a target is presented with nearby flankers in the peripheral visual field, it becomes harder to identify, which is referred to as crowding. Crowding sets a fundamental limit of object recognition in peripheral vision, preventing us from fully appreciating cluttered visual scenes. We trained adult human subjects on a crowded orientation discrimination task and investigated whether crowding could be completely eliminated by training. We discovered a two-stage learning process with this training task. In the early stage, when the target and flankers were separated beyond a certain distance, subjects acquired a relatively general ability to break crowding, as evidenced by the fact that the breaking of crowding could transfer to another crowded orientation, even a crowded motion stimulus, although the transfer to the opposite visual hemi-field was weak. In the late stage, like many classical perceptual learning effects, subjects' performance gradually improved and showed specificity to the trained orientation. We also found that, when the target and flankers were spaced too finely, training could only reduce, rather than completely eliminate, the crowding effect. This two-stage learning process illustrates a learning strategy for our brain to deal with the notoriously difficult problem of identifying peripheral objects in clutter. The brain first learned to solve the "easy and general" part of the problem (i.e., improving the processing resolution and segmenting the target and flankers) and then tackle the "difficult and specific" part (i.e., refining the representation of the target).


Watershed studies across the northeastern United States have shown that stream losses of SO42− exceed atmospheric sulfur (S) deposition. Understanding the processes responsible for this additional source of S is critical to quantifying ecosystem response to ongoing and potential future controls on SO2 emission. An integrated biogeochemical model, PnET-BGC, was used to investigate inputs and dynamics of S in a northern hardwood forest at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF), New Hampshire, USA. The changes in soil S pools and stream-water SO42− were simulated to assess the response to both atmospheric S deposition and forest clear-cutting disturbances. Model simulation using the measured dry-to-bulk deposition ratio of 0.21 resulted in an underprediction of soil S pools and stream-water SO42− concentrations in the biogeochemical reference watershed (Watershed 6). However, the depiction of biotic processes (e.g., plant uptake, mineralization) in the model reduced the discrepancy in stream SO42− concentration between measured and model predicted value by ∼50% compared to a previous modeling effort that only considered abiotic processes. Long-term simulations (∼150 yr) indicated that elevated anthropogenic S deposition has increased stream SO42− concentrations and enhanced the incorporation of S in adsorbed SO42− and organic S soil pools. Following the implementation of the 1970 and 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act, decreases in S deposition resulted in the net release of S from soil pools, including soil organic S. Model simulation of forest clear-cutting of Watershed 5 at the HBEF showed that NO3− leaching and associated acidification following this disturbance increased adsorption of SO42− to soil. Compared to the reference watershed, stream-water SO42− concentrations were slightly higher, and soil adsorbed SO42− pools were substantially higher in the clear-cut watershed 4–5 yr after disturbance. Simulation of stable S isotopes showed that fractionation associated with the mineralization of soil organic S might explain the depletion in 34S observed between throughfall and stream water in the reference watershed. There is a need for further research on: (1) the rates of dry S deposition and (2) the rate of weathering of various minerals and the isotopic composition of these minerals in order to fully assess the discrepancy (i.e., greater export of S than can be accounted for by atmospheric deposition) in watershed S mass balances. The results of forecasts of the future response to anticipated decreases in S deposition are highly dependent on the nature of this additional source of S to forest watersheds. However, the large size and relatively long turnover time of soil organic S pools compared to adsorbed SO42− pools suggest that a model depicting only abiotic processes will not be suitable for predicting the long-term recovery of stream water from acidification by atmospheric deposition in northern forests.


This article was originally published as a piece in the "The Network of Centers Collection" on  medium.com. You can read the original post here.  The COVID 19 pandemic challenges society and its institutions. Science is particularly affected by    the crisis, as it is expected to contribute with expertise to the solution of the problem. As serious  as the crisis will be for the global community, it is an exciting time for science and a sociologist of   science like me. Because while science is busy solving a problem, it inevitably changes.  Sometimes change can be so dramatic that it is hard to tell disaster from opportunity. What I ask   myself is: How does the crisis affect the nature of knowledge creation and dissemination? What   will the new normal look like?


In their recent paper on "Challenges in mathematical cognition", Alcock and colleagues (Alcock et al. [2016]. Challenges in mathematical cognition: A collaboratively-derived research agenda. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 2, 20-41) defined a research agenda through 26 specific research questions. An important dimension of mathematical cognition almost completely absent from their discussion is the cultural constitution of mathematical cognition. Spanning work from a broad range of disciplines – including anthropology, archaeology, cognitive science, history of science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology – we argue that for any research agenda on mathematical cognition the cultural dimension is indispensable, and we propose a set of exemplary research questions related to it.


We elicited the production of various types of relative clauses in a group of German-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in order to test the movement optionality account of grammatical difficulty in SLI. The results show that German-speaking children with SLI are impaired in relative clause production compared to typically developing children. The alternative structures that they produce consist of simple main clauses, as well as nominal and prepositional phrases produced in isolation, sometimes contextually appropriate, and sometimes not. Crucially for evaluating the movement optionality account, children with SLI produce very few instances of embedded clauses where the relative clause head noun is pronounced in situ; in fact, such responses are more common among the typically developing child controls. These results underscore the difficulty German-speaking children with SLI have with structures involving movement, but provide no specific support for the movement optionality account.


PIIC has begun to design and implement a program of study for mentors, coaches and school leaders. The program of study will include offerings statewide and regionally. The range of offerings are amended continually in accord with participant needs. Initially, participants are drawn from selected IUs, and will expand to a larger base as programs are evaluated and revised after the early versions are completed.


We propose a fast calculation method for diffraction to nonplanar surfaces using the fast-Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm. In his method, the diffracted wavefront on a cylindrical surface is expressed as a convolution between the point response function and the spatial distribution of objects wherein the convolution is calculated using FFT. The principle of the fast calculation and the simulation results are presented.


Innovative capability is widely seen to be the driving force in building regional competitive advantage. The present paradigm emphasises the interactive nature of the innovative processes, which sets demands on building regional innovation environment. There are certain theoretical frameworks and concepts that are considered to help in analysing the creation of regional innovative capability in the present networked development environment: social capital, regional innovation system, innovative milieu, learning economy, network leadership, creative tension, etc. These concepts are partly overlapping, but each of them gives different contribution for regional development strategies. Regional innovative capability is understood as firms? and other organisations? common innovative capability in a region. Therefore, it is formed of innovative capability of individual actors and innovation networks taking part in the regional innovation system. This combined innovative capability is, at its best, a lot more than the sum of individual parts of the system, mainly because of the achieved externalities in the networks. Network skills of the actors and mutual trust among the actors are often emphasised as assets for regional innovative capability, especially because of the often complex nature of multi-actor, interactive innovative processes. The concept of social capital is gaining importance in regional research. The concept has no commonly accepted definition, but usually it is understood as a specific form of capital, that is derived from social relations, norms, values and interaction within a community. Trust is often considered to the most important social mechanism creating social capital. It is widely accepted that social capital plays an important role in creating regional innovative capability. However, it is still far from clear what this role exactly is, and its relation to other relevant concepts has not been deeply examined. The current article is an attempt to clarify the conceptual framework related to the concept of social capital in the context of regional development. Another focus of the article is set on assessing the special contribution of social capital (in comparison with the other related concepts) in increasing regional innovative capability. Therefore, the main objectives of the article are: - to analyse the concept of social capital and its relation to other relevant concepts in the context of regional development, and - to explain the role of social capital in building regional innovative capability. A regional innovation system is essentially an unstable field of actors: their values, interests and purposes may differ significantly. Therefore, social capital cannot be based solely on shared values and purposes. We will argue that social capital is best understood as a formation of resources embedded in the social relations of the network. These resources can have their origin in the structural constitution of the network, trust-based relations between actors, or cognitive and emotional commitments to common goals or beliefs. This conception leads us to understand that social capital may play various different roles in the creation of regional innovative capability.


Introduction Buddhist Studies has, for well over a century, been seen by many in the academy as the domain of philologists and others whose skills are essentially in the translation and interpretation of texts derived from ancient languages like classical Chinese, Pali, Sanskrit, and its hybrid variations, together with the commentarial tradition that developed alongside it. Only in the last thirty-five years has there been an increasing number of theses, journal articles, and other academic texts that have seriously addressed the developments of a Western Buddhism as opposed to Buddhism in the West. As Prebish (2002:66) attests, based on his own 1975 experience of teaching Buddhism in the United States, "Even a casual perusal of the most popular books used as texts in introductory courses on Buddhism at that time reveals that Western Buddhism was not included in the discipline called Buddhist Studies." Fundamentally, this paper addresses Buddhist identity in contemporary settings, and asks what it means to be Buddhist in the West today. This is the overarching theme of my doctoral research into socially engaged Buddhism in the United Kingdom, which addresses the question of how socially engaged Buddhism challenges the notion of what it means to be Buddhist in the twenty-first century. The scope of this paper is to portray part of that work, and, in so doing, it suggests methodological approaches for students of Western Buddhism, using my research into the identity of socially engaged Buddhists in the United Kingdom as a case study. It is, however, divided into three themes. First, it presents socially engaged Buddhism and the difficulties that it presents to Western Buddhist Studies in the areas of identity, authenticity, and validity. Second, it delineates an assessment of the sub-discipline that has become the study of Western Buddhism in the United States, and its significance for the United Kingdom. In that context it addresses, briefly, the question of a globalized Western Buddhism, and, having made a case for it, explores a number of recent findings in U.S. scholarship, drawing on parallels with my own research. Finally, it examines how Western Buddhism is interpreted using sociological methods of investigation and suggests an ethnographic style of investigation appropriate for researchers in the field. As part of the case study evidence, I draw on the preliminary findings of a survey of socially engaged Buddhists conducted in the United Kingdom. Sociology, when applied to studies of Buddhist groups and organizations (lay or monastic, ethnic or convert, or in combination), seeks to answer questions relative to both the place of Western Buddhism in contemporary society and what it means to be Buddhist in that environment. Of concern to scholars in the United States, and me, in my research, are questions about the nature of Western Buddhist identity. Queen (1999:xiv), indicates, in his description of Western Buddhism, that it can be seen as "religious identities in transition." The question of identity is key in assessing what Hinnells (1997b:64) infers when he claims, "A religion is what it has become." It is at this theme of identity in transition that (in part) my research is aimed. The debate addresses a number of phenomena that supports the notion of changing Buddhist identities in the West, which takes account of the sociocultural transmission of Buddhism into Western cultures. The apolitical, otherworldly stereotypes presented by Weber (1958) and others are not a feature of an engaged Buddhist worldview, which embraces social and political cultures, and acts out a Buddhist lifestyle challenging the moral and ethical infrastructure of society from a number of standpoints. Not least from the perspectives of human rights, ecology, and social degradation, as well as moral and ethical positions taken in relation to war and peace, including arms trading and the proliferation of the seeming "armed enforcement of democracy" in the world, as highlighted by the unprecedented Buddhist support for the "stop the war" campaign in the United Kingdom over the Iraq war. …


This paper studies the impact of mobility on the power consumption of wireless networks. With increasing mobility, we show that the network should dedicate a non negligible fraction of the useful rate to estimate the different degrees of freedom. In order to keep the rate constant, we quantify the increase of power required for several cases of interest. In the case of a point to point MIMO link, we calculate the minimum transmit power required for a target rate and outage probability as a function of the coherence time and the number of antennas. Interestingly, the results show that there is an optimal number of antennas to be used for a given coherence time and power consumption. This provides a lower bound limit on the minimum power required for maintaining a green network.


Commercial time of flight depth camera such as the Kinect v2 have been shown to perform underwater for 3D scene reconstruction of underwater objects. However, to incorporate the additional noise and incorporating effect of refraction due to the change in the imaging medium, a customized user implementation of the underlying scene reconstruction algorithms with the additional developed filters needs to be developed. This paper presents the details and performance of such a graphical user interface developed for Kinect v2. The GUI is a customized implementation of the Kinect Fusion framework, and incorporates underwater camera calibration, noise filtering, time of flight correction and refraction correction filters developed to adapt Kinect Fusion for 3D scene reconstruction in an underwater environment. Details of the user interface and the effect of various sub-functions and additional correction filters on the performance of Kinect Fusion reconstruction are discussed in detail.


Direct methods have shown promise on visual odometry and SLAM, leading to greater accuracy and robustness over feature-based methods. However, offline 3-d reconstruction from internet images has not yet benefited from a joint, photometric optimization over dense geometry and camera parameters. Issues such as the lack of brightness constancy, and the sheer volume of data, make this a more challenging task. This work presents a framework for jointly optimizing millions of scene points and hundreds of camera poses and intrinsics, using a photometric cost that is invariant to local lighting changes. The improvement in metric reconstruction accuracy that it confers over feature-based bundle adjustment is demonstrated on the large-scale Tanks & Temples benchmark. We further demonstrate qualitative reconstruction improvements on an internet photo collection, with challenging diversity in lighting and camera intrinsics.


Appropriately constructed measures of the quality of life and the quality of the business environment should be important determinants of the growth and composition of population across urban areas. This paper examines that question by extending theoretical measures of household quality of life to construct the first ever measure of the quality of the business environment ? the value that firms place on the basket of amenities in a metropolitan area. An annual panel of quality of life and quality of business environment values for 37 cities in the United States is then constructed for the 1977 to 1995 period. A key finding is that many cities attractive to firms are unattractive to households, and vice versa. In addition, estimates from an error correction model (ECM) indicate that improvements in the quality of the business environment and quality of life have strong positive effects on equilibrium city shares of workers, but negative effects on equilibrium city shares of retirees. The former result reflects outward shifts of labor supply and demand in response to improved amenities. The latter is because retirees avoid high land rents that arise from the in-migration of firms and workers. Moreover, following a shock that creates migratory pressures in the system of cities, worker-population shares converge back to long run equilibrium in 8-1/2 years, while retiree-population shares converge back in 6 years. The longer response time of the worker population likely reflects the cost of adjusting the spatial distribution of industry-specific human and physical capital in a coordinated manner.


In the years 2000-2005, positive changes relating to the equipment of rural areas of Poland were noted, both with respect to selected elements of technical infrastructure and to fixed assets. An existing disproportion between particular groups of households and cities is still visible. The assessment of the issues related to health condition of the rural population is very complex, as it includes not only hygiene, medical treatment, prevention and nutrition, but also questions related to culture and living and working conditions in rural areas. Such factors as individual resistance and genetic predispositions of individuals must not be left out either. It seems that at present the most important issue is the pro-health education of the rural communities. This results from the fact that more and more the health condition and health predispositions of the society are conditioned upon the general social and economic development, which translates to the educational achievements of the society.


Foreign aid provides a windfall of resources to recipient countries and may result in the same rent seeking behavior as documented in the "curse of natural resources" literature. In this paper we discuss this effect and document its magnitude. Using data for 108 recipient countries in the period 1960 to 1999, we find that foreign aid has a negative impact on democracy. In particular, if the foreign aid over GDP that a country receives over a period of five years reaches the 75 percentile in the sample, then a 10-point index of democracy is reduced between 0.6 and one point, a large effect. For comparison, we also measure the effect of oil rents on political institutions. The fall in democracy if oil revenues reach the 75 percentile is smaller, (0.02). Aid is a bigger curse than oil. JEL: O11, O19, O16


Olsonian theory supposes that when labor unions are organized in an encompassing manner at the industrial and national levels, they can better prevent collective action problems and bring about more stable industrial relations. This theory regards the encompassing labor organization as a positive institution. However, the Korean case shows weak theoretical and empirical relevance for the proposition, as institutionalized talks between government, business, and labor did not contribute to establishing stability in industrial relations. In some respects, the situation only worsened. The Korean case therefore suggests that the optimistic propositions of encompassing organizations of labor require a careful reassessment. Key words: South Korea, economic development in East Asia, industrial relations Introduction The East Asian developmental state model that achieved industrialization through the state's strategic intervention has been challenged since the late 1990s by the neo-liberal paradigm, which emphasizes free markets and comparative advantage in international trade. East Asian states enforced market-oriented policies to create a more flexible labor market and a more competitive corporate structure. In the case of Japan, however, the unemployment rate increased owing to the corporate structural adjustment drive implemented during its long-term depression in the 1990s, which made employment and subsistence of labor the focal point of industrial relations. In an attempt to overcome the crisis, the employers' organization and the federation of unions reached an agreement on the stability of employment.1 It has been argued that the joint consultation system based upon harmony and cooperation contributed to the stabilization of industrial relations and the recovery of the economy in Japan. What about the case of Korea? The Kim Dae-jung government (1998-2003) initiated a social pact between the government, business, and labor in an attempt to overcome the economic crisis of 1997. It launched the Tripartite Commission on January 15, 1998 and succeeded in persuading business and labor to reach the so-called "9 February Social Pact," which stipulated a mass redundancy of regular workers and dispatched workers. However, the Tripartite Commission, in effect, stopped operating as the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) had seceded from it in February and April 1999, respectively. The third period of the Tripartite Commission was reluctantly resumed in September 1999, but the KCTU still refused to return to the bargaining table. The socioeconomic condition of the concluding social pact in 1998 was poor. Since his days as a presidential candidate, Kim Dae-jung had considered introducing social corporatism2 as well as a tripartite social pact with a focus on realizing stable industrial relations.3 However, the "9 February Social Pact" of 1998 was the result of the government's coerced political bargaining between business and labor. It did not result from a rational choice of participating actors. The existing studies proposing to introduce a social pact in Korea expected that the corporatist way of interest mediation would contribute to economic stabilization and development.4 It was based upon the Olsonian logic that the stability of industrial relations can be better achieved when labor organizations are encompassing-that is to say, when they are centrally organized at an industrial or a national level rather than consisting of individual, firm-based labor organizations such as are usually found in the Anglo-American world.5 However, the social pact lasted for only a year in Korea. Since 1999, it has not been revived. Neither business nor labor appears to have any intentions to continue working on interest mediation through the Tripartite Commission. Moreover, it is doubtful that the Tripartite Commission had practically contributed to creating stable industrial relations. …


In her 2012 reconfirmation speech as WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan asserted: "universal coverage is the single most powerful concept that public health has to offer. It is our ticket to greater efficiency and better quality. It is our saviour from the crushing weight of chronic noncommunicable diseases that now engulf the globe ". The UN General Assembly is currently considering proposals for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), succeeding the Millennium Development Goals. SDG, focusing on health, specifically includes universal health coverage (UHC) among its targets. Unquestionably, UHC is timely and fundamentally important. However, its promotion also entails substantial risks. A narrow focus on UHC could emphasise expansion of access to health-care services over equitable improvement of health outcomes through action across all relevant sectors — especially public health interventions, needed to effectively address non-communicable diseases (NCDs). WHO first endorsed UHC in its 2005 resolution on sustainable health financing, calling on states to provide "access to [necessary] promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative health interventions for all at an affordable cost". The resolution and its UHC concept firmly and narrowly centre on health insurance packages financed through pre-payment. This narrow understanding is echoed in major recent reviews of 65 empirical studies on UHC progress. The proposed SDGs also separate population-level public health measures from UHC, addressing the former as distinct targets, not under UHC. Yet, a broader understanding encompassing non-clinical measures can also be found in relevant WHO documents. Independent of UHC's conceptual in-determinacy, clinical health services are an essential part of UHC, and are likely to dominate post-2015 state health system improvements. In implementing UHC, how can we ensure continued emphasis on the full spectrum of public health interventions? Unmediated, a narrow UHC focus risks that five distinct pressures prioritise expanded curative clinical services at the expense of individual and population-level health promotion, prevention, and action on social determinants of health. The risk is that this focus leads to more health-care services, but worse overall health outcomes, with less equitably distributed benefits. First, unbalanced, the introduction of UHC usually increases inequity by disproportionately benefiting the wealthiest groups. Although there are some exceptions, UHC progress analyses from 11 countries at different levels of development suggest poorer people often lose out initially. UHC expansion generally begins with civil servants or urban formal sector workers; wealthier, well connected urban populations demand and receive clinical services, while poorer and rural populations do not. Some public health interventions — such as nutrition labelling, or information campaigns on behavioural NCD risks — also tend to disproportionately benefit wealthier groups, raising similar concerns. But other population-level measures such as clean air acts or road-safety improvements benefit the whole population from the outset, ensuring greater equity. Targeted population-level measures can balance temporary or persistent inequities arising from the introduction of UHC. Second, the clinical sector commonly tends to emphasise specialist curative over health promotion or preventive primary care. Interventions such as dialysis, organ transplants, or new cancer therapies — frequently introduced under UHC — often have the irresistible aura of the rule of rescue, enabling the instant saving of otherwise doomed lives. But as the addition of dialysis to the public benefit package in Thailand illustrates, doing so can entail substantial budgetary opportunity costs with unclear sustainability.


We introduce a novel Metropolis rendering algorithm that directly computes image gradients, and reconstructs the final image from the gradients by solving a Poisson equation. The reconstruction is aided by a low-fidelity approximation of the image computed during gradient sampling. As an extension of path-space Metropolis light transport, our algorithm is well suited for difficult transport scenarios. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in several well-known test scenes. Additionally, we analyze the spectral properties of gradient-domain sampling, and compare it to the traditional image-domain sampling.


Proteomic exploration of the effects of psychotropic drugs on specific brain areas in rodents has the potential to uncover novel molecular networks and pathways affected by psychotropic medications, and may inform etiologic hypotheses on mental disorders. Haloperidol, a widely used first‐generation antipsychotic, has been shown to produce structural and functional changes of the hippocampus, a brain region also implicated in the neuropathology of disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Seven adult male C57BL/6 mice were injected daily intraperitoneally with 0.5 mg/kg of haloperidol, for 28 days. A control group of six animals was injected with vehicle only (saline). Protein levels of postmortem hippocampus homogenate were determined using label‐free LC/MS/MS. In the treatment group, 216 differentially expressed hippocampal proteins were identified as compared to controls. Ingenuity pathway analysis implicated oxidative phosphorylation and mitochondrial function as top canonical pathways, and local networks involved in tubulin‐mediated cytoskeleton dynamics, clathrin‐mediated endocytosis, and extracellular signal‐regulated kinase and c‐Jun N‐terminal kinase signaling. The findings of this study could stimulate further research into the cellular mechanisms associated with haloperidol treatment and the pathophysiology of psychotic disorders, assisting treatment biomarker discovery. All MS data have been deposited in the ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD002250 (http://proteomecentral.proteomexchange.org/dataset/PXD002250).


Financial market prices contain valuable information about market participants' expectations. Information on market participants' expectations of future growth, inflation, and interest rates may help policy-makers reflect on the plausibility of their own forecast assumptions, and understand the likely market reaction to any policy announcement. However, the existence of risk premiums will bias the information content of financial market prices. For interest rate securities, the term premium will create a wedge between market participants' expectation of the future path of the policy rate and the price being traded.Therefore, in order to extract the 'true' underlying policy expectations of market participants, market pricing needs to be adjusted for the term premium. In theory, adjusting for the term premium should improve forecast performance on average, given that it provides an unbiased measure of market participants' expectations. I therefore use a popular term structure model to test the out-of-sample forecast performance of US market pricing with and without a term premium adjustment. I focus on the short-end of the yield curve, up to two years, as it is directly relevant for policy-makers and financial market commentators. The results suggest that the short-term forecasting performance of US interest rates over the medium term can be improved by adjusting for the term premium in zero-coupon rates and overnight index swap rates. The current negative term premium implies that market participants at present expect the future policy rate in the United States to be higher than that implied by market prices. I also show how the model can be applied to monitor expectations for the future path of the federal funds rate at a daily frequency. The analysis has important implications for policy-makers and financial commentators. Adjusting for the term premium should provide a better measure of market participants' actual expectations for the future path of the policy rate, and as such can improve forecast performance over the medium term.


Extreme Events an Geophysical Mon © 2012. American 10.1029/2011GM Magnetic storms are an important component of space weather effects on Earth. Superintense magnetic storms (defined here as those with Dst < 500 nT, where Dst stands for the disturbance storm time index that measures the strength of the magnetic storm), although relatively rare, can be hazardous to technological systems in space as well as on the ground. Such storms can cause life-threatening power outages, satellite damage, communication failures, and navigational problems. The data for such magnetic storms during the last 50 years is rather scarce. Research on historical geomagnetic storms can help to create a good database for intense and superintense magnetic storms. The superintense storm of 1–2 September 1859 is analyzed in the light of new knowledge of interplanetary and solar causes of storms gained from the space-age observations. We will discuss the results in the context of some recent intense storms and also the occurrence probability of such superstorms.


The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) collected data and simulated groundwater flow to increase understanding of the hydrology and the effects of drainage alterations to the water table in the vicinity of Long Lake, near Gary, Indiana. East Long Lake and West Long Lake (collectively known as Long Lake) make up one of the largest interdunal lakes within the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. The National Park Service is tasked with preservation and restoration of wetlands in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore along the southern shoreline of Lake Michigan. Urban development and engineering have modified drainage and caused changes in the distribution of open water, streams and ditches, and groundwater abundance and flow paths. A better understanding of the effects these modifications have on the hydrologic system in the area will help the National Park Service, the Gary Sanitary District (GSD), and local stakeholders manage and protect the resources within the study area. This study used hydrologic data and steady-state groundwater simulations to estimate directions of groundwater flow and the effects of various engineering controls and climatic conditions on the hydrology near Long Lake. Periods of relatively high and low groundwater levels were examined and simulated by using MODFLOW and companion software. Simulated hydrologic modifications examined the effects of (1) removing the beaver dams in US-12 ditch, (2) discontinuing seepage of water from the filtration pond east of East Long Lake, (3) discontinuing discharge from US-12 ditch to the GSD sewer system, (4) decreasing discharge from US-12 ditch to the GSD sewer system, (5) connecting East Long Lake and West Long Lake, (6) deepening County Line Road ditch, and (7) raising and lowering the water level of Lake Michigan. Results from collected hydrologic data indicate that East Long Lake functioned as an area of groundwater recharge during October 2002 and a "flow-through" lake during March 2011, with the groundwater divide south of US-12. Wetlands to the south of West Long Lake act as points of recharge to the surficial aquifer in both dryand wet-weather conditions. Among the noteworthy results from a dry-weather groundwater flow model simulation are (1) US-12 ditch does not receive water from East Long Lake or West Long Lake, (2) the filtration pond at the east end of East Long Lake, when active, contributed approximately 10 percent of the total water entering East Long Lake, and (3) County Line Road ditch has little effect on simulated water level. Among the noteworthy results from a wet-weather groundwater flow simulation are (1) US-12 ditch does not receive water from East Long Lake or West Long Lake, (2) when the seepage from the filtration pond to the surficial aquifer is not active, sources of inflow to East Long Lake are restricted to only precipitation (46 percent of total) and inflow from the surficial aquifer (54 percent of total), and (3) County Line Road ditch bisects the groundwater divide and creates two water-table mounds south of US-12. The results from a series of model scenarios simulating certain engineering controls and changes in Lake Michigan levels include the following: (1) The simulated removal of beaver dams in US-12 ditch during a wet-weather simulation increased discharge from the ditch to the Gary Sanitary system by 13 percent. (2) Discontinuation of seepage from the filtration pond east of East Long Lake decreased discharge from US-12 ditch to the Gary Sanitary system by 2.3 percent. (3) Simulated discontinuation of discharge from the US-12 ditch to the GSD sewer system increased the area where the water table was estimated to be above the land surface beyond the inundated area in the initial wet-weather simulation. (4) Simulated modifications to the control structure at the discharge point of US-12 ditch to the GSD sewer system can decrease discharge by as much as 61 percent while increasing the simulated inundated area during dry weather and decrease discharge as much as 6 percent while increasing the simulated inundated area during wet weather. (5) Deepening of County Line Road ditch can decrease the discharge from US-12 ditch by 26 percent during dry weather and 24 percent during wet weather, as well as decrease the extent of flooded areas south and east of the filtration pond near Ogden Dunes. (7) The increase of the Lake Michigan water level to match the 2 Hydrologic Data and Groundwater Flow Simulations in the Vicinity of Long Lake, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore historical maximum can increase the discharge from US-12 ditch by 14 percent during dry weather and by 9.6 percent during wet weather. (8) The decrease of the Lake Michigan water level to match the historical minimum can decrease the discharge from US-12 ditch by 7.4 percent during dry weather and by 3.1 percent during wet weather. The results of this study can be used by water-resource managers to understand how surrounding ditches affect water levels in East and West Long Lake and in the surrounding wetlands and residential areas. The groundwater model developed in this study can be applied in the future to answer questions about how alterations to the drainage system in the area will affect water levels in East and West Long Lake and surrounding areas. The modeling methods developed in this study provide a template for other studies of groundwater flow and groundwater/surface-water interactions within the shallow surficial aquifer in northern Indiana, and in similar hydrologic settings that include surficial sand aquifers in coastal settings. Kanka kee Riv er Kanka kee Ri ve r Grand Little Calumet Calumet River Rive r IL L IN O IS IN D IA N A LAKE PORTER INDIANA 41° 40'


Li-ion batteries play an ever-increasing role in our daily life. Therefore, it is important to understand the potential risks involved with these devices. In this work we demonstrate the thermal runaway characteristics of three types of commercially available Li-ion batteries with the format 18650. The Li-ion batteries were deliberately driven into thermal runaway by overheating under controlled conditions. Cell temperatures up to 850 °C and a gas release of up to 0.27 mol were measured. The main gas components were quantified with gas-chromatography. The safety of Li-ion batteries is determined by their composition, size, energy content, design and quality. This work investigated the influence of different cathode-material chemistry on the safety of commercial graphite-based 18650 cells. The active cathode materials of the three tested cell types were (a) LiFePO4, (b) Li(Ni0.45Mn0.45Co0.10)O2 and (c) a blend of LiCoO2 and Li(Ni0.50Mn0.25Co0.25)O2.


Tone mapping operators aim to compress high dynamic range (HDR) images to low dynamic range ones so as to visualize HDR images on standard displays. Most existing works were demonstrated on specific examples without being thoroughly tested on wellestablished and subject-validated image quality assessment models. A recent tone mapped image quality index (TMQI) made the first attempt on objective quality assessment of tone mapped images. TMQI consists of two fundamental building blocks: structural fidelity and statistical naturalness. In this thesis, we propose an enhanced tone mapped image quality index (eTMQI) by 1) constructing an improved nonlinear mapping function to better account for the local contrast visibility of HDR images and 2) developing an image dependent statistical naturalness model to quantify the unnaturalness of tone mapped images based on a subjective study. Experiments show that the modified structural fidelity and statistical naturalness terms in eTMQI better correlate with subjective quality evaluations. Furthermore, we propose an iterative optimization algorithm for tone mapping. The advantages of this algorithm are twofold: 1) eTMQI and TMQI can be compared in a more straightforward way; 2) better quality tone mapped images can be automatically generated by using eTMQI as the optimization goal. Numerical and subjective experiments demonstrate that eTMQI is a superior objective quality assessment metric for tone mapped images and consistently outperforms TMQI.


Modern high-bypass turbofan engines produce high levels of nuisance noise that has a significant impact on the environment near airports as well as the crew and passengers inside the aircraft. Significant research is being undertaken to understand the aeroacoustic noise source mechanisms and to accurately predict engine noise levels. High-performance computers and advanced numerical techniques are now taking an active role in this research area. In this work, a numerical solver is developed to accurately and efficiently predict noise radiation from ducts. The solver is based upon a hybrid methodology whereby only the acoustic near-field is solved using the developed numerical solver, with the resultant far-field directivity determined from an integral solution of the Ffowcs Williams - Hawking equation. Particular emphasis has been placed on the radiation of duct modes from a realistic bypass engine intake geometry.
The performance of the numerical schemes employed in the solver is analysed, with particular attention to the dispersion and dissipation qualities. A study into the determination of a suitable non-reflecting boundary condition for duct acoustics is also undertaken. Using a novel formulation of the linearised Euler equations, the solver is applied to noise radiation from a realistic engine intake geometry with background mean flow. The accuracy of the scheme is validated by comparison with analytic solutions for the unflanged duct case. For the unflanged duct case the effect of an acoustic liner is modelled using a time-domain impedance boundary condition. The effect of a locally supersonic inflow on radiation from the engine intake is examined. Finally, the solver is extended to determine multimode radiation from generic engine intakes, with the possibility to incorporate swirling mean flows and asymmetric duct geometries.


This paper details the current work status of the ETSI Reconfigurable Radio Systems (RRS) Technical Committee (TC) and gives an outlook on the future evolution. While previous publications have presented an overview of ETSI RRS' main working axes related to i) Cognitive Radio System Aspects, ii) Radio Equipment Architecture (including a Cognitive Pilot Channel (CPC) proposal and a Functional Architecture (FA) for Management and Control of Reconfigurable Radio Systems), iii) Cognitive Management and Control and iv) Public Safety, this document focuses on latest progress related to UHF White Spaces work and the definition of an SDR Handset Architecture. In particular, it is outlined how Cognitive Radio principles can help to adapt existing and/or evolving Radio Standards, such as 3GPP Long Term Evolution, to a possible operation in UHF White Space bands.


Oftentimes popular culture depicts Hawaii as an ideal paradise, represented by images of '[p]alm trees, a distant mountain (frequently a smoking volcano), and a hula maiden, all surmounted by a splendid full moon' (Brown 1994). Such a picture clearly contrasts with the labour song quoted in the title of this article, which reflects the exploitation, mainly of Asian workers, in the sugar-cane plantation system—the original basis for (white) American prosperity in the islands since the mid-nineteenth century. Philip Kan Gotanda's play, Ballad of Yachiyo, which premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 1995, takes place within a Japanese community in early twentieth-century Hawaii. It is loosely based on the silenced story of the playwright's aunt who committed suicide for bringing shame to the family as a result of an extra-marital pregnancy. Gotanda considers that this particular work is not so much about politics, but about 'a tone' and a 'kind of beautiful sadness' (1997). Despite the author's words, Ballad of Yachiyo inevitably has embedded within a political message insofar as it makes references, for example, to working conditions in the sugar plantations, the formation of the first inter-ethnic (Japanese/Filipino) trade unions and the expectations of Japanese immigrants in search of the mythical paradise Hawaii was meant to be. That is, by recovering what was once a lost voice, Gotanda reconstructs part of his family's memory as forming part of Hawaii's recent history.


ABSTRACT Wang, T.; Yu, W.; Zou, X.; Zhang, D.; Li, B.; Wang, J., and Zhang, H., 2018. Zooplankton community responses and the relation to environmental factors from established offshore wind farms within the Rudong coastal area of China. The goal of this study was to examine the responses of the zooplankton community to the establishment of an OWF, the causes of any observed effects, and their relation to environmental factors in the study area. This article describes the results of an investigation into the zooplankton community and the main environmental factors affecting that community based on data obtained from three cruises in May, August, and November of 2015 in the area of the Longyuan OWF in Rudong, China. This study analyzed the spatiotemporal distribution of zooplankton, including data obtained before the construction of the wind farm, to assess any postconstruction change in the zooplankton community. Data from the zooplankton community were analyzed using canonical correlation analysis, redundancy analysis, and multiple regression analysis. The analysis indicates that the presence of the wind turbine foundations reduced the quantity of the macrozooplankton significantly (the percentage of change was −96.87% in the autumn, and −26.70% in the spring), and reduced the biomass slightly in autumn (the percentage of change was −58.20%) or increased the biomass in the spring (the percentage of change was 75.77%). However, the quantity of the microzooplankton significantly increased (the percentage of change was 542.76% in the spring) or decreased slightly (the percentage of change was −86.25% in the autumn). The water also showed a postconstruction trend toward eutrophication in this study area. The data also showed that water temperature, dissolved oxygen, suspended matter concentration, and pH were the most important factors influencing the zooplankton community. The suspended-matter concentration had opposite effects on the macrozooplankton and microzooplankton, suggesting that the postconstruction zooplankton community might show a trend toward miniaturization.


For many years, the exegesis of the parables of Jesus was determined by assump tions that were largely purported by Adolf Julicher and subsequently underwent only insignificant modification. The Kompendium der Gleichnisse Jesu (ed. R. Zimmermann, Gutersloh 2007), whose methodology and hermeneutics are explained in this article, takes a new route, as can be illustrated in four steps. From a historical perspective, parable exegesis is released from its close relationship to the search for the Historical Jesus and is given new distinction by a paradigm of Jesus "remembered". The custom ary religioushistorical standardization of the parables (particularly with reference to rabbinical parables) is critically investigated from a traditiohistorical perspective in order to again be able to highly value the extraordinary position of Jesus' parables. From the perspective of the literary form of the parables, all internal differentiation must be made invalid by the New Testament text record itself. Instead, the discussion of a comprehen sive genre of "parable" utilises the genre consciousness of the early Christian authors; a genre that can be precisely defined by means of a literarycritical description in terms of the criteria of narrativity, fictionality, relation to reality, metaphor, appeal structure and co/contextuality. From a hermeneutic perspective, this new approach consists of a conscious affirmation of a plurality of interpretations that is established by the texts themselves and that also guarantees the timeliness and liveliness of the interpretations in a variety of reading situations.


This paper examines emerging trends in fact signaling: the performative invocation of the idea of Fact and Reason, distinct from the concrete presentation of evidence or reasoning, as a way to cultivate affective solidarity. Emblematic is the conservative influencer Ben Shapiro's slogan, "facts don't care about your feelings": a paean to the mythological figure of emotionlessly objective truth which may then be weaponised against one's enemies. Scholars are increasingly attentive to the ways in which what was once popularised as a 'fake news' epidemic is not simply a virulent strain of bad information in a fundamentally rational online ecosystem, but rather a broader crisis and transformation of what counts as truthful, trustworthy and authentic (e.g. Boler & Davis, 2018; also see Banet-Weiser, 2012). Our contribution emphasises the affective and habitual dimension of this phenomenon. Through a close analysis of Ben Shapiro's content and personal brand, we show how the generic invocation of Fact and Reason cultivates a sense of affective attachment not defined by ideological consistency or, indeed, the actual practice of research or logical reasoning, but rather a particularly masculinised and adversarial ideal of Truth. The payoff is the reassurance and pleasure of a stable subject position from which one's political opposition may be Othered with impunity. Facts may not care about your feelings, but insisting upon this fact is all about building a certain structure of feeling.


Dynamic cloth simulation becomes the most important issue in certain applications such as games, animation, virtual reality and medical which is the dynamic effect with fast self collision between cloth-to-cloth becomes the main problem to resolve. To achieve the reality cloth simulation, we use a mass-spring system, which is the universal model in cloth simulation. For the animation of the particles, we considered internal and external forces to create cloth to look more realistic. As cloth simulators, to handle the cloth self collision is more complicated. So, several methods have been suggested by numerous researchers. Furthermore, we discuss numerous methods for an efficient avoidance of self collision detection. So that the efficiency animation of cloth can be improves much.


Using theories of social capital and social networks, this research explores the role of online social network structure for facilitating collaborative civic engagement in the context of an Australian government-sponsored online discussion forum for community building. It argues that where social capital is at the currency of today's society and Web 2.0 era, social networks hold the reserves of that currency. Comparing results from the sociocentric network analysis of communication ties between the early years and current year demonstrate that there is no significant difference in the intensity of communication amongst participants (density) and the tendency for network communications to focus on particular individuals or groups (centralisation). This implies that the provision of technological infrastructure alone is not sufficient. Rather, for long-term sustainability, government agencies need to understand the impact of virtually based community versus physically based communities towards civic engagement.


Abstract Los Angeles Harbor, in San Pedro Bay, has long drawn scientific researchers, from its days as a 19th century muddy tide flat to today's industrial complex of man-made channels and wharves. A marine biological laboratory was established on Terminal Island as an outpost of the University of California and operating for the summers of 1901 and 1902. As it was a teaching laboratory, it attracted women students and researchers. Two Los Angeles women associated with the laboratory and who made contributions to the advancement of biology were Sarah P. Monks, an instructor at the Los Angeles Normal School and Martha Burton Williamson, a self-taught conchologist. These women were born in the 1840's and grew up at a time when scientific pursuits were not the norm for the proper Victorian women. Both had done research in Los Angeles Harbor before the laboratory on Terminal Island was opened and both continued their independent research in the harbor after the laboratory was relocated to San Diego. Both women had cottages on Terminal Island from where they collected and conducted their research. Monks named her cottage Phataria after a sea star, whose asexual reproduction and autonomy was the subject of her research. Williamson amassed a significant collection of shells, corresponding extensively with malacologists from around the world. Williamson's most significant publication was her 1892 Smithsonian paper on the shells of San Pedro Bay, possibly the first paper published devoted exclusively to the biota of San Pedro Bay and certainly, the first written by a woman. Both faced setbacks in their careers, Monks by not being recognized as author of her anatomy textbook and Williamson for her inability to join the California Academy of Sciences. They both survived residing, at least part-time, within the inhospitable environment of the Terminal Island district of Los Angeles Harbor. They serve as role models for any women who face the prospect of going where few women go in their quest for scientific knowledge.


The ability to extract different bio-medical parameters from one single wristwatch device can be very applicable. The wearable device that is presented in this paper is based on two optical approaches. The first is the extraction and separation of remote vibration sources and the second is the rotation of linearly polarized light by certain materials exposed to magnetic fields. The technique is based on tracking of temporal changes of reflected secondary speckles produced in the wrist when being illuminated by a laser beam. Change in skin's temporal vibration profile together with change in the magnetic medium that is generated by time varied glucose concentration caused these temporal changes. In this paper we present experimental tests which are the first step towards an in vivo noncontact device for detection of glucose concentration in blood. The paper also shows very preliminary results for qualitative capability for indication of dehydration.


I examine the private and social efficiency of patent pools in a setting in which owners of intellectual property (IP), are both vertically and horizontally related. The relationship is vertical through the ownership of complementary IP and horizontal in that at least one member owns a competing product. For this hybrid structure – referred to as overlapping ownership – I analyze the interplay between two organizational decisions: the standard-setting process in which participants choose a product type (indexed by its differentiation from the current standard), and the subsequent patent pooling decision. Consumers can be better off with patent pooling as a result of lower prices (the complements effect) and greater product variety (the differentiation effect), even when a pool member is also a competitor of the new standard. However, in comparing new product collaborations across ownership regimes, consumers prefer those that admit no overlapping ownership. These results yield insights for antitrust rules promoting efficient IP agreements.


In this paper, an economic dispatch model, which can take into account the uncertainties of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) and wind generators, is developed. A simulation based approach is first employed to study the probability distributions of the charge/discharge behaviors of PEVs. The probability distribution of wind power is also derived based on the assumption that the wind speed follows the Rayleigh distribution. The mathematical expectations of the generation costs of wind power and V2G (vehicle to grid) power are then derived analytically. An optimization algorithm is developed based on the well-established particle swarm optimization (PSO) and interior point method to solve the economic dispatch model. The proposed approach is demonstrated by the IEEE 118-bus test system.


The small but wealthy Gulf State of Qatar is striving to adopt a leading role in the Arab world, and has readjusted its foreign policy in the wake of the Arab Spring. In doing so it has tried to stick to its former strategy of maintaining good relations with all countries that could be important to Qatar's survival – primarily the US and Iran. At the same time Doha (which until 2011 had mostly counted on the authoritarian status quo in the region) hopes to profit from the recent upheavals in the Arab world by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist opposition groups. With regard to Syria, this policy is threatening to bring Qatar into conflict with its powerful neighbour Iran. While Qatar publicly declared its support for the opposition early last summer, Iran wants to save Bashar al-Assad's regime and thereby ensure the survival of its main ally in the Middle East. The Syrian crisis could risk destabilising Qatar's traditional balancing act between the US and its allies on the one hand and Iran and its allies on the other.


Monoterpenes are the most important precursors for atmospheric secondary organic aerosols (SOA). The oxidation of monoterpenes by ozone, OH- and NO3-radicals yields a variety of products, which are partitioned between the aerosol and the gas phase. The SOA yields from monoterpene oxidations and the partitioning of the oxidation products is not well characterized, especially the influence of relative humidity and temperature is rather unclear. The characterization of the partitioning of semivolatile oxidation products is important to extrapolate simulation experiments at higher concentrations to atmospheric conditions. The understanding of the secondary organic aerosol component is an important prerequisite to estimate climatic effects of atmospheric aerosols.

In the present work simulation experiments on the ozonolysis of monoterpenes were carried out at the large aerosol-chamber of the research center Julich and at the temperature controlled AIDA-chamber of the research center Karlsruhe. The investigated monoterpenes were alpha-pinene, limonene, sabinene and myrcene. Mass spectrometric methods were used to determine the partitioning of organic compounds between the aerosol and the gas phase. The monoterpenes and their gas phase oxidation products were determined by proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS). The aerosol phase was characterized by an aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) to determine the total aerosol mass and a scanning mobility particle sizer (SMPS) to determine the size distribution and the total volume of the aerosol.

Mass spectrometry allows for the direct measurement of a wealth of compounds with high time resolution and low detection limits. In this work a data evaluation routine based on fragmentation patterns of organic compounds has been developed to evaluate PTR mass spectra. It allows for the extraction of mass spectra of individual compounds from the mass spectra of the mixture. It provides the basis for an interference free quantification of fragmented products and precursors in the investigated reaction systems. Additionally, statistical methods were used to evaluate the PTR mass spectra based on time resolved, simultaneous measurements of the precursors and the oxidation products in the gas-phase. A correlation analysis for the identification of precursor and product signals has been developed and validated. Regression analysis was used to determine molar reaction yields of the identified gas phase products.

Experiments carried out at the aerosol chamber in Julich focused on the molar reaction yields of gas phase oxidation products and on mass and carbon balances of the multiphase systems.

The molar gas phase reaction yields of the monoterpene oxidation products pinonaldehyde (0.21 +/- 0.04), sabinaketone (0.54 +/- 0.13) and endolim (0.04 +/- 0.01) were determined as the major first generation oxidation products of the ozonolysis of alpha-pinene, sabinene and limonene, respectively. Acetone has been detected as a product of the ozonolysis of all investigated monoterpenes with molar yields of 0.05 - 0.40. Based on the determined yield the global emission rate of acetone from the ozonolysis of alpha-pinene has been estimated to be 4 - 10 % of the total global annual source of acetone.

In a temperature range of 292 - 298 K SOA-yields were determined for the ozonolysis in the absence of an OH-scavenger for sabinene (0.10 - 0.15), limonene (0.65), alpha-pinene (0.18 - 0.25) and myrcene (0.16). The monoterpenes with exocyclic double bonds (myrcene and sabinene) have lower SOA-yields than such with endocyclic double bonds alpha-pinene and limonene). The corresponding SOA-yield of a monoterpene mixture (sabinene, myrcene and limonene) is the weighted average of the SOA-yields of the single compounds.

The mass spectrometric approach allows for the determination of a time resolved gas-particle mass balance. Product partitioning and the influence of secondary processes were deduced from the mass balance. Secondary oxidation did neither change the aerosol nor the gas phase fractional yields for sabinene and limonene. Aerosol yields for the alpha-pinene oxidation showed a time dependent increase in the SOA-yield caused by secondary oxidation products. Myrcene showed a time dependent increase in the gas phase yield after complete consumption of the monoterpene, i.e. the secondary oxidation produced volatile compounds.

Fractional carbon yields of gas-phase and particulate-phase products were determined to describe the partitioning of the products independent of the degree of oxidation. The sum of these fractional yields provides the carbon balance of the closed system "reaction chamber". The employed analysis methods recovered within experimental errors all the reactive carbon in the reaction systems with the one exception of the alpha-pinene ozonolysis.

Experiments in the AIDA chamber in Karlsruhe aimed at the influence of relative humidity and temperature on SOA-yields and the partitioning of monoterpene oxidation products. In contrast to the Julich experiments an OH-scavenger was used during the ozonolysis. In these experiments the SOA-yields of limonene and alpha-pinene were found to be dependent on relative humidity. alpha-Pinene and limonene produced SOA-yields reduced by 50 % under dry conditions and temperatures of 253 K. At 303 K the influence of relative humidity on the SOA-yield was negligible. The impact of the relative humidity on the monoterpene degradation mechanism was derived from PTR-MS-measurements. The reaction of stabilized criegee-biradicals with water vapor is an important reaction path to yield non volatile compounds which form SOA. In these experiments particulate water did not contribute significantly to the aerosol mass under humid conditions.

SOA-yields of the ozonolysis of alpha-pinene and limonene were found to be temperature dependant. At 303 K the SOA-yields of alpha-pinene and limonene were 0.18 and 0.43, respectively. Reducing the temperature from 303 K to 253 K under humid conditions increased the SOA-yield for alpha-pinene by a factor of 4.7. At the same conditions the SOA-yield of limonene increased by a factor of 3.3. Using a two-product model to calculate temperature dependent SOA-yields provided good agreement with the observations within a temperature range of 243 - 273 K. Temperature effects on partitioning dominated over gas phase mechanistic effects. The determined model parameters are not applicable for temperatures > 273 K. At these temperatures the temperature dependence of the reaction kinetics gained influence on the SOA-yields.

The contributions of semivolatile products to the SOA-yield at decreasing temperature were determined from the AIDA-experiments. At temperatures
A temperature dependent rate coefficient for the ozonolysis of alpha-pinene has been determined for a temperature range of 243 - 303 K. Differential equations provided by the master chemical mechanism were fitted to the experimental data of ozone and alpha-pinene. Fit parameters were the rate coefficient of the alpha-pinene ozonolysis and the wall loss of ozone. The functional dependance of the rate coefficient has been expressed by the following Arrhenius parameters: A preexpontial factor of A = (1.5 +/- 0.4)E-15 cm³/s and a temperature dependent factor of E(A)/R = (860 +/- 70) K. The rate coefficient has been determined for the first time for atmospherically relevant temperatures below 276 K.


This paper explores to what extent product and marketing channel diversification contributed to the economic success of small-scale agricultural producers involved in short food supply chains after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey was conducted between April and July 2020 in four countries of the European Union–Estonia, Hungary, Portugal and Romania,–resulting in a relatively large sample of farmers (N = 421). The analysis was built on a semi-nonparametric approach. Approximately 19 percent of small-scale producers were able to increase sales during the first wave of the pandemic, although country-level variation was significant. Fruits and vegetables were by far the most popular products. The importance of specific channels varied across countries, but farm gate sales were among the most important marketing channels both before and during the first wave. The importance of channels that were based on digital resources and home delivery increased. Our evidence indicates that diversification was a strategy that paid off, both in terms of marketing channels and different product categories. However, the impact appears to be nonlinear; the initial advantage generated by diversification rapidly tapered off, either temporarily (in the case of products), or permanently (in the case of marketing channels). Later research may clarify whether these findings are generalizable in other socio-economic contexts, as well as in a non-COVID situation.


A search for a chargino-neutralino pair decaying via the 125 GeV Higgs boson into photons is presented. The study is based on the data collected between 2015 and 2018 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb−1 of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. No significant excess over the expected background is observed. Upper limits at 95% confidence level for a massless χ˜01 are set on several electroweakino production cross-sections and the visible cross-section for beyond the Standard Model processes. In the context of simplified supersymmetric models, 95% confidence-level limits of up to 310 GeV in m(χ˜±1/χ˜02), where m(χ˜01) = 0.5 GeV, are set. Limits at 95% confidence level are also set on the χ˜±1χ˜02 cross-section in the mass plane of m(χ˜±1/χ˜02) and m(χ˜01), and on scenarios with gravitino as the lightest supersymmetric particle. Upper limits at the 95% confidence-level are set on the higgsino production cross-section. Higgsino masses below 380 GeV are excluded for the case of the higgsino fully decaying into a Higgs boson and a gravitino.