ABSTRACT The current growth of the service sector in global economies is unparalleled in human history, by scale and speed of the labor migration. Even large manufacturing firms are seeing dramatic shifts in the percentage of their revenues derived from services. The need for service innovations to fuel further economic growth as well as to raise quality and productivity levels of services has never been higher. Services are moving center stage in the global competition arena, especially knowledge-intensive business services aimed at business performance transformation. One challenge to systematic service innovation is the multidisciplinary nature of services, integrating across technology, business, social, and client (demand) innovations. This paper argues for the emergence of service science, a new multidisciplinary area of study, to address the challenge of becoming more systematic about innovating in services. INTRODUCTION: MOTIVATION & GOALS Through a series of events, the opportunity to study and impact services at a major information technology (IT) company arose. In less than a decade the portion of revenue derived from services had grown by over 33% and was rapidly approaching 50% of the revenue of the entire corporation (see Figure 1). A top global research organization was faced with the need to innovate in service operations, service offerings, as well as to add a services research component onto a research culture steeped in technology and product innovation excellence. In addition to a multibillion dollar acquisition of a large business services firm as well as many smaller acquisitions, the corporation needed to enhance its ability to innovate in services. Gray hairs in the research organization told of a similar transition that had occurred a few decades earlier, when software systems research was added to a research culture composed primarily of physicists, chemists, electrical engineers, and mathematicians. During that transition, PhD computer scientists entered the research organization in large numbers. What many people may not have known, and may still not know, is that the corporation that was now hiring so many new computer science PhDs had actually played a major role in helping to establish that academic discipline decades earlier (Asprey and Williams, 1994). Immediately, the question of what new types of PhDs might be needed to build a world-class corporate services research organization arose as a topic of much discussion and debate. A quick survey of the PhDs within our own services organization revealed a three-way split between technology, business-related, and social sciences PhDs. It was also clear that the existing research organization was dominated by technology PhDs. For a research organization focused on technology systems, the shift to services would require a shift towards innovation aimed at improving sociotechnical business systems (Trist, 1981). For example, these days clients rarely buy an information technology (IT) system simply because of its technical capabilities (faster, more capacity, etc.), but instead require a business model (return on investment) as well as the organizational change model (reengineered processes and job roles) that make the technology a solution to a business problem. Thus, the transition from an IT vendor to a firm specialized in coproducing IT-driven business transformation with clients. As the author was struggling with the practical issue of hiring people with PhDs in diverse areas related to services, colleagues inside the corporation as well as from academia were advocating a bold approach - a new academic discipline - which they were later to write about and call services science (Chesbrough, 2004; Chesbrough, 2005; Horn, 2005). This idea was particularly appealing as the number of separate PhDs required to form a suitable services research organization was growing to nearly a dozen! The communication challenge alone of getting a diverse population of scientists to speak a common language around "service innovation" was requiring retraining them in each others' separate disciplines as well as the injection of new, practical concepts fresh from the front lines of our own services business. …


The idea that Felix Mendelssohn prevented his sister, Fanny Hensel, from publishing her compositions is central to biographical representations of her, including Franccoise Tillard9s Fanny Mendelssohn (1992) and Gloria Kamen9s Hidden Music (1996). This story can be traced to nineteenth-century publications by male members of the Mendelssohn family and their desire to portray both siblings according
 to socially acceptable gender roles. Such origins challenge the assumption that the story of Fanny Hensel9s "suppression" represents a modern feminist reinterpretation of her life. Instead, current treatment
 of Hensel relies on common biographical models for male composers; in her lack of a public career, she fits the Romantic stereotype of the neglected, suffering genius. The retelling of the "suppression"
 of Fanny Hensel represents a "story" in itself - a rescue plot in which modern women rediscover Hensel and somehow "save" her from historical neglect. This feminist recovery relies on the assumption that
 Hensel was forgotten, overlooking the numerous publications between 1830 and 1920 in which she appears. Centering Hensel9s biography on her brother9s influence rather than on her eventual publication of
 her music oversimplifies the larger historical situation for women composers, replacing the manifold issues surrounding gender and class with a single male villain. The difficulties encountered in telling
 the story of Hensel9s life reveal a need for a feminist biography that balances an understanding of larger cultural constraints with recognition of individual female agency.


This study examines reasons for the declining share of revenue going to Major League Baseball players. Though the players' union and team owners have proposed competing explanations, the phenomenon has not received any rigorous academic study. Economic theories for the similar decline of labor's share in the macroeconomy provide possible explanations. The ability to estimate baseball players' marginal revenue products through their performance offers a unique opportunity to examine the role of worker productivity in determining labor's share of income in general. The analysis indicates that the returns to player performance have declined and that collective bargaining agreement terms that promote revenue sharing among teams appear to play a significant role. In addition, increased returns from new non-player revenue sources have lowered the share of league revenue going to players. Competition from substitute labor inputs and changes in returns to physical capital do not appear to be important factors.


An optical correlator, believed to be novel, adds an x-y mirror image to the input and filter images to perform convolution involving amplitude and phase. The resulting real Fourier transform filters can be loaded into a liquid-crystal device (LCD). In contrast, a complex filter would require high-resolution film. A Hilbert transform and a point source are applied at the filter plane to reduce filter storage and LCD loading time by a factor of 2. An optional spatial filter removes an offset intensity and squares the result. Filters have only twice the number of pixels of the images. Analysis is verified by computer simulation, and performance is discussed.


Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a case whose ramifications for the pursuit of racial equality within criminal justice are still felt today. McCleskey set an impossibly high bar for constitutionally-based challenges seeking fundamental racial fairness in capital punishment. The McCleskey decision strengthened a jurisprudential climate that shifted and increased the burden onto defendants seeking constitutional relief from discriminatory and biased decisions at every step of the criminal justice process, from arrest to conviction and punishment. The McCleskey court articulated a crime-control rationale for tolerance of error and refused to confront the racial disparities inherent in those errors, offering an affirmative argument for the institutionalization of racialized discretion in criminal justice. The Court chose to tolerate widespread errors and racial disparities in criminal justice, finding no offense to the Constitution in these patterns. In so doing, the McCleskey court reified the institutional norms and structural biases that sustain racial imbalances in all stages of the criminal law. We convened the Symposium on Pursuing Racial Fairness in Criminal Justice at Columbia Law School in March 2007 to draw lessons from current work on racial inequality in criminal law, and to design new strategies to pursue the goals of the McCleskey litigation and the movement that surrounded the case. The participants included legal scholars, practitioners, researchers and activists engaged in the difficult analysis, mobilization, and theorizing to develop the foundation of new models of legal scholarship and civil rights advocacy to challenge McCleskey. The contributions in this Symposium are not naive with respect to the formidable litigation-based challenges or the racial inequality that persists in the criminal law. Rather, they take on the task of building a diverse and empirically-informed strategy that looks critically into the institutional norms and designs of criminal justice institutions. The articles locate racial disparities in the institutional dynamics of criminal justice and in the racial skew of everyday decision-making. The authors identify the frontlines of a renewed struggle for the pursuit of racial fairness that was the heart of the McCleskey litigation.


We propose new sequent calculus systems for orthologic (also known as minimal quantum logic) which satisfy the cut elimination property. The first one is a simple system relying on the involutive status of negation. The second one incorporates the notion of focusing (coming from linear logic) to add constraints on proofs and to optimise proof search. We demonstrate how to take benefits from the new systems in automatic proof search for orthologic.


A uniformly p-to-one endomorphism is a measure-preserving map with entropy log p which is almost everywhere p-to-one and for which the conditional expectation of each preimage is precisely 1/p. The standard example of this is a one-sided p-shift with uniform i.i.d. Bernoulli measure. We give a characterization of those uniformly finite-to-one endomorphisms conjugate to this standard example by a condition on the past tree of names which is analogous to very weakly Bernoulli or loosely Bernoulli. As a consequence we show that a large class of isometric extensions of the standard example are conjugate to it.


Given that previous research provides conflicting evidence regarding perceptions of a target with cancer, the current study aimed to identify whether severity of this illness drives perceptions or if the diagnosis of cancer holds unique stereotypes in judgment. Two hundred ninety-four college students were presented with a stimulus paragraph about a 10-year-old female child who was described as being in good health or as suffering from one of three illness conditions: (a) a fictitious illness called Haltmar's disease, described like a brain tumor; (b) a fictitious illness called Haltmar's disease, described like cancer; or (c) the diagnosis of cancer. A photo of a 10-year-old girl manipulated to look healthy or unhealthy accompanied the materials. Thus, the study employed a 4 (illness) x 2 (child appearance) factorial ANOVA. Results indicated that favorability for the child target was not linearly influenced by severity of illness and a cancer stereotype was not observed. An attractiveness stereotype was not detected in the current findings and participants' Just World Beliefs did not impact perceptions of the target. However, when the child was portrayed as sickly and unattractive, the illness label was influential on ratings of likability.


Although probiotics are generally considered to be safe, their increasingly widespread use warrants better understanding of their risks in companion animals. This study evaluated the safety and tolerance of dietary supplementation with a canine-derived probiotic, Bifidobacterium animalis strain AHC7 (Prostora, Procter & Gamble Pet Care), fed to growing beagles beginning at approximately 6 months of age (11 males; 9 females). Probiotic B. animalis AHC7 administered orally once per day at a dose of up to 5 x 1010 colony-forming units for at least 12 consecutive weeks was well tolerated with no safety concerns.


18 populations of Salvia species are selected in the fitocenological complexes of the regions of Lesser Caucasus range (Nakhchivan AR and north-east regions of LC ). In these populations, the fitocenological state of 4 species (S.limbata, S.sclarea, S.verticulata və S.tesquicola) which are belonged to the breed, is estimated,their reserves are found out and the dynamics of the productivity in the ontogeny is determined.It is known that, in the populations, individuals belonged to the g1 və g2 phases of the ontogeny are more and at the same phase, the plant gives more product. Sage (Salvia L.) breed is one of the representatives of Lamiaceae (Lamiaceae Lindl.) family.27 species of the breed spread in the flora of Azerbaijan. 19 species of them spread in the flora of the Nakhchivan AR, and 12 species in the central, northern and eastern regions of Lesser Caucasus.Two of these territories – central and south are under Armenian occupation, that is why, only the population structure of the species in the north-east is found out. 9 species from 19 species which are come across in the flora of the Nakhchivan AR are merely characteristic for the region. 4 species which are come across in the north-east regions of Lesser Caucasus and in the autonomous republic, are selected and each of the species is in the surround of Lesser Caucasus range[nakh cons]. Referring to the literature,among them, S.limbata is not noted in the north-east regions of LC, but during the reserches, the same species are come across in the lower and central mountainous zones of the territory and in the dry stony-rocky slopes. It is a xerophyte plant, the territory is a new spreading field for it. In "Tartar" region, its new population is noted. Its other populations are noted in "Goranboy" and "Dashkesen" regions. 5-6 populations of the plant are setted in the Nakhchivan AR ( in "Babak", "Sherur", " Kengerli" regions).From the other selected three species, S.verticulata is come across in the all regions of Azerbaijan, S.tesquicola is in the Nakhchivan plain and "Goygol" region in the north of LC,and S.sclareais in the east of LC range ( in the "Shamkir" and "Gadabay" regions) and in the Nakhchivan highlands.


Medical technology disadoption, a topic which has not previously been studied in great detail by health economists, is of great importance in a health care system where technology is understood to be a major driver of expenditure growth and the adoption of new technologies is consistently promoted by cultural norms and financial incentives. The disadoption of technologies with sub-optimal efficacy or safety is a key to improving the quality and value of care, and thus there is obvious utility to learning more about factors that influence technology disadoption. This dissertation establishes a novel theoretical framework to characterize the disadoption process along multiple dimensions, and then develops a simple mathematical model to describe physician disadoption behavior. Disadoption is examined empirically by analyzing the use of coronary drug-eluting stents (DES) in 2006-07(following their rapid adoption in 2003-04) using New York and Florida hospital discharge data, national practice organization data, and physician characteristic data. Preceding DES adoption behavior and physician group size are the primary factors studied for association with DES disadoption behavior. Empirical analyses indicate that faster DES adoption may be weakly associated with later DES disadoption, which may be consistent with physician risk aversion or product loyalty playing roles in disadoption decisions. Also, analyses suggest that there may be a week negative relationship between group size and timing of DES disadoption, suggesting that physicians in larger groups may begin the disadoption process later. These empirical results, which are subjected to instrumental variable analysis and extensive robustness checks, generally lack statistical significance, which highlights the current level of uncertainty surrounding disadoption behavior, including the observation that it does not appear to be empirically either similar or related to adoption behavior. Thus, this work both promotes and guides future research on medical disadoption and its determinants. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Health Care Management & Economics First Advisor Guy David


In this work, new approaches are proposed for online large vocabulary conversational speech recognition, including a fast confusion network algorithm, novel features and a Random Forests based classifier for word confidence annotation, new improvements in speech decoding speed and latency, novel lookahead phonetic decision tree state tying and Random Forests of phonetic decision tree state tying for acoustic modeling of speech sound units. The fast confusion network algorithm significantly improves the time complexity from O(T) to O(T), with T equaling the number of links in a word lattice. Several novel features, as well as Random Forests based classification technique are proposed to improve word annotation accuracy for automatic captioning. In order to improve the speed of speech decoding engine, we propose to use complementary word confidence scores to prune uncompetitive search paths, and use subspace distribution clustering hidden Markov modeling to speed up computation of acoustic scores and local confidence scores. We further integrate pre-backtrace in decoding search to significantly reduce captioning latency. In this work we also investigate novel approaches to improve the performance of phonetic decision tree state tying, including two lookahead methods and a Random Forests method. Constrained lookahead method finds an optimal question among n pre-selected questions for each split node to decrease effects of outliers, and it also discounts the contributions of likelihood gains by deeper decedents. Stochastic full lookahead method uses sub-tree size instead of likelihood gain as a measure for phonetic question selection, in order to produce small trees with better generalization capability and consistent with training data. The Random Forests method uses an ensemble of phonetic decision trees to derive a single strong model for each speech unit. We investigate several methods of combining the acoustic scores from multiple models obtained from multiple phonetic decision trees in decoding search. We further propose clustering methods to compact the Random Forests generated acoustic models to speed up decoding search.


The importance of adult and further education is stressed by national, European and international policy documents as being critical to economic, social and cultural initiatives, capable of benefiting all sectors of society. In Ireland, the current economic recession, financial crisis, increased unemployment and enforced emigration has created an urgent need to re-shape the adult education provision to meet the educational, social and skill needs of society with particular emphasis on the workforce and the unemployed.

This thesis sets out to evaluate the effectiveness of County Kildare VEC adult education service. It strives to discover if Kildare VEC adult education service is adequately and strategically equipped to meet the needs of students in the future. This thesis investigates if appropriate courses and programmes are available to achieve the most effective outcomes for students within the current environment. The study describes the current educational, social and economic context in which Kildare VEC provides a range of services. It involves reviewing the relevant literature on adult education and lifelong learning in the context of societal and economic change. The methodology involved qualitative interviews with sixty-five individuals involved in VEC adult education. In addition, a study visit to Norway was completed to survey their adult education policies and practices. The study findings will be used to augment the research conducted in Ireland.

Semi-structured interviews were organised with Kildare VEC students, tutors, middle and senior managers and CEOs from external VEC which provide rich data describing the accomplishments and the challenges facing Kildare VEC adult education service. Kildare VEC was found to be responding to particular educational needs through its programme provision. However, deficits were highlighted in terms of the absence of an overall vision for adult education, continued professional development for staff and linkages with employment providers. The need for further research and analysis is also highlighted which is required to inform a more appropriate educational response to the authentic needs of students in the future.

The research provides practitioners, stake-holders, policy makers and the implementers of adult education practice with interesting insights and eleven recommendations, that if implemented will improve the provision by Kildare VEC as well as other VECs in Ireland.

Finally, the outcomes of the research will specifically benefit Kildare VEC in re-structuring and creating an improved adult education and training provision. The recommended changes will result in a more comprehensive response to the needs of adult students facing rapid and transformational change in so many areas life and work.


The process of urbanization dramatically alters the landscape which can have negative effects on the environment, and thereby, places the inhabitants and the city itself at risk. The development of an urban heat island can have severe health implications for city inhabitants during prolonged heat waves. Urbanisation also alters hydrological processes, which can place urban areas at a greater threat of surface flooding during heavy rainfall. As cities are continuing to expand, and as climate change proceeds, these problems are only likely to be exacerbated and there is a need to find ways to reduce these negative effects.This thesis builds upon previous modelling work on the effect of greenspace on the climate and hydrology of Manchester, U.K. The aims were to test the predictions of this model by investigating the effect of trees and grass in reducing surface temperatures and rainfall runoff, and further investigate their effects on air and globe temperatures. Surface, globe, and air temperatures were measured on grass and concrete areas in full sun and tree shade, both under large tree canopies, and below those of a range of street tree species. The rainfall runoff from experimental plots covered in asphalt, asphalt plus a tree and grass, was also investigated. Grass reduced surface temperatures in full sun by up to 24�C, in good agreement with previous models, but permanent tree shade reduced concrete temperatures by almost as much, up to 19�C. Tree shade also reduced globe temperatures by up to 7�C, a reduction which can improve human comfort on hot day. These results indicate that both forms of vegetation will act regionally, reducing the urban heat island effect, but that trees can dramatically improve the local environmental conditions. Street trees reduced surface and globe temperatures by rather less, 12�C and 4�C respectively, though trees with a higher leaf area index provided greater cooling. Because of advection neither trees nor small areas of grass had an effect on local air temperatures.Grass was most effective vegetation type at preventing rainfall runoff, reducing runoff coefficients of the plots from around 60% on asphalt to near zero. However, tree units also reduced the runoff coefficient to around 25%, despite having a canopy that covered only a small proportion of the plot, suggesting that much of the rainfall must have infiltrated into the planting hole. These reductions are higher than predicted by previous modelling, highlighting the importance of greenspace on the hydrology of the urban environment.The results suggest that trees and grass provide complementary environmental benefits in cities, and that the benefits of trees strongly depend on species and planting conditions


Experiments with a global observing system simulation experiment (OSSE) system based on the recent 7-km-resolution NASA nature run (G5NR) were conducted to determine the potential value of proposed Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) radio occultation (RO) constellations in current operational numerical weather prediction systems. The RO observations were simulated with the geographic sampling expected from the original planned Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate-2 (COSMIC-2) system, with six equatorial (total of ~6000 soundings per day) and six polar (total of ~6000 soundings per day) receiver satellites. The experiments also accounted for the expected improved vertical coverage provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory RO receivers on board COSMIC-2. Except that RO observations were simulated and assimilated as refractivities, the 2015 version of the NCEP's operational data assimilation system was used to run the OSSEs. The OSSEs quantified the impact of RO observations on global weather analyses and forecasts and the impact of adding explicit errors to the simulation of perfect RO profiles. The inclusion or exclusion of explicit errors had small, statistically insignificant impacts on results. The impact of RO observations was found to increase the length of the useful forecasts. In experiments with explicit errors, these increases were found to be 0.6 h in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics (a 0.4% improvement), 5.9 h in the Southern Hemisphere extratropics (a significant 4.0% improvement), and 12.1 h in the tropics (a very substantial 28.4% improvement).


Masting is the synchronous, episodic production of large seed crops by perennial plant populations. Generally, hypotheses concerning the evolutionary origin and maintenance of masting entail economies of scale, where the benefit of large, synchronous reproductive events accrues by overcoming some environmental constraint, such as pollen limitation or seed predation. Because all perennial plants face some degree of inter-annual environmental variability, assessing the importance of selection via economies of scale requires a clear expectation for the reproductive dynamics of plants adapted to variable environments. Using a dynamic life-history model, I demonstrate that the observed range of reproductive variability and several other aspects of masting should be expected for size-structured populations of plants utilizing optimal allocation strategies in variable environments, even in the absence of economies of scale benefits. Thus, life-history evolution in even modestly variable environments may predispose species to realize reproductive benefits via economies of scale. However, distinguishing the effects of evolved responses to environmental variability from the effects of economies of scale using current criteria is difficult, if not impossible. My results reinforce the dictum that ecologists and evolutionary biologists must carefully consider their expectations before generating and testing explanations for observed phenomena. As variations on an established evolutionary theme, economies of scale undoubtedly provide selective advantages. However, caution should be exercised when inferring that they are the major ecological and evolutionary determinant of reproductive variability of plant populations.


—A novel interface neurocontroller (INC) is proposed for the coordinated reactive power control between a large wind farm equipped with doubly fed induction generators (DFIGs) and a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM). The heuristic dynamic programming (HDP) technique and radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) are used to design this INC. It effectively reduces the level of voltage sags as well as the over-currents in the DFIG rotor circuit during grid faults, and therefore, significantly enhances the fault ride-through capability of the wind farm. The INC also acts as a coordinated external damping controller for the wind farm and the STATCOM, and therefore, improves power oscillation damping of the system after grid faults. Simulation studies are carried out in PSCAD/EMTDC and the results are presented to verify the proposed INC.


Ribosomal RNAs contain a number of modified nucleotides. The most abundant nucleotide modifications found within rRNAs fall into two types: 2'-O-ribose methylations and pseudouridylations. In eukaryotes, small nucleolar guide RNAs, the snoRNAs that are the RNA components of the snoRNPs, specify the position of these modifications. The 2'-O-ribose methylations and pseudouridylations are guided by the box C/D and box H/ACA snoRNAs, respectively. The role of these modifications in rRNA remains poorly understood as no clear phenotype has yet been assigned to the absence of specific 2'-O-ribose methylations or pseudouridylations. Only very recently, a slight translation defect and perturbation of polysome profiles was reported in yeast for the absence of the Psi at position 2919 within the LSU rRNA. Here we report the identification and characterization in yeast of a novel intronic H/ACA snoRNA that we called snR191 and that guides pseudouridylation at positions 2258 and 2260 in the LSU rRNA. Most interestingly, these two modified bases are the most conserved pseudouridines from bacteria to human in rRNA. The corresponding human snoRNA is hU19. We show here that, in yeast, the presence of this snoRNA, and hence, most likely, of the conserved pseudouridines it specifies, is not essential for viability but provides a growth advantage to the cell.


The Dent Medal, struck in memory of the distinguished scholar and musician Edward J. Dent (1876–1957), has been awarded by the Royal Musical Association annually since 1961 to recipients selected for their outstanding contribution to musicology. A list of candidates is drawn up by the Council of the Association and the Directorium of the International Musicological Society. The Dent Medal for 2021 is awarded to LAURA TUNBRIDGE. Laura Tunbridge completed her Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2002 and subsequently held lectureships at the universities of Reading and Manchester. She is currently Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Catherine's College. Tunbridge's research has focused primarily on German repertoires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She did much to challenge the reception of Schumann with her first monograph, Schumann's Late Style (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and the co-edited collection Rethinking Schumann (Oxford University Press, 2011), and has subsequently made a major contribution to the history of song with the monographs The Song Cycle (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performance in New York and London between the World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and the co-edited collectionsGerman Song Onstage (Indiana University Press, 2020) and Song beyond the Nation: Translation, Transnationalism, Performance (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her most recent book, Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (Viking, 2020), has been warmly received across a broad media spectrum, winning the Best Composer Biography award from Presto Books in 2021. Tunbridge's work is distinguished by her dedication to the historical specificity and contingency of musical meaning, whether unpicking the way that Schumann's biography shaped the reception of his music, the role of recording technology in communicating the idea of a song cycle or the agency of performers (or radio producers or film-makers) as they engage with and interpret repertoires we think we know. In The Song Cycle, this led Tunbridge to challenge musicologists to take seriously as song cycles concept albums by twentieth-century popular artists as disparate as Joni Mitchell and Radiohead alongside earlier classical examples by Schubert and Schumann. Singing in the Age of Anxiety, meanwhile, is exemplary in its subtle, productive intertwining of performing and cultural histories. Tunbridge's scholarly achievements are particularly remarkable given the work she has also undertaken as an administrator and public intellectual. She was editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association from 2013 until 2018; she was elected to the Directorium of the International Musicological Society in 2017; and she features regularly in the media. The widespread success of Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces has cemented Tunbridge's standing as one of the most significant public musicologists in Britain today. It marks a milestone in a career distinguished by collegiality as well as impressive productivity.


Objective: Many trauma centers have separated emergency and general surgery from trauma care. However, decreased trauma volume and more frequent nonoperative management may limit operative experience and the economic viability of the trauma service. Trauma surgeons at our Level I trauma center have long provided all emergency surgical care and elective surgery. We sought to determine the impact of this policy. Methods: We reviewed all admissions to the trauma service from June of 1992 to July of 1998 and cross-referenced this with our trauma registry. The number of major and minor procedures performed was also determined, and we reviewed all operative procedures by the trauma service for June of 1996 to October of 1998. Results: Total admissions by the trauma service averaged 3,003 patients/year (range, 2,798-3,198 patients). Nontrauma patients accounted for 34% of all trauma service admissions (range, 26-40% ). During this time period, there was no change in volume of operative or intensive care unit procedures, whereas minor procedures recently decreased from a peak of 141/month to 50/month. This was largely due to decreased use of diagnostic peritoneal lavage (surgeon reimbursable) and an increased use of computed tomographic scan and ultrasound (not presently reimbursed) to evaluate blunt abdominal trauma. During the past 2 years, nontrauma cases accounted for 33% of all operative procedures by the trauma service. Conclusions: Maintenance of emergency and general surgical care by the trauma service has allowed us to buffer impact of variations in trauma volume and to maintain operative skills in an era of increased nonoperative management of many injuries.


Introduction This paper examines the links between entry mode and performance of Japanese direct investment in Western Europe, adding to the body of international business research in two areas. The first of these is Japanese-European foreign direct investment (FDI), which has received sparse attention in the literature. The United States has been a frequent subject of research, both as home country of parent firms and host country to foreign investment. In recent years, Japan has attracted considerable scholarly attention as an outward-investing country. In contrast, Europe has not been as frequent a subject of research, not even as Japanse and other foreign investment were becoming increasingly prevalent in the region. We report recent data on the entry mode characteristics of Japanese investment in Europe. The second area investigated is the effect of entry mode choice on subsidiary performance. This paper adopts the transaction coast approach in analyzing the relative performance of ownership-based foreign entry modes. This approach has a long and rich history in international research, and has been recently employed by Anderson and Gatignon (1986), Gatignon and Anderson (1988), Erramilli and Rao (1993), among others. Subsequent sections of the paper will review the literature on entry mode research, outline a theoretical argument for why entry mode is an important determinant of performance, and present the results of the analysis of two sets of data on Japanese subsidiaries in Europe. Preliminary findings and areas for future research form the conclusion. Entry Mode Research Selection of entry mode by multinational firms has been widely studied, and a number of contingency variables have been empirically linked to the entry mode choice. Some of the earliest research in the area proposed an incremental, to some extent time-based, model of internationalization, in which a firm moved through ever-increasing levels of international resource commitment as its size, product diversity, and foreign experience grew. Stopford and Wells (1972) observed a link between entry mode (defined by parent company structure) and international experience and level of product diversification. Johanson and Vahlne (1977) made the incremental process more explicit, adding the theoretical rationale that mangers' growing understanding of foreign markets over time and exposure leads to a higher comfort level with succeedingly more "psychically distant" locations. Increasing familiarity would tend to reduce managers' perceived uncertainty about internationalizing, and lead to an increasing willingness to commit their firms' resources in foreign countries. More recent research has focused on country and firm-specific contingencies as discriminating variables among entry mode decisions. Kogut and Singh (1988) found that home-country cultural attributes influenced the mode preferences of firms investing in the U.S. In addition, several industry- and firm-specific variables were found to be linked to wholly-owned and joint venture modes. Kogut and Zander (1993) differentiated between licensing or joint ventures and wholly owned subsidiaries in their study of the impact of knowledge transfer on mode choice. Noting that knowledge-transfer is most efficient (least costly) in wholly owned subsidiaries, they showed that the more tacit, less "teachable", and more complex firm-specific knowledge is, the more likely it will be transferred abroad via a wholly owned subsidiary. This suggests that marketing- and technology-intensive companies with greater reliance on difficult-to-transfer knowledge will prefer the wholly owned mode to others, a conclusion supported by Anderson and Gatignon (1986) and Kim and Hwang (1992). In a partial departure from the incremental models adopted by earlier researchers, Caves and Mehra (1986) argued that previous investments in a country were irrelevant, and that the selection between greenfield and acquisition modes was fully explained (while controlling for joint ventures) by the degree of multinationality, the product diversity, and the size of the parent firm. …


Abstract: On June 30, 2009, the German Constitutional Court declared the Lisbon Treaty to be compatible with the German constitution. The Lisbon decision marked the end of an intense constitutional battle. The following text illustrates how different views on and different understandings of European constitutional law and European integration and, more generally speaking, different backgrounds and perspectives may lead to different readings of the decision. It also suggests an assessment of the state of European constitutionalism and of some changes in its landscape, arguing that democracy as the central constitutional concept of reflection and debate is being replaced by identity.


Pandita Ramabai provides an instructively complex example for a transcultural biography, a life extending over different and distant cultural spaces, times and practices. After travelling around India, from south to north, east to west, in the function of an itinerary religious story reciter, she went and lived in England, spent two years in America, returned and settled in India. In the process of living across countries, Ramabai converted to Christianity, yet her autobiography documents that her conversion was socially not livable and conceptually problematic in the entangled history of India and Europe. Her own words reveal the traces of her self-imposed or historically determined silences or criticisms. For the research it leads to insights into religious and political challenges of her historical set up and allows for conceptual inquiries into transcultural conversion.


This guide indentifies access to current, historic bylaws for: Amalgamated City of TO (1998-present), Former Metropolitan TO, Former City of Toronto, Former City of North York and Former Cities of Etobicoke, York, Scarborough, Former Borough of East York.


This paper makes the case for the relevance of C. G. Hempel's 1942 proposal of the usage of «covering laws» in History. To do so, it argues that such a proposal reflects how 18 and 19th centuries «philosophy of History» became methods or epistemology of History. This carried a change in meaning of «History»: no longer a succession of past events but the study of documented human action (including of scientific kind in general), its distinction vis-a-vis philosophy, sociology etc., becomes a minor matter as far as logic of research is concerned. Also present in this paper is the conception of theory as a conceptual mode of narrative, and the defense of a development of theories alongside their practice, not apart from them. Authors considered besides Hempel range from Max Weber to Sigmund Freud, from Arthur C. Danto to Albert O. Hirschmann. Except for a few desultory efforts to account for paradigm shifts, or in what Foucault designates enonces, I can think of very little in the philosophy of History from the middle1960's to the present. Somewhere someone in the last decade must have written about explanation, even about historical explanation – but I cannot think of an example offhand. (It should be noted that, as editor of the Journal of Philosophy, I see a fair sample each year of what philosophers offer as their most advanced work: my estimate is that a contribution on any aspect of the philosophy of history occurs at a rate of one per thousand submissions.) It is not just that the topic is under extreme neglect. It is, rather, that there is hardly room in the present scene of philosophy for discussion of its issues. So to find someone actively working at them would be almost as encounter a historically displaced person, like someone doing abstract expressionist canvasses as if the whole subsequent history of art had not taken place. Or like encountering Japanese soldiers on some obscure atoll who never found out that the war had ended. Arthur C. Danto (in Ankersmit and Kellner 1995: 72/3)


Target search in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems refers to finding a specific (target) image such as a particular registered logo or a specific historical photograph. Existing techniques, designed around query refinement based on relevance feedback, suffer from slow convergence, and do not guarantee to find intended targets. To address these limitations, we propose several efficient query point movement methods. We prove that our approach is able to reach any given target image with fewer iterations in the worst and average cases. We propose a new index structure and query processing technique to improve retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. We also consider strategies to minimize the effects of users' inaccurate relevance feedback. Extensive experiments in simulated and realistic environments show that our approach significantly reduces the number of required iterations and improves overall retrieval performance. The experimental results also confirm that our approach can always retrieve intended targets even with poor selection of initial query points.


Over a period of forty years, from 1947 to 1986, Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman wrote to each other constantly. The topics they wrote about were as wide-ranging as their interests and experiences, and their correspondence encompassed many of the varied events of their lives. Laurence's letters - of which far more are extant than Wisman's - reveal much about the impact of her years in Africa, motherhood, her anxieties and insecurities, and her developement as a writer. Wiseman, whose literary success came early in her career, provided a sympathetic ear and constant encouragement to Laurence. The editors' selection has been directed by an interest in these women as friends and writers. Their experiences in the publishing world offer an engaging perspective on literary apprenticeship, rejection, and success. The letters reveal the important roles both women played in the buoyant cultural nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. This valuable collection of previously unpublished primary material will be essential to scholars working on Canadian literature and of great interest to the general reading. The introduction contextualizes the correspondence and the annotations to the letters help to clarify the text. The Laurence-Wiseman letters offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives and friendship of two remarkable women whose personal correspondence was written with verve, compassion, and wit.


Intense, gruesome and dangerous work situations are frequent for the emergency response worker (ERW's). Emergency response workers, including ambulance workers, paramedics, emergency medical technicians (EMT) and firefighters are regularly exposed to stressful situations. This exploratory and qualitative research offered an in-depth look, through the eyes of ERW's, into their day to day lives. The study asked rural ERW's to identify critical or stressful incidents, factors that contribute to their stress and their perspective on supports and coping mechanisms implemented to address these stressful events. Findings indicated that the ERW's most often identified stressful incidents as those involving children and situations involving significant injury and potential danger for the ERW's. Contributing factors of stress involved the reaction of the victim's family, hearing victim's personal stories and knowing the victim. Another significant contributing factor of stress is exposure to prior trauma, both work related and personal. ERW's greatest support came from peers and critical incident stress debriefing. Based on these findings, the profession of social work has expanding opportunities to support ERW's. Social workers must expand their education about the impact of trauma and stress on functioning as well as effective treatment modalities to address stress symptoms. Consideration should also be given to expanding their availability to emergency departments that provide fire and emergency medical services in order for these important members of our community to access supportive services.


Children represent a critical social-economic group in the farm family set up and can play a myriad of roles in achieving sustainable development, especially in agriculture. This study examined children's participation in agriculture with a view of identifying their training needs in agriculture and their career aspirations. A two-stage random sampling technique was used to select 100 children (50 each) from two adopted villages of the Institute of Agricultural Research and Training that represent two agro-ecological zones in southwest Nigeria. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics such as frequency distribution, mean and percentages, while participation in agricultural activities was ranked on a Likert point scale of 0 to 3. The total score of participation in all agricultural activities was determined and compared with the total attainable score. Findings from the study show children participated in nearly all kinds of farm operations ranging from planting (96%), harvesting (92%), processing (80%), weeding (76 %), marketing (76%) and packing of trash (60%). Although participation in all the activities was higher for male children (10.36) than female children (8.74), only (18%) of the children interviewed were prepared to take up farming as a career in the future. The children, however, indicated their need for training on snail rearing (70%), grass cutter rearing (60%), and compost preparation (60%), among other activities.


Aligning IT to business needs is still one of the most important concerns for senior management. The message of Business & IT Alignment (BIA) is logical and undisputed, but implementation apparently difficult. As part of a research program on the differences between the theory and practice of BIA this paper presents a conceptual exploration of the impact of national cultures on the maturity of BIA. The paper relies on Hofstede's framework of cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1980) to understand the concept of culture. We present a compact literature review on the influence of culture on IT that leads to the conclusion that there is an influence and that it is likely that also alignment of business and IT will be affected by cultural aspects. After a brief introduction we analyze this influence by conceptually assessing the potential impact of Hofstede's cultural dimensions on the variables of BIA maturity.


Abstract The recent discovery of a gravitational wave from the merging of two black holes of about 30 solar masses each challenges our incomplete understanding of massive stars and their evolution. Critical ingredients comprise mass-loss, rotation, magnetic fields, internal mixing, and mass transfer in close binary systems. The imperfect knowledge of these factors implies large uncertainties for models of stellar populations and their feedback. In this contribution we summarize our empirical studies of Wolf-Rayet populations at different metallicities by means of modern non-LTE stellar atmosphere models, and confront these results with the predictions of stellar evolution models. At the metallicity of our Galaxy, stellar winds are probably too strong to leave remnant masses as high as ~30 M⊙, but given the still poor agreement between evolutionary tracks and observation even this conclusion is debatable. At the low metallicity of the Small Magellanic Cloud, all WN stars which are (at least now) single are consistent with evolving quasi-homogeneously. O and B-type stars, in contrast, seem to comply with standard evolutionary models without strong internal mixing. Close binaries which avoided early merging could evolve quasi-homogeneously and lead to close compact remnants of relatively high masses that merge within a Hubble time.


The happy death of the Stoic. Wisdom and finitude in Stoic philosophy. This paper attempts to furnish a Stoic reply to an accusation addressing the Stoics' ideal of the wise man according to which it is impossible to realize their ideal and therefore their whole system has to face a paradox: How is wisdom possible when all people are fools and it is impossible for them to become good? In addition to this question there is another important problem connected with the ideal of wisdom. The Stoic philosophers deny transcendental ideas. Instead they are well known for their thorough-going materialism. Therefore, even their idea of the wise man must be based on experience. How would it otherwise be possible to form the idea of wisdom by a method of analogy if experience did not provide any example of truthful virtue to us? A possible answer to this problem can be found in the writings of Seneca, a Stoic of the first century A.D. Seneca emphasizes the close relation between wisdom and human mortality owing to which it is at least possible for the philosopher who has made sufficiently progress in his efforts to gain wisdom to find lasting happiness in death.


We report results from a large field experiment that with a few hours prior notice provided Danish residential consumers with dynamic price and environmental signals aimed at causing them to shift their consumption either into or away from certain hours of the day. The same marginal price signal is found to cause substantially larger consumption shifts into target hours compared to consumption shifts away from target hours. Consumption is also reduced in the hours of the day before and after these into target hours and there is weaker evidence of increased consumption in the hours surrounding away target hours. The same into versus away results hold for the environmental signals, although the absolute size of the effects are smaller. Using detailed household-level demographic information for all customers invited to participate in the experiment, both models are re-estimated accounting for this decision. For both the price and environmental treatments, the same qualitative results are obtained, but with uniformly smaller quantitative magnitudes. These selection-corrected estimates are used to perform a counterfactual experiment where all of the retailer's residential customers are assumed to face these dynamic price signals. We find substantial wholesale energy cost savings for the retailer from declaring into events designed to shift consumption from high demand periods to low demand periods within the day, which suggests that such a pricing strategy could significantly reduce the cost of increasing the share of greenhouse gas free wind and solar electricity production in an electricity supply industry.


The application of new signal analysis techniques provides increased insight into the study of the fossil record and processes of evolution. The fossil record of 622 planktic foraminifera contains data from 200 stratigraphic stages of the past 127 m.y. Time-series analyses (wavelet and Fourier transform) of the planktic foraminifera fossil record were used to discern periodic components in long-term evolution. The correlation function analysis was used to distinguish between random and deterministic behavior of the fossil record. The analyses show that stationary ~30 m.y. periodicity and complex deterministic patterns occur in the long-term planktic foraminifera evolution, in particular in the extinction record. Our results suggest that the occurrence of intense diversity fluctuations with 3–10 m.y. periodicity after major extinction events may be attributed to nonlinear, self-organized evolutionary response to the availability of new ecospace. This coupled nonlinear-periodic scenario may explain the repetitive appearance of similar morphotypes in ~30 m.y. intervals.


Absolute distance measurements can be performed with an interferometric method that uses only a single tunable laser. This method has one major drawback, because a small target movement of the order of one wavelength during a measurement will be interpreted as a movement of one synthetic wavelength. This effect is usually mitigated by adding a second (nonscanning) laser. We show that absolute distance measurements can be performed with only one laser if the movements encountered are smooth, on the time scale of one measurement. In this case the movement errors can be compensated with a simple algorithm that combines several subsequent measurements. First experimental results show good agreement with theory.


The reconstruction of the stable carbon isotope evolution in atmospheric CO 2 (δCatm), as archived in Antarctic ice cores, bears the potential to disentangle the contributions of the different carbon cycle fluxes causing past CO2 variations. Here we present a new record of δCatm before, during and after the Marine Isotope Stage 5.5 (155 000 to 105 000 yr BP). The dataset is archived on the data repository PANGEA ® (www.pangea.de ) under doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.817041 . The record was derived with a well established sublimation method using ice from the EPICA Dome C (EDC) and the Talos Dome ice cores in East Antarctica. We find a 0.4 ‰ shift to heavier values between the mean δCatm level in the Penultimate ( ∼ 140 000 yr BP) and Last Glacial Maximum (∼ 22 000 yr BP), which can be explained by either (i) changes in the isotopic composition or (ii) intensity of the carbon input fluxes to the combined ocean/atmosphere carbon reservoir or (iii) by long-term peat buildup. Our isotopic data suggest that the carbon cycle evolution along Termination II and the subsequent interglacial was controlled by essentially the same processes as during the last 24 000 yr, but with different phasing and magnitudes. Furthermore, a 5000 yr lag in the CO2 decline relative to EDC temperatures is confirmed during the glacial inception at the end of MIS5.5 (120 000 yr BP). Based on our isotopic data this lag can be explained by terrestrial carbon release and carbonate compensation.


The heterogeneous nature of the documents both in terms of physical forms, types,sources of generation following different standards and that of users carrying both 13; research and development work demanding services suitable to them and co-existence of both old timers loving only print documents and younger scientists asking for documents on to their desk tops, the responsibility of information professionals is becoming much more challenging. The developments in information technology and their applications to library and information services have given new dimension to the entire spectrum of information management. The information generated is usually stored in four physical media: paper, film, optical, and magnetic disks. The e-document be it a book, journal, technical report, conference proceedings is portable; has random access to its contents; and the document can also be a multimedia object, in that it may contain not only text, but also graphics, drawings, photographs or video. Now we have the emergence of publications over the electronic networks and the activity took off in a big way following the invention of the World Wide Web. The Open Access movement is becoming the order of the day. More than 3000 journals are free on net for anybody to access. A number of Institutional repositories and e-Prints archives have thrown challenge to the publishing industry. . The developments in ICT have enabled the Information Centers to develop many innovative tools and techniques for acquiring, organizing, retrieving and disseminating knowledge sources, generating information services and marketing them to its clientele. 13; 13; Consortium approach through different pricing, management and licensing models is enabling the libraries to provide access to thousands of e-journals, e-books and other kinds of e-documents. The Information center at NAL with its state-of-the-art library has progressed a good deal in this direction by acquiring different kind of documents especially e-form, cataloguing amp; processing them appropriately, storing and giving access to its patrons not only in library premises, but on to the desk tops spread in three different campuses through laboratory LAN and also extending selected services through Internet for the benefit of any body from any part of the world. 13; Created and maintained by ICAST the Portal x2018;AeroInfox2019; (www.aeroinfo.org.in) serves as one window information search facility for Web sources in aerospace science and technology. This virtual library facilitates multiple approach to information seekers as the web sources are indexed and organised using different schemes of classification including NASA subject categories. Care is taken to cover Indian aerospace sources exhaustively. The ICAST site (www.icast.org.in), apart from giving detailed information about library sources including books, journals, E-journals, databases and technical reports makes available different search tools for its users. Other details like working hours, library rules, staff details, contact persons, etc are provided. One can submit an online query and suggest documents for acquisition using online forms provided. The Library Database (OPAC) is probably is single largest in the country with more than 3.25 lakh bibliographic records of books, technical reports, patents, standards, journals, etc.13; 13; ICAST users can search International databases like Aerospace Database, NTIS, J-Gate, Medline, etc through campus LAN. Users can access more than 2500 full text journals covering titles published by Elsevier (ScienceDirect), ASME, AIAA, Springer, John Wiley, OUP, CUP, AMS, World Scientific, few Annual Series, etc. Created by ICAST an e-journals gateway with browse and search (alphabetical and subject wise) facility for titles provides access to more than 700 journals available free on the net. The Centre provides a number of web/e-mail based innovative information services including Journal Contents Service, News Clipping Service, Monthly Documents Additions Lists covering both Books and Technical Reports, Web Alert Service and Union Catalogue of Journals -CSIR and Aerospace Libraries, etc. 13;


Asset purchase programmes (APPs) may insulate banks from having to terminate relationships with unproductive customers. Using administrative plant and bank data, we test whether APPs impinge on industry dynamics in terms of plant entry and exit. Plants in Germany connected to banks with access to an APP are approximately 20% less likely to exit. In particular, unproductive plants connected to weak banks with APP access are less likely to close. Aggregate entry and exit rates in regional markets with high APP exposures are also lower. Thus, APPs seem to subdue Schumpeterian cleansing mechanisms, which may hamper factor reallocation and aggregate productivity growth.


Before the widespread introduction of antiretroviral therapy (ART), most perinatally infected children did not survive beyond the first 2 years of life. With treatment, HIV-positive children are living longer. In the developed world, where HAART has been widely available since 1996, survival of perinatally infected children into adolescence is now the norm. Of a French cohort of perinatally infected children born before 1993, 58% were still alive and receiving HIV care 13 years later. In the UK the proportion of HIV-infected children in care aged 10 - 19 years increased from 11% to 44% between 1996 and 2005. As HAART becomes increasingly available in South Africa, we can expect similar trends.


In this paper, we introduce an Augmented Lagrangian based method in a search relevance ranking algorithm to incorporate the multi-dimensional nature of relevance and business constraints, both of which are the requirements for building relevance ranking models in production. The off-the-shelf solutions cannot handle such complex objectives and therefore, modelers are left hand-tuning of parameters that have only indirect impact to the objectives, at-tempting to incorporate multiple objectives (MO) in a model. This process is time-consuming and tends to face sub-optimality. The proposed method is designed to systematically solve the MO problem in a constrained optimization framework, which is integrated with a popular Boosting algorithm and is, by all means, a novel contribution. Furthermore, we propose a procedure to specify the constraints to achieve business goals and the exploration scales linearly in the number of constraints, while existing methodology can scale exponentially . The experimental results show that the method successfully builds models that achieve MO criteria much more efficiently than existing methods. The potential impact in-cludes significant reduction in model development time and allows for automation of model refresh even with presence of several MO criteria, in real world production system scale with hundreds of millions of records.


This memo presents techniques for controlling the membership of
multicast groups which are constrained to be a subset of a pre-
existing multicast group, where such subset groups are only used for
short duration transactions which are multicast to a subset of the
larger multicast group. Further the memberships of these transactional
groups is pushed by the sender rather than being pulled by the
receiver. These groups could be called Transactional Subset Push
Multicast Groups, but that label would be a bit long.


This thesis reports on a study investigating the mathematical skills and attitudes of incoming engineering students in Dublin City University. The following questions are posed in this thesis: What are the students' strengths and weaknesses in basic areas of mathematics? What beliefs do the students express in relation to mathematics?

The research attempted to answer these questions using two approaches: Firstly, an attitudinal survey was undertaken to identify students' attitudes towards mathematics, under a selection of different headings. Secondly, mathematics tests were run, focusing on the core mathematical skills necessary for engineering students. Both the test and survey were run at the beginning and/or end of the academic years 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 to give comparative data.

The results of the survey reflected high levels of confidence in relation to mathematics and high goals in relation to mathematical achievement. The test results showed a number of strengths and weaknesses in understanding or dealing with basic mathematical problems and concepts. The test was graded using certainty-based marking, which allowed the identification of misconceptions as well as knowledge gaps in students" mathematical skills. Based on these findings, recommendations are made in relation to the mathematical education of engineers in DCU.


The impact of ocean coupling on landfalling hurricanes is studied using a coupled hurricane‐ocean model with idealized atmospheric and oceanic conditions. We focus here on coastal sea surface temperature responses and their effects on hurricanes during landfall. We find that given the ocean thermal stratification, the hurricane‐induced sea surface cooling is nearly independent of the ocean depth as long as the ocean is considerably deeper than the mixed layer. After the storm center moves inland, the near‐surface processes around the storm core area are influenced by the sea surface cooling behind and on the right side of the storm track via reduction of near‐surface entropy advection into this area. The impact of ocean coupling is generally limited to the early times after landfall and nearly disappears after the hurricane center reaches about 200 km inland.


With many operational centers moving toward order 1-km-gridlength models for routine weather forecasting, this paper presents a systematic investigation of the properties of high-resolution versions of the Met Office Unified Model for short-range forecasting of convective rainfall events. The authors describe a suite of configurations of the Met Office Unified Model running with grid lengths of 12, 4, and 1 km and analyze results from these models for a number of convective cases from the summers of 2003, 2004, and 2005. The analysis includes subjective evaluation of the rainfall fields and comparisons of rainfall amounts, initiation, cell statistics, and a scale-selective verification technique. It is shown that the 4- and 1-km-gridlength models often give more realistic-looking precipitation fields because convection is represented explicitly rather than parameterized. However, the 4-km model representation suffers from large convective cells and delayed initiation because the grid length is too long to correctly reproduce the convection explicitly. These problems are not as evident in the 1-km model, although it does suffer from too numerous small cells in some situations. Both the 4- and 1-km models suffer from poor representation at the start of the forecast in the period when the high-resolution detail is spinning up from the lower-resolution (12 km) starting data used. A scale-selective precipitation verification technique implies that for later times in the forecasts (after the spinup period) the 1-km model performs better than the 12- and 4-km models for lower rainfall thresholds. For higher thresholds the 4-km model scores almost as well as the 1-km model, and both do better than the 12-km model.


This paper explores the chronological relationship between the fine art market and the work produced by black South African artists since the emergence of a black urban class in the 1940s. It stems from the hypothesis that historically the art market had (and to some degree, still has) a major influence on the works produced by black artists in South Africa. In the introduction I contextualized the title of this dissertation by discussing the definitions of the terminology which feature therein. In Chapter One I have contextualized the study by looking at the historical background (the pre-1994) of South African art. I have specifically looked at how the socio-political conditions of that time influenced the work produced by black South African artists, hence the emergence of Township Art and Resistance Art. In Chapter Two I looked at the roles played by art institutions, galleries, and organizations in the stylistic developments made by black South African artists between the 1950s and 2000. The discussion of the influential role played by such informal institutions as Polly Street Art Centre, Jubilee Art Centre, the Johannesburg Art Foundation and many others on black artists forms a greater part of this chapter. Also included in this chapter is the discussion which examines the hypothesis that many black artists who do not have a formal academic background constitute a greater part of the informal art market. Tommy Motswai, Joseph Manana and Sibusiso Duma are examples of such artists and their work is discussed in depth. David Koloane, De Jager, Anitra Nettleton and other writers who have made literary contributions to South African art history, have been extensively cited and critically engaged in this chapter. iv In Chapter Three I discussed contemporary perceptions of the formal art sector, particularly in the post apartheid period. In this regard I looked at what defines mainstream or high art and how it differs from the marginal forms of art which are discussed in the preceding chapter. In this discussion I looked at the work of Sam Nhlengethwa, Colbert Mashile and my own work. In my discussion of their work I mapped out the characteristics of contemporary mainstream art, focussing primarily on 2-dimensional art.


Mobile devices including smartphones and wearable devices are increasingly gaining popularity as platforms for collecting and sharing sensor data, such as the accelerometer, gyroscope, and rotation sensor. These sensors are used to improve the convenience of smartphone users, e.g., supporting the mobile UI motionbased commands. Although these motion sensors do not require users' permissions, they still bring potential risks of leaking users' private information reflected by the changes of sensor readings. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of inferring a user's handwritten pattern on a smartphone touchscreen by using the embedded motion sensors. Specifically, our inference attack is composed of two key steps where we 1) first exploit the dynamic time warping (DTW) technique to differentiate any pair of time-series sensor recordings corresponding to different handwritten patterns; and 2) develop a novel sensor fusion mechanism to integrate information contained in multiple motion sensors by exploiting the majority voting strategy. Through extensive experiments using real-world data sets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed attack which can achieve 91.4% accuracy for inferring smartphone users' handwritten patterns.


Animals are a more active and compelling part of the ecosystem, with intrinsic value and utilization value. In the early days of human civilization, humans used wild Animals to protect themselves from the hungry and the cold, reflecting their direct utilization value. At the same time, wild animals have indirect value in human cognition, and many wild animals are regarded as the totem of the clan. With the development of society, human beings also conceived some beast animals that did not appear in nature, and used the power supply class as a symbol of their own identity. Whether it is a wild animal in nature or a conceived beast, it is often displayed on various creations, such as rock paintings, cave paintings, ceramics, and so on. In this article, ceramic products are used as a medium to explore the patterns and cultural characteristics of ceramic products using animals as elements. Objective: To study the history, categories and cultural connotations of the use of ceramic products by showing the traces, movements and forms of the decoration of wild animals with the patterns of wild animals as elements. Methods: Using the methods of image, type analysis and interpretation to study the application and paradigm of wild animal decoration in the design of ceramic products. Results: Through the research on wild animal ornamentation and dynamics on ceramic products, the idea conveyed is that humans and animals should coexist in a harmonious coexistence and natural fusion, maintain ecological balance, and show the ecological values of human health.


Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and economic efficiency for alternative allocation rules where emission allowances are based on either emissions or output. Based on analytical partial equilibrium and numerical general equilibrium analysis, we show that in open trading systems the trade-off becomes the more severe, the higher the international permit price is. Whenever the permit price can be considered exogenous to firms or industries, the output-based allocation rule is distinctly less costly than the emission-based rule to preserve output and employment in energy-intensive sectors. The reason is that emission-based allocation of allowances not only provides an implicit output subsidy but also lowers the effective price of emission inputs to regulated firms. Emissionbased allocation is particularly expensive towards higher international permit prices where the implicit subsidies to emission use in energy-intensive sectors produce drastic efficiency losses, since they imply high expenditures for carbon permit imports rather than high net revenues from efficient carbon permit exports.


The anticancer drug CPT-11 (7-ethyl-[4(1-piperidino)-1-piperidino]carbonyloxycamptothecin) is a water-soluble derivative of camptothecin. We report here the conversion of APC (7-ethyl-[4-N-(5-aminopentanoic acid)-1-piperidino] carbonyloxycamptothecin), an inactive metabolite of CPT-11, to SN-38 (7-ethyl-10-hydroxycamptothecin), the active metabolite of CPT-11, by a rabbit liver carboxylesterase. This reaction is not catalyzed by any known human enzyme. The formation of SN-38 from APC was characterized by an apparent Km of 37.9 +/- 7.1 microM and a Vmax of 16.9 +/- 0.9 pmol/units/min. SN-38 was confirmed as a reaction product by high-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. A 24-h incubation of 10 microM APC with 500 units/ml of rabbit carboxylesterase produced 4 microM SN-38. The product of this reaction inhibited the growth of U373 MG human glioblastoma cells in vitro. The IC50 for a 24-h exposure of U373 MG cells to APC in the presence of 50 units/ml of rabbit carboxylesterase was 0.27 +/- 0.08 microM, whereas APC alone demonstrated no inhibition of growth at concentrations up to 1 microM. The IC50 of U373 MG cells transfected with the cDNA encoding the rabbit carboxylesterase (U373pIRESrabbit) and exposed to APC for 24 h was 0.8 +/- 0.1 microM APC, whereas the growth of cells transfected with vector control (U373pIRES) was unaffected by up to 1 microM APC. Because APC is nontoxic to human cells, we are investigating the possibility of using APC/rabbit carboxylesterase in a prodrug/enzyme therapeutic approach.


This article first briefly reviews the basic concepts about cognitive radio (CR) technology and CR-enabled cognitive wireless communications, and then discusses the differentiating features of CR and the fundamental theories or principles behind CR, especially from the artificial intelligence and machine learning perspective. As a CR testbed plays an important role in the transition of CR technology from concept to large-scale deployment, a survey on the state-of-the-art development on CR testbeds is presented, which indicates the trend of future development. Emerging research topics and potential applications of CR technology in various areas are also discussed which could be further investigated in an innovative CR approach.


Objective The objective of the study was to examine the independent association of emotional distress with unhealthy sleep duration (defined as <7 or >8 hours). Methods Data from the 2009 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a cross-sectional household survey, were analyzed to investigate the associations of emotional distress with unhealthy sleep durations, adjusting for sociodemographic factors, health risks, and chronic diseases through hierarchical multiple logistic regression analysis. Participants A total of 27,731 participants (age range 18–85 years) from the NHIS 2009 dataset were interviewed. Measures Unhealthy sleep duration is defined as sleep duration <7 or >8 hours, whereas healthy sleep is defined as sleep duration lasting for 7–8 hours. Emotional distress is based on the Kessler 6 Non-Specific Distress Battery, which assesses the frequency of feeling sad, nervous, restless, hopeless, worthless, and burdened, over a 30-day period. Results Of the sample, 51.7% were female; 83.1% were white and 16.9% were black. Eleven percent experienced emotional distress and 37.6% reported unhealthy sleep. Adjusted logistic regression analysis revealed that individuals with emotional distress had 55% greater odds of reporting unhealthy sleep (odds ratio [OR] =1.55, 95% confidence interval [CI] =1.42, 1.68, P<0.001). Conclusion Emotional distress, an important proxy for poor psychological health, was a significant predictor of unhealthy sleep, independent of the influences of several factors including demographic (age, education, sex, race/ethnicity, and family income), health risks (alcohol consumption and smoking status), and chronic diseases/conditions (diabetes, obesity, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and arthritis).


Do you need help making your food look as delicious as it tastes? Are you a foodie hungry for more tantalizing photos of your culinary creations? Do you have a food blog that youd like to take to the next level, with better images and a stronger business strategy? Then this book is for you! In Food Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots, Second Edition, photographer Nicole Young returns to dish up the basics on everything you need to know to make great food images, from getting the right camera equipment to mastering the key photographic principles of aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. She offers tips on styling food using props, fabrics, and tabletops; and she explains how to improve your photos through editing after the shoot. This new edition features many brand-new images and examples, accompanied by up-to-date discussions on achieving good lighting and composition. In addition Nicole covers developments in the industry that have emerged since the publication of the first edition, such as the entry of mirrorless cameras on the scene, and more. She also provides a brand new post-processing section focusing on Photoshop Lightroom, showing how to improve your photos through sharpening, color enhancement, and other editing techniques. Beautifully illustrated with large, vibrant photos, this book offers the practical advice and expert shooting tips you need to get the food images you want every time you pick up your camera.


The vertex cover number of a graph is the minimum number of vertices that are needed to cover all edges. When those vertices are further required to induce a connected subgraph, the corresponding number is called the connected vertex cover number, and is always greater or equal to the vertex cover number. Connected vertex covers are found in many applications, and the relationship between those two graph invariants is therefore a natural question to investigate. For that purpose, we introduce the \em Price of Connectivity, defined as the ratio between the two vertex cover numbers. We prove that the price of connectivity is at most 2 for arbitrary graphs. We further consider graph classes in which the price of connectivity of every induced subgraph is bounded by some real number t. We obtain forbidden induced subgraph characterizations for every real value t ≤q 3/2. We also investigate critical graphs for this property, namely, graphs whose price of connectivity is strictly greater than that of any proper induced subgraph. Those are the only graphs that can appear in a forbidden subgraph characterization for the hereditary property of having a price of connectivity at most t. In particular, we completely characterize the critical graphs that are also chordal. Finally, we also consider the question of computing the price of connectivity of a given graph. Unsurprisingly, the decision version of this question is NP-hard. In fact, we show that it is even complete for the class Θ₂^P = P^NP[\log], the class of decision problems that can be solved in polynomial time, provided we can make O(\log n) queries to an NP-oracle. This paves the way for a thorough investigation of the complexity of problems involving ratios of graph invariants.


Sleep patterns can influence amyloid plaque formation in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. Accumulation of β-amyloid (Aβ) in the brain is thought to be the initiating event in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Aβ is a peptide secreted in a soluble monomeric form predominantly by neurons, and its aggregation into toxic forms is concentration dependent. Synaptic activity regulates the release of Aβ in vivo. However, how physiological and environmental processes are involved in regulation of Aβ levels is not understood. Kang et al., by performing sleep-wake studies in freely behaving animals concomitant with in vivo microdialysis, found that brain interstitial fluid levels of Aβ were significantly correlated with wakefulness and negatively correlated with sleep. Furthermore, relatively short-term (3 weeks) sleep deprivation markedly accelerated amyloid plaque deposition in amyloid precursor protein transgenic mice. Thus, sleep-wake behavior is linked to Aβ levels, and abnormal sleep may be linked to AD pathogenesis. J.-E. Kang, M. M. Lim, R. J. Bateman, J. J. Lee, L. P. Smyth, J. R. Cirrito, N. Fujiki, S. Nishino, D. M. Holtzman, Amyloid-β dynamics are regulated by orexin and the sleep-wake cycle. Science 326, 1005–1007 (2009). [Abstract] [Full Text]


This licentiate thesis is a part of an effort to run large electronic structure calculations in modern computational environments with distributed memory. The ultimate goal is to model materials consisting of millions of atoms at the level of quantum mechanics. In particular, the thesis focuses on different aspects of a computational problem of inverse factorization of Hermitian positive definite matrices. The considered aspects are numerical properties of the algorithms and parallelization. Not only is an efficient and scalable computation of inverse factors necessary in order to be able to run large scale electronic computations based on the Hartree–Fock or Kohn–Sham approaches with the selfconsistent field procedure, but it can be applied more generally for preconditioner construction. Parallelization of algorithms with unknown load and data distributions requires a paradigm shift in programming. In this thesis we also discuss a few parallel programming models with focus on task-based models, and, more specifically, the Chunks and Tasks model.


There are not yet fully autonomous flying robots capable of maneuvering in small cluttered environments as insects do. The substantial weight and energy constraints typically encountered in this kind of robotic applications preclude the use of powerful processors and classical distance sensors. Moreover, due to their highly dynamic motion, flying systems require fast sensory-motor mapping. To pave the way toward fully autonomous indoor flying robots we take inspiration from flying insects like flies because (i) they generally display efficient flight control capability in complex environments in spite of their limited weight and tiny brain, (ii) the sensory modalities they are using for flight control have artificial counterparts (sensors) that fit the limited available payload, and (iii) a large body of literature has been produced by biologists on their anatomy, sensors, processing pathways, and behaviors. The latest prototype we built is named MC1 and has an overall weight of 10 g including visual, inertial, and airflow sensors. It is capable of automatic take-off, speed regulation, and obstacle avoidance in a 7x6-m room equipped with randomly textured walls. To avoid collisions, it computes optic-flow from its onboard CMOS camera and fuses it with rotation rate information provided by a MEMS gyroscope. It has already demonstrated robust operation during several test flights, which lasted up to 10 minutes of autonomous operation.


Two synaptic adhesion molecules that have been implicated in psychiatric diseases affect the kinetics of synaptic events. Mutations altering neurexin and neuroligin have been linked to several psychiatric disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. However, it remains uncertain how these mutations alter neural circuit development and function. Working in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, Hu et al. found that neurexin and neuroligin function downstream of a muscle microRNA (miR-1), mediating a retrograde synaptic signal that inhibits neurotransmitter release. This retrograde signal inhibited transmission by adjusting the rate and duration of synaptic vesicle release. Z. Hu, S. Hom, T. Kudze, X.-J. Tong, S. Choi, G. Aramuni, W. Zhang, J. M. Kaplan, Neurexin and neuroligin mediate retrograde synaptic inhibition in C. elegans. Science 337, 980–984 (2012). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Abstract BACKGROUND Insecticide resistance is the major threat to vector control and for the prevention of vector‐borne diseases. Because almost all insecticides used against insect vectors are or have been used in agriculture, a connection between agricultural insecticide use and resistance in insect vectors has been hypothesized. However, it is challenging to find a causal link between past agricultural use of insecticides and current resistance in vector populations without historical data series. Here we investigated the relative contribution across time of agricultural and public‐health insecticide applications in selecting for diflubenzuron (DFB) resistance in Culex pipiens populations. Using DNA sequencing, we looked for DFB resistant mutations in current and historical mosquito samples, dating back to the 1980s–1990s, when DFB was used in agriculture but not yet in mosquito control. RESULTS In the samples collected before the introduction of DFB in vector control, we found the resistant mutation I1043M in rural regions but not any of the neighboring urban and natural areas, indicating that the selection pressure was derived by agriculture. However, after the introduction of DFB for vector control, the resistant mutations were found across all study areas showing that the initial selection from agriculture was further boosted by the selection pressure imposed by the mosquito control applications in the 2000s. CONCLUSIONS Our findings support a combined role of agricultural and public‐health use of insecticides in vector resistance across time and call for specific actions in integrated resistance management, including increased communication between agriculture and health practitioners. © 2022 The Authors. Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.


For ages we used our ears side by side with our ophthalmic stimuli to gather additional information, leading and supporting us in our visualization. Nowadays numerous software visualization techniques exist that aim to facilitate program comprehension. In this paper we discuss how we can support such software comprehension visualization with environmental audio and lead users to identify relevant aspects. We use cognitive visualization techniques and audio concepts described in our previous work to create an ambient audio software exploration (AASE) out of program entities (packages, classes …) and their mapped properties. The concepts where implemented in a extended version of our tool called CocoViz. Our first results with the prototype shows that with this combination of visual and aural means we can provide additional information to lead users during program comprehension tasks.


This is the twentieth Anniversary Edition - with a new introduction by the author. "About as close to flawless as any reader could ask for". ("The New York Times Book Review"). Carolina in the 1950s, and Bone - christened Ruth Anna Boatwright - lives a happy life, in and out of her aunt's houses, playing with her cousins on the porch, sipping ice tea, loving her little sister Reece and her beautiful young mother. But Glen Waddell has been watching them all, wanting her mother too, and when he promises a new life for the family, her mother gratefully accepts. Soon Bone finds herself in a different, terrible world, living in fear, and an exile from everything she knows. "Bastard Out of Carolina" is a raw, poignant tale of fury, power, love and family. "For anyone who has ever felt the contempt of a self-righteous world, this book will resonate within you like a gospel choir. For anyone who hasn't, this book will be an education". (Barbara Kingsolver). Dorothy Allison was awarded the 2007 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, and has been likened to Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner and Harper Lee.


Financial systems are crucial to the allocation of resources in a modern economy. They channel household savings to the corporate sector and allocate investment funds among firms; they allow intertemporal smoothing of consumption by households and expenditures by firms; and they enable households and firms to share risks. These functions are common to the financial systems of most developed economies. Yet the form of these financial systems varies widely. In the United States and the United Kingdom competitive markets dominate the financial landscape, whereas in France, Germany, and Japan banks have traditionally played the most important role. Why do different countries have such different financial systems? Is one system better than all the others? Do different systems merely represent alternative ways of satisfying similar needs? Is the current trend toward market-based systems desirable? Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale argue that the view that market-based systems are best is simplistic. A more nuanced approach is necessary. For example, financial markets may be bad for risk sharing; competition in banking may be inefficient; financial crises can be good as well as bad; and separation of ownership and control can be optimal. Financial institutions are not simply veils, disguising the allocation mechanism without affecting it, but are crucial to overcoming market imperfections. An optimal financial system relies on both financial markets and financial intermediaries.


In this chapter, we examine the meta-analytic talk of nine adolescent L2 Spanish learners and their subsequent accuracy on a grammaticality judgment task, with the pronoun se as an instructional target. Data come from a U.S. high school during three 90-minute lessons, where learners "co-constructed" rules for se in groups based on its use in reading passages. We coded learners' analytic talk as belonging to higher or lower levels of analytical abstraction (LAAs) to distinguish labeling L2 forms and categories from identifying broader patterns and rules. The amount of individual and group analytic talk, as well as talk at higher LAAs, was compared to individual grammaticality judgment scores before and six weeks after instruction. Results show that learners in groups with greater mutuality improved their scores even when their overall individual participation was only low or moderate. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.


Abstract Recombinant vectors based on adeno-associated virus serotype 8 (AAV8) have been successfully used in the clinic and hold great promise for liver-directed gene therapy. Preexisting immunity against AAV8 or the development of antibodies against the therapeutic transgene product might negatively affect the outcomes of gene therapy. In the prospect of an AAV8-mediated, liver-directed gene therapy clinical trial for mucopolysaccharidosis VI (MPS VI), a lysosomal storage disorder caused by arylsulfatase B (ARSB) deficiency, we investigated in a multiethnic cohort of MPS VI patients the prevalence of neutralizing antibodies (Nab) to AAV8 and the presence of ARSB cross-reactive immunologic material (CRIM), which will either affect the efficacy of gene transfer or the duration of phenotypic correction. Thirty-six MPS VI subjects included in the study harbored 45 (62.5%) missense, 13 (18%) nonsense, 9 (12.5%) frameshift (2 insertions and 7 deletions), and 5 (7%) splicing ARSB mutations. The detection of ARSB protein in 24 patients out of 34 (71%) was predicted by the type of mutations. Preexisting Nab to AAV8 were undetectable in 19/33 (58%) analyzed patients. Twelve out of 31 patients (39%) tested were both negative for Nab to AAV8 and CRIM-positive. In conclusion, this study allows estimating the number of MPS VI patients eligible for a gene therapy trial by intravenous injections of AAV8.


Along with rapid change in global manufacturing scenario, environmental and social issues are becoming more important in managing any business. Green supply management (GSCM) is one of the corporate environmental management that has been adopted by manufacturing firms. It indents to reduce or minimize negative environmental impacts. This research aims to investigate the Green Supply Chain Management practices, likely to be adopted by Zarmakaron Company of Iran. The statistical population consists of experts and managers in this company, and our sample population using limited sample size formula is 51.For gathering data we used questionnaires, and In order to assess the validity we referred to advisors, supervisors, and some experts. The reliability of the questionnaire was calculated using SPSS and Cranachs alpha Coefficient obtained to be 0.856, indicating the reliability of the research tool. Data analysis and hypothesis testing have done through T-Student test by SPSS software, which results showed that 2 hypotheses are proved, and GSCM could be implemented from 2 perspectives in this company.


Under section 704 of the Administrative Procedure Act, courts can only review agency actions when they are "final." In Bennett v. Spear, the Supreme Court put forth a seemingly simple two-part test for assessing final agency action. However, the second prong of that test—which requires agency actions to "create rights or obligations from which legal consequences flow" to be final—poses several problems. Most importantly, because it overlaps with the legal tests for whether a rule is a legislative rule or a nonbinding guidance document, it seems to effectively bar courts from reviewing nonlegislative rules before agencies have taken enforcement action. Because of this overlap, the Bennett test conflicts with—and thus undercuts—other principles of administrative law that seem to promote a pragmatic, flexible approach for courts to use in determining whether, when, and how to review agency rules. The result is a confusing standard of review that can prevent plaintiffs from challenging agency rules in court, especially when those plaintiffs are beneficiaries of regulation who will never be subject to enforcement action down the road. At the same time, however, courts should not be able to review every single agency rule before it is enforced. Agencies should be able to experiment, but should not be permitted to indefinitely shield potentially dangerous deregulatory programs from judicial review, as Bennett seems to allow. Accordingly, this Note argues that to be faithful to the Court's commitment to "pragmatic" interpretation of the finality requirement, lower courts should follow a two-pronged approach to analyzing questions of final agency action. When courts can compel an agency to finalize its allegedly temporary action because of "unreasonable delay," they should interpret Bennett's second prong formally, holding that only truly legally binding action can be final. If this bars some plaintiffs from suing now, they will be able to challenge the rule later when the agency's process is finished. But when courts cannot force agencies to finalize their rules, they should construe Bennett functionally, conceptualizing the agency's allegedly temporary action under a "practically binding" standard. Under this framework, if the agency's "temporary" action in practice consistently follows certain criteria, it should be viewed as binding and final under Bennett, and thus subject to judicial review, regardless of what the agency or its employees are legally required to do. This twopronged approach would help to strike the right balance between the private party and the agency in a practical manner that depends upon the context.


ABSTRACT There is a general assumption in democracy promotion that liberal democracy is the panacea that will solve all political and economic problems faced by developing countries. Using the concept of "good society" as analytical prism, the analysis shows that while there is a rhetorical agreement as to what the "good society" entails, democracy promotion practices fail to allow for recipients' inclusion in the negotiation and delivery of the "good society". Contrasting US and Tunisian discourses on the "good society", the article argues that democracy promotion practices are underpinned by neoliberal parameters borne out from a reliance on the transition paradigm, which in turn leave little room to democracy promotion recipients to formulate knowledge claims supporting the emergence of alternative conceptions of the "good society". In contrast, the article opens up a reflective pathway to a negotiated democratic knowledge, which would reside in a paradigmatic change that consists in the abandonment of the transition paradigm in favour of a "democratic emergence" paradigm.