While analysing the foreign states' criminal codes and works of different scientists on repetitive criminal acts, one can see that there is no unified position to the problem. The discussions involve both the qualification of repetitive criminal acts, and their forms as well as their influence on sentencing. However, the article with the use of dogmatic, logic and systematic analysis methods aims at analysing only the most complex and disputable problematic aspects of this independent institute of criminal law. These are the forms of repetitive crimes, and sentencing, after commitment of several criminal acts. The focus is on the forms of repetitive criminal acts, since the conception of this issue determines the solution of other problems of the institute. According to the author, the most often supported system of the three-member repetitive criminal acts (coincidence of criminal acts, repetition of criminal acts and recurrence of criminal acts) does not hold the criticism, since in the process of dividing the coincidence of the criminal acts, repeat and recurrence into types, it becomes obvious that a number of them repeat each other. Besides, the terminology of repetitive criminal acts' forms and their types is rather confusing. After the analysis of those problems, the author presents a more recent and modern view to the forms of serial criminal acts, and recognizes only the ones of coincidence and repetition as such. No less attention is dedicated to the problem of sentencing in case of several criminal acts, as long as its decision is directly connected to the discernible forms of serial criminal acts. It is recognized on the article that the new rules of generalising of sentencing are much more obvious than the previous ones in the Criminal Code of the Republic of Lithuania of 1961. Under this Code, courts in essence used only the principle of sentence embracing, what was especially favourable for the persons committing criminal acts. However, the author states, that the provisions of Article 63 of the Criminal Code of Lithuania of 2000 has not fully solved the problem. The perpetrator may find it useful to commit more crimes before the incriminatory decision of the court is made. Moreover, the author assumes that the application of the principle of the addition of partial sentence in the case of the repetition of criminal acts is neither scientifically grounded, nor properly regulated by laws. The Criminal Code does not even mention what levers court should take into consideration in the most severe punishment, of all given, adding a part of other mild ones. Due to this reason, a conclusion is made that the principle of partial addition of sentences is a kind of sentence embracing and the suggestion to withdraw from its application is provided in the article. At the same time, the author maintains, that adding the sentences for several criminal acts committed, the amount of the final sentence would not be limited. Only in such a case, it will become clear, how many crimes the sentenced has committed and what is the retribution of society. Apart from the theoretical aspect of this issue, the article draws attention to the problems arising in court practice while imposing sentences after several criminal acts have been committed.


Isolation and Host Range of Staphylococcus aureus Bacteriophages and Use for Decontamination of Fomites Kyle C. Jensen Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology, BYU Master of Science Staphylococcus aureus is a common bacterium found on the skin and mucosal membranes of about 20% of the population. S. aureus growth on the skin is harmless, but if it bypasses the skin it can causes life-threatening diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis, bacteremia, and sepsis. Antibiotic-resistant strains of S. aureus, called Methicillin Resistant S. aureus (MRSA), are resistant to most antibiotics except vancomycin. However, vancomycin resistant strains of MRSA are becoming more common. In this study, 12 phages were isolated capable of infecting human S. aureus and/or MRSA strains. Five phages were discovered through mitomycin C induction of prophages and seven phages were found through enrichment of environmental samples. Primary S. aureus strains were also isolated from environmental sources to be used as tools for phage discovery and isolation as well as to examine the target cell host range of the phage isolates. S. aureus isolates were tested for susceptibility to oxacillin in order to determine methicillin-resistance. Experiments were performed to assess the host range and killing potential of newly discovered phage. The M1M4 phage had the broadest host range and lysed 12% of the S. aureus strains that were tested. The host ranges were reinforced by spectrophotometric assay data which showed a reduction in bacterial optical density of 1.3 OD600. The phages were used to decontaminate MRSA from fomites (glass and cloth) and successfully reduced colony forming units by 1-2 logs, including tests of a phage cocktail against a cocktail of MRSA isolates. Our findings suggest that phage treatment can be used as an effective tool to decontaminate human MRSA from both hard surfaces and fabrics.


Abstract Aims: To investigate candidate genes in peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) that are associated with early onset severe preeclampsia (ES-PE) and to describe candidate genes function using microarrays and real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Methods: PBMC RNA was extracted from six patients with ES-PE and five uncomplicated pregnancies. The HG_U133 plus 2.0 Affymetrix GeneChips that represented 47,000 genes were used to measure gene expression in each sample. Significance analysis of microarray identified potential signature genes characterizing ES-PE vs. uncomplicated pregnancies. Eight genes were selected for confirmation by real-time PCR of 32 patients with ES-PE and 24 uncomplicated pregnancies, matched for maternal age, parity, race and gestational weeks. Results: Using a whole-genome approach to study the molecular determinants of ES-PE, 72 genes were found to be differentially expressed between cases and controls, including 38 up-regulated genes and 34 down-regulated genes in the group of ES-PE. Killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptor, three domains, long cytoplasmic tail, 2 (KIR3DL2), aldo-keto reductase family 1, member C3 (AKR1C3), churchill domain containing 1 (CHURC1), and solute carrier family 25, member 13 (SLC25A13) were validated to be down-regulated in the patients with ES-PE by real-time PCR. Conclusions: Expression of genes with diverse function is associated with ES-PE risk, providing opportunities for the development of non-invasive diagnosis.


The cloud is poised to become the next computing environment for both data storage and computation due to its pay-as-you-go and provision-as-you-go models. Cloud storage is already being used to back up desktop user data, host shared scientific data, store web application data, and to serve web pages. Today's cloud stores, however, are missing an important ingredient: provenance.

Provenance is metadata that describes the history of an object. We make the case that provenance is crucial for data stored on the cloud and identify the properties of provenance that enable its utility. We then examine current cloud offerings and design and implement three protocols for maintaining data/provenance in current cloud stores. The protocols represent different points in the design space and satisfy different subsets of the provenance properties. Our evaluation indicates that the overheads of all three protocols are comparable to each other and reasonable in absolute terms. Thus, one can select a protocol based upon the properties it provides without sacrificing performance. While it is feasible to provide provenance as a layer on top of today's cloud offerings, we conclude by presenting the case for incorporating provenance as a core cloud feature, discussing the issues in doing so.


Community health assessment (CHA) professionals who use information technology need a complete system that is capable of supporting numerical-spatial problem solving. On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) is a multidimensional data warehouse technique that is commonly used as a decision support system in standard industry. Coupling OLAP with Geospatial Information System (GIS) offers the potential for a very powerful system. For this work, OLAP and GIS were combined to develop the Spatial OLAP Visualization and Analysis Tool (SOVAT) for numerical-spatial problem solving.
In addition to the development of this system, this dissertation describes three studies in relation to this work: a usability study, a CHA survey, and a summative evaluation.
The purpose of the usability study was to identify human-computer interaction issues. Fifteen participants took part in the study. Three participants per round used the system to complete typical numerical-spatial tasks. Objective and subjective results were analyzed after each round and system modifications were implemented. The result of this study was a novel OLAP-GIS system streamlined for the purposes of numerical-spatial problem solving.
The online CHA survey aimed to identify the information technology currently used for numerical-spatial problem solving. The survey was sent to CHA professionals and allowed for them to record the individual technologies they used during specific steps of a numerical-spatial routine. In total, 27 participants completed the survey. Results favored SPSS for numerical-related steps and GIS for spatial-related steps.
Next, a summative within-subjects crossover design compared SOVAT to the combined use of SPSS and GIS (termed SPSS-GIS) for numerical-spatial problem solving. Twelve individuals from the health sciences at the University of Pittsburgh participated. Half were randomly selected to use SOVAT first, while the other half used SPSS-GIS first. In the second session, they used the alternate application. Objective and subjective results favored SOVAT over SPSS-GIS. Inferential statistics were analyzed using linear mixed model analysis. At the .01 level, SOVAT was statistically significant from SPSS-GIS for satisfaction and time (p < .002).
The results demonstrate the potential for OLAP-GIS in CHA analysis. Future work will explore the impact of an OLAP-GIS system in other areas of public health.


Background Within a rights-based paradigm, wheelchairs are essential in the promotion of user autonomy, dignity, freedom, inclusion and participation. Objectives This paper aimed to describe a group of Zimbabwean wheelchair users' satisfaction with wheelchairs, wheelchair services and wheelchair function. Method A mixed method, descriptive study was done. Quantitative data was collected from 94 consecutively sampled wheelchair users, who accessed wheelchair services at 16 clinics in five Zimbabwean provinces between October 2013 and February 2014, using the Quebec User Evaluation of Satisfaction with Assistive Technology for adults and children and Functioning Every day with a Wheelchair questionnaire. Qualitative data were collected through two focus group discussions (22 participants) and two case studies with participants purposively sampled from those who participated in the quantitative phase. Results More than 60% of participants were dissatisfied with the following wheelchair features: durability (78.6%), weight (75.6%), ease of adjustment (69.1%), effectiveness (69.0%), safety (66.7%), reliability (66.7%), and meeting user needs (60.6%). Similarly, more than 66% of participants were dissatisfied with various services aspects: professional services (69.0%), follow-up (67.0%), and service delivery (68.3%). Although 60% of participants agreed that the wheelchair contributed to specific functions, more than 50% of participants indicated that the features of the wheelchair did not allow in- (53.2%) and outdoor (52.7%) mobility. Conclusion Findings indicate high levels of dissatisfaction with wheelchair features and services, as well as mobility. It is recommended that policy and minimum service standards which incorporate evidence and good practice guidelines for wheelchair services and management of wheelchair donations are developed for Zimbabwe.


There has been contentious debate surrounding the issue of undervaluation of the Chinese Renminbi. Despite continuous international political pressure to appreciate its currency, the Chinese government has resisted significant changes. A key question underlining the debate is whether a Renminbi appreciation would deliver substantial gains for exports and employment as the United States has argued or a significant slowdown of Chinese economy as feared by the Chinese government, and if so to what extent. This paper analyzes the ex-ante, short-term impacts of the Chinese Renminbi appreciation on the Chinese and world economies using the novel approach of modeling nominal exchange rate adjustment in the Global Trade Analysis Project, a global computable general equilibrium model. Scenario results show that the Chinese economy will be affected negatively, with lower real gross domestic product, lower employment rates, and a decline in the trade surplus. Chinese currency appreciation has a positive impact on the GDP of the major countries and regions, but by a small margin. With a higher Chinese exchange rate, trade balances for other trading partner countries, with the exception of the United States, improve.


This work presents one of the first low power pH sensing microfluidic chip based on the heterogeneous integration of: (i) high-k FinFET sensors with liquid gate, (ii) miniaturized Ag/AgCl quasi-Reference Electrode and (iii) passive microfluidic. The integration of these three components provides a fully integrated and compact platform that could be exploited for ionic monitoring in biofluids for healthcare applications. We describe the full fabrication process for the microfluidic system with the embedded reference electrode. The electrical characterization of heterogeneously integrated pH FinFET sensor with the integrated reference electrode shows Id-Vg characteristics with subthreshold swing SS~141mV/dec, low Ioff current and ION/IOFF > 105. When applying a constant current operation scheme, a sensitivity of 8mV/pH of the output drain voltage is reported. Due to the biocompatibility of the selected materials and small size, the resulting microsystem-on-chip could be used as a noninvasive wearable sensor for continuous monitoring of pH in sweat.


BACKGROUND
Foot blisters are common and painful nuisances in competitive sports and in military service. The pathogenesis of the problem is related to excessive frictional forces experienced on or under the foot. The incidence of foot blisters in marathon runners can reach 39%. Similarly, up to 42% of cadets in Reserve Officers' Training Corps camps might be prone to foot blisters. Although the problem usually disappears within 5 days, a single blister might be a major problem in competitive sports or in a wilderness setting. Military training and combat effectiveness might also be compromised by foot blisters. This study sought to reveal the distribution of plantar shear forces in athletic individuals and its relevance to foot blisters.

METHODS
Three groups of 11 participants each were studied: blister, adult control, and pediatric control. A custom-built shear and pressure platform was used to collect plantar pressure and shear data while the participants walked over the device. Data were analyzed with repeated-measures analysis of variance.

RESULTS
The blister group had significantly increased pressure and shear stress magnitudes compared with the other groups, although no significant group-site interaction was found. The shear-time integral values were increased approximately 50% at specific sites of the athletic feet, suggesting that contact time may play a role in blister formation.

CONCLUSIONS
The biomechanical interaction on the plantar surface of a blister-prone person is different from that of individuals who are less prone to the problem.


"Predictive Analytics" blends the latest research in behavioral economics with artificial intelligence to address one of the most important legal questions at the heart of intellectual property law and antitrust law – how do courts and agencies make judgments about innovation and competition policies? How can they better predict the consequences of intervention or non-intervention?

The premise of this Article is that we should not continue to build doctrine at the IP-antitrust on theoretical neoclassical assumptions alone but also on the reality of markets using all that AI has to offer us. Behavioral economics and AI do not replace traditional antitrust analysis. Rather they are complements and imbue antitrust law with continuing durability.

Predicting competitive effects is difficult and we need tools to predict outcomes as precisely and reliably as possible. Until now, antitrust law has only been able to operate before a veil of assumptions and rhetoric. Stakeholders have only been able to think about whether and how to intervene in the exercise of IP rights, particularly patent rights, in the broadest terms since even the smallest perturbations in a complicated set of variables can set off ripples that lead to dramatically divergent outcomes. Facts have always mattered in antitrust law, and a more expansive toolkit can only increase our likelihood of getting it right.

Behavioral economics sheds light on anticompetitive conduct that neoclassical antitrust may regard as irrational and therefore improbable. Once we recognize that it is rational and probable, we need to quantify and value the effects of the conduct. To do this, we need to employ more of the analogical reasoning intrinsic in antitrust law. For that, predictive analytics is very good in helping stakeholders with pattern recognition and simulation runs. This brings us closer to being able to ascribe value which human judgment can be brought to bear. In these, AI provides stakeholders with augmented capabilities to confront the computational challenges these tasks require.


Irrigation canals transport water from water sources (such as large rivers and lakes) to water users (such as farmers). Irrigation canals are typically very large in nature, covering vast geographical areas, and involving a significant number of control actuators, such as pumps, gates, and locks. The control of such canals is aimed at guaranteeing the adequate delivery of water with minimal water spillage and with minimal control structure usage. To take into account forecasts on, e.g., water consumption and weather, model predictive control (MPC) can be used to determine which actions to take. For large-scale systems, in which different parts of the canal are owned by different parties, distributed MPC control could then be employed. Although iterative distributed MPC approaches proposed earlier in the literature may yield overall optimal performance, the amount of iterations required before achieving this performance may be large, and thus require a significant amount of time. In this paper, the structure of systems consisting of serially interconnected subsystems is exploited to obtain an efficient non-iterative, cascaded MPC scheme. Simulation studies on a 7-reach irrigation canal illustrate the performance of this non-iterative scheme in comparison with an iterative scheme.


Objective: To enhance solubility of efavirenz by using chitosan-graft-HPβCD copolymer synthesized by novel one pot technique. Methodology : Poor aqueous solubility and limited bioavailability is the major problem for more than 40% NEC (new chemical entities). Efavirenz (EFV), widely used non nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI) belongs to BCS class II drug is having very poor intrinsic water solubility and limited oral bioavailability. Chitosan –graft-HPβCD (CS-g-HPβCD) copolymer was synthesized by tosylation of HPβCD followed by grafting on chitosan (CS) backbone. CS-g-HPβCD was prepared by varying CS: HPβCD weight ratios (1:1, 1:2, 1:3 and 1:4). The copolymer was characterized by FT-IR, NMR and DSC. The molecular weight of grafted copolymer was determined and copolymer was further evaluated for its solubility enhancement capability. Result: Tosylated HPβCD was grafted on CS backbone by simple one pot synthesis method. FT-IR, NMR and DSC results avowed the synthesis of grafted copolymer. The molecular weight of grafted polymer was greater than molecular weight of CS also support confirmation of HPβCD grafting on CS. The copolymer was found to tremendously enhance aqueous solubility of EFV (380 times the solubility of drug in water). These results conclusively demonstrated synthesis of grafted copolymer possessing good potential in the solubility enhancement of the poorly water soluble drug like EFV. Conclusion: Grafted copolymer is an excellent strategy to conquer the solubility issues of hydrophobic drugs like EFV owing to solubility enhancement capability and mucoadhesivity. Key words: Chitosan, Chitosan-g-HPβCD, Efavirenz, Hydroxypropyl-β- cyclodextrin, Grafting, Solubility enhancement.


Abstract We have identified and developed new classes of quasi-axially symmetric configurations that have attractive properties from the standpoint of both near-term physics experiments and long-term power-producing reactors. These include configurations with very small aspect ratios (~2.5) having superior quasi-symmetry and energetic particle confinement characteristics, and configurations with strongly negative global magnetic shear from the shaping fields so that the overall rotational transform, when combined with the transform from bootstrap currents at finite plasma pressures, will have a small but positive shear, making the avoidance of low-order rational surfaces at a given operating beta possible. Additionally, we have found configurations with National Compact Stellarator Experiment–like characteristics but with the biased components in the magnetic spectrum that allow us to improve the confinement of energetic particles. For each new class of configurations, we have also designed coils to ensure that the new configurations are realizable and engineering-wise feasible. The coil designs typically have the properties of R/Δmin(C-P) < 6 and R/Δmin(C-C) < 10, where R is the plasma major radius and Δmin(C-P) and Δmin(C-C) are the minimum coil-to-plasma and coil-to-coil separations, respectively. These coil properties allow power-producing reactors to be designed with R < 9 m for deuterium-tritium plasmas with a full breeding blanket. The good quasi-axisymmetry limits the energy loss of alpha particles to below 10%.


Abstract Close relationships are demonstrated between reservoir quality, lithofacies, provenance and burial history in the Jurassic Brent and Viking Groups in the Norwegian North Sea. Porosity and permeability are strongly and systematically related to the initial texture and composition of the sandstones. Porosity variations are related to the amount of compaction, which is more severe in matrix-rich than in clean facies, and quartz cementation, which is most important in clean facies. Permeability variations are related to porosity and facies-controlled variations in grain size, and abundance and texture of intergranular fines. Illitization of early diagenetic kaolins require K, which is derived mainly from dissolution of K-feldspar. Sediments were sourced from K-feldspar-poor provenances during the maximum progradation of the Brent Group, and sandstones deposited at this time are less exposed to illitization and have better permeability at deep burial than reservoir sandstones that initially contained more K-feldspar.


In Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Supreme Court has both an opportunity and a responsibility to reaffirm our basic constitutional system of checks and balances by making an independent review of whether the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) was validly enacted pursuant to congressional power under the Intellectual Property Clause. The Intellectual Property Clause was drafted with important substantive limitations on federal power to grant exclusive rights of patent and copyright, designed to insure that Congress did not succumb to the temptation to effect indirect wealth transfers to rent-seeking special interests. To uphold the CTEA would permanently remove these explicit textual limitations on congressional power from the Constitution because concentrated special interests will always have greater lobbying resources than self-appointed and uncompensated representatives of the public interest. Overturning the CTEA would not take away from Congress the basic power to resolve the complex policy tensions that will be present in any modern copyright statute. The Court possesses the power of judicial review over Intellectual Property Clause legislation. The Court should also independently review the bases on which Congress acts to ensure that there is good reason to believe that Congress acted with the constitutionally mandated goals in mind and that Congress had a reasonable basis to believe that its action would further those goals through constitutionally permitted means. There is nothing in the record to show that Congress had a reasonable basis for believing that the CTEA's retroactive extension would promote the progress of science. Congress did hear from copyright owners holding rights to a relatively small number of old but still valuable works who were seeking desperately to keep their royalty streams flowing. If there was a constitutionally valid reason for retroactive extension, we can be sure that these representatives would have thought of and presented them. Consequently, the Court in Eldred can and should find, without remand, that retroactive extension under the CTEA was unconstitutional (without necessarily determining the validity of any prior retroactive extensions), and the Court should overturn the CTEA in its prospective aspect as well, giving Congress another try at adopting prospective extension if Congress concludes that it is in the public interest and can find constitutionally valid bases for acting. By "remanding" to the legislature, the Court would recognize the basic policymaking role of Congress in our democratic society while maintaining its own special role in interpreting the meaning of the Constitution. This article summarizes the evidence before Congress for the CTEA's adoption, argues that any independent review of that evidence must conclude that none of the justifications of the CTEA offered by Congress can be the real reason for the congressional action, concludes that the only viable inference from an independent reading of the evidence before Congress was that Congress gave in to the demands of the heirs and assignees of old copyrights that still had economic value but were about to enter the public domain, and amplifies the claims that the powers granted to Congress by the Intellectual Property Clause require an approach to judicial review different from that used in Commerce Clause cases.


In this study, the author analyzes new trends in the development of the human capital theory and offers an interdisciplinary approach to the application of the human capital concept for the analysis of the modern labor market and labor relations. Over the 60 years of its existence, the theory of human capital has not only been tested in numerous empirical studies, but also received further theoretical development due to the inclusion of scientific insights from related fields, such as social psychology, organizational behavior, economic sociology, human resource management, strategic and general management. An integrated approach to the study of human capital allows us to expand our understanding of the role that an individual plays in the production process and its impact on the economic outcomes of organizational activities.


We demonstrate a method to determine the Brownian motion and the diffusion coefficient of a nanoparticle in water in a plane that is parallel to a solid boundary and as function of the distance normal to that boundary by using an optical tweezers instrument. A solution of 190 nm-diameter fluorescent polystyrene nanoparticles in de-ionized (DI) water is introduced in a micro-chamber built from two thin glass substrates. A single particle is trapped by the tweezers and optically moved in the z-direction normal to a substrate. By analyzing a scatter plot of the time-dependent positions of the nanoparticle in the x-y plane in a histogram, the diffusion coefficient parallel to the substrate of the Brownian particle constrained by the substrate is determined as a function of the distance between the substrate and the nanoparticle. The experimental results indicate the increased drag effect on the nanoparticle when it is close to the substrate, as evidenced by an experimental diffusion coefficient nearby the substrate that is about half of that of the particle in the bulk fluid.

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/206427/files/H. Yang et al. - SPIE2015.pdf


Categorical distributions are ubiquitous in machine learning, e.g., in classification, language models, and recommendation systems. They are also at the core of discrete choice models. However, when the number of possible outcomes is very large, using categorical distributions becomes computationally expensive, as the complexity scales linearly with the number of outcomes. To address this problem, we propose augment and reduce (A&R), a method to alleviate the computational complexity. A&R uses two ideas: latent variable augmentation and stochastic variational inference. It maximizes a lower bound on the marginal likelihood of the data. Unlike existing methods which are specific to softmax, A&R is more general and is amenable to other categorical models, such as multinomial probit. On several large-scale classification problems, we show that A&R provides a tighter bound on the marginal likelihood and has better predictive performance than existing approaches.


Litigation surrounding use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to exempt employers from the Affordable Care Act's "contraception mandate" is moving steadily towards resolution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Both opponents and supporters of the mandate, however, have overlooked the Establishment Clause limits on such exemptions.The heated religious-liberty rhetoric aimed at the mandate has obscured that RFRA is a "permissive" rather than "mandatory" accommodation of religion — a government concession to religious belief and practice that is not required by the Free Exercise Clause. Permissive accommodations must satisfy Establishment Clause constraints, notably the requirement that the accommodation not impose material burdens on third parties who do not believe or participate in the accommodated practice.While it is likely that RFRA facially complies with the Establishment Clause, it violates the Clause's limits on permissive accommodation as applied to the mandate. RFRA exemptions from the mandate would deny the employees of an exempted employer their ACA entitlement to contraceptives without cost-sharing, forcing employees to purchase with their own money contraceptives and related services that would otherwise be available to them at no cost beyond their share of the healthcare insurance premium.Neither courts nor commentators seem aware that a line of permissive accommodation decisions prohibits shifting of material costs of accommodating anti-contraception beliefs from the employers who hold them to employees who do not. Many of the Court's decisions under the Free Exercise Clause and Title VII also exhibit this concern with cost-shifting accommodations. Yet, one federal appellate court has already mistakenly dismissed this cost-shifting as irrelevant to the permissibility of RFRA exemptions from the mandate.The impermissibility of cost-shifting under the Establishment Clause is a threshold doctrine whose application is logically prior to all of the RFRA issues on which the courts are now focused: If RFRA exemptions from the mandate violate the Establishment Clause, then that is the end of RFRA exemptions, regardless of whether for-profit corporations are persons exercising religion, the mandate is a substantial burden on employers' anti- contraception beliefs, or the mandate is not the least restrictive means of protecting a compelling government interest.Part I summarizes the legal mechanics of the mandate and briefly describes the three classes of anti-mandate plaintiffs — churches, religious nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses owned by anti-contraception believers. Part II details Establishment Clause doctrine that prohibits permissive accommodations that impose material burdens on third parties. Part III applies this rule to RFRA exemptions from the mandate, showing that the cost- shifting entailed by such exemptions violates the Establishment Clause. Part II also surveys free-exercise and Title VII decisions influenced by the same concern. We conclude that the existing regulatory regime that exempts churches, accommodates religious nonprofits, and leaves for-profit businesses subject to the mandate is the proper balance of private and government interests in the radically plural society that the United States has become.


Mutations in neuropeptide receptors prevent nematode worms from swimming away to avoid bacterial pathogens. Pathogenic and commensal microorganisms can trigger immune responses and control host behavior, revealing complex communication between host and microbe. Natural variation in pathogen susceptibility between different strains of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans has been linked to a polymorphism in the npr-1 gene, which encodes a homolog of the mammalian neuropeptide Y receptor. Reddy et al. studied the mechanism of NPR-1–mediated pathogen susceptibility and found that behavioral changes in the nematodes in response to altered oxygen levels caused by the presence of bacteria resulted in an increased exposure to pathogen, thus causing increased sensitivity. These data underscore the important contribution of behavioral avoidance to nematode survival in the presence of pathogenic bacteria. K. C. Reddy, E. C. Andersen, L. Kruglyak, D. H. Kim, A polymorphism in npr-1 is a behavioral determinant of pathogen susceptibility in C. elegans. Science 323, 382–384 (2009). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The debt crisis in several member states of the euro area has raised doubts on the viability of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the future of the euro. While the launch of the euro in 1999 stirred a lot of interests in regional monetary integration and even monetary unification in various parts of the world, including East Asia, the current crisis has had the opposite effect, even raising expectations of a break-up of the euro area. Indeed, the crisis has highlighted the problems and tensions that will inevitably arise within a monetary union when imbalances build up and become unsustainable. This article discusses the causes of the current European crisis and the challenges that EMU countries face in solving it. Based on this analysis, it derives five lessons for regional financial and monetary cooperation and integration in East Asia.


Background: The microbiota is central to gut homeostasis and overall health, with dysbiosis linked to multiple morbidities. The gut and brain are linked via multiple, bidirectional, communication mechanisms including the vagus nerve, immune system, and neurotransmitter metabolism. Increased attention has been given to the microbiota's impact on the brain and its potential role in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders (PNDs), such as schizophrenia and autism. We aim to investigate the role of the microbiome and gut dysfunction in these disorders to further understand the potential mechanisms involved. The Phencyclidine (PCP) and Neurexin1α heterozygous (Nrxn1α+/-) mouse models are relevant to schizophrenia and autism. Materials and Methods: Bacterial DNA, extracted from the intestinal contents of PCP and Nrxn1α+/- mice, were subject to community profiling by Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (DGGE). Gut tissue were analysed histologically to determine the impact on gut architecture and EECs. Results: Subchronic PCP treatment significantly increased the depth of the muscle layer in the colon but had no effect on gut architecture or the microbiome composition. Nrxn1α+/-significantly decreased the depth of the muscle layer in the colon and caecum in mice of both sexes. Nrxn1α+/- impacted on gut architecture in female but not in male mice. By contrast, Nrxn1α+/- selectively decreased GLP-1 positive EEC number in males. Nrxn1α+/- also significantly affected gut microbiome composition. Liraglutide did not reverse the impact of Nrxn1α+/- on the gut. However, Liraglutide treatment selectively decreased EEC number in the caecum of Nrxn1α+/- males. Liraglutide treatment also significantly decreased goblet cell size in the colon, and increased goblet cell size in the caecum of male mice, independent of genotype. Liraglutide-treated mice had a significantly different microbiome composition in the mucus layer of the colon and caecum. Conclusions: As PCP had no effect on the gut architecture or microbiome, it is unlikely that it models the gut dysfunction seen in schizophrenia. Therefore, the behaviour changes in PCP mice are independent of effects on the gut. Nrxn1α+/- impacted on the gut and microbiome which may be relevant to the behavioural changes seen in Nrxn1α+/- mice. Changes to the gut and microbiome may be one mechanism by which Nrxn1α+/- increases the risk of developing PNDs. Liraglutide did not reverse the impact of Nrxn1α+/- on the gut. However, Liraglutide did modify gut architecture and the microbiome which could be relevant to the use of the drug in type II diabetes.


The post-larval phase is an essential period in the life history of marine invertebrates; vulnerable to high
mortality, it ultimately influences the distribution and abundance of adult populations. The postmetamorphic
ontogenesis of thirty species of deep-sea echinoderms, belonging to three classes
(Ophiuroidea, Asteroidea and Echinoidea), is described using scanning electron microscopy. The life
history of Ophiocten gracilis is also examined as a case study for future research on post-larval organisms.
The analysis of development in ophiuroids reveals that species can be identified from a very early postmetamorphic
stage, even in congeneric species, contrary to the findings of other authors. The ontogeny of
homologous structures is similar within related groups, but may give rise to different adult structures in
different taxa. The mouth papillae within the ophiurids are serially homologous, originating from the jaw,
but the fourth mouth papilla may have a different origin. In the families Ophiactidae, Ophiacanthidae and
Amphilepididae examined, the mouth papillae have different origins, as, for instance, the adoral shield
spine or tentacle scale. Data on the post-larval development of Ophiura affinis suggest that this species is
more closely related to the genus Ophiocten and a change in the generic status is proposed.
Ophiocten gracilis is a bathyal brittle star occurring on both sides of the North Atlantic and its life
history is studied in the eastern side of the North Atlantic. In this area, O. gracilis spawns in
February/March of each year producing a large number of eggs. Fecundity is estimated to be around 40,000
eggs ind"1, with the population of the Hebridean Slope being able to produce probably up to 16 million eggs m"2. Post-larvae start settling in May and numbers settling reached over 3,200 post-larvae m"2. The settling
speed of post-larvae in the water column is estimated to be around 500 m day"1, settling faster in warmer
than colder water. Settling speeds appear to be similar for post-larvae ranging from 0.6 to 0.9 mm in disk
diameter. Size at settlement is around 0.6 mm in disk diameter and 5-6 arm segments. The settlement of
post-larval O. gracilis on the bottom of the Hebridean Slope also represented a considerable fraction of the
particulate organic carbon (POC) flux in the area, reaching over 7% of the total daily flux. This is likely to
have a considerable impact in the benthic community as competition and predation and as an additional
food source for demersal and benthic organisms. The occurrence of post-larvae of O. gracilis in sediment
traps also represented a large problem for POC flux measurements, with ophiuroids consuming part of the
flux. In future works with sediment traps, such errors must be taken into account and ophiuroids must be
included in the total POC flux.
The deep-sea juvenile asteroids of the NE Atlantic could be distinguished to species level from a very
early stage of development. The ontogenesis of Porcellanaster ceruleus shows that this species is likely to
undergo a shift in habitat and diet during the juvenile phase. This is evidenced by the appearance of the
epiproctal cone, the changing of the furrow and apical spines, the early development of the cribriform
organ adjacent to the madreporite and the appearance of sediment in the stomach. P. ceruleus is probably a
predator on meiofauna and small macrofaunal organisms during the early stages of life, changing to a
burrowed life style ingesting sediment particles. Most juvenile sea stars analysed during the present study
showed wider bathymetric distribution than their adult counterparts, suggesting that events occurring during
the early stages of life are important for the maintenance of the local population structure and diversity in
the deep NE Atlantic.
The post-metamorphic development of three deep-sea spatangoid echinoids is very similar, but the
morphology and formation of fascioles facilitate the distinction of the species examined. Whereas in
Hemiaster expergitus and Spatangus raschi the fascioles present in the post-larvae develop to form the
adult fascioles, in Brissopsis lyrifera post-larvae there is a juvenile fasciole, which disappears during
ontogenesis giving way to the adult fascioles. The function of the juvenile fasciole is unknown in B.
lyrifera. The development of the periproct in all spatangoids examined is similar to that described by other
authors, with the periproct being initially endocyclic and migrating towards the rear of the animal as
development progresses. Post-larvae of the genus Echinus could not be separated into different species,
which may be linked to the recent diversification of the genus in the North Atlantic.
The widespread settlement of echinoderm post-larvae reported in the present thesis and in other works is
thought to have been very important for the colonization of the deep-sea through the supply of stages to
deeper areas and selection of pressure adapted animals and subsequent speciation.


Objectives: To provide an overview of the addiction potential; adverse effects (e.g., cardiovascular, immune dysfunction, respiratory system, mental health disorders); drug interactions; effects of accidental exposure; crime statistics; and pharmacist's considerations for the use of inhaled medical marijuana.
Methods: A PubMed search was conducted from 1966 to March 2016 to identify articles in which the safety of inhaled medical marijuana was assessed. Key MeSH search terms included medical marijuana with a subheading for adverse effect. Only articles in adult patients were considered. In addition, medical marijuana or cannabis plus one of the following search terms were searched: drug interactions, herb-drug interactions, drug-related side effects and adverse drug reactions, substance-related disorders, addiction, and abuse. A free-text search was also conducted to identify articles not included in the MeSH term search. A bibliographic search was also conducted. Articles were included if they addressed adverse effects of medical marijuana for the treatment of a condition. Meta-analyses, randomized controlled clinical trials, and case reports were included in the review if the primary focus of the article related to the adverse effect profile of inhaled medical marijuana. Medical marijuana efficacy studies were not assessed. In the absence of this information, case reports or reports of inhaled recreational marijuana use was used. Studies were excluded if published in languages other than English. In addition, studies highlighting mechanisms of action, studies of pharmacodynamics or pharmacokinetic effects were excluded, unless these effects were due to drug-drug interactions. Prescription products containing marijuana or derivatives were excluded from evaluation. An Internet search was conducted to locate the most up-to-date information on the laws concerning medical marijuana.
Key findings: A PubMed search revealed 58 articles and 28 of those studies were included in this review. Several studies were located that evaluated the safety of medical marijuana; however, much of the review focused on inhaled, recreational marijuana use due to the paucity of information on inhaled medical marijuana. Since marijuana is a Schedule1 product, few clinical studies have been conducted to determine the adverse event profile of the product. As a result, several articles that characterized recreational inhaled marijuana were included. Recreational inhaled marijuana use may be associated with an increase in cardiovascular (CV)/ cerebrovascular effects (CVA); however, conflicting information exists in the literature. Recreational marijuana use may also increase risky behaviors that increase the transmission of infectious diseases and respiratory diseases. Many of the studies were retrospective in nature; therefore, it was difficult to determine a cause and effect relationship between inhaled marijuana use and the development of adverse reactions or drug-drug interactions.
Conclusions: There is a paucity of information related to the use of inhaled medical marijuana. Recreational marijuana use is associated with several adverse events including CV/CVA, respiratory, and transmission of infectious diseases. Theoretical literature indicates that medical marijuana may be associated with significant drug-drug interactions and adverse drug reactions. Legalization of medical marijuana may be associated with an increase in abuse/dependence and accidental exposures in children. Pharmacists need to be educated regarding the appropriate use of medical marijuana to avoid adverse reactions and potential drug-drug interactions between medical marijuana and other products.

Type: Original Research


A novel scheme for carrying out all-optical intensity differentiation is proposed and demonstrated based on the cross-gain modulation (XGM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). Because of the XGM, the mathematical definition of differentiation can be expressed by the combined power of the amplified pump pulse and the delayed modulated probe pulse at the output of the SOA. The final waveform and error evolution versus relative time delay between two pulses is investigated. Interestingly enough, it is shown that the acquisition of good differentiation is possible under zero time delay. A further study of zero time delay has been performed for various data rates and shows that the carrier recovery time of the SOA is a speed-limiting factor of the scheme.


Preschool-aged learners process information differently from older individuals, making it critical to design digital educational games that are tailored to capitalize on young children's learning capabilities. This in-depth literature synthesis connects features of digital educational game design - including visuals, feedback, scaffolding challenge, rewards, and physical interactions to how young children learn. Preschoolers' interests and abilities (e.g., limited attention-span, early reading skills, etc.) are different than older users. As such, developmental science should be used to guide the design of educational games from aesthetic decisions that capture preschoolers' initial interest (e.g., meaningful characters) to carefully select end-of-game rewards (e.g., leveling up). This article connects learning and developmental science research to the design of digital educational games, offering insights into how best to design games for young users and how to select developmentally appropriate games for children.


The Cod. Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been triggered by it, national diets have been based on it, economies and livelihoods have depended on it. To the millions it has sustained, it has been a treasure more precious that gold. This book spans 1,000 years and four continents. From the Vikings to Clarence Birdseye, Mark Kurlansky introduces the explorers, merchants, writers, chefs and fisherman, whose lives have been interwoven with this prolific fish. He chronicles the cod wars of the 16th and 20th centuries. He blends in recipes and lore from the Middle Ages to the present. In a story that brings world history and human passions into captivating focus, he shows how the most profitable fish in history is today faced with extinction.


Computer systems have become very important all over the world. They are capable of doing complicated works. When the main power falls, the computer system cannot support. Its normal operation and it will shut down immediately.
Consequently, all working data will be lost if they are not saved previously. Therefore, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) should be designed to protect data loss and to prevent any output interruption during a power failure. The objective of this project is to design, construct, and test UPS for personal computers. The proposed UPS is cheaper and its size is smaller than that of the conventional UPS available in the market. The proposed UPS consists of rectifiers, a battery charger, an automatic controller, a sealed lead acid battery, regulators and a boost DC-to-DC converter. The proposed UPS is capable of supporting the normal operation of the PC for 20 minutes during power failure. This 20-minute time is enough for the user to save the current work on the PC and switch off the PC properly. The detailed analysis of the design, experimental works and simulation are discussed in this report. Results of the experimental and simulation work showed that there was a
good agreement between the hardware and software. This indicated that UPS was successfully developed.


We present a method for size-independent manipulation of elastic polystyrene (PS), poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), and fused silica (FS) microspheres that uses travelling surface acoustic waves (TSAWs). Normally incident TSAWs originating from an interdigitated transducer (IDT) were used to separate similar-sized pairs of PS and PMMA or PS and FS elastic particles by producing distinct lateral deflections across laminar streamlines in a continuous flow microfluidic channel. Elastic particles with similar diameters but different acoustic impedances exhibit significantly different deflection characteristics when exposed to TSAW-based acoustic radiation forces (ARFs). For instance, exposing a mixture of PS and PMMA particles with similar diameters (∼5 μm) to TSAWs with frequencies of 140 MHz and 185 MHz produces larger deflections of the PS and PMMA particles, respectively. This difference arises because of the resonance of the elastic particles with the incoming acoustic waves at certain frequencies. Similar particle deflection characteristics were observed for mixtures of PS and FS particles with comparable diameters (3/3, 4.8/5, 10/10 μm). This difference in deflection distances was used to experimentally characterize the non-linear behavior of the ARFs acting on particles (3–10 μm) exposed to a range of TSAW frequencies (120–205 MHz). Our experimental results can be explained by plotting the acoustic radiation force factor (FF) against the TSAW frequency (fTSAW) and the dimensionless Helmholtz number (1 < κ < 4), which is calculated by using a theoretical model of an elastic microsphere suspended in a fluid.


This paper examines the ways in which the realization of clitics in the Srpske narodne pjesme ("Serbian Folk Songs") can depend on metrical considerations, and places these dependencies within a model of grammar that can provide appropriate mechanisms to express them. It is demonstrated that both the form and position of words in poetry can be sensitive to metrical requirements, in that these sometimes deviate from what is normally expected in order to respect the exigencies of meter. It is further argued that the observed phenomena are best understood as the imposition of metrical constraints in a specialized optimality theoretic model, in which a set of highly ranked metrical constraints is superimposed on the normal system. We imagine a metrical module which employ either generative rules (cf. e.g. Kiparsky 1975) or OT constraints (cf. e.g. Hanson and Kiparsky 1996; Hayes and MacEachern 1998; and Freidberg 1999) to produce a metrical template. Two types of mismatches between this template and what the "normal" grammar provides are encountered, quantitative ones and qualitative ones. In the former, (1) and (2), the grammar provides fewer or greater syllables than the template has beats and in the latter, (3) and 94), there is conflict between the prosodic properties of those syllables and the strong or weak status of the corresponding beat. These mismatches are stated as OT constraints as follows: 1. No extra syllables (*Ex-Syl) 2. No extra beats (*Ex-Beat) 3. Accented syllables are strong (Ac St) 4. Clitics are weak (Cl Wk) In all instances, violations of these constraints are avoided by selecting as optimal an otherwise ungrammatical alternative, by deleting or adding syllables, pronouncing lower copies, and so on. Rice (1997) has similarly demonstrated that metrical constraints outrank syntactic constraints in poetry, which is a reversal of the normal situation observed by Golston (1995) for prose. We extend his conclusions to show how metrical considerations can have priority also over requirements stemming from any component of grammar . We than argue against the idea that poetry involves noncanonical ranking, since constraints such as (1)–(4) are simply irrelevant in Serbian prose. Instead, we put forward a system in which the mapping of linguistic structure onto a metrical template is regulated by OT-like constraints. Following Franks (1999b, 2000), the proper place of OT is to police interfaces between components, picking from a small set of options supplied by one component the best choice to serve as input to the next component. Given a system with the following basic components: (i) lexical choices are made, (ii) abstract lexical items are manipulated by the syntax, (iii) the resulting structure is further adjusted by the morphology, (iv) morphosyntactic feature sets are replaced by phonological representations, upon which the phonology then operates. At each juncture, we argue that what the normal grammar provides is evaluated against metrical requirements, with the typical consequence that some property of normal grammar is flouted in order to satisfy some metrical constraint. By regarding EVAL as a cyclic process, this model highly restricts the role of OT and equates GEN with traditional generative components. Metrical constraints are an overlay on the normal interfaces, which the poet must continuously keep in mind and at each interface point in the creative process use to assess the fit between what s/he wants to say and the target metrical template. In this way, the exigencies of literary form and convention are superimposed on the grammar.


Images that seamlessly combine views at different levels of detail are appealing. However, creating such multiscale images is not a trivial task, and most such illustrations are handcrafted by skilled artists. This paper presents a framework for direct multiscale rendering of geometric and volumetric models. The basis of our approach is a set of non-linearly bent camera rays that smoothly cast through multiple scales. We show that by properly setting up a sequence of conventional pinhole cameras to capture features of interest at different scales, along with image masks specifying the regions of interest for each scale on the projection plane, our rendering framework can generate non-linear sampling rays that smoothly project objects in a scene at multiple levels of detail onto a single image. We address two important issues with non-linear camera projection. First, our streamline-based ray generation algorithm avoids undesired camera ray intersections, which often result in unexpected images. Second, in order to maintain camera ray coherence and preserve aesthetic quality, we create an interpolated 3D field that defines the contribution of each pinhole camera for determining ray orientations. The resulting multiscale camera has three main applications: (1) presenting hierarchical structure in a compact and continuous manner, (2) achieving focus+context visualization, and (3) creating fascinating and artistic images.


In this paper, we describe MLSA, a publicly available multi-layered reference corpus for German-language sentiment analysis. The construction of the corpus is based on the manual annotation of 270 German-language sentences considering three different layers of granularity. The sentence-layer annotation, as the most coarse-grained annotation, focuses on aspects of objectivity, subjectivity and the overall polarity of the respective sentences. Layer 2 is concerned with polarity on the word- and phrase-level, annotating both subjective and factual language. The annotations on Layer 3 focus on the expression-level, denoting frames of private states such as objective and direct speech events. These three layers and their respective annotations are intended to be fully independent of each other. At the same time, exploring for and discovering interactions that may exist between different layers should also be possible. The reliability of the respective annotations was assessed using the average pairwise agreement and Fleiss' multi-rater measures. We believe that MLSA is a beneficial resource for sentiment analysis research, algorithms and applications that focus on the German language.


Abstract Conventional skin UV-sensitivity phototesting is based on semi-quantitative assessment of minimal erythema dose (MED). This study demonstrates a method for quantitative MED determination, using a lengthwise attenuating UVB-field combined with tissue viability imaging (TiVi). The study aim was to investigate the agreement between MED acquired by traditional phototest and by the new method. Forty-seven voluntary subjects underwent phototesting with a traditional phototest and with the new technique. Test reading, carried out after 24 h, showed moderate agreement between the methods when assessed with TiVi (Kappa value = 0.46) and visually (Kappa value = 0.48). For the new method, no systematic differences were seen between outcomes assessed with TiVi or visually (95% CI for the mean difference = −1.6–2.0). In conclusion, the results give promising support for the concept of achieving a more precise MED estimation by combining continuous attenuating UV fields with new available bioengineering technology.


Ultrasonic vibration enhanced friction stir welding (UVeFSW) is a recent modification of conventional friction stir welding (FSW), which transmits ultrasonic vibration directly into the localized area of the workpiece near and ahead of the rotating tool. In this study, a high strength aluminium alloy (2024-T4) was welded by this process and conventional FSW, respectively. Then tensile tests, microhardness tests and fracture surface analysis were performed successively on the welding samples. The tests results reveal that ultrasonic vibration can improve the tensile strength and the elongation of welded joints. The microhardness of the stir zone also increases.


We present the first edition of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Quasar Catalog. The catalog consists of the 3814 objects (3000 discovered by the SDSS) in the initial SDSS public data release that have at least one emission line with a full width at half-maximum larger than 1000 km s-1, luminosities brighter than Mi* = -23, and highly reliable redshifts. The area covered by the catalog is 494 deg2; the majority of the objects were found in SDSS commissioning data using a multicolor selection technique. The quasar redshifts range from 0.15 to 5.03. For each object the catalog presents positions accurate to better than 0.″2 rms per coordinate, five-band (ugriz) CCD-based photometry with typical accuracy of 0.05 mag, radio and X-ray emission properties, and information on the morphology and selection method. Calibrated spectra of all objects in the catalog, covering the wavelength region 3800–9200 Å at a spectral resolution of 1800–2100, are also available. Since the quasars were selected during the commissioning period, a time when the quasar selection algorithm was undergoing frequent revisions, the sample is not homogeneous and is not intended for statistical analysis.


1. The position of the epithelial pigment and cones in the retina of Salmo gairdneri was determined during extended periods of darkness in fish entrained to both artificial and natural light/dark cycles.

2. An endogenous rhythm of such photomechanical movements, unique among species so far examined, was observed in both groups of fish, with two peaks of light adaptation coincident with dawn and dusk.

3. It is suggested that such an apparently non-adaptive physiological rhythm is related to the behavioural pattern of trout and reveals a basic crepuscular organisation.

4. No endogenous rhythm was observed in continual light.

5. These results suggest that control of photomechanical changes in rainbow trout has two components: an endogenous component, that causes the bimodal pattern in maintained darkness, and a direct effect of light, that maintains light adaptation throughout a normal day.


Cross-sectional household surveys are extensively used for data collection, priority setting and programme evaluation in developing countries. They are now being promoted to assess a number of health care interventions such as Control of Diarrhoeal Diseases (CDD), Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI), AIDS control and child survival programmes. Few field studies of the validity and precision of data generated from these surveys have been carried out, in part because such work is rather demanding of resources. The purpose of this study was to draw conclusions on validity and reliability of data from household surveys through a comparison of results from large-scale surveys on diarrhoea conducted by CDD and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) programmes in developing countries. Diarrhoea prevalence and treatment were compared for nine surveys for which little time had passed in between the CDD and DHS survey. The variation in results between the surveys was in many instances too large to be explained only by a true variation in the variable studied. A literature review suggested that validity problems could be due to response and recall errors. The authors caution the use of frequent household surveys for programme impact evaluation. Their cost-effectiveness should be carefully assessed, especially when services' evaluations already have provided evidence that a programme has had a positive effect on the behaviour of health workers and target groups in the community. It is recommended that more research be carried out on how selection and training of surveyors can be improved to make the quality of household surveys in developing countries better.


ARHA110 Introduction to Western Art: Renaissance to Modern This course surveys the development of Western art from the Renaissance through the modern period. We will examine art's changing status within specific social and artistic contexts: from the Church and court of the Renaissance, through the formation of art academies in the late 16th century, to the development of an increasingly individualized artistic practice that led to the formation of an avant-garde. Classes will be organized chronologically and touch upon the following themes and ideas: politics, religion, and patronage; perception and experience; artistic identity and originality; relationships between artistic media; and the rise of a public sphere for art. Offering: Host Grading: A-F Credits: 1.00 Gen Ed Area: HA-ART Prereq: None


One of the major features of British Columbia's community colleges has been the university transfer programs which provide the opportunity for students to earn credits towards a university degree. Previous studies have shown, however, that only a small percentage of students from these programs actually transfer to a university. This study was designed to examine the behaviour of those students who complete academic or university transfer courses in a college, but do not continue their study in a university. Data were gathered from approximately 4,000 students from 14 colleges in the 1979-80 calendar year. The results of the study indicate that students pursue academic credit courses primarily for per- sonal development rather than for university transfer. The community colleges provide an intellectual and cultural environment, particularly for mature students who for geographic, educational or socio-economic reasons would not have been able to continue their education beyond secondary school The study provided an important insight into the changing role of the community college. Originally designed as an institution for college age students to begin university level study, it has become a multi-purpose educational resource for a wide segment of society.


Neonatal ventral hippocampus (nVH) lesion in rats is a widely used animal model of schizophrenia due to the predominantly post-pubertal emergence of many schizophrenia-like behaviours. Our previous studies have shown increased ligand binding of alpha1 adrenergic receptors (AR) in the frontal cortex of post-pubertal, but not pre-pubertal, nVH-lesioned rats, compared to sham-lesioned control rats. Moreover, pretreatment with the alpha1 adrenergic receptor antagonist prazosin reversed amphetamine-induced hyperlocomotion in controls, but failed to do so in lesioned animals. This led to our hypothesis that nVH lesions may lead to post-pubertal hyperactivity of alpha1 adrenergic receptors. In order to test the functional relevance of alpha1 adrenergic hyperactivity to schizophrenia-like behaviours of nVH-lesioned animals, we conducted prepulse inhibition (PPI) studies in post-pubertal (postnatal days 56-120) sham and lesioned animals in response to systemic injections of alpha1 adrenergic receptor antagonist and agonist, prazosin and cirazoline, respectively. Our results show that PPI deficits in nVH-lesioned animals were reversed with prazosin treatment, without a significant effect on PPI in sham animals. Further, at various doses, cirazoline had a significantly greater PPI disruptive effect in nVH-lesioned animals than in sham animals. Together, these results suggest that nVH-lesioned animals show a hyperactive alpha1 adrenergic receptor system that may mediate sensorimotor gating abnormalities reported in these animals.


Canoscan 80000f 6000DPI TIFF scanner used, edited using Photoshop v7. Photo dimensions:165mm x 210mm black and white photograph on olive cardboard.


This paper presents a series of test results of large-scale rectangular concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) beams to explore their performance under pure bending. Concrete-filling tests were initially carried out on two beam specimens of 12-m in length to investigate the feasibility of casting horizontally large-scale rectangular tubes. A total of six 6-m long specimens were subjected to flexural test afterward, including four CFST beams and two steel hollow section (SHS) beams for comparison. The test results showed that the rectangular CFST beams behaved in a relatively ductile manner. The concrete infilling enhanced the flexural behavior and performance of the steel tubes. Finally, the current Brazilian specifications for the design of steel-concrete composite beams showed suitable to predict the moment capacity of CFST beams.


Manual analysis of flow cytometry data and subjective gate-border decisions taken by individuals continue to be a source of variation in the assessment of antigen-specific T cells when comparing data across laboratories, and also over time in individual labs. Therefore, strategies to provide automated analysis of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) multimer-binding T cells represent an attractive solution to decrease subjectivity and technical variation. The challenge of using an automated analysis approach is that MHC multimer-binding T cell populations are often rare and therefore difficult to detect. We used a highly heterogeneous dataset from a recent MHC multimer proficiency panel to assess if MHC multimer-binding CD8+ T cells could be analyzed with computational solutions currently available, and if such analyses would reduce the technical variation across different laboratories. We used three different methods, FLOw Clustering without K (FLOCK), Scalable Weighted Iterative Flow-clustering Technique (SWIFT), and ReFlow to analyze flow cytometry data files from 28 laboratories. Each laboratory screened for antigen-responsive T cell populations with frequency ranging from 0.01 to 1.5% of lymphocytes within samples from two donors. Experience from this analysis shows that all three programs can be used for the identification of high to intermediate frequency of MHC multimer-binding T cell populations, with results very similar to that of manual gating. For the less frequent populations (<0.1% of live, single lymphocytes), SWIFT outperformed the other tools. As used in this study, none of the algorithms offered a completely automated pipeline for identification of MHC multimer populations, as varying degrees of human interventions were needed to complete the analysis. In this study, we demonstrate the feasibility of using automated analysis pipelines for assessing and identifying even rare populations of antigen-responsive T cells and discuss the main properties, differences, and advantages of the different methods tested.


Arterial telomere dysfunction may contribute to chronic arterial inflammation by inducing cellular senescence and subsequent senescence-associated inflammation. Although telomere shortening has been associated with arterial aging in humans, age-related telomere uncapping has not been described in non-cultured human tissues and may have substantial prognostic value. In skeletal muscle feed arteries from 104 younger, middle-aged, and older adults, we assessed the potential role of age-related telomere uncapping in arterial inflammation. Telomere uncapping, measured by p-histone γ-H2A.X (ser139) localized to telomeres (chromatin immunoprecipitation; ChIP), and telomeric repeat binding factor 2 bound to telomeres (ChIP) was greater in arteries from older adults compared with those from younger adults. There was greater tumor suppressor protein p53 (P53)/cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 1A (P21)-induced senescence, measured by P53 bound to P21 gene promoter (ChIP), and greater expression of P21, interleukin 8, and monocyte chemotactic protein 1 mRNA (RT-PCR) in arteries from older adults compared with younger adults. Telomere uncapping was a highly influential covariate for the age-group difference in P53/P21-induced senescence. Despite progressive age-related telomere shortening in human arteries, mean telomere length was not associated with telomere uncapping or P53/P21-induced senescence. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that advancing age is associated with greater telomere uncapping in arteries, which is linked to P53/P21-induced senescence independent of telomere shortening.


Varicella-zoster virus (VZV) is a human herpes virus that causes varicella as a primary infection and herpes zoster following reactivation of the virus from a latent state in trigeminal and spinal ganglia. In order to study the global pattern of VZV gene transcription, VZV microarrays using 75-base oligomers to 71 VZV open reading frames (ORFs) were designed and validated. The long-oligonucleotide approach maximizes the stringency of detection and polarity of gene expression. To optimize sensitivity, microarrays were hybridized to target RNA and the extent of hybridization measured using resonance light scattering. Microarray data were normalized to a subset of invariant ranked host-encoded positive-control genes and the data subjected to robust formal statistical analysis. The programme of viral gene expression was determined for VZV (Dumas strain)-infected MeWo cells and SVG cells (an immortalized human astrocyte cell line) 72 h post-infection. Marked quantitative and qualitative differences in the viral transcriptome were observed between the two different cell types using the Dumas laboratory-adapted strain. Oligonucleotide-based VZV arrays have considerable promise as a valuable tool in the analysis of viral gene transcription during both lytic and latent infections, and the observed heterogeneity in the global pattern of viral gene transcription may also have diagnostic potential.


Over the last two decades there has been a global surge in interest in visual research
methods. Word and number-based researchers are coming to realise there is considerable
potential for gaining knowledge if image-based methodologies are adopted. This paper
provides and overview of approaches and perspectives broken down into five easily
digested sections to be consumed wholly or in part: early visual research; researcher
created data; respondent created data; research design; and visual ethics. The paper will
be of particular interest to qualitative social scientists new to visual methods or those with
little experience of their application. A wide range of carefully selected references and
resources are included to provide the reader with further in-depth insights.


When a multidimensional signal is uniformly sampled, its spectrum is replicated. If the signal is band limited and the replications (1) contain regions that are identically zero and (2) are not aliased, then the samples are dependent. Indeed, lost samples can be regained from those remaining. In dimensions greater than one, there are spectral regions of support for which this is the case even when sampling is performed at the Nyquist (minimum) density (e.g., a circular spectral region of support in two dimensions). When the known samples are perturbed by additive noise, lost-sample restoration noise levels in certain cases can be obtained by simple geometrical observations in the frequency domain. The results are specifically applied to coherent and incoherent optical images of objects of finite extent obtained from imaging systems with circular pupils.


This paper describes a pattern recognition architecture, which we term hierarchical pyramid/neural network (HPNN), that learns to exploit image structure at multiple resolutions for detecting clinically significant features in digital/digitized mammograms. The HPNN architecture consists of a hierarchy of neural networks, each network receiving feature inputs at a given scale as well as features constructed by networks lower in the hierarchy. Networks are trained using a novel error function for the supervised learning of image search/detection tasks when the position of the objects to be found is uncertain or ill defined. We have evaluated the HPNN's ability to eliminate false positive (FP) regions of interest generated by the University of Chicago's Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for microcalcification and mass detection. Results show that the HPNN architecture, trained using the uncertain object position (UOP) error function, reduces the FP rate of a mammographic CAD system by approximately 50% without significant loss in sensitivity. Investigation into the types of FPs that the HPNN eliminates suggests that the pattern recognizer is automatically learning and exploiting contextual information. Clinical utility is demonstrated through the evaluation of an integrated system in a clinical reader study. We conclude that the HPNN architecture learns contextual relationships between features at multiple scales and integrates these features for detecting microcalcifications; and breast masses.


Insulin, a hormone produced in the pancreas, is more commonly known for its role in diabetes. But its reputation may be changing. Insulin and a related hormone known as insulin-like growth factor (IGF) are now at the center of a growing wave of research around the world aimed at elucidating what many scientists consider to be their critical role in fueling a wide range of cancers. Elevated levels of insulin and IGF are also the leading candidates to explain a significant correlation in epidemiology that has gained attention over the past 30 years: Obese and diabetic individuals have a far higher risk than lean healthy people of getting cancer, and when they do get it, their risk of dying from it is greater. And now that obesity and diabetes rates are skyrocketing, the need to understand this link has become far more urgent.


This article presents the first empirical analysis of patent value by examining renewal rate data for nearly 100,000 patents. Finding that 53.7% of all patentees allow their patents to expire for failure to pay maintenance fees confirm common perceptions of patent issuance being a poor measure of innovation value. Even more interesting is the finding that patents which expire for failure to pay maintenance fees share some common identifiable characteristics. In particular, we found that renewed patents had more claims, cited more prior art, received more citations, had more related applications, had more inventors, and spent longer in prosecution. We also found that renewal rates varied both by assignee (individual versus corporation) and (foreign versus domestic) and by technology. By providing a means of systematically identifying worthless patents and their ex ante characteristics, this article complements the author's earlier work on identifying valuable patents by comparing litigated and issued patents. Renewal rate data, however, seems a better predictor of value than litigation data as renewal rate data captures the many ways a patent may be of private value to its owner such as revenue generation via licensing or litigation, defensively, or for signaling purposes. Hence, rather than analyzing a subset of really valuable patents (those that are litigated) which may or may not be representative of all valuable patents, analysis of renewal rate data captures the population of valuable patents.


Infrared studies of gases, C(_2)H(_4), trans-C(_2)D(_2)H(_2), C(_2)H(_2), C(_2)D(_2), C(_3)H(_6), NH(_3), CO and H(_2)S, adsorbed onto self supporting discs of various transition metal exchanged zeolites are reported (4000-1200cm(^-1)). C(_2)H(_4) and trans-C(_2)D(_2)H(_2) were adsorbed onto fully silver exchanged type A (AgA) zeolite. AgA samples were subjected to various dehydration treatments prior to adsorotion of C(_2)H(_4) and it has been shown that the adsorption behaviour is a function of pretreatment. Under all pretreatment conditions used two adsorption sites were observed. However, whilst AgA samples pretreated at higher temperature held ethylene equally strongly on both sites, those samples pretreated at the lower temperature held ethylene less strongly on one site than the other. To continue our study on AgA zeolite, we also adsorbed C(_2)H(_2) and C(_2) D(_2) onto AgA samples which had been degassed at temperatures of 543 and 673K for 2 hours. Acetylene was found to be adsorbed on the cations at two different sites, and were easily removed on evacuation. In addition part of the adsorbed acetylene lost hydrogen to form silver acetylide (HC=CAg). The liberated hydrogen formed both hydroxyl and hydronium ions within the framework. In another study, the adsorption behaviour of C(_2) H(_4) and C(_2)H(_2) on Cu(^II) and Cu(^I)Y zeolites was compared. Cu(^I)Y zeolite was prepared in situ by the reduction of Cu(_2)H(_2) zeolite in an atmosphere of CO with preadsorbed ammonia. It was found that the C(_2)H(_4) adsorbed on Cu(^II)Y was not rotating and that the symmetry of the adsorbed species was apparently preserved (D(_2h)), while, the symmetry of the adsorbed species in Cu(^I)Y zeolite was reduced, probably to C(_2v). In contrast to the results for C(_2)H(_2) adsorption, the adsorption behaviour of C(_2)H(_2) was found to be similar on both Cu(^II) and Cu(^I)Y zeolites. Acetylene was found to be adsorbed at two different sites with a 'side-on' interaction, and that one site held acetylene more strongly than the other. For the Cu(^I)Y sample, following the evacuation of either C(_2)H(_4) or C(_2)H(_2), GO was introduced. It was suggested that C(_2)H(_2) and CO were held with comparable strength by Cu(^+) ions and that the gases were adsorbed on equivalent sites. C(_2)H(_2) and CO, on the other hand, were adsorbed at two different sites. Partially Zn-, Ni-, and Cu- exchanged NaA zeolites were used to study the isomerization of cyclopropane to propene. ZnNaA samples were subjected to various pretreatment conditions before the adsorotion of cyclopropane. Water was found to promote the isomerization in this sample and that isomerization occurred via a, protonated cycloorooane intermediate. Bands due to cycloprooane and propene were observed at the same time in samples ZnNaA and NiNaA and it was suggested that the gases were adsorbed at two different sites. Propene was adsorbed on the cations more strongly than cycloprooane since propene could only be removed at 473K while cyclopropane could be removed easily by evacuation. For CuNaA, however, no interaction between the cations and cyclopropane was observed at room temperature. Upon heating the sample with 100 torr of cyclopropane, isomerization occurred at 473K. It was suggested that isomerization occurred on the external surface of the zeolite and that propene was not adsorbed on the cations within the framework. Finally, the adsorption of H(_2)S onto partially Ni-, Cu-, Zn-, Mn-, and Co- exchanged NaA zeolites were studied. No adsorption of H(_2)S onto the NiNaA and CuNaA samples was observed. On the other hand, two types of adsorption, dissociative and non- dissociative were observed in ZnNaA and MnNaA samples. Water was also formed. H(_2)S was found to adsorb weakly and molecularly onto CoNaA.


Concerns about cyberwar, cyberespionage, and cybercrime have burst into focus in recent years. The United States and China have traded accusations about cyber intrusions, and a December 2012 U.N. conference broke down over disagreements about cyberspace governance. These events show the increased risk of cyberconflict and the corresponding need for basic agreement between states about governing cyberspace. States agree that something must be done, but they disagree about almost everything else. Two competing visions of cyberspace have emerged so far: Russia and China advocate a sovereignty-based model of cyber governance that prioritizes state control, while the United States, United Kingdom, and their allies argue that cyberspace should not be governed by states alone. Prior academic writing has focused on cyber issues related to states' regulation of their citizens, but this Article addresses the now-pressing state-to-state issues. A limited analogy to existing legal regimes for the high seas, outer space, and Antarctica shows that global governance of cyberspace is possible. Moreover, these existing regimes provide a menu of options for governance and establish a baseline against which cyber governance can be assessed. The Article examines three fundamental questions that states have answered for the other domains and must now answer for cyber: (1) what role, if any, private parties should play in governance; (2) how the domain should be governed (no governance system, treaty, or norms); and (3) whether and how to regulate military activities in the domain. The answers for the old domains were similar — multilateral governance, governance by treaty, and some level of demilitarization. But cyber differs from the old domains in important ways that suggest the answers for cyber should be different. This Article argues for multistakeholder governance, governance through norms, and regulated militarization.


The idea that tech companies should be permitted to acquire nascent start-ups is under attack from antitrust populists. Yet, this debate on vertical mergers has overlooked important empirical contributions regarding innovation-related mergers in the strategy literature. This Article explores the extant empirical strategy literature, which generally identifies a procompetitive basis that supports vertical mergers as efficiency enhancing. This literature solidifies the current general vertical merger presumption that favors a procompetitive vertical merger policy for purposes of government merger enforcement. However, the procompetitive benefit for a presumption of merger approval for most vertical mergers does not end with the synthesis of an under-explored literature. Rather, the broader implications of vertical mergers and presumptions of legality have another overlooked implication—a change of policy may dampen entrepreneurial investment and innovation. Entrepreneurial exit is critical to a well-functioning entrepreneurial ecosystem, as the possibility of entrepreneurial exit via vertical merger is now the most usual form of liquidity event/exit for founders and venture capitalists. Vertical merger policy that would unduly restrict large tech firms from undertaking acquisitions in industries as diverse as finance, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, technology hardware, and internet platforms would hurt incentives for innovation in the economy by chilling business formation in start-ups. Increased difficulty in the exit for founders and ventures capitalists makes investment in such ventures less likely, since the purpose of such investment is to reap the rewards of scaling a venture to exit. Thus, a general inference that makes vertical acquisitions, particularly in tech, more difficult to undertake leads to direct contravention of antitrust's role in promoting competition and innovation. This Article explores how entrepreneurial exit for founders and venture capitalists is best served by promoting a robust vertical merger policy, though one that intervenes in cases of specific anticompetitive harm.


Some older community residents can exhibit baffling behaviors in daily life, despite their memory and general cognitive functions being normal. Thus, they may be superficially suspected to have a psychiatric disease. We experienced a case in which risk behaviors related to fire, consumer damage, fall, etc. and hyperactivity were observed in daily life; despite general cognitive function being within a normal range. Her abnormal behaviors were summarized by behavioral neurology, as follows: 1) hyperactivity caused by right hemisphere damage, 2) decreased right frontal lobe function caused by right frontal lobe damage, and 3) confabulation caused by disinhibition of the left frontal lobe. Thus, we performed neuroimaging examinations, and found right basal ganglia infarction (MRI) and decreased blood flow to the right frontal lobe (single photon emission computed tomography [SPECT], remote effect). After a service representatives meeting, where the physician in charge provided an explanation, the patient, who did not like drug administration by nature, and had thus refused recommendations from her home doctor, began to be conscious about her disease and agreed to undergo drug treatment. It is not easy to explain the relationship between cerebral infarction in a strategically important region and daily life (behavior). This is the specialty of dementia medicine. When a disease is found to exhibit cerebral injury, the patient will be able to correctly understand the disease, and appropriate care will be promoted under the health management and collaboration between medical and nursing care.


The avalanche-dynamics approach has a long history in avalanche prediction. In the ab- sence of computers, scientists and engineers focused on idealized models in which avalanches were seen as rigid sliding blocks. Although the resulting governing equation was very simple, the use of empirical rules made the model outcomes quite realistic, the errors being counterbalanced by common sense and experience of practitioners. To improve the earliest models, scientists explored two com- plementary paths. The first was to provide a more physical framework for avalanches. In the 1960s, Bruno Salm suggested that flowing snow can be regarded as a continuum, an idea which has encoun- tered great success, but which, at that time, faced considerable computational difficulties. A second path was the development of analytical and numerical models to solve the governing equations of con- tinuum models. In the 1970s, French and Soviet scientists played a key role in the development of the Saint-Venant models for flowing avalanches. Since the 1990s, these models have been made availa- ble worldwide. Paradoxically, the substantial increase in model complexity can lead us to lose sight of the empirical nature of the assumptions used to build the models. Human expertise should still be of paramount im- portance when evaluating the relevance of numerical outputs. In 2004, Salm sounded an alarm, stat- ing that excessive confidence was placed in the accuracy of model outputs. The problem of predicta- bility and accuracy of models used for environmental purposes has attracted growing attention in re- cent years, but the debate seems an endless story as it is extremely difficult to determine the source of errors and remove them. In this talk, I will present the conclusions of experimental campaigns conducted in the laboratory to study avalanches of fluid. In this setting, an avalanche of fluid results from the sudden release of a fixed volume of fluid down a sloping bed. Both fluid properties and flow geometry are imposed. Using high-resolution flow-visualization techniques, we are also able to monitor the internal evolution of the avalanche from release to runout. The experimental data can then be compared with models of vary- ing complexity. For Newtonian fluids (i.e., fluids whose rheological behavior is linear), we have found that the model accuracy increases with its degree of complexity. Surprisingly, for viscoplastic fluids (non-linear rheol- ogy), simple models perform much better than sophisticated models (such as the Saint-Venant equa- tions). Our conclusions do not differ from the lessons learnt in other fields, such as atmospheric sci- ences, in which small nonlinearities in the governing equations are known to produce large errors, which accumulate to give false predictions. There is no feasible reason why governing equations such as the Saint-Venant equations, which are unable to provide accurate predictions in well-controlled experiments should miraculously outperform other methods when applied to complex natural phenomena such as snow avalanches. Such models are certainly valuable in avalanche expertise as they provide a precise conceptual framework that link physical processes to universal principles such as conservation of mass and momentum. But, in agreement with Salm's warning, our experiments show that the returns from using sophisticated mod- els may be minimal or diminishing unless we take notice of the errors and biases introduced by these models.


The study examines the effects of student debt on the outcomes for individual students. Three hundred and twenty-eight students at the University of Canterbury completed questionnaires asking for information about their debt levels, happiness, attitude to debt and motivation. Their academic records were also obtained. As in previous studies, students with more debt exhibited greater tolerance for it. However, student debt did not have strong associations with individual's motivation. Nor was there any evidence that higher debt levels were related to levels of personal happiness or academic achievement. Overall, the results indicate debt to have little to no impact on the outcome attributes examined in the present study. ********** Over the last twenty years or so, debts incurred by tertiary students have become a prominent feature of New Zealand society. Student loans are now the largest non-housing debt category for New Zealand households (Thorp & Ung, 2001). Established by the government in 1992, the Student Loan Scheme has become the most important source of borrowed finance for tertiary students. With a balance of $8.4 billion in 2007, 23 percent of the population over the age of 15 have held or are currently holding a student loan (Ministry of Education, 2008). Due to the increasing presence of student debt, the present study focuses on the outcomes of student borrowing. The increase in student debt, both in New Zealand and overseas (Barr & Crawford, 2005L has led to increasing debate about its desirability. While governments have defended student loans by pointing to the increased participation in tertiary education (Ministry of Education, Inland Revenue, & Ministry of Social Development, 2002, 2006), critics have suggested a number of undesirable consequences. For example, it has been suggested that student debt causes New Zealand graduates to emigrate to facilitate faster debt repayment or to avoid repayment entirely (Brown & Matthews, 2003). In the United Kingdom, it has been suggested that the accumulation of student debt may encourage students both to become more tolerant of debt in the future (Davies & Lea, 1995) and to be more spendthrift when studying (Morgan, Roberts, & Powdrill, 2001). The relationship between student debt and tolerance of debt has been perhaps the most frequently studied. Davies and Lea (1995) developed a scale to measure attitudes to debt and found that students with higher debt levels were more tolerant of debt. Clearly, such a relationship could be explained either by the more tolerant students borrowing more or by the students who borrow more developing a greater tolerance for debt. However, Davies and Lea found that, in tact, increases in debt level preceded greater tolerance, a finding that has since been replicated both in the United Kingdom and in New Zealand (Boddington & Kemp, 1999; Lea. Webley & Bellamy, 2001), strongly suggesting that the acquisition of debt brings about increased tolerance rather than vice versa. This suggestion is reinforced by the consideration that the phenomenon of student debt in both countries has not arisen spontaneously but as the result of governmental and societal action. Moreover, in Italy, which has taken a different path to financing tertiary education and where student debt is infrequent, students did not exhibit debt tolerance (Vicenzi, Lea & Rumiati, 2001). The present paper focuses on the relationship of student debt with three other variables: happiness or subjective well-being; academic performance; and motivation to study. These three variables were chosen for two reasons. Firstly, they are important outcome variables that contribute to an individual's tertiary experience. Secondly, previous work suggested a reasonable possibility that each might be affected by the acquisition of debt (e.g., Davies & Lea, 1995; Stradling, 2001; Scott, 2006). Happiness, or subjective well-being, is a systemically important psychological variable that has frequently been the subject of psychological interest (e. …


Introduction The purpose of this paper is to present a record of observations on dike-like deposits of clay and other material traversing the bituminous coal regions west of the Allegheny mountains, together with illustrations of and references to allied phenomena in other countries. The comparative obscurity of clay-veins confines their inspection and study in situ almost entirely to such parts of them as are laid bare by such mine workings as these veins or dikes intersect or disturb. In other words, it is only a very small part, indeed, of a clay-vein that can be seen and examined, for a miner will cut or cross as few of them as possible. Nevertheless, many of them occur, and are of necessity cut and thus exposed in one place or another and at one horizon or another in the Coal Measures. Definition of a Clay-vein A clay-vein (also termed "clay-seams," " mud-seams," . . .


We have investigated the environmental controls of seasonally resolved records of oxygen and carbon isotopes of modern Mercenaria mercenaria bivalves collected live from five coastal sites along the east coast of North America. Seasonal profiles of δ18O and δ13C obtained by subsampling the incremental growth layers of aragonite were compared with in situ historical records of temperature and salinity. We show that M. mercenaria δ18O profiles track accurately the seasonal variations of water temperature and that variations in growth rates do not affect the shell δ18O values. Growth rates are strongly reduced or interrupted below water temperatures ranging from 8 to 10°C, implying that only bivalves sampled in tropical areas track the full amplitude of seasonal variations. Although further measurements of water δ18O and a better understanding of seasonal variations of the water δ18O‐salinity relationships are necessary, Mercenaria mercenaria bivalves appear to precipitate their shell close to isotopic equilibrium. Whereas the amplitude of the seasonal profiles of δ18O reflects variations in water temperature, the annual average δ18O decreases with latitude, reflecting the trend of rainfall and riverwater δ18O with latitude over the Northern American continent.


This paper presents a new deadline-based algorithm for dynamic task scheduling on multiprocessor real-time systems. The proposed algorithm was built based on the well-known dynamic scheduling algorithm the Earliest Deadline First (EDF). We extend the EDF algorithm in three significant criterions: (1) The original EDF deals with set of periodic task. (2) It schedules only independent tasks. (3) It works best in the single processor system. Our contribution in this study is a creation of a new variation of EDF called EDF-pc that able to schedule set of non-periodic tasks. It also deals with tasks that may or may not have precedence constraints and it produced acceptable results in the multiprocessor systems.