The current primary focus of this five-year project is the partially-sorted postwar British Theatre Archive that is held at the British Library. Research development work is being undertaken on significant theatre collections (John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke, Michel Saint-Denis), a process that will lead to a deeper understanding of the evolution of British theatre between 1945 and 1968. This period represents theatre produced from the end of the Second World War to the abolition of censorship in 1968. The project's aim is to ask new questions about this crucial period of British theatre history. Although some material has been sorted and described, there is still a wealth of invaluable unsorted material that has yet to be seen by scholars. The project aims to create a complete, detailed catalogue of archive descriptions which will be accessible online. The first archive to have been sorted as part of this project is that of the French director, actor, producer and designer Michel Saint-Denis. Although he was highly regarded in the 1950s and 60s, Saint-Denis's contribution to contemporary performance has not received due recognition. Jane Baldwin remarks that 'more often than not [Saint-Denis] appears only as a passing reference in a theatrical biography or study of modern British theatre'. (1) Baldwin's monograph, together with the rich archival material, highlights the need for a reassessment of this theatrical polymath. Born in 1897, Saint-Denis was greatly influenced by his uncle, the producer and critic Jacques Copeau. With Copeau's assistance, Saint-Denis in 1930 set up the Compagnie des Quinze, which performed to great acclaim across Europe. After the Compagnie des Quinze disbanded, Saint-Denis emigrated to Britain and, with George Devine and Marius Goring, founded the London Theatre Studio in 1935. The school was dedicated to the application of Copeau's acting techniques and was later to become the Old Vic School. Under the pseudonym 'Jacques Duchesne', Saint-Denis returned to France in war time and worked for Radio Diffusion Francaise, broadcasting material that was often considered controversial; his programme Les Trois Amis, in particular, was characterised by its shrewd political analysis and satirical digs at the Nazi-controlled station Radio Paris. In the role of director, Saint-Denis's impact on British Theatre was enormous; he co-directed the Royal Shakespeare Company with Peter Hall from 1961 to 1966 and his influence can be seen in many contemporary institutions such as the National Theatre and Royal Court. His legacy to theatre internationally is also beyond doubt, as he taught at New York's Juilliard School and was a special advisor to Canada's National Theatre School. He was a brilliant and charismatic speaker and the archive contains many transcripts of his radio broadcasts, first drafts of lecture scripts and remarkably prescient articles for various theatre journals. Saint-Denis suffered from recurrent health problems throughout his life and died from a stroke in 1971. One of the most valuable characteristics of the Saint-Denis archive is the variety of its contents. There are some fascinating photographs of actors preparing at the Old Vic, detailed hand-drawn timetables for rehearsals, well-preserved promotional literature for productions as well as an extensive collection of audio material. Saint-Denis's fastidious retention of his professional correspondence reveals the workings of the many powerful institutions over which he had influence. This paper will examine material in the archive that is indicative of Saint-Denis's position as an 'outsider'. Baldwin comments that Saint-Denis 'tried under all circumstances to keep his critical detachment, although his students and actors frequently found his assessments more cutting than detached'. (2) It is perhaps this detachment that has led to this great theatrical figure being sidelined instead of recognised as a key post-war influence on the British stage, and I would like to examine two areas of the archive which are indicative of a form of 'detachment', in both a cultural and critical sense. …


Purpose: We aim to characterize VTX-2337, a novel Toll-like receptor (TLR) 8 agonist in clinical development, and investigate its potential to improve monoclonal antibody–based immunotherapy that includes the activation of natural killer (NK) cells. Experimental Design: HEK-TLR transfectants were used to compare the selectivity and potency of VTX-2337, imiquimod, CpG ODN2006, and CL075. The ability of VTX-2337 to induce cytokine and chemokine production from human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) and activation of specific immune cell subsets was examined. The potential for VTX-2337 to activate NK cell activity through direct and indirect mechanisms was also investigated. Finally, we tested the potential for VTX-2337 to augment antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC), especially in individuals with low-affinity FcγR3A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). Results: VTX-2337 selectively activates TLR8 with an EC50 of about 100 nmol/L and stimulates production of TNFα and interleukin (IL)-12 from monocytes and myeloid dendritic cells (mDC). VTX-2337 stimulates IFNγ production from NK cells and increases the cytotoxicity of NK cells against K562 and ADCC by rituximab and trastuzumab. Effects of VTX-2337 on NK cells were, in part, from direct activation as increased IFNγ production and cytotoxic activity were seen with purified NK cells. Finally, VTX-2337 augments ADCC by rituximab in PBMCs with different FcγR3A genotypes (V/V, V/F, and F/F at position 158). Conclusions: VTX-2337 is a novel small-molecule TLR8 agonist that activates monocytes, DCs, and NK cells. Through the activation of NK cells, it has the potential to augment the effectiveness of monoclonal antibody treatments where a polymorphism in FcγR3A limits clinical efficacy. Clin Cancer Res; 18(2); 499–509. ©2011 AACR.


Both within and outside organizations, employees and managers, or citizens and
politicians ask, and sometimes demand, swift solutions to all kinds of problems.
This concerns small and simple problems, but also addresses complex and ambiguous
situations, where people are confronted with impediments, even pain. In
many cases professionals, such as managers, politicians, and consultants take
actions that make life easier. Think of the introduction of ERP systems or the merging
of two large companies. This is not always the case, e.g. redesigning work
processes and introducing ERP-systems in a heavily politicized organization. Other
examples of ambiguous and complex events can be found in many other fields
such as social youth care where many organizations try to work together, but where
a tragedy occurs more than once each year. Another example is the integration of
people from other countries. This is a hard and untamed politicized issue where
solutions are hard to find. When I – as a consultant – get involved in such complex
and ambiguous situations, I feel a tension between satisfying the principal and
many other people involved and trying to convince the people that this situation is
not easy or maybe even impossible to solve. On the one hand, I want to avoid the
ambiguity, the unpredictability, and the fact that I am dealing with a complex of
many things, within which many people interact with each other. It is as if I am
looking for something to tame the cognitive and normative unpredictable sides of
what is happening. At the same time I want to be as professional as possible and
by trusting my knowledge and experience regarding the complex nature of many
events, I try to postpone my first response.


Lower computer system input-to-output latency substantially re-duces many task completion times. In fact, literature shows that reduction in targeting task completion time from decreased latency often exceeds the decrease in latency alone. However, for aiming in first person shooter (FPS) games, some prior work has demonstrated diminishing returns below 40 ms of local input-to-output computer system latency. In this paper, we review this prior art and provide an additional case study with data demonstrating the importance of local system latency improvement, even at latency values below 20 ms. Though other factors may determine victory in a particular esports challenge, ensuring balanced local computer latency among competitors is essential to fair competition.


We present modeling strategies that describe the motion and interaction of groups of pedestrians in obscured spaces. We start off with an approach based on balance equations in terms of measures and then we exploit the descriptive power of a probabilistic cellular automaton model.Based on a variation of the simple symmetric random walk on the square lattice, we test the interplay between population size and an interpersonal attraction parameter for the evacuation of confined and darkened spaces. We argue that information overload and coordination costs associated with information processing in small groups are two key processes that influence the evacuation rate. Our results show that substantial computational resources are necessary to compensate for incomplete information — the more individuals in (information processing) groups the higher the exit rate for low population size. For simple social systems, it is likely that the individual representations are not redundant and large group sizes ensure that this non-redundant information is actually available to a substantial number of individuals. For complex social systems, information redundancy makes information evaluation and transfer inefficient and, as such, group size becomes a drawback rather than a benefit. The effect of group sizes on outgoing fluxes, evacuation times and wall effects is carefully studied with a Monte Carlo framework accounting also for the presence of an internal obstacle.


The extramural General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) program has been funded for more than 50 years, first by the National Center for Research Resources, NIH, and more recently as part of the Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA) program through the newly formed National Center for Advancing Translation Sciences (NCATS). The GCRCs represent the federally funded laboratories that employ a highly trained cadre of research nurses, dietitians, and other support staff and in which generations of clinical investigators trained and performed groundbreaking human studies that advanced medical science and improved clinical care. Without the opportunity for adequate discussion, NCATS has now stopped funding these Research Centers. In this "eulogy," we review the origins and history of the GCRCs, their contributions to the advancement of medicine, and the recent events that have essentially defunded them. We mourn their loss.


We present an approach to encode a speech signal into a fixed-size representation which minimizes the cosine loss with the existing massively multilingual LASER text embedding space. Sentences are close in this embedding space, independently of their language and modality, either text or audio. Using a similarity metric in that multimodal embedding space, we perform mining of audio in German, French, Spanish and English from Librivox against billions of sentences from Common Crawl. This yielded more than twenty thousand hours of aligned speech translations. To evaluate the automatically mined speech/text corpora, we train neural speech translation systems for several languages pairs. Adding the mined data, achieves significant improvements in the BLEU score on the CoVoST2 and the MUST-C test sets with respect to a very competitive baseline. Our approach can also be used to directly perform speech-to-speech mining, without the need to first transcribe or translate the data. We obtain more than one thousand three hundred hours of aligned speech in French, German, Spanish and English. This speech corpus has the potential to boost research in speech-to-speech translation which suffers from scarcity of natural end-to-end training data. All the mined multimodal corpora will be made freely available.


Droughts are complex natural disasters caused due to deficit in water availability over a region. Water availability is strongly linked to precipitation in many parts of the world that rely on monsoonal rains. Recent studies indicate that the choice of precipitation datasets and drought indices could influence drought analysis. Therefore, drought characteristics for the Indian monsoon region were reassessed for the period 1901-2004 using two different datasets and standard precipitation index (SPI), standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index (SPEI), Gaussian mixture model-based drought index (GMM-DI), and hidden Markov model-based drought index (HMM-DI). Drought trends and variability were analyzed for three epochs: 1901-1935, 1936-1970 and 1971-2004. Irrespective of the dataset and methodology used, the results indicate an increasing trend in drought severity and frequency during the recent decades (1971-2004). Droughts are becoming more regional and are showing a general shift to the agriculturally important coastal south-India, central Maharashtra, and Indo‑Gangetic plains indicating food security challenges and socioeconomic vulnerability in the region. Drought severities are commonly reported using drought classes obtained by assigning pre-defined thresholds on drought indices. Current drought classification methods ignore modeling uncertainties and provide discrete drought classification. However, the users of drought classification are often interested in knowing inherent uncertainties in classification so that they can make informed decisions. A probabilistic Gamma mixture model (Gamma-MM)-based drought index is proposed as an alternative to deterministic classification by SPI. The Bayesian framework of the proposed model avoids over-specification and overfitting by choosing the optimum number of mixture components required to model the data - a problem that is often encountered in other probabilistic drought indices (e.g., HMM-DI). When sufficient number of components are used in Gamma-MM, it can provide a good approximation to any continuous distribution in the range (0,infinity), thus addressing the problem of choosing an appropriate distribution for SPI analysis. The Gamma-MM propagates model uncertainties to drought classification. The method is tested on rainfall data over India. A comparison of the results with standard SPI shows significant differences, particularly when SPI assumptions on data distribution are violated. Finding regions with similar drought characteristics is useful for policy-makers and water resources planners in the optimal allocation of resources, developing drought management plans, and taking timely actions to mitigate the negative impacts during droughts. Drought characteristics such as intensity, frequency, and duration, along with land-use and geographic information, were used as input features for clustering algorithms. Three methods, namely, (i) a Bayesian graph cuts algorithm that combines the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and Markov random fields (MRF), (ii) k-means, and (iii) hierarchical agglomerative clustering algorithm were used to find homogeneous drought regions that are spatially contiguous and possess similar drought characteristics. The number of homogeneous clusters and their shape was found to be sensitive to the choice of the drought index, the time window of drought, period of analysis, dimensionality of input datasets, clustering method, and model parameters of clustering algorithms. Regionalization for different epochs provided useful insight into the space-time evolution of homogeneous drought regions over the study area. Strategies to combine the results from multiple clustering methods were presented. These results can help policy-makers and water resources planners in the optimal allocation of resources, developing drought management plans, and taking timely actions to mitigate the negative impacts during droughts.


This article explores a number of characteristics of the conceptual structure and teaching of classical rhetoric, and indicates that the subject contents of rhetoric were based at the outset on certain principles and con texts of public communication events in the world in which people lived. This approach to the identification of the subject contents of oral communication has not changed substantially over time, nor have the basic categories by which public communication was originally distinguished as a field of study. What has changed considerably, is the human concept of the fundamental nature and scope of communication principles and contexts, the perspectives from which it is approached and its ontological and philosophical basis. The ordering and systemisation of these are naturally expressed in a more comprehensive and scientific conceptual system than was the case in the classical era. In order to gain a thorough understanding of the complex system, however, It is necessary to study its classical rhetorical roots.


Total lipid content of freshwater macroinvertebrates from different orders and with different life histories was investigated. Lipids were determined as HIP-extractable lipids (HIP = hexane: isopropanol). Macroinvertebrate taxa were assigned to different feeding guilds, and life histories for insect taxa: Gammarus pulex (Amphipoda/shredder), Ecdyonurus sp. (Ephemeroptera/hemimetabolous/grazer), Perla sp. (Plecoptera/hemimetabolous/predator), Hydrophsyche sp. (Trichoptera/holometabolous/ suspension feeder), and Atherix ibis (Diptera/holometabolous/predator). Animals were collected in two streams in Switzerland bimonthly between October 1994 and October 1995. Lipids, expressed as percent dry mass (dm), were estimated using two techniques: (1) as total lipid content, determined by the sulphophosphovanilline method; (2) as total fatty acids (= sum of fatty acids), determined by gas chromatography. The annual average total lipid contents for G. pulex, Ecdyonurus and Perla were 6.1 %, 7.0 % and 6.0 % dm, respectively. The two holometabolous insects, Hydropsyche (8.0 %) and A. ibis (9.3 %), exhibited the highest total lipid content. Total fatty acids as a percentage of total lipids was lowest in G. pulex (62 %), followed by Ecdyonurus (64 %), Perla (73 %), Hydropsyche (80 %), and A. ibis (85 %), The dry mass of holometabolous insects (Hydropsyche and A. ibis) related positively with lipids, indicating an increase in body concentration during larval growth. No or only a weak positive relationship with dry mass was found for the hemimetabolous Ecdyonurus and Perla. Gammarus pulex, in contrast, showed a negative relationship. Male G. pulex attained a larger size and contained less fat than juveniles and adult females. Seasonal changes in total lipid content were recognisable only as weak trends because of high variation among individuals. Gammarus pulex had higher total lipid content in spring, while Perla and Hydropsyche maxima occurred in summer. No seasonal trends in total lipid content could be observed in Ecdyonurus and A. ibis.


A recent discovery by Bruce Ross of Oceanic Coal Australia Ltd in the roof of the Borehole Seam, West Wallsend Colliery, is the first well documented evidence of a tetrapod fauna from the Permian of Australia. The Borehole Seam (Newcastle Coal Measures, Lambton Subgroup) lies immediately above the Waratah Sandstone which forms the base of the Newcastle Coal Measures and is most likely Kazanian in age. Preliminary study has shown that among the five tetrapod specimens recovered at least temnospondyl amphibians are represented. The only previous tetrapod body fossil from the Australian Permian is a temnospondyl amphibian, Bothriceps major, from Airly, to the north-west of Sydney. Tetrapod trace fossils have been known for some time in the southern part of the Sydney Basin where the Illawarra Coal Measures have yielded several sets of reptilian footprints. Tetrapods were therefore living to the north, west and south of the Sydney Basin in the Late Permian of Australia.


In the year 2004 the Govt. of India launched a dedicated Satellite called EDUSAT (Educational Satellite) to serve the educational sectors offering an interactive satellite based distance education system for the country. It is to provide connectivity to schools, colleges, and other similar institutions. Initially it is proposed to use the facilities in four different states for reaching different target groups. In Karnataka State the Edusat is being used to supplement classroom teaching in all the elementary schools (850 Schools) of one district.

The schools are provided with receiving solar backed system to receive signals (programmes) in all the 850 schools. On each day two programmes of 30 minutes were broadcast for the benefit of students of Grade III to VIII. The contents covered almost all subject areas of all the grades. In the academic year 2005-06 almost 200 video programmes were broadcast. The teachers were given training with respect to the use of television as medium of instruction and also to conduct Pre and post broadcast activities.

As part of evaluation of Edusat Project in Karnataka a comprehensive research study has been initiated to find out the impact on the attendance, and academic achievement of students by following experimental and control design. The content achievement (one test of about 20 items for each grade) and visual achievement (one test of 10 items for each grade) tests have been administered on students of different grades to ascertain the learning gains. The feedback from teachers have been obtained.

This paper will high light the implementation of the EDUSAT project and analysis the impact on students attendance, learning gains and attitude and opinion of teachers based on the data collected from about 2000 students and 200 teachers.


We present numerical modeling and laboratory studies of degenerate type I nanosecond optical parametric oscillators. Because the signal and idler waves are identical and parametric gain is phase sensitive, their round-trip phase is a critical parameter. We show that signal spectrum, transverse mode, and conversion efficiency are all strongly influenced by this phase. We also examine the influence of signal-wave injection seeding and phase-velocity mismatch.


The purpose of this paper is to explore the trend and most common themes about Lean Six Sigma (LSS) implementation in the finance sector, and also to identify gaps in the themes that may be preventing organisations from identifying benefits from their LSS strategy and developing an agenda for future research on LSS themes. The following research is based on a systematic literature review of 30 papers that were published on LSS in the finance sector, from 2005 to 2015. Many issues and important themes have emerged, which are benefits, motivation factors, limitations and reasons for implementing LSS in financial organisations. Review identified many gaps and limitations that need to be explored as future research since little have been written on LSS as a holistic strategy for business improvement. It is important for practitioners to be aware of LSS benefits, limitations and motivating factors before starting the implementation process. This paper is based on a comprehensive literature review which gives an opportunity to LSS researchers to understand some common themes about LSS implementation in depth. In addition, by highlighting gaps in the current literature and proposing an agenda for future research saves time and effort for readers looking to research topics within LSS.


As a result of availability of new technologies, functional printing as a segment has become one of the most interesting directions of research and development in graphic technology. Conductive inks are not a novelty and they already have broad possibilities in production of everyday products. There is still a big market for the broadening of their use, as well as a possibility of further enhancing their properties. This paper analyzes the influence of printing substrate, age of ink and the number of IR drying on the electrical resistance of the conductive inks. In the paper, subject of analysis was the change of electrical resistance in the line that was 9 cm long and 10 typographic points wide. The semi-automated screen-printing machine was used for printing. Three types of printing substrates were used; uncoated, coated and recycled paper. Two types of inks were used; newly opened ink and ink that was out of date for half year. After the printing, prints were dried using the IR dryer. Prints were dried once, and then additional three times. After the first and last drying, multimeter was used to measure electrical resistance of the lines. Analysis of the data shows that the older ink produces prints with higher electrical resistance. There are also notable differences in the electrical resistance based on the printing substrate.


The extensive Islamic missionary movement of Tablighi Jamaat, which originated in colonial India but is now worldwide, encourages participants to go out on small group tours to invite others, primarily nominal Muslims, to return to faithful adherence to Islamic teachings, above all the canonical prayer. At the conclusion of a tour, participants should report back, orally or in writing, their experiences to the mosque-based group (local, regional, or national) from which they set out. A sample of these reports, called karguzari, are the basis of this article. The reports reflect two discourses: one of jihad, in the sense of the nonmilitant "greater jihad" focused on self-discipline; and one of Sufism, embedded in the efforts of the charismatic group rather than in institutional tasawwuf.


Extracted from text ... THE EARLY MISSION IN SOUTH AFRICA/DIE
VROEE? SENDING IN SUID-AFRIKA, 1799?
1819
Karel Schoeman
Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2005, 272 pp.,
map, chronology, bibl., index. ISBN: 1-
9198525-42-8
Karel Schoeman's career as a historian shows an
intriguing development. After concentrating on
the history of the Free State during the 1980s, he
gradually migrated south (and back in time),
starting off (in 1993?4) with three articles in the
South African Historical Journal on the London
Missionary Society's short-lived stations among
the San. The mid-1990s saw an outpouring of
innovative and ground-breaking books on people
connected to the early missionary movement in ..


This paper provides a framework to automatically generate a hybrid controller that guarantees that the robot can achieve its task when a robot model, a class of admissible environments, and a high-level task or behavior for the robot are provided. The desired task specifications, which are expressed in a fragment of linear temporal logic (LTL), can capture complex robot behaviors such as search and rescue, coverage, and collision avoidance. In addition, our framework explicitly captures sensor specifications that depend on the environment with which the robot is interacting, which results in a novel paradigm for sensor-based temporal-logic-motion planning. As one robot is part of the environment of another robot, our sensor-based framework very naturally captures multirobot specifications in a decentralized manner. Our computational approach is based on first creating discrete controllers satisfying specific LTL formulas. If feasible, the discrete controller is then used to guide the sensor-based composition of continuous controllers, which results in a hybrid controller satisfying the high-level specification but only if the environment is admissible.


With a significant increase in the number of countries with antitrust laws, technical assistance to improve the capacity of antitrust agencies has become a key priority for international antitrust aid efforts. Donors have assigned a significant amount of time and financial resources to technical assistance to raise the capacity and effectiveness of younger agencies. However, quantitative analysis of the impact of this technical assistance remains limited at best. In this article we focus on what appears to be a particularly important part of technical assistance and capacity building — the use of long term advisors (LTA) and short term interventions (STI). In a year-long project, the International Competition Network surveyed its member antitrust agencies on antitrust technical assistance. The questionnaire contained over 1,000 questions on various aspects of technical assistance. We provide an analysis of the data using formal modeling. The most important findings from the model relate to two structural features of recipient antitrust agencies. First, recipient agencies absorb LTA and STI services best when the agency head has a rank of minister or higher and/or when agencies had prosecutorial discretion. At the heart of these agency features is the relative power position of the agency in the domestic political and economic structure of the country. Those agencies with a strong power base seem well positioned to receive the current formatted technical assistance involving LTAs and STIs. Second, bilateral donor relationships did remarkably better in helping the agencies with their strategic mission.


Context: Midwives are in a key position given that they are the first members of the healthcare profession to meet the baby and the family in both the treatment and the rehabilitative setting. Aim: The present study aimed to determine the awareness levels of midwifery students on child abuse and neglect, and to evaluate the efficacy of a planned training on this issue. Setting and Design: A semi-experimental study was performed in a Health Sciences Faculty, Turkey. Materials and Methods: Midwifery students (n = 85) enrolled in a Health Sciences Faculty comprised the sample of the study. The data were collected using a sociodemographic characteristics form and the Scale for the Identification of Symptoms and Risks of Child Abuse and Neglect (SISRCAN). Statistical Analysis Used: The study included a pretest, a training program on child abuse and neglect, and a posttest, and the data were analyzed using SPSS 21.0. Number, percentage, mean, paired samples t-test, and Wilcoxon test were used for the comparison of the values. A statistical significance level of P= 0.05 was applied. Results: Among the participants, 61.2% stated that they had encountered cases of child abuse before while 40% stated that they themselves had experienced child abuse. The participants' mean posttraining score on the whole SISRCAN and their mean posttraining scores on the subscales of "physical symptoms of the child," "behavioral symptoms of child abuse," "characteristics of parents prone to abusing and neglecting their children," and "neglect and familial characteristics in child abuse and neglect" were found to significantly differ statistically (P < 0.001) compared to the mean scores they obtained in pretraining on the total scale and the mentioned subscales. Conclusion: Training programs that aim to raise the knowledge level of midwifery student, who play an especially important role in children's health, on child abuse and neglect in their future career should be planned and implemented effectively by the managers of health-care centers and hospitals.


The chapters in the book come from an international group of authors with diverse backgrounds including ergonomics, psychology, architecture, computer science, engineering, and sociology. Specific topics include biometric systems development, military command and control, cellular phone interface design, methodologies for workplace design, medical device design, cockpit display and decision tool design for pilots, driver visual and cognitive processes, and performance of inspection tasks in manufacturing operations; and extend to human-automation integration in future aviation systems, novel 3-D display technologies for enhancing information analysis, training methods for mental models, approaches to activity analysis, new research-oriented frameworks and paradigms in training, and the use of virtual reality for skill development and assessment. The book is divided into sections covering: I. Cultural Differences in Computing Systems Design II. Decision Making and Decision Support III. Desktop/Mobile Interface Design IV. Ergonomics in Design V. Ergonomics in Product Design VI. Human Factors in Aviation Systems VII. Human Factors in Driving VIII. Human Factors in Manufacturing IX. Human Factors in NextGen Operations X. Information Visualization for Situation Awareness XI. Mental Models XII. Perceptuo-Motor Skills & Psychophysical Assessment XIII. Task Analysis XIV. Training Technology XV. Virtual Reality for Behavior Assessment XVI. Virtual Reality for Psychomotor Training The implications of all this work include design recommendations for complex systems and commercial products, new procedures for operator training and self-regulation as well as methods for accessibility to systems, and specification of ergonomic interventions at the user. It is expected that this book will be of special value to practitioners involved in design process development, design and prototyping of systems, products and services, as well as training process design for a broad range of applications and markets in various countries. Seven other titles in the Advances in Human Factors and Ergonomics Series are:Advances in Human Factors and Ergonomics in Healthcare Advances in Applied Digital Human Modeling Advances in Cross-Cultural Decision Making Advances in Occupational, Social and Organizational Ergonomics Advances in Human Factors, Ergonomics and Safety in Manufacturing and Service Industries Advances in Ergonomics Modeling & Usability Evaluation Advances in Neuroergonomics and Human Factors of Special Populations


Labour groups in Western countries face an immense challenge to develop a progressive international response to the economic transformation of India and China. This article develops one aspect of such a response through a consideration of the past experiences of internationalism, developments in international labour standards debates, and changes that have occurred in both international and domestic legal arenas. The first section briefly examines the notion of labour internationalism and its checkered past. The second section considers the origins and politics of the North-South divide on the issue of enforceable international labour standards. This debate highlights many of the tensions in internationalism and the difficulties of using and restraining state power. The third section considers the application of extraterritorial law to hold Western multinationals responsible for their actions in other countries. It is based primarily on a consideration of cases arising from the United States. The fourth section highlights some of the difficulties that using an extraterritorial legal approach would entail. The article concludes by speculating about the path forward.


The Butterfly Defect addresses the widening gap between the new systemic risks generated by globalization and their effective management. It shows how the dynamics of turbo-charged globalization has the potential and power to destabilize our societies. Drawing on the latest insights from a wide variety of disciplines, Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan provide practical guidance for how governments, businesses, and individuals can better manage globalization and risk. Goldin and Mariathasan demonstrate that systemic risk issues are now endemic everywhere—in supply chains, pandemics, infrastructure, ecology and climate change, economics, and politics. Unless we address these concerns, they will lead to greater protectionism, xenophobia, nationalism, and, inevitably, deglobalization, rising inequality, conflict, and slower growth. The Butterfly Defect shows that mitigating uncertainty and risk in an interconnected world is an essential task for our future.


Everyone should be able to program. Programming in informal, but precise natural language would enable anyone to program and help eliminate the world-wide software backlog. Highly trained software engineers would still be needed for complex and demanding applications, but not for routine programming tasks. Programming in natural language is a monumental challenge and will require AI and software researchers to join forces. Early results, however, appear promising. Combining natural language understanding and ontological reasoning helps remove defects from requirements statements, transforms requirements into UML models, and might even enable script-like programming in specific, narrow domains. An important precondition for rapid progress in this area are benchmarks that help compare different approaches and stimulate competition among researchers.


The identification of historical events by geological and archaeological evidence is often ambiguous and conflicting, undermining the enormous potential for sub-annual precision in dating. The ruin of one of the largest pottery factories in the Middle East during Byzantine times, recently excavated in Yavneh (central Israel), exemplifies this: aligned fallen walls and columns and a kiln that collapsed while still in operation, with dozens of ceramic storage jars in articulation. Archaeological dating, which limits the time of the collapse to the seventh century CE, cannot distinguish between two large documented earthquakes that occurred during this century. By using pollen grains trapped by the collapse, we were able to distinguish, for the first time, between the two candidate earthquakes: September 634 CE and early June 659 CE. The pollen was extracted from the dust captured on the floor of the kiln during the cooling process of the vessels. The dust was collected only from below in situ whole vessels, and based on our reconstruction had been accumulated for about several days (after the heating process ended and before the collapse). Since the palynological assemblages included spring-blooming plants (such as Olea europaea and Sarcopoterium spinosum) and no common regional autumn bloomers (e.g. Artemisia), it is proposed that the kiln went out of use due to the early June 659 CE earthquake. We also propose that the recovery of the Yavneh workshops was no longer economically worthwhile, maybe in part due to changes in economic and political conditions in the region following the Muslim conquest.


The global carbon emissions budget over the next decades depends critically on the choices made by fast-growing emerging economies. Few studies exist, however, that develop country-specific energy system integration insights that can inform emerging economies in this decision-making process. High spatial- and temporal-resolution power system planning is central to evaluating decarbonization scenarios, but obtaining the required data and models can be cost prohibitive, especially for researchers in low, lower-middle income economies. Here, we use Nicaragua as a case study to highlight the importance of high-resolution open access data and modeling platforms to evaluate fuel-switching strategies and their resulting cost of power under realistic technology, policy, and cost scenarios (2014–2030). Our results suggest that Nicaragua could cost-effectively achieve a low-carbon grid (≥80%, based on non-large hydro renewable energy generation) by 2030 while also pursuing multiple development objectives. Regional cooperation (balancing) enables the highest wind and solar generation (18% and 3% by 2030, respectively), at the least cost (US$127 MWh−1). Potentially risky resources (geothermal and hydropower) raise system costs but do not significantly hinder decarbonization. Oil price sensitivity scenarios suggest renewable energy to be a more cost-effective long-term investment than fuel oil, even under the assumption of prevailing cheap oil prices. Nicaragua's options illustrate the opportunities and challenges of power system decarbonization for emerging economies, and the key role that open access data and modeling platforms can play in helping develop low-carbon transition pathways.


The feasibility of employing biochar as a fuel in a direct carbon fuel cell (DCFC) or a hybrid carbon fuel cell (HCFC) is investigated in the present study, by utilizing bare biochar or biochar/carbonate mixture as feedstock, respectively. Three different types of biochars, i.e., pistachio shells (PI), pecan shells (PE) and sawdust (SD) are used as feedstock in a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) of a type: Biochar|Co–CeO2/YSZ/Ag|Air. All samples were characterized by means of chemical composition (ultimate/proximate analysis), mercury porosimetry, N2 adsorption–desorption isotherms (BET method), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray Diffraction (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), to obtain a close correlation between cell performance and biochar characteristics. The electrochemical measurements reveal that the optimum performance, in terms of maximum power density (Pmax), is obtained for the PI biochar, which demonstrated a power output of 15.5 mW cm−2 at 800 °C, compared to 14 and 10 mW cm−2 for PE and SD biochars, respectively. The obtained cell performance results are interpreted on the basis of biochar physicochemical characteristics and AC impedance spectroscopy studies. The superior performance of PI biochar is attributed to a synergistic effect of several physicochemical characteristics, involving the porosity, the acidity, the volatile matter, the carbon and hydrogen content as well as the population of oxygenated surface functionalities.


Religiousness exerts a protective effect against underage alcohol use, but it is largely unknown whether its protective quality extends equally to alcohol-related problems. It is also unclear to what extent spirituality, which is related to religiousness, exerts a similar protective effect. The current study examined whether facets of religiousness and spirituality—religious commitment and spiritual transcendence—were differentially related to alcohol use and alcohol-related problems among an underage sample of young adults. Despite being underage, most participants (n 344; 61% female) reported having an alcoholic drink at least once a month and having at least two to three drinks per occasion. Results of hierarchical linear regression analyses that controlled for demographics, positive alcohol expectancies, and impulsivity found unique associations between religious commitment and spiritual transcendence and alcohol use. Specifically, religious commitment operated as a protective factor, while spiritual transcendence operated as a risk factor for alcohol use. Neither religious commitment nor spiritual transcendence predicted alcohol-related problems. Results of this study inform future research by highlighting the importance of studying religiousness and spirituality as unique constructs with the potential for differential predictive utility.


The Competition Act and certain recent decisions by the competition authorities are examined here to assess the extent to which South Africa's conduct-based approach to competition law has led to consistent outcomes in the assessment of effects on competition. This has not been the case in the assessment of anti-competitive effects among customers or resellers when a supplier accused of an anti-competitive action does not compete with its customers. An anti-competitive effect among customers or resellers is treated as anti-competitive when it arises from some form of conduct, such as price discrimination. However, it is not seen as anti-competitive when it arises from a refusal to supply, for example. Possible reasons for South Africa's conduct-based approach and this inconsistent outcome in the assessment of competition among customers and resellers, including the economic foundations of the relevant approaches and their relationship with competition law in other jurisdictions, are assessed.


In developing geothermal resources there is a high risk of failure compared to hydrocarbon exploration. The MeProRisk projects aims at improving the strategies in all phases of the reservoir life cycle. It is a joint enterprise of three German universities and two companies: RWTH Aachen; FU Berlin; University of Kiel; Geophysica GmbH (Aachen); and RWE Dea AG (Hamburg). It is funded for three years by the German Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF). The key idea of this project is to understand the development of a given reservoir as an iterative process. Starting from existing geological information and geophysical data, one or more conceptual models will emerge which will be used for first numerical simulation, forward and inverse. The models will be progressively refined by including reliable rock properties based on a statistical analysis and geological fine structure deduced from sophisticated seismic interpretation. The use of inverse simulation techniques in a broad sense will not only finally yield an optimal model but provide estimates of uncertainty and resolution for the model. This information is useful for further optimizations of experiments, not the least important of which is comprised of choosing the locations of new exploration wells.


Pecking order models of international finance suggest that countries should become less reliant on international bank lending as they develop. Reduced information costs are one of the factors behind this trend towards disintermediation. This paper presents a simple model on the choice between bank debt and bond finance which builds on Rajan (1992), and it uses two new datasets to test the implications, focusing on bilateral cross-border bank claims and bond holdings. We find support for the hypothesis that the state of development of an economy lowers the share of bank finance. However, evidence on the importance of variables which more directly measure information costs is less clear-cut.


Listeners were tested on their ability to discriminate "standard" and "comparison" pure-tone musical intervals that differed in size by 20 cents (1/ 5 of an equal-tempered semitone). Some of the intervals
 were prototypic, equal-tempered perfect fifths (exactly 7 semitones, or 700 cents). Others were mistuned to various degrees (660, 680, 720, or 740 cents). The intervals were melodic (sequential) in Experiments
 1 and 2 and harmonic (simultaneous) in Experiment 3. Performance was neither enhanced nor impaired in comparisons that included the prototype. In other words, no "perceptual magnet" or "perceptual anchor"
 effects were observed. Nonetheless, performance was markedly asymmetric. Regardless of listeners9 musical expertise, discrimination was superior when the standard interval was more accurately tuned than
 the comparison interval (e.g., 700- cent standard, 680-cent comparison), compared with when the comparison was more accurately tuned than the standard (e.g., 680-cent standard, 700-cent comparison).


Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) has extensive interactions with the host DNA damage response (DDR) machinery that can be either detrimental or beneficial to the virus. Proteins in the homologous recombination pathway are known to be required for efficient replication of the viral genome, while different members of the classical non-homologous end-joining (c-NHEJ) pathway have opposing effects on HSV-1 infection. Here, we have investigated the role of the recently-discovered c-NHEJ component, PAXX (Paralogue of XRCC4 and XLF), which we found to be excluded from the nucleus during HSV-1 infection. We have established that cells lacking PAXX have an intact innate immune response to HSV-1 but show a defect in viral genome replication efficiency. Counterintuitively, PAXX−/− cells were able to produce greater numbers of infectious virions, indicating that PAXX acts to restrict HSV-1 infection in a manner that is different from other c-NHEJ factors.


Studies have shown that most Canadians are deficient in Vitamin D3. In addition to its role in systemic calcium regulation, Vitamin D3 is also proposed to be integral to the suppression of cancer, as well as to the regulation of certain immune and endocrine components. Many experts are seriously concerned that Health Canada's current Vitamin D3 dosage recommendations are inadequate to facilitate these mechanisms. A bitter debate on dosage has ensued—largely between researchers and regulatory bodies such as Health Canada and the US Institute of Medicine—leaving health practitioners caught in the middle with contradictory directives and information.


The design of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine for an autonomous agent (bot) in a game is always a difficult task mainly done by an expert human player, who has to transform his/her knowledge into a behavioural engine. This paper presents an approach for conducting this task by means of Genetic Programming (GP) application. This algorithm is applied to design decision trees to be used as bot's AI in 1 vs 1 battles inside the RTS game Planet Wars. Using this method it is possible to create rule-based systems defining decisions and actions, in an automatic way, completely different from a human designer doing them from scratch. These rules will be optimised along the algorithm run, considering the bot's performance during evaluation matches. As GP can generate and evolve behavioural rules not taken into account by an expert, the obtained bots could perform better than human-defined ones. Due to the difficulties when applying Computational Intelligence techniques in the videogames scope, such as noise factor in the evaluation functions, three different fitness approaches have been implemented and tested in this work. Two of them try to minimize this factor by considering additional dynamic information about the evaluation matches, rather than just the final result (the winner), as the other function does. In order to prove them, the best obtained agents have been compared with a previous bot, created by an expert player (from scratch) and then optimised by means of Genetic Algorithms. The experiments show that the three used fitness functions generate bots that outperform the optimized human-defined one, being the area-based fitness function the one that produces better results.


Purpose To determine if lumbar synovial cyst rupture in symptomatic patients results in improved clinical outcome when using direct tandem and/or coaxial percutaneous CT guided techniques. Materials and methods 20 patients with unilateral lower extremity radiculopathy and/or low back pain underwent CT guided percutaneous treatment for their symptomatic lumbar synovial cysts. Cysts were identified with the use of a low osmolar non-ionic contrast agent via facet joint injection or through direct injection. Cyst rupture, using a direct tandem and/or coaxial technique, was attempted in all patients using an 18 gauge guide needle and a 22 gauge insert needle. Following attempted cyst aspiration, cyst rupture was performed using 1–3 mL of a mixture of methylprednisolone (2 mL, 80 mg) and bupivacaine (3 mL, 0.5%). All patients were followed-up in clinic for a minimum of 6 months after their procedures and up to a maximum of 24 months. Results 11 patients were male and nine were female, with an average age of 65.6 years. 17 patients presented with severe unilateral lower extremity radiculopathy and three patients were experiencing low back pain. One of the patients had two synovial cysts, and therefore a total of 21 lumbar synovial cysts were treated in this group of patients. Direct cyst puncture was achieved using a tandem technique in nine patients, a coaxial interlaminar approach in seven patients, a coaxial transforaminal approach in two patients, and a coaxial trans-facet approach in three patients. Cyst rupture was documented in all cases, as evidenced by CT confirmation of cyst decompression and contrast agent extravasation into the epidural space. The mean surveillance period in these patients was 18 months. Six patients experienced their usual radicular pain within 2 months of their treatment. Four of these patients were re-treated for recurrent smaller cysts. These patients have not had a recurrence at 24 months of follow up. Two of these six patients elected to undergo open surgical decompression without symptomatic improvement. No treatment related complications were observed in this group of patients. Conclusions Direct tandem and/or coaxial percutaneous CT guided techniques for rupture and treatment of symptomatic lumbar synovial cysts reduces recurrence rates and therefore helps avoid more invasive open surgical procedures in this group of patients.


This study presents a pre-registered replication of one of the most influential articles in the customer engagement literature entitled Consumer Brand Engagement in Social Media: Conceptualization, Scale Development and Validation (Hollebeek, Glynn, & Brodie, 2014, Journal of Interactive Marketing, 28[2], 149–165). By employing the popular social media brand Instagram®, which is often used by marketers to facilitate consumer engagement, this study tested the hypotheses posited by Hollebeek et al. (2014). Although the original model replicated well and similar findings were observed, replication results indicated problems with discriminant validity between consumer brand engagement and self-brand connection constructs. Further exploratory analyses of the dataset also revealed potential gender differences in responses to consumer brand engagement items. Future replication studies are required to address these issues and increase the generalizability of consumer brand engagement theories. (Less)


Industrial and competition policy are often seen as logical opposites: inherently conflicting. In my earlier research (1997) I have found that at EU level these two policies are in principle compatible if industrial policy is defined as promoting structural reform. This was illustrated by the telecommunications liberalization which was then ongoing. An update of this research based on the example of broadband roll-out shows that the finding of consistency remains the same or at least similar. However the impact of competition policy has broadened. It has moved from antitrust and mergers to include more active policies on state aid and sectoral competition policy. At the same time in the context of broadband these policies favour (i) more public intervention (aid) and (ii) perpetuate sectoral regulation where originally a rapid transition to general antitrust had been envisaged. This example suggests that to balance industrial policy and competition policy as a whole consistency and predictability – including between the different branches of competition policy – is essential.


The recycling of steel chips into an environmentally friendly, responsive, and profitable commodity in the manufacturing and construction industries is a huge and difficult challenge. Several strategies designed for the management and processing of this waste in developed countries have been largely unsuccessful in developing countries mainly due to its capital-intensive nature. To this end, this investigation attempts to provide an alternative solution to the recycling of this material by maximizing its utility value in the building construction industry. This is to establish their influence on the compressive strength of sandcrete hollow blocks and solid cubes with the aim of specifying the range percent of steel chips for the sandcrete optimum compressive strength value. This is particularly important for developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and even Latin America where most sandcrete blocks exhibit compressive strengths far below standard requirements. Percentages of steel chips relative to the weight of cement were varied and blended with the sand in an attempt to improve the sand grading parameters. The steel chips variations were one, two, three, four, five, ten and fifteen percent respectively. It was confirmed that the grading parameters were improved and there were significant increases in the compressive strength of the blocks and cube samples. The greatest improvement was noticed at four percent steel chips and sand combination. Using the plotted profile, the margin of steel chips additions for the optimum compressive strength was also established. It is recommended that steel chip sandcrete blocks are suitable for both internal load bearing, and non-load bearing walls, in areas where they are not subjected to moisture ingress. However, for external walls, and in areas where they are liable to moisture attack after laying, the surfaces should be well rendered. Below ground level, the surfaces should be coated with a water proofing agent like bitumen and cement containing waterproofing agents be used in the manufacture, laying, and rendering of steel chip sandcrete blocks.


This paper uses identical surveys conducted in July 2020 in eight countries – U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy, Sweden, China, South Korea, and Japan – and examines teleworking within and across these eight countries. We seek to answer the following questions: (1) Which demographic and socioeconomic groups are more likely to telework? (2) Is there any association between telework and other work-related experiences such as life satisfaction and perceived productivity at work? Across countries, we observe that teleworking was higher in countries that imposed strict lockdowns, such as China, and lower in countries that had soft lockdowns, such as Japan. Within each country, there are notable differences in teleworking between low- and high-income persons, and between those employed in small versus large firms. We also find that people who used telework before COVID-19 report higher life satisfaction compared to those who started using telework for the first time after the COVID-19 outbreak.


The electrical characteristics of a Metal-Semi-insulator-Semiconductor diode have been comprehensively studied at various temperatures. In particular the electrical, structural and compositional properties of the semi-insulator, silicon-rich-oxide (SRO), have been thoroughly investigated. The SRO films were all deposited by atmospheric pressure chemical vapour deposition, (APCVD), at 650 C with silane (SiH(_4)) and nitrous oxide (N(_2)O) reactant gases and a carrier gas of nitrogen. The reactant gas ratio, γ, was held at 0.22 and the deposition time varied between 0.5 and 8 minutes. The effects of film thickness, film annealing, forming, top contact metal (i.e. work function difference), top contact metal area, substrate material and temperature on the electrical characteristics in both forward and reverse bias have been reported. Various techniques have been employed to elucidate the physical and structural properties of the SRO film. These include: Auger Electron Spectroscopy; Secondary Ion Mass Spectroscopy; Glow Discharge Optical Emission Spectroscopy; Scanning Electron Microscopy; Transmission Electron Microscopy; Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy; Optical Ellipsometry and Alpha Step Analysis. A model for the structure of SRO films has been put forward. The films are thought to be extremely random in structure, containing many voids with a gradual variation in composition from substrate to top metal contact. Various models for conduction in the SRO film were investigated over a range of electric fields and temperatures to determine the predominant conduction mechanism for a particular set of conditions. Conduction in SRO is thought to be dominated by Schottky emission across the SRO-substrate interface. Once this Schottky barrier is conducting, at suitably high biases, conduction across the remainder of the device is thought to be by thermionic emission at high temperatures and by a Poole-Frenkel process at low temperatures.


Most randomized controlled trials (RCT) of social programs test interventions at modest scale. While the hope is that promising programs will be scaled up, there are few successful examples of this scale-up process in practice. It would be ideal to know which programs will work at large scale before investing the resources to take them to scale. But it would seem that the only way to tell whether a program works at scale is to test it at scale. The goal of this paper is to propose a way out of this Catch-22. The researchers first develop a simple model that helps clarify the type of scale-up challenge for which their method is most relevant. Most social programs rely on labor as a key input (teachers, nurses, social workers, etc.). People vary greatly in their skill at these jobs. So social programs, like firms, confront a search problem in the labor market that can lead to inelastically-supplied human capital. The result is that as programs scale, either average costs must increase if program quality is to be held constant, or else program quality will decline if average costs are held fixed. The researchers' proposed method for reducing the costs of estimating program impacts at large scale combines the fact that hiring inherently involves ranking inputs with the most powerful element of the social science toolkit: randomization. They show that it is possible to operate a program at modest scale n but learn about the input supply curves facing the firm at much larger scale (S × n) by randomly sampling the inputs the provider would have hired if they operated at scale (S × n). They build a simple two-period model of social-program decision making and use a model of Bayesian learning to develop heuristics for when scale-up experiments of the sort they propose are likely to be particularly valuable. The researchers also present a series of results to illustrate the method, including one application to a real-world tutoring program that highlights an interesting observation: The noisier the program provider's prediction of input quality, the less pronounced is the scale-up problem.


This review of the development and current status of electron tomography deals mainly with the mathematical and algorithmic aspects. After a very brief description of the role of electron tomography in structural biology, we turn our attention to the derivation of the forward operator. Starting from the Schrödinger equation, the electron–specimen interaction is modelled as a diffraction tomography problem and the picture is completed by adding a description of the optical system of the transmission electron microscope. The first-order Born approximation enables one to explicitly express the intensity for any finite wavenumber in terms of the propagation operator acting on the specimen convolved with a point spread function, derived from the optics in the transmission electron microscope. Next, we focus on the difficulties that cause the reconstruction problem to be quite challenging. Special emphasis is put on explaining the extremely low signal-to-noise ratio in the data combined with the incomplete data problems, which lead to severe ill-posedness. The next step is to derive the standard phase contrast model used in the electron tomography community. The above-mentioned expression for the intensity generalizes the standard phase contrast model which can be obtained by replacing the propagation operator by its high-energy limit, the x-ray transform, as the wavenumber tends to infinity. The importance of more carefully including the wave nature of the electron–specimen interaction is supported by performing an asymptotic analysis of the intensity as the wavenumber tends to infinity. Next we provide an overview of the various reconstruction methods that have been employed in electron tomography and we conclude by mentioning a number of open problems. Besides providing an introduction to electron tomography written in the 'language of inverse problems', the authors hope to raise interest among experts in integral geometry and regularization theory for the mathematical and algorithmic difficulties that are encountered in electron tomography.


The purpose of this pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) was to compare the 6-month outcomes of a Dialectical Behavioral Therapy–Corrections Modified (DBT-CM) program versus a Health Promotion (HP) program on mitigating recidivism among 130 female parolees/probationers between baseline and 6-month follow-up. The effect of DBT-CM on reducing recidivism was greater among those who expressed a desire for help (risk ratio [RR] = 0.40; 95% confidence interval [CI] = [0.16, 1.00]; p = .050) and among homeless female ex-offenders (HFOs) who were younger (<50 years of age; RR = 0.46; 95% CI = [0.19, 1.11]; p = .085) and participants with Desire for Help score > 35 (Model 3; RR = 0.40; 95% CI = [0.16, 1.00]; p = .050). Findings from this pilot study suggest that the DBT-CM intervention may be effective in reducing reincarceration rates among some HFOs during reentry. Larger RCTs are needed to validate our findings.


Every year in this country, hundreds of people are convicted of having shaken a baby, most often to death. In a prosecution paradigm without precedent, expert medical testimony is used to establish that a crime occurred, that the defendant caused the infant's death by shaking, and that the shaking was sufficiently forceful to constitute depraved indifference to human life. Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) is, in essence, a medical diagnosis of murder, one based solely on the presence of a diagnostic triad: retinal bleeding, bleeding in the protective layer of the brain, and brain swelling. New scientific research has cast doubt on the forensic significance of this triad, thereby undermining the foundations of thousands of SBS convictions. Outside the United States, this scientific evolution has prompted systemic reevaluations of the prosecutorial paradigm. Most recently, after a seventeen-month investigation costing $8.3 million, a Canadian commission recommended that all SBS cases be reviewed. In contrast, our criminal justice system has failed to absorb the latest scientific knowledge. This is beginning to change: for the first time, an SBS conviction was overturned last year because "newly discovered" scientific evidence would likely create a reasonable doubt about the defendant's guilt; also for the first time, a state Supreme Court is considering whether a trial judge erred in excluding as unreliable the prosecution's expert testimony regarding SBS; and the U.S. Supreme Court is now reviewing a petition seeking review of a habeas grant in an SBS case. Yet the response has been halting and inconsistent. To this day, triad-based convictions continue to be affirmed, and new prosecutions commenced, as a matter of course. These developments have not attracted the attention of legal scholars. In the face of this void, this article identifies a criminal justice crisis and begins a conversation about its proper resolution. The conceptual implications of the inquiry - for scientific engagement in law's shadow, for future systemic reform, and for our understanding of innocence in a post-DNA world - should assist in the task of righting past wrongs and averting further injustice.


Mantle Plumes are considered to play an important role in continental break-up or are even the driving force. Some researchers relate the break-up of continents and the extensive sub-aerial flood basalt magmatism directly to the arrival of a mantle plume. Despite ongoing research activities no consensus in the geoscience community has been achieved, if this model is correct. Competing ideas interpret the separation of continents as a consequence of plate tectonics.Geophysical data, which can probe deeper crustal levels do not provide an unique interpretation. One of the most disputed issues is the origin of lower crustal high velocity bodies (LCB, Vp > 7.0 km/s), which are found along volcanic rifted margins. In the absence of any rock samples from the LCB no geochemical and/or age control on its nature and evolution is available, which might facilitate the interpretation.In this contribution new geophysical data will be presented from the North Atlantic, the Namibian margin and the Atlantic sector of Antarctica to question the plume-continental break-up paradigm. Starting in the north it is striking that for the opening of the Arctic Ocean no plume location has been discovered so far, which can be considered to be responsible for the break-up. Towards the south, the East Greenland margin shows a quite variable crustal structure, which is difficult to understand in view of a large thermal plume anomaly. The crustal structure south of the Denmark Strait, however, shows classical structures, which are related to the occurrence of a plume during break-up.In the southern hemisphere, the break-up of Gondwana is explained in most publications with the existence of several mantle plumes. Thus, Antarctica should have faced several magmatic events during its dispersal. However, this is not obvious from the onshore geology and especially the available geophysical data. Recent aeromagnetic data show that the African and South American plates moved at different velocities from the beginning of seafloor spreading. Thus, rifting between these two plates is much older than the eruption of flood basalts (132-135 Myr) on both continents. This might point towards the fact that after the arrival of a plume beneath Africa/South America more than 10-30 Myr were necessary to separate the continents or that the thermal anomaly played a more passive role.


The debate concerning the role of knowledge in the economic growth process has gained considerable attention, both because of the importance of its implications in terms of economic policy and due to the number of theoretical and empirical analyses it has engendered. Thus, the argument according to which endogenous growth models explain long-term economic growth is often put forward. It is held that the production of knowledge induces self-maintained economic growth. However, in spite of numerous theoretical developments, attempts at empirical verification have run up against serious methodological difficulties. The first and most serious stumbling block is the way in which an intangible good of incommensurable size such as knowledge is evaluated. Moreover, most of the empirical studies carried out in recent years have taken the form of cross-national comparisons designed to analyse the role of different socio-economic factors in growth. So far, however, they have not succeeded in making conclusive statements of whether or not knowledge can induce long-term economic growth. Taking this state of research into consideration, the main objective of the present volume is to re-examine, by way of new techniques of quantitative analysis, theoretical models developed with a view to ascertaining the endogenous nature of economic growth induced by the production of knowledge.


Abstract Evolutionary stasis has often been explained by stabilizing selection, intrinsic constraints, or, more recently, by spatially patterned population dynamics. To distinguish which of these mechanisms explains a given case of stasis in the fossil record, stasis must first be rigorously documented in a high-resolution stratigraphic time series of fossil specimens. Furthermore, past studies of evolutionary mode in fossil mammalian lineages have often been limited to univariate traits (e.g., molar crown area). It is reasonable to assume that tooth shape, a multivariate trait, reflects important additional aspects of tooth form and function. Here we present the results of a geometric morphometric analysis of the lower dentition of the Paleocene-Eocene condylarth species Ectocion osbornianus collected from the Bighorn and Clarks Fork Basins of northwestern Wyoming. Tooth margin shape, cusp configuration, and shearing crest shape were digitized for the last lower premolar, p4, and for two lower molars, m1 and m3. Multivariate statistical tests of evolutionary mode were used to analyze the change in shape variance over time in addition to the magnitude and direction of shape change. Test results characterize the shape time series as consisting of counteracting changes with less change than expected under a random walk (i.e., stasis). The temporal structure of shape variance implies that the sampled E. osbornianus most likely represent a single population, which is not concordant with the population dynamic mechanism of stasis. Stabilizing selection and/or intrinsic constraints remain as the mechanisms that could explain stasis in the lower dental shape of E. osbornianus despite the variable environmental conditions of the Paleocene–Eocene.


ABSTRACT An important tenet of biogeography and comparative ecology is that disjunct assemblages in similar physical environments are functionally more similar to each other than to assemblages from other environments. Temperate rainforests in South America, New Zealand and Australia share certain physiognomic similarities, but we are not aware of any statistical evidence that these disjunct plant assemblages share a distinctive suite of functional traits, or trait combinations. We compiled height, leaf, wood and reproductive traits from the 25 commonest arborescent species at Chilean and New Zealand sites matched for summer rainfall, summer maximum temperatures, and winter minimum temperatures. We then used multivariate tests of trait convergence. Tropical and subtropical assemblages served as out-groups. PERMANOVA showed convergence of trait centroids at the two temperate sites, where trees on average had denser wood and smaller leaves than trees at the (sub)tropical sites. Principal components analyses carried out separately on each assemblage showed that the Chilean and New Zealand assemblages were also the most similar pair in terms of trait relationships, although New Zealand also shared strong similarities with subtropical Argentina. The main axis of variation in both temperate assemblages ranged from small, short-lived understorey trees with soft leaves, to emergents with sclerophyllous leaves and fairly dense wood. However, the New Zealand assemblage was much richer in small trees with soft leaves than its Chilean counterpart; possible historical influences on this difference include conditions favouring radiation of small trees during the late Neogene in New Zealand, competition from Chusquea bamboos in Chile and the historical absence of browsing mammals from New Zealand. Environmental filtering has produced similar values of individual traits in Chile and New Zealand, but only partial convergence of functional trait combinations. As far as we know, this is the first study to statistically test whether disjunct tree assemblages on climatically matched sites are more functionally similar to each other than to assemblages from other environments.


Typical soft armor systems are constructed of multiple layers of a single fabric type. This empirical research sought to begin optimization of these systems through hybridization, sequencing dissimilar armor fabrics to maximize their ballistic protective performance, by first investigating single plies with a spectrum of properties to determine their behavior and response to impact. Eight individual plain weave fabrics with varying yarns and thread counts were manufactured from para-aramid and ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) yarns and physical and ballistic characterizations were conducted. The ballistic impact tests established the specific energy absorption (SEA) of each fabric across a range of impact velocities (340–620 m·s–1) and the transverse displacement wave velocity across the rear of the fabric was found using digital image correlation. Low cover factor (Cfab) fabrics (0.74–0.84) consistently showed faster transverse wave speed than the high Cfab fabrics (0.84–0.96) for any given yarn type. The relative SEA of the fabrics varied dependent on both the impact velocity and number of plies impacted. It was found that lower Cfab fabrics had the highest SEA, critical velocity and transverse wave velocity. UHMWPE fabrics were not considered suitable for a woven hybrid system as they had a significantly lower SEA compared to all the para-aramid fabrics. Results indicate that a hybrid system, when considered as a theoretical spaced system, would benefit from higher Cfab fabrics as rearward layers. However, transverse wave results suggest the lower response of these fabrics may inhibit lower Cfab fabrics at the front of a combined hybridized system.


The non-linear buckling of composite laminates, triggered by geometric imperfections, is here analysed adopting a boundary element methodology. The non-linear theory for thin anisotropic plates couples in-plane forces causing buckling with the consequent bending deformation. The adopted formulation for in-plane forces in terms of the stress function is mathematically identical to that for the bending problem, thus boundary integral equations and fundamental solutions of the same form are used. Differential equations governing increments of the stress function and the deflection are obtained; the resulting integral equations include irreducible domain integrals depending on powers or products of the second derivatives of the stress function and the deflection. The latter are calculated through complementary integral equations obtained from the original ones by differentiating the field variables in the domain. The solution process accounts for the domain integrals through an iterative scheme; thus there is no need for modelling any field variables in the plate domain although domain meshing is necessary for performing numerical integrations. The boundary is meshed into quadratic discontinuous elements while the domain is divided into triangular cells with linear discontinuous variation of the relevant field variables for integration purposes. The analysis is implemented through a suit of C codes and applied to a rectangular symmetrically laminated plate. Its predictions are compared with published results obtained by other methods. The accuracy and limitations of the formulation are discussed and alternative approaches for expanding its scope pointed out.


Research of fundamental molecular and genetic processes of plant interaction with the environment, is a progressive field of understanding the fundamental problems of stress supramolecular biochemistry of developmental biology. The purpose of the work was the analysis of localization shielded to protease processing proteins of suprastructures of interphase chromatin matrix in the conditions of adaptation during vegetative phase of wheat to stressful environment factors. It is shown that in the conditions of perennial adaptation to cold shock of wheat at the level of chromatin suprastructures tightly bound to the nuclear matrix there is a total shielding of arginine-X sites to protease-processing. Perhaps these are zones that affect to the architecture organization of the cell nucleus that can help to survive in complex environmental conditions. According to the priorities in the study of agricultural plants, put forward by EPIC (The Epigenomics of Plants International Consortium) in 2011 for the next decade, was included the point of necessity to understand the molecular basis of the interactions of genotype and environment that change the characteristics of plants in different conditions of the environment. These data will be useful for those who involved in the development of mathematical logic schemes of the theory and practice of biological specificity, and it could be included in the ontology of the stages plant growth and development.


BACKGROUND
Allotments in the UK are popular and waiting lists long. There is, however, little evidence on the health benefits of allotment gardening. The aims of this study were to determine the impacts of a session of allotment gardening on self-esteem and mood and to compare the mental well-being of allotment gardeners with non-gardeners.

METHODS
Self-esteem, mood and general health were measured in 136 allotment gardeners pre- and post- an allotment session, and 133 non-gardener controls. Allotment gardeners also detailed the time spent on their allotment in the current session and previous 7 days, and their length of tenure.

RESULTS
Paired t-tests revealed a significant improvement in self-esteem (P < 0.05) and mood (P < 0.001) as a result of one allotment session. Linear regression revealed that neither the time spent on the allotment in the current session, the previous 7 days or the length of tenure affected the impacts on self-esteem and mood (P > 0.05). One-way ANCOVA revealed that allotment gardeners had a significantly better self-esteem, total mood disturbance and general health (P < 0.001), experiencing less depression and fatigue and more vigour (P < 0.0083).

CONCLUSIONS
Allotment gardening can play a key role in promoting mental well-being and could be used as a preventive health measure.


OBJECTIVES
During the Middle Ages, Portugal witnessed unprecedented socioeconomic and religious changes under transitioning religious political rule. The implications of changing ruling powers for urban food systems and individual diets in medieval Portugal is poorly understood. This study aimed to elucidate the dietary impact of the Islamic and Christian conquests.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Radiocarbon dating, peptide mass fingerprinting (ZooMS) and stable isotope analysis (δ13 C, δ15 N) of animal (n = 59) and human skeletal remains (n = 205) from Muslim and Christian burials were used to characterize the diet of a large historical sample from Portugal. A Bayesian stable isotope mixing model (BSIMM) was used to estimate the contribution of marine protein to human diet.

RESULTS
Early medieval (8-12th century), preconquest urban Muslim populations had mean (±1SD) values of -18.8 ± 0.4 ‰ for δ13 C 10.4 ± 1 ‰ for δ15 N, indicating a predominantly terrestrial diet, while late medieval (12-14th century) postconquest Muslim and Christian populations showed a greater reliance on marine resources with mean (±1SD) values of -17.9 ± 1.3‰ for δ13 C and 11.1 ± 1.1‰ for δ15 N. BSIMM estimation supported a significant increase in the contribution of marine resources to human diet.

DISCUSSION
The results provide the first biomolecular evidence for a dietary revolution that is not evidenced in contemporaneous historical accounts. We find that society transitioned from a largely agro-pastoral economy under Islamic rule to one characterized by a new focus on marine resources under later Christian rule. This economic change led to the naissance of the marine economy that went on to characterize the early-modern period in Portugal and its global expansion.


The distribution of tectonic superstructure across the Shuswap metamorphic complex of southern British Columbia is explained by east-west– trending corrugations of the Okanagan Valley shear zone detachment. Geological mapping along the southern Okanagan Valley shear zone has identified 100-m-scale to kilometer-scale corrugations parallel to the extension direction, where synformal troughs hosting upper-plate units are juxtaposed between antiformal ridges of crystalline lower-plate rocks. Analysis of available structural data and published geological maps of the Okanagan Valley shear zone confirms the presence of ≤40-km-wavelength corrugations, which strongly influence the surface trace of the detachment system, forming spatially extensive salients and reentrants. The largest reentrant is a semicontinuous belt of late Paleozoic to Mesozoic upper-plate rocks that link stratigraphy on either side of the Shuswap metamorphic complex. Previously, these belts were considered by some to be autochthonous, implying minimal motion on the Okanagan Valley shear zone (≤12 km); conversely, our results suggest that they are allochthonous (with as much as 30–90 km displacement). Corrugations extend the Okanagan Valley shear zone much farther east than previously recognized and allow for hitherto separate gneiss domes and detachments to be reconstructed together to form a single, areally extensive Okanagan Valley shear zone across the Shuswap metamorphic complex. If this correlation is correct, the Okanagan Valley shear zone may have enveloped the entire Shuswap metamorphic complex as far east as the east-vergent Columbia River–Slocan Lake fault zones.


This is a 'client-oriented' study, initiated for the first
time in Mauritius in the area of research in social welfare,
aiming specifically at outdoor relief or residential institutions, and health services. It is postulated that the service--users are
the best judge of their needs. Thus, departing from the colonially inherited research methodologies and techniques by applying a down-up approach, 225 respondents, 25 from each of the 9 Districts in the island. were interviewed. using a combination of open-ended interview schedules, audio-tape,
observational techniques for data collection. Also
interviewed were some key senior and junior members of staff
from the relevant government departments, politicians, and
the ordinary folks. Covert and observational processes were
used in relation to some residential establishments and
the psychiatric hospital because of the problems of access.
The findings have shown that 98% of the recipients
experience physical difficulties and 40% of this figure also
have one or another form of mental illness. Other problems
encountered by them include inadequate income, loneliness,
alienation, the stigma attached to disabilities, and abuses
and violence of all forms, bureaucratic, racist, physical,
mental, verbal, and emotional, inflicted, in some cases,
deliberately by the carers, relatives, staff, and, in others', unconsciously. It was not an uncommon sight during
fieldwork to witness recipients being strapped to cots or
beds, locked out during the day, kept in specially built
tin sheds, hidden inside the house, transferred to remote
corners at the back of the house beyond the public's view,
or administered overdose of medication to exercise control.
Welfare support is principally confined to a pension much
below subsistence level and some health care. 81% of the
respondents receive these two services, but 19% of the
sample population receive no welfare support at all in spite of their disabilities and inability to support themselves. No
less than an average of 86% of the respondents are dissatisfied with both the quantity and quality of services received, whilst, in the context of residential care, there is an impression of gratitude for the services. With the industrialization of the country, there is a corrosive impact on informal support in the family and in the community, which is resulting in a growing dependency culture and increasing reliance on the Welfare state across the socio-economic spectrum. 91% of the sample population believe that the government has a constitutional and moral duty to provide welfare assistance in time of need, thereby confronting the Mauritian society with difficult and complex issues, requiring honest and experienced leadership and determined and pragmatic political will to resolve.


Topographic index-based hydrological models have gained wide use to describe the hydrological control on the triggering of rainfall-induced shallow landslides at the catchment scale. A common assumption in these models is that a spatially continuous water table occurs simultaneously across the catchment. However, during a rainfall event isolated patches of subsurface saturation form above an impeding layer and their hydrological connectivity is a necessary condition for lateral flow initiation at a point on the hillslope. Here, a new hydrological model is presented, which allows us to account for the concept of hydrological connectivity while keeping the simplicity of the topographic index approach. A dynamic topographic index is used to describe the transient lateral flow that is established at a hillslope element when the rainfall amount exceeds a threshold value allowing for (a) development of a perched water table above an impeding layer, and (b) hydrological connectivity between the hillslope element and its own upslope contributing area. A spatially variable soil depth is the main control of hydrological connectivity in the model. The hydrological model is coupled with the infinite slope stability model and with a scaling model for the rainfall frequency–duration relationship to determine the return period of the critical rainfall needed to cause instability on three catchments located in the Italian Alps, where a survey of soil depth spatial distribution is available. The model is compared with a quasi-dynamic model in which the dynamic nature of the hydrological connectivity is neglected. The results show a better performance of the new model in predicting observed shallow landslides, implying that soil depth spatial variability and connectivity bear a significant control on shallow landsliding.


Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2008.; Includes bibliographical
 references. Epithelial dysplasia in the prostate is seen adjacent to foci of inflammatory
 atrophy. How the inflammatory process leads to cellular dysplasia and transformation is not
 well understood. This thesis identifies a mechanism for inflammation to cause decreased
 expression of a key prostate tumor suppressor protein, NKX3.1. We have found that the
 inflammatory cytokine TNF-alpha induced rapid ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation of
 NKX3.1 in vitro. Inhibition of proteasomal degradation prevented the loss of NKX3.1 and
 resulted in the accumulation of ubiquitin-bound NKX3.1. The C-terminus of NKX3.1 is comprised
 of 51 amino acids distal to the homeodomain. Deletion of the C-terminal domain of NKX3.1
 resulted in prolonged protein half-life and absence of TNF-alpha-induced ubiquitination.
 Site-directed mutation of either or both of the two lysines (193 and 201), possible sites for
 ubiquitin ligation, in the C-terminus did not affect ubiquitination or protein half-life.
 Sequential deletion of fragments of the C-terminus identified amino acids 185-199 as the
 peptide region affecting NKX3.1 stability. In the C-terminal region of NKX3.1, serines
 185,195, and 196 were identified as potential phosphorylation sites. Mutation of serine 185 to
 alanine resulted in a significant increase in protein half-life, but retained susceptibility
 to TNF-alpha-induced ubiquitination. In contrast, steady-state NKX3.1 turnover was unaffected
 by a serine 196 to alanine substitution. However, mutation of serine 196 to alanine abrogated
 TNF-alpha-induced ubiquitination and degradation. Serine 195 was shown to have a modulating
 affect and attenuated TNF-alpha-induced ubiquitination. Phosphorylation of NKX3.1 was
 increased in the presence of TNF-alpha, but the role of serines 185, 195, 196 was not studied.
 Our data provides evidence that inflammatory cytokines can reduce NKX3.1 levels. Strategies to
 inhibit inflammation may result in a therapeutic intervention to maintain NKX3.1 levels and
 slow prostate cancer development and progression.


This collection of papers from the Roehampton conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible is the first jubilee volume published to celebrate the discovery of the Scrolls fifty years ago. Experts on the Scrolls, Hebrew language, biblical studies, ancient Judaism and modern literary theory cover a range of perspectives-as well as important issues of method and the perennial problems of the identity of the inhabitants of Khirbet Qumran and the relationship between the site and the discoveries in the nearby caves. Contributors include the well-known experts, Philip Davies, George Brooke, Al Wolters and J.D.G. Dunn.


This paper describes a performance study of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) programming techniques. Its goal is to use these results as a guide for making "best practice" RDMA programming decisions. Infiniband RDMA is widely used in scientific high performance computing (HPC) clusters as a low-latency, high-bandwidth, reliable interconnect accessed via MPI. Recently it is gaining adherents outside scientific HPC as high-speed clusters appear in other application areas for which MPI is not suitable. RDMA enables user applications to move data directly between virtual memory on different nodes without operating system intervention, so there is a need to know how to incorporate RDMA access into high-level programs. But RDMA offers more options to a programmer than traditional sockets programming, and it is not always obvious what the performance tradeoffs of these options might be. This study is intended to provide some answers.


We report high-resolution anion photoelectron spectra of the cryogenically cooled cyanomethide anion, CH2CN(-), and its isotopologue, CD2CN(-), using slow photoelectron velocity-map imaging (SEVI) spectroscopy. Electron affinities of 12 468(2) cm(-1) for CH2CN and 12 402(2) cm(-1) for CD2CN are obtained, demonstrating greater precision than previous experiments. New vibrational structure is resolved for both neutral species, especially activity of the ν5 hydrogen umbrella modes. The ν6 out-of-plane bending mode fundamental frequency is measured for the first time in both systems and found to be 420(10) cm(-1) for CH2CN and 389(8) cm(-1) for CD2CN. Some rotational structure is resolved, allowing for accurate extraction of vibrational frequencies. Temperature-dependent SEVI spectra show marked effects ascribed to controlled population of low-lying anion vibrational levels. We directly measure the inversion splitting between the first two vibrational levels of the anion ν5 umbrella mode in both species, finding a splitting of 130(20) cm(-1) for CH2CN(-) and 81(20) cm(-1) for CD2CN(-). Franck-Condon forbidden activity is observed and attributed to mode-specific vibrational autodetachment from the CH2CN(-) and CD2CN(-) dipole bound excited states. We also refine the binding energy of the anion dipole bound states to 39 and 42 cm(-1), respectively, for CH2CN(-) and CD2CN(-).


As COVID-19 has shown in a way unimaginable before it hit, tourism is susceptible to uncertainty and incidents that can directly impact the supply and demand of its discretionary products and services. Before the pandemic, consensus had been reached among practitioners and academics that consumer experience is more important than ever for enterprises as well as destinations, as the sector had become globalized, reached maturity and became highly competitive. Tourism came to a grinding halt due to the pandemic and recovery may take years. Still, the pathway to success (or failure) lies on the overall satisfaction of visitors and tourists, which heavily depends on perceived value; a concept that can be co-created or co-destroyed by the very interaction between all social actors and stakeholders involved. Value creation or destruction is critical not just for traditional supply of and demand for, but also for an array of actors across value and distribution chains (including for example staff and intermediaries across the networks). The special issue's aim was to assist the better understanding of value co-creation and co-destruction in tourism development by bringing together different perspectives and disciplines. Judging from the diversity of the theoretical perspectives of the articles collected in this issue and the richness of the presented findings the special issue has indeed achieved its aim. Yet some real trends could be distinguished: the relevance of online communication and information; the importance of interpersonal encounters and social interaction for value co-creation and co-destruction in tourism; and the challenges in the design and delivery process of co-created experiences.


At the Nijmegen Institute for Cognition Research and Information Technology (NICI), linguistic modules have been developed to make computer simulations of human language processing possible. Those modules are also used in several practical applications in the field of computer-assisted instruction. In order to improve the results of te teaching of grammar and spelling in Dutch and Flemish schools, we developed two programs: BOUWSTENEN, an intelligent program for Dutch grammar teaching, and SPELRAAM, an intelligent program for the instruction of the spelling of Dutch verbsThe innovative aspects of BOUWSTENEN are:- the explicit grammar which makes a clear distinction between grammatical functions and categories at different levels- the constructive method: the program offers constructive as well as analytical exercices- the two-dimensional display of the syntactic structure of sentences- mmediate feedback adapted to the knowledge level of the student and explaining what is wrong as well as why it is wrong.An elaborate description of BOUWSTENEN is given, in which the architecture of the program and the elements (examples, exercises, explanation) that are part of every lesson are discussed. Two lessons are described in detail: the finite verb lesson and the direct object lesson.In the future, BOUWSTENEN could be elaborated into a complete Intelligent Tutoring System by developing a curriculum network as a base for a didactic component and a student model.Knowledge of all the rules for the spelling of regular Dutch verbs makes SPELRAAM also an intelligent program. By practising with SPELRAAM, a student learns to spell Dutch verb forms correctly by applying a small set of rules. The program is able to diagnose errors made by the student and to help the student corect them.


Proceedings of the Workshop on Annotation and
Exploitation of Parallel Corpora AEPC 2010.
Editors: Lars Ahrenberg, Jorg Tiedemann and Martin Volk.
NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 10 (2010), 44-52.
© 2010 The editors and contributors.
Published by
Northern European Association for Language
Technology (NEALT)
http://omilia.uio.no/nealt .
Electronically published at
Tartu University Library (Estonia)
http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15893 .