Picture this: 388 babies in one room breastfeeding. All at the same time. Imagine the quantities of milk being produced and consumed. Imagine all those breasts in the one
room. The room is the new 'megaplex' movie cinema at Marion shopping complex in Adelaide, South Australia. Is this a coincidence, that such a surreal event takes place in a cinema complex? The event has been dubbed a 'Breastfest' and is organized by the South Australian College of Lactation Consultants, the Nursing Mothers Association of Australia (NMAA) and midwives from the nearby Flinders Medical Centre. It is intended
to be a world record for the most babies being breastfed at any one time, making it into the Guinness Book of Records. Once the baby has latched on, the mother puts up her hand to be counted. It's a stunt, a media event. It's also World Breastfeeding Week. But in August 1999 when it takes place, it comes amid almost two years of media 'scandals' about breastfeeding in public.

I'm interested in recent media 'events' involving breastfeeding because they generate particular narratives about breastfeeding and most are infused with 'scandal'. 'Breasts are a scandal for patriarchy', writes Iris Young, 'because they disrupt the border between
motherhood and sexuality' (Young, 1990, p. 190). As if that weren't enough, I want to show how lactating breasts when they are taken outside the home are capable of
disrupting the borders of morality, discretion, taste and politics; in short, breasts are capable of transforming legislation, citizenship, and cities themselves. Lactating breasts are particularly scandalous, and I want to read the scandals they have recently provoked as crucial elements in cultural change. The 'scandals' I have chosen to read are events between 1998 and 2000 that were given national coverage in the print media in Australia
and provoked a divided response through letters to the editors to those newspapers about women's breastfeeding practices in public. These events and the scandalizing rhetoric used to debate women's public breastfeeding practices can be read as marking a critical cultural moment in the contestation and renegotiation of social values.

The examples of breastfeeding in public that reach the newspapers are always to do with white middle-class urban dwellers. It is signi� cant that indigenous, ethnic, rural and lower socio-economic groups are not the subject of scandals about breastfeeding. White middle-class women like myself are the women with the most available power in a Western colonized nation like Australia—we are the ones in a position to publicly contest social values. We are usually assumed to be 'average', or normative, and so do
not usually have to negotiate discourses of race or class or sexuality, which are rendered invisible. While acknowledging that we all inhabit specific social, historical and discursive contexts, I argue that the narratives produced about these women breastfeeding
in public can be read symptomatically as an historical moment when particular social values are threatened, and that this has much broader implications about the politics of women's sexuality, use of public space and citizenship.


Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been shown to be clinically effective for some forms of treatment-resistant chronic pain, but the precise mechanisms of action are not well understood. Here, we present an analysis of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from a patient with whole-body chronic pain, in order to investigate changes in neural activity induced by DBS for pain relief over both short- and long-term. This patient is one of the few cases treated using DBS of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We demonstrate that a novel method, null-beamforming, can be used to localise accurately brain activity despite the artefacts caused by the presence of DBS electrodes and stimulus pulses. The accuracy of our source localisation was verified by correlating the predicted DBS electrode positions with their actual positions. Using this beamforming method, we examined changes in whole-brain activity comparing pain relief achieved with deep brain stimulation (DBS ON) and compared with pain experienced with no stimulation (DBS OFF). We found significant changes in activity in pain-related regions including the pre-supplementary motor area, brainstem (periaqueductal gray) and dissociable parts of caudal and rostral ACC. In particular, when the patient reported experiencing pain, there was increased activity in different regions of ACC compared to when he experienced pain relief. We were also able to demonstrate long-term functional brain changes as a result of continuous DBS over one year, leading to specific changes in the activity in dissociable regions of caudal and rostral ACC. These results broaden our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of DBS in the human brain.


This paper reviews the recently enacted Chilean National Aquaculture Policy (NAP). It goes through its central objective, summarises its main components and points out the main actions already underway by the government in the process of implementing this policy. The paper underlines the fact that this is one of the few national policies around the world explicitly setting Sustainable Development (SD) as its central and main objective. The paper also points out two main weaknesses worthy of discussion. The first weakness is the partial way in which the NAP focuses equity and the effect that not properly recognising the existence of 'resource rent' or 'user cost' may have on the final pursued objective. The second weakness is the fact that presently the NAP lacks a proper approach to deal with the complex spatial, multifactor, ecosystems, dynamic and anthropocentric nature of aquaculture.


Information system software development projects suffer from a high failure rate. One of many obstacles faced by project managers is non-supportive users, those not actively sharing in development responsibilities. The coordination activity of early partnering has been proposed in the literature to promote collaboration and enhance user support. The extent of partnering is considered in a model that relates partnering to the risks of user non-support and eventual project success. The model is developed from contingency theory, with residual performance risk as an intermediary variable. A survey of IS project membership provides the data, which indicates that partnering significantly relates to higher user support, less residual risk, and better project performance. Researchers may use variations on the model to examine other barriers to success and the techniques applied to lower the barriers. Practitioners should consider applying partnering techniques to improve software development project performance.


In much of South Asia (e.g. India, Bangladesh, Sri-Lanka) there had been a post-colonial emphasis on the use of mother tongue. For instance, in Bangladesh, a nation almost solely founded on the basis of the language movement (Bhasa Andolon) of 1952. About 98% of the country's population speak Bangla . Bangla was the medium of education at all levels except in a small number of schools (Hossain and Tollefson, in Power and Shrestha, 2009). However, in an increasingly globablised world, English Language is now re-emerging as a significant factor in economic development. It is widely perceived that many graduates fail to gain employment because their English skills or qualifications fall below the required level of functional literacy. (British Council, 2009).

It has therefore become paramount to develop effective skills in the use of spoken and written English and some governments have been taking measures to address this need. For instance, the Bangladeshi government in collaboration with the Department for International Development (DFID) of the UK government jointly funded the English Language Teaching Improvement Project (ELTIP). (Power and Shrestha, 2009, p.2). But research evidence (Power and Shrestha, 2009, p.2) show that, despite the huge investments since the early 2000s, the quality of English remains low. This indicates that more needs to be done, or it needs to be done differently.
There is therefore a need to train or upskill large numbers of English Language Teachers (ELTs), both in relation to their own level of English Language proficiency, and in relation to their teaching skills and practices. The situation calls for responses that are effective, imaginative, and capable of operating scale. It may possible for such responses to transcend national boundaries, whilst recognizing local teacher identities and contexts.


We present Sigma*, a novel technique for learning symbolic models of software behavior. Sigma* addresses the challenge of synthesizing models of software by using symbolic conjectures and abstraction. By combining dynamic symbolic execution to discover symbolic input-output steps of the programs and counterexample guided abstraction refinement to over-approximate program behavior, Sigma* transforms arbitrary source representation of programs into faithful input-output models. We define a class of stream filters---programs that process streams of data items---for which Sigma* converges to a complete model if abstraction refinement eventually builds up a sufficiently strong abstraction. In other words, Sigma* is complete relative to abstraction. To represent inferred symbolic models, we use a variant of symbolic transducers that can be effectively composed and equivalence checked. Thus, Sigma* enables fully automatic analysis of behavioral properties such as commutativity, reversibility and idempotence, which is useful for web sanitizer verification and stream programs compiler optimizations, as we show experimentally. We also show how models inferred by Sigma* can boost performance of stream programs by parallelized code generation.


The balance between privacy and security concerns is a hotly debated topic, especially as government (and private) entities are able to gather and analyze data from several disparate sources with ease. This ability to do large scale analytics of publicly accessible data leads to significant privacy concerns. In particular, for the government, there is the fear of a fishing expedition against individuals. The model in this paper describes a way to address these concerns in a multi-user and multi-database owner environment. The model provides an assurance system where database owners are able to test and audit the assurances given by users thereby increasing the trust in the system. The concept of segregating data used for processing from data needed for final end use and providing different levels of access to them through a mediator machine has been used. The audit component consisting of a justification mechanism increases the trust in the system.


Arctic foxes, Alopex lagopus, live in low productivity arctic and northern tundra habitats, where they generally prey heavily on lemmings. In Iceland, however, no lemmings are present, and the foxes have a very varied diet, including plants such as seaweed and black crowberries, a wide range of birds and invertebrates, and carcasses of large mammals such as seals, reindeer, and sheep. Marked seasonal, geographical and inter-annual differences confirm arctic foxes in Iceland as opportunistic feeders. There are coastal and inland foxes: coastal foxes feed mainly on prey derived directly or indirectly from the ocean, particularly various seabirds and seals, while inland foxes feed largely on migrant birds, such as geese, waders and passerines in summer, and ptarmigan in winter. Despite their reputation for killing lambs, in this study, lamb carcasses were found at only 19.4% of 1125 fox dens, 44% of which had only one carcass. The distance to the nearest farm and the physical condition of lambs were major determinants of the number of carcasses found at a den. We discuss the implications of arctic foxes' diet for population dynamics and group formation, and for management practices.


Reports of a rising incidence of breast cancer and the consistent finding of a significantly younger population of breast cancer patients in the country than in the west led to this study to determine the proportion of women who have a clinical breast examination at the booking visit for antenatal care in the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH).The booking information on the antenatal cards of patients who registered within a one-month period was examined. Clinical breast examination (CBE) was performed on 41.6% of the women. Women who were reviewed by consultants recorded a rate of 78.2% while the rates for women attended to by resident doctors and interns were 41.2% and 19.6% respectively (P=0.00). The CBE rate was 57.6% among women who were reviewed by female physicians and 38.3% among those reviewed by male physicians (P = 0.00). The practice of CBE in UCTH is low and is significantly related to the cadre and gender of the attending physician. Obstetricians must embrace the practice fully and utilize measures such as increased supervision and departmental seminars to sensitize doctors they train to emulate them.

 KEYWORDS: Antenatal, Practice and Breast Examination


We aimed to determine whether the type of outcome expectation, stemming from HPV vaccination, would have any effect on young men's HPV vaccine intent. We recruited young men (18–24 years of age) from two university campuses (n = 150). After answering a series of questions they were randomly assigned to one of three information conditions (all delivered by computer): (1) how women may benefit from men's HPV vaccination, (2) preventing genital warts and (3) preventing head and neck cancers. Intent to be vaccinated against HPV in the next 12 months was assessed before and after receiving the informational session corresponding to the assigned condition. A repeated-measures t-test indicated that a significant increase in young men's intent to be vaccinated after they received the assigned information (t = 9.48, [147], P = 0.0001). However, the increase in intent to be vaccinated did not vary by group assignment as there were no significant differences in mean intent scores between the three groups (F = 0.59, [2/144], (P = 0.56). Information that promotes the outcome expectations of protecting women from cervical cancer, preventing genital warts for men and preventing head and neck cancers for men may be equally effective in promoting increased intent for HPV vaccine acceptance among young university men.


Triticale (×Triticosecale), an amphiploid of wheat (mainly Triticum turgidum) and cereal rye (Secale cereale), is an excellent source of resistance to wheat stem rust, caused by Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici. A collection of 567 triticale accessions originating from 21 countries was evaluated at the seedling stage for reaction to races of P. graminis f. sp. tritici with broad virulence, including TTKSK, TRTTF, and TTTTF. A high frequency (78.4%) of accessions was resistant to race TTKSK, with low infection types ranging from 0; to X. A selection of 353 TTKSK-resistant accessions was evaluated for reaction to three South African isolates of P. graminis f. sp. tritici with single and/or combined virulences to stem rust resistance genes SrSatu, Sr27, and SrKw present in triticale. Genes SrSatu, Sr27, and SrKw were postulated to be present in 141 accessions and contributed to TTKSK resistance. The remaining 212 resistant accessions may possess uncharacterized genes or combinations of known genes that could not be determined with these isolates. These accessions were further evaluated for resistance to races TTKST, TPMKC, RKQQC, RCRSC, QTHJC, QCCSM, and MCCFC. Resistance remained effective across the entire set of races in the majority of the accessions (n = 200), suggesting that the resistances are effective against a broad spectrum of virulence. In all, 129 (79.6%) resistant accessions with noncharacterized genes were resistant to moderately resistant in field stem rust nurseries at Debre Zeit (Ethiopia) and St. Paul (Minnesota). Results from evaluating F2 populations derived from resistant-susceptible crosses revealed that resistance to TTKSK in triticale was conferred mostly by single genes with dominant effects.


Nano-biotechnology gives emphasis for the synthesis of nanoparticles using living organisms such as microorganisms, plant extracts or plant biomass in an eco-friendly way. Among the various agents used for nanoparticle synthesis, plants and the extracts from various parts of the plant have found to possess important applications. The biomolecules found in plants induce the reduction of Ag+ ions from silver nitrate to silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). The Caesalpinia bonduc stem bark extract was used as reducing and stabilizing agent for the synthesis of silver nanoparticles. Synthesized nanoparticle is confirmed by the change of color from transparent yellow to dark brown indicates the formation of silver nanoparticles. UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy was used to monitor the quantitative formation of silver nanoparticles. The maximum Peak was observed at 490 nm and also characterized by SEM, TEM and the average particle size was found to be in between 5-50nm respectively. The antibacterial assay was done on Gram positive bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus, Basillus subtilis and Gram negative bacteria like Escherichia coli. The plant based route could be considered to be an environmental friendly, safe and economic biological method for the silver nanoparticles production.


The GDI1 gene encodes αGDI, which retrieves inactive GDP-bound RAB from membranes to form a cytosolic pool awaiting vesicular release. Mutations in GDI1 are responsible for X-linked Intellectual Disability. Characterization of the Gdi1-null mice has revealed alterations in the total number and distribution of hippocampal and cortical synaptic vesicles, hippocampal short-term synaptic plasticity and specific short-term memory deficits in adult mice, which are possibly caused by alterations of different synaptic vesicle recycling pathways controlled by several RAB GTPases. However, interpretation of these studies is complicated by the complete ablation of Gdi1 in all cells in the brain throughout development. In this study, we generated conditionally gene-targeted mice in which the knockout of Gdi1 is restricted to the forebrain, hippocampus, cortex and amygdala and occurs only during postnatal development. Adult mutant mice reproduce the short-term memory deficit previously reported in Gdi1-null mice. Surprisingly, the delayed ablation of Gdi1 worsens the pre-synaptic phenotype at cortico-amygdala synaptic connections compared to Gdi1-null mice. These results suggest a pivotal role of αGDI via specific RAB GTPases acting specifically in forebrain regions at the pre-synaptic sites involved in memory formation.


ABSTRACT Security Sector Reform (SSR) is an important element of the EU's external intervention toolkit. In an increasingly uncertain global security environment, the EU has currently stepped up its SSR endeavours. However, success of these efforts largely depends on the EU's capabilities in navigating complex context-specific challenges. In particular the EU needs to be able to simultaneously address the functional and normative-societal imperatives that underpin SSR. This article considers the case of the EU's ongoing SSR mission to Ukraine – the European Union Advisory Mission (EUAM). It asks, what are the unique context-specific challenges faced by EUAM in Ukraine? How do these challenges influence the EU's ability to satisfy both the normative-societal imperative of SSR through the EUAM? This article mainly relies on secondary data, and applies a "Whole of Society" approach to conflict prevention and peacebuilding (WOS). Amidst a situation of ongoing multiple armed conflicts and EU-Russian relations of mutual dependence, a key finding is that the mandate of the mission has become more narrow and exclusive by sacrificing vertical coherence and the normative-societal imperative. We recommend EUAM adopt a more "revolutionary" approach to SSR, by adhering to key SSR normative principles so that the mission can overcome the challenges of the unique reform environment of Ukriane. This will also make it able to contribute more meaningfully to the wider reform process in an effective and sustainable manner.


You'll never catch Burgin," television investigative reporter Marsha Halford said to me during an off-camera interview regarding rumors of bribery in the Mississippi senate. "He is the smartest and most corrupt politician in the state." The Federal Bureau of Investigation had Senator William G. Burgin Jr., chairman of the Mississippi State Senate Appropriations Committee, under scrutiny. As the agent in charge of the case, I wasn't allowed to answer her. But I knew something that Halford and even Burgin didn't know: We'd just about nailed him, and he wasn't very smart after all. Within a month of that interview, Burgin was indicted for pocketing at least $83,000 in bribes. He later was convicted and served three years in federal prison. The Burgin investigation illustrates a checklist of classic lessons that CPAs can apply when confronted with allegations or suspicions of bribery. RUMORS OFTEN ARE TRUE Those who accept illegal payments usually have a motive for doing so. For most people, it is debt; but once they pay their debts, they end up spending the rest of the loot. Coworkers often notice extravagances and report them; CPAs should be alert to rumors or complaints about employees who seem to live beyond their means. Burgin's lifestyle. For years Burgin--a part-time legislator--had one of the most successful solo law practices in Mississippi and lived the life of a wealthy plantation owner. Because of his visibility as a politician, people noticed his ostentatious wealth, and it was one of them who tipped the FBI off to his illegal scheme. Evidence later showed that one of the principal reasons for his "success" was that his firm served as a conduit for the lucre of corruption. LOOK TO THE TOP At some point, regardless of internal controls or safeguards, a person at the top of an organization has the ultimate authority to decide how it spends its money; lower-level employees must contend with restrictions. This means that within an entity the chief purchasing agent or similar officer would be the most likely suspect for corruption. CPAs therefore should satisfy themselves that controls over purchasing managers are adequate and are not being overridden. Burgin's opportunity. As chairman of the Mississippi Senate Appropriations Committee, Burgin was the state's chief purchasing agent of sorts. The state neatly divided its finances according to revenue and appropriations. While the Senate Revenue Committee raised money to fund state programs, Burgin's committee was in charge of spending it. Every check the state wrote was within his powerful domain. There were controls, of course--but none the enterprising politician couldn't bypass. THE "SNIFF TEST" In theory, any employee authorized to spend an organization's money is a possible candidate for corruption. Those paying the bribes tend to be commissioned salespeople or intermediaries for outside vendors. The following players usually are present in a corruption scheme. The gift bearer. Illegal inducements often begin when a businessperson routinely offers inappropriate gifts or provides lavish entertainment to an employee with purchasing authority or otherwise tries to ingratiate himself or herself for the purpose of influencing those in charge. The odd couple. When a purchasing agent becomes the "friend" of an outside vendor, beware. A key technique bribe-givers use is to befriend their targets. They go to lunch together, take trips and engage in other social outings. But often the pair has nothing in common except for an illegal scheme. The too-successful bidder. A supplier who consistently wins business without any apparent competitive advantage might be providing under-the-table incentives to obtain the work. Be alert to sole-source contracts and to bidders who nearly always win, who win by thin margins and who bid last. These are indicators someone at the company is supplying the winning bidder inside information. …


CARS holography captures both the amplitude and the phase of a complex anti-Stokes field, and can perform three-dimensional imaging by digitally focusing onto different depths inside a specimen. The application of CARS holography for bio-imaging is demonstrated. It is shown that holographic CARS imaging of sub-cellular components in live HeLa cells can be achieved.


A novel multi-functional bilayer coating combining an anti-corrosion Al–Zr (4 at.% Zr) underlayer and an anti-biofouling TiO2 top layer was deposited on high-speed steel (HSS) substrates. Al–Zr (4 at.% Zr) film, deposited by DC magnetron sputtering, which is a single phased supersaturated solid solution of Zr in Al, is used to provide sacrificial corrosion resistance of steels and TiO2 is added as a top layer to induce photocatalytic activity and hydrophilic behavior which can generate antifouling properties in order to slow down the biofouling process. The top TiO2 films, deposited at 550 ◦C by AACVD (aerosol-assisted chemical vapor deposition), consisting of anatase TiO2 microflowers physically attached to the TiO2 thin films present a high decomposition rate of Orange G dye (780 × 10−10 mol L−1·min−1). The enhanced photocatalytic performance is associated with the rough network and the presence of TiO2 microflowers capable of supporting the enhanced loading of organic contaminants onto the film surface. Electrochemical tests in saline solution have revealed that bilayer films provide cathodic protection for the steel substrate. The Al–Zr/TiO2 bilayer presents a lower corrosion current density of 4.01 × 10−7 A/cm2 and a corrosion potential of −0.61 V vs. Ag/AgCl, offering good protection through the preferential oxidation of the bilayer and an increased pitting resistance. The proposed functionalized coating combining anticorrosion and photocatalytic properties is a promising candidate for an anti-fouling system in sea water.


Background Male gender, training volume (# of hours per week) and match exposure (# of games played per week) have been documented as risk factors for jumper's knee among young elite volleyball players (Visnes & Bahr, 2012). However, it is not known whether jump frequency differs between intra-squad players. Objective To examine inter-individual and gender differences in jump frequency during training and matches in young elite volleyball players. Design Observational study. Setting Norwegian elite volleyball boarding school training program. Participants Student-athletes (26 boys and 18 girls, 16–18 yrs). Main outcome measures Individual jump counts were recorded based on video recordings obtained from one week of volleyball training (9 training sessions for boys and 10 for girls, 14.1 h and 17.8 h of training, respectively) and 10 matches (5.9 h for boys (16 sets) and 7.7 h for girls (21 sets). Results A total of 7805 jumps were recorded during training, 4993 among boys and 2812 among girls. As training attendance and jump frequency varied substantially between players, the total exposure in training ranged from 50 to 666 jumps/week among boys and from 11 to 251 jumps/week among girls. On average, this corresponded to 35.7 jumps/h for boys and 13.7 jumps/h for girls (t-test, P=.002). Total jump exposure ranged between 1 to 339 jumps among boys and between 0 to 379 jumps among girls. Player jump frequency averaged 62.2 jumps/h for boys and 41.9 jumps/h for girls (t-test, P<.039). The inter-individual differences seen in jump frequency were substantially more pronounced than any differences observed between player functions. Conclusions Substantial inter-individual and gender differences were observed in jump frequency during training and matches in young elite volleyball players. Thus, jump frequency may represent a more important risk factor for jumper's knee than total training volume and warrants further research attention.


The Stopping Sight Distance (SSD) must be guaranteed the entire length of a highway. However, elements of the cross-section in the design can interfere with sight distances. This can be the case when barriers, rather than medians, are used on two-way highways, especially along left curves. Thus, this study analyzed the position of barriers in a hypothetical scenario using graphic three-dimensional simulations. The lateral offset of the barrier relative to the roadway was defined according to each design speed and radius of the horizontal curve was analyzed. The results of the simulation were compared with the model, which was found in national standards, for offsetting fixed objects from horizontal curves. The differences found in this study demonstrated the viability of the method used, and the project was considered useful as a whole because it was developed in a three-dimensional fashion.


This dissertation contains new results on the design of dynamic positioning (DP) systems for marine surface vessels. A positioned ship is continuously exposed to environmental disturbances, and the objective of the DP system is to maintain the desired position and heading by applying adequate propeller thrust. The disturbances can be categorized into three classes. First, there are stationary forces mainly due to wind, ocean currents, and static wave drift. Secondly, there are slowly-varying forces mainly due to wave drift, a phenomenon experienced in irregular seas. Finally there are rapid, zero mean linear wave loads causing oscillatory motion with the same frequency as the incoming wave train. The main contribution of this dissertation is a method for better compensation of the second type of disturbances, slowly-varying forces, by introducing feedback from measured acceleration. It is shown theoretically and through model experiments that positioning performance can be improved without compromising on thruster usage. The specific contributions are: • Observer design: Two observers with wave filtering capabilities was developed, analyzed, and tested experimentally. Both of them incorporate position and, if available, velocity and acceleration measurements. Filtering out the rapid, zero mean motion induced by linear wave loads is particularly important whenever measured acceleration is to be used by the DP controller, because in an acceleration signal, the high frequency contributions from the linear wave loads dominate. • Controller design: A low speed tracking controller has been developed. The proposed control law can be regarded as an extension of any conventional PID-like design, and stability was guaranteed for bounded yaw rate. A method for numerically calculating this upper bound was proposed, and for most ships the resulting bound will be higher than the physical limitation. For completeness, the missing nonlinear term that, if included in the controller, would ensure global exponential stability was identified. The second contribution of this dissertation is a new method for mapping controller action into thruster forces. A low speed control allocation method for overactuated ships equipped with propellers and rudders was derived. Active use of rudders, together with propeller action, is advantageous in a DP operation, because the overall fuel consumption can be reduced. A new model ship, Cybership II, together with a low-cost position reference system was developed with the aim of testing the proposed concepts. The acceleration experiments were carried out at the recently developed Marine Cybernetics Laboratory, while the control allocation experiment was carried out at the Guidance, Navigation and Control Laboratory. The main results of this dissertation have been published or are still under review for publication in international journals and at international conferences.


Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is considered one of the promising pillars for Egypt's economic growth. Recent social responsibility initiatives aim at leveraging the potentials of ICT industry to achieve inclusive development. Nonetheless, the current workforce is technically-oriented due to the rise of global outsourcing. There is a need for a workforce that is willing to engage with the bottom the pyramid as a potential market. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) discipline puts the user in the heart of the design process, and thus it is argued that teaching HCI could build a capacity necessary to fulfil the workforce gap. HCI education is underrated by engineering students due to the way by which its courses are integrated in the Egyptian curriculum along with other inherited pedagogical challenges. Following the best practices of introductory HCI courses, an interactive two-weeks Winter School activity was designed for sensitising 31 engineering undergraduates to user-experience in technology design. The students' feedback, the instructor's reflections, and the implications on future offerings are presented.


A variety of aftereffects was found to be processed non-retinotopically. Other studies failed to find non-retinotopic aftereffects. These experiments relied on paradigms involving eye movements. We have developed a paradigm, based on the Ternus–Pikler display, which tests retinotopic vs non-retinotopic processing without the involvement of eye movements. Here, we presented three disks for about 5 s. The central disk contained a tilted Gabor patch to which observers adapted (the outer disks were grey). After an ISI of 146 ms, the disks were shifted to the right creating the impression of group motion and establishing a non-retinotopic frame of reference. The center disk in the first frame now overlapped with the left most disk. When a test Gabor was presented on this left disk, a strong tilt aftereffect was found, but not when the test Gabor was presented on the center disk. Similar results were found for motion stimuli. Interestingly, invisible retinotopic motion can create a strong aftereffect even though non-retinotopic motion was perceived during adaptation masking the retinotopic motion. Hence, tilt and motion adaptation are processed retinotopically whereas form, motion, and attention were found to be non-retinotopically processed with the Ternus–Pikler paradigm.


An NHS trainee obstetrician who faced the first prosecution in the United Kingdom for female genital mutilation has been acquitted after the jury deliberated for less than half an hour.

Dhanuson Dharmasena, then a junior registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology at the Whittington Hospital in north London, was accused of reinfibulating a Somali woman by sewing her labia together after the birth of her first child in 2012. But he told the jury that he had put only a small suture at the top of a cut he had made to deliver the baby, to stop bleeding, in an emergency situation.

The verdict of not guilty came after Mr Justice Sweeney, who presided over the 13 day trial at Southwark Crown Court, told the jury in his summing up that they would have to consider whether the doctor had been made a "scapegoat" …


Most deep learning models in chest X-ray prediction utilize the posteroanterior (PA) view due to the lack of other views available. PadChest is a large-scale chest X-ray dataset that has almost 200 labels and multiple views available. In this work, we use PadChest to explore multiple approaches to merging the PA and lateral views for predicting the radiological labels associated with the X-ray image. We find that different methods of merging the model utilize the lateral view differently. We also find that including the lateral view increases performance for 32 labels in the dataset, while being neutral for the others. The increase in overall performance is comparable to the one obtained by using only the PA view with twice the amount of patients in the training set.


Abstract:  Among Earth's most stunning, yet imperiled, biological phenomena is long‐distance migration (LDM). Although the understanding of how and why animals migrate may be of general interest, few site‐specific strategies have targeted ways in which to best retain such increasingly rare events. Contrasts among 29 terrestrial mammals from five continents representing 103 populations indicate that remnant long‐distant migrants have poor long‐term prospects. Nonetheless, in areas of low human density in the Western Hemisphere, five social and nongregarious species, all from the same region of the Rocky Mountains (U.S.A.), still experience the most accentuated of remaining New World LDMs south of central Canada. These movements occur in or adjacent to the Greater Yellowstone region, where about 75% of the migration routes for elk (Cervus elaphus), bison ( Bison bison), and North America's sole surviving endemic ungulate, pronghorn (Antilocapra americana), have already been lost. However, pronghorn still migrate up to 550 km (round‐trip) annually. These extreme movements (1) necessitate use of historic, exceptionally narrow corridors (0.1–0.8 km wide) that have existed for at least 5800 years, (2) exceed travel distances of elephants ( Loxodonta africana) and zebras ( Equus burchelli), and (3) are on par with those of Asian chiru ( Pantholops hodgsoni) and African wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus). Although conservation planners face uncertainty in situating reserves in the most biologically valued locations, the concordance between archaeological and current biological data on migration through specific corridors in these unprotected areas adjacent to the Yellowstone system highlights their retention value. It is highly likely that accelerated leasing of public lands for energy development in such regions will truncate such migrations. One landscape‐level solution to conserving LDMs is the creation of a network of national migration corridors, an action in the Yellowstone region that would result in de facto protection for a multispecies complex. Tactics applied in this part of the world may not work in others, however, therefore reinforcing the value of site‐specific field information on the past and current biological needs of migratory species.


In this master thesis, different PV facade systems located in Norway have been evaluated and analyzed. It will thus contribute to the ongoing development of a national database of BIPV. Also, technical and economic aspects of the PV systems are analyzed. Data series from the web-based monitoring systems have been evaluated, cross-sections of the PV facades are examined, and the economic costs associated with the PV systems have been evaluated. The specific yield and cost of the analyzed cases have been compared with simulated data and traditionally clothed facades and with each other. The results showed that the facade PV systems can be compared to the roof installations with regard to specific yield and with traditional facade cladding on cost. From May 2017 to April 2018, the annual specific yield is in the range 500-770 kWh/kWp for the analyzed cases. The facades have a more even annual distribution contrary to the summer season, which has a typical peak for the roof installation. When comparing the specific yield for the PV systems on the facades with the roof PV systems, the facade systems produced 80-98 % of the roof systems. As the development of installed PV systems are rapidly increasing, the importance of evaluating operative PV systems with regard to expected energy production and cost is necessary. The findings from this master thesis can be used as a guideline for expected specific yield and technical solutions on the PV facade systems in Norway.


The focus of this article is on mapping the inclusion of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) content in the higher education curriculum of universities that offer library and information science (LIS) education in Anglophone eastern and southern Africa (AESA). As universities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are being encouraged to "adapt" and to become more "societally relevant" in their production, transmission and acquisition of knowledge, they should include hitherto subjugated IKS. The main argument is that the inclusion of indigenous knowledge (IK), with its emphasis on context and the holistic nature of human experiences, in higher education may partly offer knowledge that resonates with Bernstein's (2000) horizontal discourses and Dewey's (2004) notion of education that addresses the disposition of the learner holistically. Although some studies on higher education curricula have focused on a diversity of issues, including improved pedagogy, assessment strategies, low achievement, student throughput, content, institutional autonomy and public accountability (Bester, 2011), the scope of this article is limited to the content aspect of the curriculum. Content is at the centre of the relevance of a curriculum in a specific context. A meaningful coverage of IK content in the curriculum may equip information and heritage management professionals with skills and knowledge to preserve the declining IK and elevate it to a respectable level in Africa. The results of this quantitative study confirm that the end of foreign domination in AESA did not bring about a new cartography in the LIS curricula of the universities, as colonial pedagogic practices that undervalued IK have continued to dominate the higher education landscape at the expense of the inclusion of IK.


In this limited space I have attempted to convey information regarding progress in discovering the nature of human intelligence. By intensive factor-analytic investigation, mostly within the past 20 years, the multifactor picture of intelligence has grown far beyond the expectations of those who have been most concerned. A comprehensive, systematic theoretical model known as the "structure of intellect" has been developed to put rationality into the picture. The model is a cubical affair, its three dimensions representing ways in which the abilities differ from one another. Represented are: five basic kinds of operation, four substantive kinds of information or "contents," and six formal kinds of information or "products," respectively. Each intellectual ability involves a unique conjunction of one kind of operation, one kind of content, and one kind of product, all abilities being relatively independent in a population, but with common joint involvement in intellectual activity. This taxonomic model has led to the discovery of many abilities not suspected before. Although the number of abilities is large, the 15 category constructs provide much parsimony. They also provide a systematic basis for viewing mental operations in general, thus suggesting new general psychological theory. The implications for future intelligence testing and for education are numerous. Assessment of intellectual qualities should go much beyond present standard intelligence tests, which seriously neglect important abilities that contribute to problem-solving and creative performance in general. Educational philosophy, curriculum-building, teaching procedures, and examination methods should all be improved by giving attention to the structure of intellect as the basic frame of reference. There is much basis for expecting that various intellectual abilities can be improved in individuals, and the procedures needed for doing this should be clear.


Objective: Evaluate long term whole body vibration training effects on bone mineral density in postmenopausal osteoporosis. Background: Osteoporosis has been defined as a skeletal system disease characterized by low bone density and deterioration of bone microarchitecture which results in increased risk for fracture occurrence and predisposes the person to injury. Whole body vibration therapy showed positive effects on Bone mineral density. Materials and methods: Literature and scientific papers review of was conducted through the use of several databases: Science Direct, Web of Science, SCIdirect, PubMed, Taylor and Francis Online, Springer Link, SAE publications, JAMA Pediatr Idea: drexler e-repository and archives, Google Scholar and City Library Marko Marulic Split University Library in Split Online catalog. Conclusion: Whole body vibration training is a relatively new and promising non-pharmacological method for bone mineral density decline prevention.


The authors have made investigations with Super XX film and find that the resolving power in white light is strongly influenced by the shape and size of the blue and red images. The results indicate that if the imaging characteristics of a lens in white light are to be determined photoelectrically they should be done in at least three wavelength regions. As a by-product of the experiments it was found that the low-contrast resolving power correlated fairly well with subjective picture evaluation.


A downscaling approach based on multiple‐point geostatistics (MPS) is presented. The key concept underlying MPS is to sample spatial patterns from within training images, which can then be used in characterizing the relationship between different variables across multiple scales. The approach is used here to downscale climate variables including skin surface temperature (TSK), soil moisture (SMOIS), and latent heat flux (LH). The performance of the approach is assessed by applying it to data derived from a regional climate model of the Murray‐Darling basin in southeast Australia, using model outputs at two spatial resolutions of 50 and 10 km. The data used in this study cover the period from 1985 to 2006, with 1985 to 2005 used for generating the training images that define the relationships of the variables across the different spatial scales. Subsequently, the spatial distributions for the variables in the year 2006 are determined at 10 km resolution using the 50 km resolution data as input. The MPS geostatistical downscaling approach reproduces the spatial distribution of TSK, SMOIS, and LH at 10 km resolution with the correct spatial patterns over different seasons, while providing uncertainty estimates through the use of multiple realizations. The technique has the potential to not only bridge issues of spatial resolution in regional and global climate model simulations but also in feature sharpening in remote sensing applications through image fusion, filling gaps in spatial data, evaluating downscaled variables with available remote sensing images, and aggregating/disaggregating hydrological and groundwater variables for catchment studies.


Objectives were to investigate prospectively the ability of DNA adducts to predict cancer and to study the determinants of adducts, especially air pollutants. DNA adducts were measured in a case-control study nested in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) investigation. Cases included newly diagnosed lung cancer (n = 115), upper respiratory cancers (pharynx and larynx; n = 82), bladder cancer (n = 124), leukemia (n = 166), and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or emphysema deaths (n = 77) accrued after a median follow-up of 7 years among the EPIC former smokers and never-smokers. Three controls per case were matched for questionnaire analyses and two controls per case for laboratory analyses. Matching criteria were gender, age, smoking status, country of recruitment, and follow-up time. Individual exposure to air pollution was assessed using concentration data from monitoring stations in routine air quality monitoring networks. Leukocyte DNA adducts were analyzed blindly using 32P postlabeling technique. Adducts were associated with the subsequent risk of lung cancer, with an odds ratio (OR) of 1.86 [95% confidence interval (95% CI), 0.88-3.93] when comparing detectable versus nondetectable adducts. The association with lung cancer was stronger in never-smokers (OR, 4.04; 95% CI, 1.06-15.42) and among the younger age groups. After exclusion of the cancers occurring in the first 36 months of follow-up, the OR was 4.16 (95% CI, 1.24-13.88). A positive association was found between DNA adducts and ozone (O3) concentration. Our prospective study suggests that leukocyte DNA adducts may predict lung cancer risk of never-smokers. Besides, the association of DNA adduct levels with O3 indicates a possible role for photochemical smog in determining DNA damage.


Fifteen New Zealand rabbits were used in this study. Buffered saline solution was given through the common carotid artery to remove the blood from the cranial veins. The jugular vein was ligated prior to giving blue latex to 10 rabbits and blue Batson's No. 17 to 5 rabbits through the maxillary vein. Rabbits were left for 24 hours in order to let the latex harden and then they were transferred to 10% formaldehyde solution and dissected. Rabbits that were injected with Batson's No17 were kept in 33% KOH solution for 48 hours and corrosion casts were prepared. The diameters of the veins were measured with a digital dial caliper. It was observed that the pterygoid plexus, the superficial temporal vein, the ascending pharyngeal vein, the caudal auricular vein and the ventral masseteric vein provided 25%, 21%, 21%, 20% and the 13% of the venous blood of the maxillary vein, respectively. Results of estimations of the diameter and the thickness of the vessels showed that the caudal auricular vein was 35% thicker than the rostral auricular vein. In addition, 32%, 23% and 45% of the venous blood coming to the caudal auricular vein was provided by the lateral auricular vein, the intermediate auricular vein and the deep auricular vein, respectively. It was determined that the transverse facial vein provided 40% drainage to the masseteric muscle. Other vessels that drained this muscle were the ventral masseteric vein (41%) continuing caudoventrally and the masseteric vein (19%) going caudodorsally. It was also found that a thin vein provided the drainage of a small caudal part of the nasal cavity, namely the sphenopalatine vein. It was observed that the branches from the palatine plexus passed through the palatine fissure and connected with the nasal venous plexus. Some branches passed on the rostral side through the caudal part of the incisive teeth and went to the apex nasi connected with the superior labial vein. It was determined that the palatine veins originating from the palatine plexus passed through the medial part of the lamina perpendicularis of the palatine bone and connected to the descending palatine vein. The venous plexus of the dorsal nasal concha and the venous plexus of the ventral nasal concha on either side of the cavum nasi were connected at the apex nasi and the caudal part of the cartilago septi nasi respectively. Furthermore, the venous plexus of the ventral nasal concha formed a strong anastomosis with the descending palatine vein at the choana.


India and Britain were much bigger players in the eighteenth-century world market for manufactures than were Egypt, the Levant, and the core of the Ottoman Empire, but these eastern Mediterranean regions did export carpets, silks, and other textiles to Europe and the east. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they had lost most of their export market and much of their domestic market to globalization forces and rapid productivity growth in European manufacturing. How different was the Ottoman experience from the rest of the poor periphery? Was de-industrialization more or less pronounced? Was the terms of trade effect bigger or smaller? How much of Ottoman de-industrialization was due to falling world trade barriers such as ocean transport revolutions and European liberal trade policy, how much due to factory-based productivity advance in Europe, how much to declining Ottoman competitiveness in manufacturing, how much to Ottoman railroads penetrating the interior, and how much to Ottoman policy? This article uses a price-dual approach to seek the answers.


The ability to redress one's wrongs has gone through four phases. In the premodern "personal" phase, an aggrieved party enjoyed unlimited power to exact revenge against a suspected offender who stood completely vulnerable to such aggression. In the ensuing "social" phase, the avenger's response was loosely regulated by community customs and local tribunals, which provided partial protection to the party under attack. In the next "administrative" phase, a claimant's recourse was strictly controlled and copiously administered by the state to curb abuses within the previous justice systems. In the final "process" phase, the state guaranteed that its own processes could not be used as a tool of oppression against the unjustly accused.The obvious pattern in this progression is the incremental contraction of private recourse rights and corresponding expansion of public rights to private defense. The present paper — which will appear as a chapter in my forthcoming book "The Right to Civil Defense in Torts" — explains how tort law and due process shaped these developments. Contrary to one fashionable tort theory, tort law was not created to empower aggrieved parties to get redress from their wrongdoers. That power was and is primordial and perpetual. Rather, tort law arose in the "administrative" phase to hinder such efforts. It did this both by establishing a central grievance system that supplanted existing avenues of recourse and by blocking the remaining road to recovery with a host of substantive, procedural, and evidentiary obstacles. Thus, when the concept of due process emerged in the final phase, it did not impel the recognition of a right to civil recourse, as the trending view suggests. Instead, it tempered that right with a superior right of civil defense. Though originally cast as a general prohibition against arbitrary government action, this due process protection specifically encompasses the state's assistance of unsubstantiated legal proceedings, including the liberty-infringing actions of tort litigation.


A practical handbook on diagnosis and management of common sports injuries. Written for GPs, physiotherapists and sports therapists to tailor diagnosis and suggested therapy, as well as for coaches and athletes, and for keen amateur sports people who want to know what to do if they injure themselves. A clear and easy to follow design with one injury explored per page. Includes the most common lower and upper extremity injuries occurring in team sports such as football/rugby/cricket, and some non-team sports injuries (tennis, running, swimming, skiing). Many people with a sports injury end up giving up exercising or cause further damage because their injury isn't treated properly - either treated as 'non-urgent' because it was caused by sporting activity, or treatment is delayed because of long waiting times, or GPs/physios are unsure of the diagnosis and treatment of sports injuries. GPs usually immediately refer sports injuries to consultants, with a long waiting list for consultation/scan. This means patients suffer for longer, give up exercising and often cause more damage by not following an exercise programme in the meantime. This book will offer diagnosis and how to treat/investigate and refer. Training advice during convalescence will also be given.


We describe the application of wide-field frequency domain Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscopy (FLIM) to imaging in microfluidic devices. FLIM is performed using low cost, intensity modulated Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) for illumination. The use of lifetime imaging for quantitative analysis within such devices is demonstrated by mapping the molecular diffusion of iodide ions across a microchannel.


The EU has widened and deepened the single market over time according to a transactionalist discourse of common-interests in integration. This rationale holds that as amounts of cross-border movement increase, Member State populations should perceive the single market as beneficial, thus leading to the creation of an affective European identity. Instead, as consequences of integration have become more visible, resistance to the EU has become more pronounced, especially with relation to the Union's right of free movement of persons. This thesis argues that interest-based theories of integration ignore prospects for resilient national identities to influence the accordance of solidarity ties, so as to color interest perceptions within national public spheres. Combining the literature on European identity, moral panic and communication studies on news framing, it maintains that the popular news media provide a conduit through which these interest perceptions can be taken up through the tendency of news outlets to report events that deviantly threaten underlying identity conceptions. Through content analysis of 'popular' press in the UK, Spain and Poland, it seeks to show how the inane tendency of news to report events in terms of an identity-based narrative can serve to foment moral panic within national publics. Contrary to interest based theories of integration, the EU's discourse clashes with national identity. Disintegration may be posited as the 'proper stance' to be supported on the part of the public in news narrative, if threatening deviance caused by EU migration is to be resolved.


This paper provides a historical analysis of an urban services district through its examination of the Melbourne wool trade precinct in the 1920s. It is a study of both a local and global community whose social and spatial interaction facilitated large-scale trade of a complex commodity that has rarely been examined. Geographic mapping of the local and global connections of the precinct has been combined with archival evidence. It reveals the "buzz" of the Melbourne precinct, created by local social and professional connections among wool brokers and buyers. "Pipelines" to wool growing and textile regions were developed through overseas branches of firms, with global knowledge exchanged through correspondence, telegraph, and migration. These features shaped the progress of the trade, facilitating improvements in its infrastructure and in the ability of Melbourne's wool brokers and buyers to fulfill their role as intermediaries in the global supply chain for this complex commodity.


The Airborne Prism EXperiment (APEX) is an airborne pushbroom imaging spectrometer for Earth observation. Its products will become available in 2011. APEX is currently prepared for final acceptance configuration completing final hardware upgrades, refined calibration methodologies and test flights. APEX is composed of an airborne dispersive pushbroom imaging spectrometer, a Calibration Home Base (CHB) for instrument calibration and a data Processing and Archiving Facility (PAF) for operational product generation and delivery. A unique In-Flight Characterization (IFC) unit is integrated within the sensor optical head, providing pre- and post- data-acquisition characterization monitoring the instruments spectral and radiometric stability. This paper outlines the activities performed with a special focus on system calibration and validation procedures, as well as preliminary measurement results.


We examine whether financial analysts' forecast accuracy differs between the preand postadoption of Australian Equivalents to the International Financial Reporting Standards (AIFRS). We find that forecast accuracy has improved after Australia adopted AIFRS. As a secondary objective, this paper also investigates the role of financial analysts in reducing information asymmetry in today's Australian capital market. We find weak evidence that more analysts following a stock do not help to improve forecast accuracy by bringing more firm-specific information to the market.


Under this stodgy title, in this ruminative monologue, I wish to take on some meta-metalinguistic questions, regarding certain points of interest in Egyptian as a whole, namely its diachrony: the chronological taxonomy of the huge corpus of corpuses that is the Egyptian language. I shall try to be extra-cautious with banalities, but, as behooves a scholar of more than half-a-century's work on the Egyptian language (always including Coptic), I shall be outspoken to a degree. I will present these reflections as short theses, summing up the central issues involved, all familiar enough. Critical assessment of received notions (I trust not pedantic quibbles) will be followed by a few particularly revealing examples


Retirement benefit guarantees can ensure a minimum standard of living in retirement. I propose a framework to discuss the design of such guarantees. The model features a standard life-cycle setting, in which individual agents' choices can have negative external effects on public finances, whenever their retirement consumption drops below a minimum level. Within this framework, I derive two alternative forms of intervention that can efficiently deliver a minimum standard of living to retirees. According to the first policy, agents use part of their accumulated assets to purchase a claim providing a fixed income stream for the duration of their life. According to the second policy, they purchase an appropriately structured portfolio insurance policy.


Based on a qualitative study of youth identities in Greece, the paper unpacks the dynamic processes of ethnonational (dis)identification and belonging that Albanian young migrants are implicated in.Analysis of in-depth interviews illustrates how racism, coupled with their lack of citizenship, affect their (dis)identifications. Additionally, categorisation is reported to crucially mediate their belonging, giving rise to a double-edged sense of otherness and alienation. The paper concludes by putting forward a conceptualisation of young migrants' collective identities as involving the emotive dialectic of (dis)identification, categorisation and belonging, along with negotiation of boundaries and acceptance by 'others' in both home and settlement


This dissertation focuses on a conjecture of S. Chowla which asserts the equidistribution of the parity of the number of primes dividing the integers represented by a polynomial of degree d. This involves the behaviour of the classical Liouville function λ(n) which captures the parity of the total number of prime factors of an integer n. For any non-square polynomial f(n) with integral coefficients of degree d we consider the distribution of the sequence {λ(f(n))}n=1. Chowla conjectured that the partial sum average of this sequence goes to zero. In the first two chapters we study a weaker form of this conjecture for polynomials of degree 2 with integer and rational coefficients and prove that this sequence takes the values −1 and +1 infinitely often. In the final chapter we show that this partial sum average goes to zero when f(n) = n(n+ 1)(n+ 2) and λ(n) is replaced by the truncated Liouville function λy(n).


The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is one of the brain regions with more prominent changes in human aging. The molecular processes related to the cognitive decline and mood changes during aging are not completely understood. To improve our knowledge, we integrated transcriptomic data of four studies of human PFC from elderly people (58–80 years old) compared with younger people (20–40 years old) using a meta-analytic approximation combined with molecular signature analysis. We identified 1817 differentially expressed genes, 561 up-regulated and 1256 down-regulated. Pathway analysis revealed down-regulation of synaptic genes with conservation of gene expression of other neuronal regions. Additionally, we identified up-regulation of markers of astrogliosis with transcriptomic signature compatible with A1 neurotoxic astrocytes and A2 neuroprotective astrocytes. Response to interferon is related to A1 astrocytes and the A2 phenotype is mediated in aging by activation of sonic hedgehog (SHH) pathway and up-regulation of metallothioneins I and genes of the family ERM (ezrin, radixin, and moesin). The main conclusions of our study are the confirmation of a global dysfunction of the synapses in the aged PFC and the evidence of opposite phenotypes of astrogliosis in the aging brain, which we report for the first time in the present article.


In this paper, attempts were made to study the progression of fibre-matrix adhesion of five composite specimens taking into consideration the hand lay-up method of composite formation. The ampreg 21 epoxy resin was used as the matrix for the glass fibre-epoxy resin formation. E- Glass fibre was used as matrix reinforcement. The morphology and the XRD of these composites were examined. Key of the findings from the morphological analysis of these composites showed that the fractured surface of the samples depicted better adhesion between the matrix and the fibres. The micrographs and EDS of the composite specimens also showed the retention of elemental composition of the glass fibre which is in line with other published works. The XRD results of these composites indicated a peak at Bragg's angle 2θ=20.6 o , affirming the remnant crystalline silica in the composite. Hence, these composites are projected to possess better dimensional stability adaptable for high performance structural applications. Keywords: composite, interfacial adhesion, morphology, reinforcing fibre


Political demands for environmental improvement create obligations for managers that can conflict with shareholder value creation. While differentiating products along environmental lines is a conceptually straightforward way of reconciling these apparently conflicting demands, not all attempts to do so have succeeded. This article describes three requirements for successful environmental product differentiation. Firms must discover or create a willingness in consumers to pay for public goods; they must overcome barriers to the dissemination of credible information about the environmental attributes of their products; and they must defend themselves against imitation. More broadly, environmental strategy must be integrated with the overall strategy of the business. The appropriate environmental strategy depends, like the business's overall strategy, on the fundamental economics of the industry and the business's internal capabilities—basic constraints that have often been obscured in the academic debate about business and the environment.


Objective: The investigation aimed to evaluate the in vitro quantitative phytochemical compositions and antioxidant capacity of the dried leaves of Phragmanthera capitata extracted with different solvents. Methodology: Different phytochemical assays were used to evaluate the phenols, flavonoids, and proanthocyanidin contents of the acetone, methanol, ethanol, and aqueous extracts of the sample. Antioxidant activity was measured using 2,2diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH), 2,2′-azino-bis (3-ethylbenzthiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) (ABTS), Ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), nitric oxide, and total antioxidant capacity (TAC) assays. Results: Methanol had the highest extraction yield (21.50%) followed by aqueous (10.87%). Acetone and ethanol yielded 6.87% and 4.3%, respectively. However, acetone and ethanol extracts had more phenolic content (218.6 ± 3.38 and 214.8 ± 3.56 mg gallic acid equivalent (GAE)/g, respectively) that were significantly higher (P < 0.05) than the methanol and aqueous extracts (203.8 ± 1.95 and 175.5 ± 0.32 mg GAE/mg, respectively). Acetone extract also had more flavonoid and proanthocyanidin contents (679.8 ± 6.26 mg quercetin equivalent/g and 645.7 ± 6.35 mg catechin equivalent/g, respectively) that were significantly higher than the other solvent extracts (P < 0.05). All the solvent fractions showed great antioxidant activities with the acetone fraction having the highest capacity based on ABTS, DPPH, and TAC assays (half maximal inhibitory concentration [IC50] = <5 μg/mL, 24.5 μg/mL, and 85 μg/mL respectively). The methanol extract however had FRAP and nitric oxide antioxidant activities (IC50 = 302 μg/mL and < 25 μg/mL respectively). Conclusion: The findings of this study provide evidence that P. capitata has potential as a natural source of antioxidant with acetone showing to be the best extractant of the polyphenolics with corresponding higher antioxidant activities.


The small‐scale variability and scaling properties of solute transport dynamics were investigated by laboratory experiments. Dye‐stained water was applied at a constant flux in a Plexiglas Hele‐Shaw cell filled with soil material, and the transport process was registered by digital photographs of the cell front, producing a very high resolution in both time (minutes) and space (millimeters). The experiments comprised different cell materials (uniform and natural sand) and different water fluxes. Scaling properties of vertically integrated dye mass distributions were analyzed and modeled using so‐called breakdown coefficients (BDCs), which represent the multiplicative weights in a microcanonical random cascade process. The pdfs of BDCs varied with scale, indicating self‐affine scaling, and were accurately approximated by beta distributions with a scaling parameter. Two versions of BDC‐based random cascade models were used to simulate mass distributions at different time steps. The results support the applicability of random cascade models to subsurface transport processes.


This working paper presents the first step of an ongoing research project which will be continued during the next few years at the University of Economic Sciences in Berlin.

The subject of this paper is the decision-making process for decisions on innovations. During the past three decades considerable efforts have been devoted to investigating the role and importance of innovations for the growth and prosperity of firms both in market and planned economies. Effective management of innovations is a decisive factor in their development. A certain increase of funds devoted to R&D does not result in an appropriate increase of output in terms of productivity. Problems of an "optimal" management of innovations are investigated in many countries.

The study was initiated by decision-makers of a particular industrial branch in the GDR. An analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the decision-making process revealed the necessity of a decision support system. The approach developed is tailored to the case study but is general in several aspects. This paper describes a model for resource allocation in R&D which is well suited for our case study. The choice of the model type was based on an analysis both of the decision-making process in the particular firm and of existing models for this purpose.

A combination of innovation theory and economic-mathematical methods for aiding decisions is from our viewpoint a necessary condition for a successful development and implementation of a system we are aiming at.

A system of this kind will improve the decision-maker's understanding of the relationship between the long-term development of the firm and the resource allocation in R&D.


Over the last decade, the development of methods to promote conversion of one type of cell to a specific type of another cell (or change of cell fate) has received great attention in basic biological research and therapeutic applications. A precise, reproducible and safe protocol for inducing this change is a prerequisite for cellular conversion. Although genetic manipulation, which relies on the introduction of specific genes into cells, is a promising approach, the results of initial investigations have highlighted serious safety concerns associated with forced ectopic gene expression with unpredictable side effects. Alternatively, a chemical approach that relies on the use of small molecules to modulate the cell fate has great potential in terms of precise control and clinical safety. In addition, the ease of application, reproducibility and scalability are features that make a small molecule-based approach an extraordinary resource for this purpose. In this review we summarize methods which have been devised to identify small molecules that induce cellular conversion and highlight recent advances made using small molecule modulators to induce changes in the fate of cells.


Acrel's "ganglion" is a controversial structure found towards the dorsum of the wrist. It is thought to be either the distal swelling of the posterior interosseous nerve or even a cystic tumour on an extensor tendon of the wrist named after the Swedish surgeon Olof af Acrel in the 18th century. The function and exact location of this swelling remain a mystery within published literature. It has been in the past a target for anaesthetic blocks; however histological studies suggest it to be devoid of nerve cell bodies; hence it is deemed to be a 'pseudoganglion'. This study aims to determine the possibility of identifying Acrel's "ganglion" using ultrasound. Ten wrists were examined and compared using a GE LOGIQ e ultrasound system with a 12L-RS transducer. A hypoechoic structure was found within the fourth extensor compartment in all the wrists investigated. Our findings suggest that a structure located in the described site of Acrel's "ganglion" appears to be hypoechoic, contrary to the typical hyperechoic appearance of a nerve. It is possible to visualize Acrel's "ganglion" using ultrasound. Our findings also back up histological studies indicating it is not the termination of the posterior interosseous nerve. Documentation of the exact location of this pseudoganglion has clinical implications. Future studies should focus on the benefits of introducing an aesthetic agent in a precise location rather than distal part of interosseous nerve as there are probably no cell bodies at this location.


This report examines the educational leadership development system in England over the last 15 years to identify ideas American leaders and policymakers might learn from looking cross-nationally. The report describes the rise of the National College for School Leadership in England, which spearheaded much of the early policy development and enactment and the subsequent governmental shift towards a more decentralized policy of fostering school networks. Supovitz envisions the potential assimilation of these two movements into an integrated lattice for school leadership. The lattice for school leadership in England is the careful integration of formal and social learning opportunities for leaders. It features a centrally developed, high-quality leadership development program combined with lateral social networks. These complementary elements of leadership development are carefully enmeshed in a system that provides clear responsibilities for multiple levels of leadership within schools, incentives for identifying and grooming leadership within schools, pathways for leadership progression, and certification for leader attainments. All of these elements are supported by an accountability structure that emphasizes the contribution of school leadership and teaching in school improvement.


A growing body of evidence shows a widening gulf between baseball and African-Americans. African-Americans comprise less than three percent of the players at the highest competitive levels of youth baseball and three percent of NCAA Division I baseball players. African-Americans constitute less than five percent of spectators at some Major League parks and the percentage of African-American players in the Major Leagues has reached a 30-year low. Basketball has become pre-eminent among sports in African-American culture. Baseball assumed that role at one time, with even small African-American enclaves sponsoring and supporting teams during the first decades of the 20th Century. But the cultural shift away from baseball to basketball has been brought about partly through the process of collective identity. Collective identity involves the absorption of cultural traits by an individual in the formation of self-identity. African-American youth are more apt to gravitate to basketball rather than baseball because of the cultural premium placed on the former and various factors that facilitate interest in the sport. A survey of literature on race theory and on leisure studies shows that four factors tied to collective identity influence African-American youths' preference for basketball: encouragement by authority figures to pursue basketball, basketball's portrayal as a form of expression and empowerment, the abundance of black role models in basketball, and the perception of basketball's influence on social mobility. Future research should explore other cultural and social factors which predispose youth to favor certain sports.


A 32-year-old left-handed woman presented with a 4-week history of progressive left hand numbness, tingling, and clumsiness. Symptoms worsened until she found it difficult to write and perform fine motor tasks. She reported having no transient neurological symptoms in the past. Her medical history was significant only for Dengue fever acquired several years ago while on a visit to Southeast Asia. She was taking no medications, and a review of systems was noncontributory.


Abstract A number of life cycle assessment (LCA) tools have been suggested for pavements. However, very few have been adopted by the road authorities. The key reasons for this lack of implementation have been the tendency for very broad LCA analyses that include system boundaries considerably beyond the more natural system boundaries associated with road design, construction and maintenance as well as the lack of available LCA tools that have attributes that reflect key road properties. In this paper, a new attribute based pavement LCA framework is evaluated for use on real road materials. Aggregates from two different sources and the effect of using a warm mix asphalt additive (WMAA) in asphalt mixtures were investigated in the laboratory. Different pavement design alternatives were generated using the laboratory data and analysed using the road LCA framework. Asphalt production and material transportation were found to be the most energy-consuming processes. The results presented show that having actual pavement material properties as the key attributes in LCA enables a pavement-focused assessment of environmental impacts associated with different design options, and LCA can help in decision support by evaluating environmental impacts of different design alternatives in a project planning/design stage.


By understanding how the horse's biomechanics works and how to influence it, most of the misunderstanding between horse and rider is avoidable, and the vast majority of schooling problems solvable. Although in its infancy, equine sport science teaches us how a horse's body and mind functions. Through an understanding of this natural science, together with literature left to us by the classical masters, training horses, without the dependence on gadgets, becomes extremely easy and logical. The knowledge of equine biomechanics turns horse training and riding teaching into a completely logical process.In this work, Karin Blignault investigates the horse's natural methods of performing movements and compares this with the movements he performs in dressage and jumping. Examining each individual gait and movement - including lateral work, piaffe, passage, flying changes - the author highlights the biomechanical difficulties the horse encounters in his effort to please the rider, gives suggestions to riders and trainers on how to overcome these difficulties, and further gives judges pointers on how to recognize these problems.


Education researchers and classroom teachers have argued that the constant pressure to measure and rank students makes it difficult to shape assessment as an episode of learning. Yet we know little about how learning moves in and through assessment of any kind. Building on two national multisited studies, the research reported here uses ethnographic techniques to examine learning within critique. Critique is a form of assessment through which young people jointly judge their own work and that of their peers. The article focuses on episodes of critique within two nonschool sites for collaborative production involving ethnically and economically diverse groups of youth—a community-based video project and an organization in which young people create radio stories for local and national broadcast. Learning environments such as these draw voluntary youth participation and are organized around sustained projects released to outside audiences. Findings indicate that critique manifests itself as an episode of learning by engaging young people in joint assessment events that are improvisational, reciprocal, and oriented toward the future of the work under review. Intra- and cross-site comparisons suggest that critique is likely to arise within specific conditions: when stakes are intense, metastandards are subjected to review, accountability is mutual and interactively sustained, and interdisciplinary practice is mandatory. The article reviews various ways to conceptualize learning and argues in the end for a theory of learning as production, a way of making. Implications include new ideas for research methodologies and new understandings of youth-adult collaborations in learning and production.


Stem cell research, especially the one dealing with human embryonic stem cells, is a major topic nowadays. In the last few years studies about human embryonic stem cell derived cardiomyocytes highlighted the importance of those, as their characteristics are almost identical as of the cardiomyocytes in the heart (i.e. the contraction of those cells). The studies concentrate on the ability of using cardiomyocytes in the drug development for cardiac diseases or in regenerative medicine and cell replacement therapies. In contrast some researchers concentrate on microRNAs (miRNAs) as regulators in the development of cardiomyocytes. This study combines both research topics as it deals with stem cells and miRNAs (as well as their target mRNAs). A main objective is to find differentially expressed genes by using Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM) as method. Furthermore miRNA target prediction is applied and the identified targets are compared with the ones found by SAM. With an intersection approach we derived 41 targets of up-regulated miRNAs and 25 targets of down-regulated miRNAs, which can be the basis for further studies (i.e. knock-out experiments).


This article reports on the preliminary findings of a two-staged empirical study aimed at gaining insights into the variables salient in the early language and literacy development of young English language learners (ELL). Increasingly, young ELL, whether foreign-born or Canadian-born, arrive at school with little developed English-language proficiency. They must acquire oral language and literacy synchronously. Stage one of this study consists of time series data for reading and vocabulary scores using the Gates MacGinitie reading tests. Stage two consists of an early literacy screen and vocabulary profiles generated from an oral storytelling task for 65 kindergarten-aged ELL and a comparison group of 25 native speakers of English (NS). The findings suggest that although reading and vocabulary are closely interrelated in the stages of early literacy development, over time ELL youngsters face the greatest learning challenges in the area of vocabulary development. Implications for the design of early literacy programs are offered


In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution protects a
woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy, Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, and that a State may not unduly burden the exercise of that fundamental right by regulations that prohibit or substantially limit access to the means of effectuating that decision, Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179. But rather than settling the issue, the Court's rulings have kindled heated debate and precipitated a variety of governmental actions at the national, State and local levels designed either to nullify the rulings or hinder their
effectuation. This brief discusses this ongoing issue, including related legislation and judicial history.


In this paper we describe theoretical synthesis of the x-ray diffraction line profile as a superposition of the
spectral components Ka1 and Ka2 optimized to the experimental data by the genetic algorithm and nonlinear
optimization methods 'Nelder-Mead downhill simplex' and Levenberg-Marquardt method. Such combination of global and
local optimization methods results in a mathematical model of the diffraction profile, providing reliable determininig of
diffraction line characteristics for the material structure properties study. Experimetal results of the optimization preocedures are
given too.


Battle: A History of Combat and Culture spans the globe and the centuries to explore the way ideas shape the conduct of warfare. Drawing its examples from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and America, John A. Lynn challenges the belief that technology has been the dominant influence on combat from ancient times to the present day. In battle, ideas can be more far more important than bullets or bombs. Carl von Clausewitz proclaimed that war is politics, but even more basically, war is culture. The hard reality of armed conflict is formed by - and, in turn, forms - a culture's values, assumptions, and expectations about fighting. The author examines the relationship between the real and the ideal, arguing that feedback between the two follows certain discernable paths. Battle rejects the currently fashionable notion of a "Western way of warfare" and replaces it with more nuanced concepts of varied and evolving cultural patterns of combat. After considering history, Lynn finally asks how the knowledge gained might illuminate our understanding of the war on terrorism.


The penetration levels of wind turbines (WTs) in power grid have significantly increased in the last decade. These renewable energy resources integrated with doubly fed induction generators (DFIGs) are able to provide reactive power to support power grid during steady-state and transient state conditions. However, the DFIGs suffer from high sensitivity to system disturbance and thus, they cannot be kept connected with the utility under severe faults. Nowadays, most machines are equipped with rotor crowbar protection to prevent the damage on the converters caused by system disturbances. In this paper, two types of crowbar protections: one in the rotor winding and the second in the DC link are used to protect the rotor side converter and minimize the rotor crowbar switching time. The combined crowbars are coordinated using a novel control strategy to limit the rotor current and smoothing the DC voltage fluctuation to enhance the DFIG reactive power control for fault ride-through capability. The behavior of the DFIG is investigated when the combined crowbars are operating with the proposed coordinated control approach and results are presented.


We draw on a newly collected historical dataset of fiscal variables for a large panel of countries— to our knowledge, the most comprehensive database currently available—to gauge the degree of fiscal prudence or profligacy for each country over the past several decades. Specifically, our dataset consists of fiscal revenues, primary expenditures, the interest bill (and thus both the primary and the overall fiscal deficit), the government debt, and gross domestic product, for 55 countries for up to two hundred years. For the first time, a large cross country historical data set covers both fiscal stocks and flows. Using Bohn's (1998) approach and other tests for fiscal sustainability, we document how the degree of prudence or profligacy varies significantly over time within individual countries. We find that such variation is driven in part by unexpected changes in potential economic growth and sovereign borrowing costs.


The notion of "human rights" is widely used in political and moral debates. The core idea, that all human beings have some inalienable basic rights, is appealing and has an important practical function: It allows moral criticism of various wrongs and calls for action in order to prevent them. The articles in this collection take up a tension between the wide political use of human rights claims and some intellectual skepticism about them. In particular, three major issues call for clarification: the questions of how to justify human rights, how to determine their scope and the corresponding obligations, and how to overcome the tension between universal normative claims and particular moralities.


Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, established in January 2007, is the latest in a long line of Algerian jihadi groups. Like many terrorist organizations, AQIM enjoys global media exposure on activist Internet sites, but unlike other al-Qaeda franchises, it has managed to maintain its indigenous leadership. The group has become known for fearsome suicide attacks, which were previously unheard of in Algeria, but has failed to incorporate the jihadi outfi ts from neighboring Morocco and Tunisia. AQIM has therefore focused on the northern Sahara, carving out safe havens and threatening weak government forces,first in Mauritania, and now increasingly in Mali. At the outset, AQIM's global strategy was based on the triangular dynamic of the Middle East (where Iraq serves as a magnet for potential recruits), North Africa (where the group functions as a regional jihadi recruiting hub), and Europe (where it pursues aggressive propaganda against the French and Spanish "Crusaders"). The demise of al-Qaeda in Iraq jeopardized this grand design, undermining AQIM's capabilities on both sides of the Mediterranean, but although it primarily targets Western "Crusaders" in its own Algerian and Saharan environment, AQIM remains wedded to a global agenda.The threat of AQIM must be contained, and hopefully, ultimately eradicated. Algeria and the other targeted states have a long record of fi ghting similar jihadi networks, but they cannot confront transnational movements without international cooperation. To address this threat, regional security organizations can enhance much-needed bilateral exchanges among law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Additionally, the countries implementing the UN global strategy against terrorism should focus considerable attention on North Africa and the Sahel, where the threat is on the rise, but not yet out of control.


This thesis is concerned with the design of multiplier-less (ML) finite impulse response (FIR) digital filters. The use of multiplier-less digital filters results in simplified filtering structures, better throughput rates and higher speed. These characteristics are very desirable in many DSP systems. This thesis concentrates on the design of digital filters with power-of-two coefficients that result in simplified filtering structures. Two distinct classesof ML FIR filter design algorithms are developed and compared
with traditional techniques. The first class is based on the sensitivity of filter coefficients to rounding to power-of-two. Novel elements include extending of the algorithm for multiple-bands filters and introducing mean square error as the sensitivity criterion. This improves the performance of the algorithm and reduces the complexity of resulting filtering structures. The second class of filter design algorithms is based on evolutionary techniques, primarily genetic algorithms. Three different algorithms based on genetic algorithm kernel are developed. They include simple genetic algorithm, knowledge-based genetic algorithm and hybrid of genetic algorithm and simulated annealing. Inclusion of the additional knowledge has been found very useful when re-designing filters or refining previous designs. Hybrid techniques are useful when exploring large, N-dimensional searching spaces. Here, the genetic algorithm is used to explore searching space rapidly, followed by fine search using simulated annealing. This approach has been found beneficial for design of high-order filters. Finally, a formula for estimation of the filter length from its specification and complementing both
classes of design algorithms, has been evolved using techniques of symbolic regression and genetic programming. Although the evolved formula is very complex and not easily understandable, statistical analysis has shown that it produces

more
accurate results than traditional Kaiser's formula.

In summary, several novel algorithms for the design of multiplier-less digital filters
have been developed. They outperform traditional techniques that are used for the
design of ML FIR filters and hence contributed to the knowledge in the field of ML
FIR filter design.


The countries like India with increasing demand of electric power day by day it is difficult to expand the existing transmission system due to difficulties in right of way and cost problem in transmission network expansion. So, we need power flow controllers to increasing transmission capacity and controlling power flows Increased demands on transmission, absence of long-term planning, and the need to provide open access to generating companies and customers, all together have created tendencies toward less security and reduced quality of supply. Due to increase in demand, the transmission system becomes more stressed, which in turn, makes the system more vulnerable to voltage instability. Voltage stability plays an important role in the operation of the power system and there are major concerns about it for better utilizations of the system. Improvement in power system performance can be obtained using flexible AC transmission systems (FACTS). FACTS devices are capable of the simultaneous control of the bus voltage and real and reactive power flow in transmission systems independently; but because of excessive cost, the number and the location of these devices should be indicated optimally. This paper proposes a method of optimization of STATCOM allocation based on specific coefficients algorithm (SCA) to specify the number, location and input values by minimizing the voltage indices of system buses. The proposed SCA noticeably improves the accuracy and performance of traditionally used optimization processes especially in large scale networks. This method is applied to the 14-bus IEEE standard system. The results of ordinary and new optimization algorithm have shown the great improvement in optimization process using SCA.


This thesis comprises three essays in the field of applied microeconomic theory. In
the first essay we present a generalized Nash model of household decision making that
does not restrict a priori the household's location on the Pareto frontier and that allows
the opportunity cost of household membership to influence the intrahousehold allocation
of resources. This approach generalizes both the collective and the symmetric Nash
models of household decision making. Formally, we derive the restrictions on household
demands implied by the generalized Nash model and we show that the collective model,
the symmetric Nash model and the traditional (unitary) model of the household are all
special cases of the generalized Nash model.
In the second essay we analyze the optimal risk-sharing contract to emerge between
two risk averse individuals under repeated double moral hazard. Several interesting
properties of the optimal contract emerge. First, the contract is less sensitive to the
performance of any single individual than would have been the case under single moral
hazard. Second, a well-known condition describing the optimal level of intertemporal
consumption smoothing under repeated single agency is generalized to take account of
the double incentive problem. In particular, when both individuals face binding incentive
constraints then the expectation of the ratio of person i's to person j's marginal utility
in period t is strictly greater than the known ratio of person i's to person j's marginal
utility in period t - 1, i,j = 1,2, i /= j.
In the final essay we examine the optimal balance between the provision of income
insurance through family networks and provision through the redistributive tax system.
We demonstrate that even when there is full risk-sharing within the family there are nevertheless
further welfare gains to be achieved through an appropriate level of government
intervention. We also demonstrate that where intra-family moral hazard implies that
only partial risk-sharing is achieved within the family, the existence of further welfare
gains from government intervention will depend on the effects of such intervention on the
intra-family income transfer and on effort incentives.


Translational stop codon readthrough was virtually unknown in eukaryotic genomes until recent developments in comparative genomics and new experimental techniques revealed evidence of readthrough in hundreds of fly genes and several human, worm, and yeast genes. Here, we use the genomes of 21 species of Anopheles mosquitoes and improved comparative techniques to identify evolutionary signatures of conserved, functional readthrough of 353 stop codons in the malaria vector, Anopheles gambiae, and 51 additional Drosophila melanogaster stop codons, with several cases of double and triple readthrough including readthrough of two adjacent stop codons, supporting our earlier prediction of abundant readthrough in pancrustacea genomes. Comparisons between Anopheles and Drosophila allow us to transcend the static picture provided by single-clade analysis to explore the evolutionary dynamics of abundant readthrough. We find that most differences between the readthrough repertoires of the two species are due to readthrough gain or loss in existing genes, rather than to birth of new genes or to gene death; that RNA structures are sometimes gained or lost while readthrough persists; and that readthrough is more likely to be lost at TAA and TAG stop codons. We also determine which characteristic properties of readthrough predate readthrough and which are clade-specific. We estimate that there are more than 600 functional readthrough stop codons in A. gambiae and 900 in D. melanogaster. We find evidence that readthrough is used to regulate peroxisomal targeting in two genes. Finally, we use the sequenced centipede genome to refine the phylogenetic extent of abundant readthrough.