This dissertation documents signification research conducted into exportation mitigation techniques. In doing so the dissertation firstly explores current mitigation techniques floating, shade and chemical covers. The dissertation highlights suitable methods for monitoring evaporation loss in small water facilities. Using the NCEA Evaporation Compound Facility field trials were conducted. Understanding the behaviour at the air/water, will hopefully lead to improvements in the performance of monolayers through the identification of optimum application periods.

The field research conducted compares the evaporative performance of an artificially imposed warm and cold surface film. Using black plastic covers to impose a warm surface film and a bilge pump to mix water and impose a cold surface film. A series of thermocouple probes are used to analysis the air/water interface and monitoring the presents of warm and cold surface film within two tanks. Through field trials an understanding of the natural resistance to evaporation loss imposed by a thermally stable warm surface film is explored. It is predicted that the resistance of a thermally stable warm surface film may exceed the resistance imposed by an artificial monolayer.

The dissertation finds that a warm surface film consistently recorded higher rate of evaporative loss. However significant turnover events are experienced within the tank where the artificial warm surface film is imposed. The turnover event causes the resistance imposed by the warm surface film, to be outweighed by a dominate cold surface film. The turnover which occurs daily around 5:00pm implies that the application of a monolayer overnight would significantly reduce rates of evaporation.


Abstract The statistical description of a hot, magnetized, and classical plasma is reviewed. The latter represents the appropriate model for a fusion plasma in magnetic confinement. Approaches for (reduced) kinetic descriptions are presented. We first briefly discuss the Landau-Fokker-Planck equation. The famous Boltzmann equation for dilute gases is then presented (without a systematic derivation), and the differences between the kinetic and the hydrodynamic regimes are worked out. In the main part, the consequences of long-range Coulomb interactions are demonstrated. Several plasma-kinetic equations, like for instance the Balescu-Lenard equation, are systematically presented. Physical consequences from the linearization of the kinetic equations, e.g., collision frequencies and Landau damping, are elucidated. In the final part of the paper the specific re-formulations in magnetized plasmas are sketched. The drift-kinetic and the gyro-kinetic approaches are presented. The paper is concluded by an outlook on often used truncations.


Chöd (gcod), "severance" or "cutting," is a Tibetan term referring to a cycle of Tibetan Buddhist practice and to the lineage initiated by the Tibetan woman Machik Lapdrön sometime in the 11th or 12th century. It is primarily based on the teachings of the perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) that represent the second phase of Buddhist texts that developed in India. In Tibet itself, Chöd was one of the many new sects that flourished in the second dissemination of Buddhism from India from 950 to 1350ce. Chöd has been classified as a branch of Zhijé (zhi byed) or "Pacification," one of the eight great practice lineages that trace back to India, though no actual text on Chöd has been discovered in the early texts of Zhijé. Despite this quandary, its classification has afforded a kind of validation in being connected with the sources of Buddhism through the Indian master Dampa Sangyé.
 Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Machik Lapdrön herself is the sole progenitor for the teachings and the lineage. This woman from the area of Lap in central Tibet was known as Lapkyi Drönma, "the Light of Lap." The respectful title of Machik, "One Mother," was added later and is shared with several other important women of the time, often leading to confusion. Lapdrön showed remarkable abilities from an early age, and later gained mastery of speed reading. This led to a job as a chaplain in a patron's house, where she met her future partner, providing her biographers with a fascinating narrative revealing the problematic status of female masters in Tibet. The recitation of prajñāpāramitā sūtras also led to her epiphany around the parts on māra, "devil," "demon," or (spiritual) "death." This, along with her visions of the bodhisattva Tārā and the important connection with the Indian master Dampa Sangyé, were the inspiration for what became one of the most widespread practices in Tibet.
 The early Chöd teachings represent aspects derived from both sūtra and tantra sources. The focus is on the understanding of emptiness that severs fixation on the reification of the self and the resultant conduct based on compassion for others. The impediments that prevent such realization, called māras in Sanskrit, were a point of departure. As time went on, specific techniques and methods of practice (sādhana) accrued to this philosophy. While the main practice has remained the cultivation of insight and the enactment of separating the consciousness from the body, the post-meditation practice known as lü jin (lus byin) "giving the body" developed elaborate visualizations and ritual accouterments that came to dominate popular practice. Renowned as a charnel ground practice due to the visualized offering of one's corpse as food for demons and other beings in situations that are intended to provoke fear, it is this that has become known far and wide as Chöd. The sources for this aspect are obscure and may well come from the surrounding culture of the Tibetan plateau, harking back to Bön and other pre-Buddhist practices. Some elements associated with shamanic practices are enacted in the Chöd rituals, despite its Buddhist soteriological assertions.
 With its beautiful melodies and lurid visualizations, Chöd quickly became popular in Tibet for exorcism, healing, and other practical usages. Its followers did not establish monasteries, as the lifestyle of roaming mendicants was emphasized, but Chöd was incorporated into most other schools in Tibet. Their liturgies are drawn from the works of Lapdrön's descendants, or from visionary experiences, or found as treasure texts (terma). As of the early 21st century, Chöd has gained popularity worldwide, with many iterations in 21st-century practice.


The utilization of three novel and distinct agricultural waste materials, namely casuarina fruit powder (CFP), sorghum stem powder (SSP) and banana stem powder (BSP) as low cost adsorbents for reducing chemical oxygen demand (COD) levels of coffee industry wastewater has been examined. Prepared adsorbents were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopic (EDAX) and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy. The effects of parameters like adsorbent dose, pH, temperature, agitation rate and time of adsorption on the reduction of COD levels were analyzed for each adsorbent individually and the efficiency order is CFP>SSP>BSP. Based on the extent of compatibility to Freundlich/Langmuir adsorption isotherm and different models (pseudo-first order and second order, Boyd, Weber's and Elovich), simultaneous occurrence of chemisorption and physisorption was proposed. Based on the observations, it is proposed that three kinetic stages involve in adsorption process viz., diffusion of sorbate to sorbent, intra particle diffusion and then establishment of equilibrium. As these three adsorbents exhibit adsorption capacity more than 80%, the adsorbents prepared from agricultural wastes have promising role towards reduction of COD from industrial wastewater to contribute environmental protection.


Perspective on the paper by Booth et al (see page398)

There is currently a great dilemma regarding the early management of extremely low birthweight (ELBW) infants, which involves the use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) after delivery compared with the use of prophylactic or early surfactant. Although there is good evidence that prophylactic and early surfactants reduce mortality and respiratory morbidity,1–4 few of these studies had large numbers of the smallest babies who are the longest-term residents of our neonatal intensive care units; also, none of the studies randomised infants in the placebo or control group to treatment with early CPAP. In addition, surfactant treatment may be associated with a lowered rate of milder disabilities at 1 year of age.5 The use of mechanical ventilation, especially in the first few days of life, seems to considerably increase the risk for bronchopulmonary dysplasia as defined by the need for oxygen at 36 weeks,6,7 and the incidence of bronchopulmonary disease (BPD) may be increasing in the most premature infants8,9 with a lesser incidence of the most severe forms of this disorder.10 There is an established association between the occurrence and severity of BPD and later neurodevelopmental disabilities.11–15 In our current quandary, is it better to avoid mechanical ventilation in the most vulnerable of preterm infants to circumvent the effects of intubation and baro-volutrauma and not administer early surfactants by using early CPAP, or do the benefits of intubation with the administration of early surfactant outweigh any subsequent morbidities seen with the use of CPAP?

Gregory et al 16 showed that CPAP improved oxygenation in the presurfactant era for infants with respiratory distress and that CPAP was able to help in the establishment and maintenance of functional residual capacity. Subsequent …


In 2000 the Security Council unanimously adopted the UN Resolution 1325 on "women, peace and security". The Resolution urged member states to take action to protect women and to involve them as equal actors in conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding. To take action, several member states developed National Action Plans to foster methods and tools to improve women's participation. Two of those countries were Sweden and France. With a theoretical starting point in gender mainstreaming, the Author use a qualitative text analysis to compare the French and Swedish National Action Plan for implement Security Council Resolution 1325 on "women, peace and security". The comparison is executed by analyzing the 18 paragraphs of the UN Resolution 1325. Then, Resolution 1325 is used as a model to compare the two action plans and following to investigate the two countries' interpretation. Since the UN Resolution 1325 does not make any priorities or specify any interests before another in the resolution, there could be some variations. The aim is to investigate if there are any obstacles for collaboration between Sweden and France in international operations on "women, peace and security" matters. This is interesting because the countries both have international commitments within the United Nations and the European Union.


In this student creativity competition karsa cipta division, we would like to create an application tool to learn violin instrument named Violin Education Kit (VOEDK), by using application on android to execute scoring process. The main goal of this tool is to help those who wanted to learn violin, especially for children. Also, it could help those who have not be able to read nots, because it has a basic music tutorial. The method uses an Arduino microcontroller to convert digital signal (Digital Signal Processing) from silent violin, then the converted digital signal would be transmitted to Android Tab by using bluetooth. The application on Android Tab would synchronised the digital signal with a certain note, then the result will appear like on a game fiture. This tool is also completed with sound effect and monitor sound, so hopefully user would not be bored in learning. Applicable for solo concert. Keywords: Android, Violin, Bluetooth, DSP..


Mutations caused by the insertion of members of the Ac or Spm family of transposable elements result in a great diversity of phenotypes. With the cloning of the mutant genes and the characterization of their products, the mechanisms underlying phenotypic diversity are being deciphered. These mechanisms include (i) imprecise excision of transposable elements, which can result in the addition of amino acids to proteins; (ii) DNA methylation, which has been correlated with the activity of the element; (iii) transposase-mediated deletions within elements, which can inactivate an element or lead to a new unstable phenotype; and (iv) removal of transcribed elements from RNA, which can facilitate gene expression despite the insertion of elements into exons. An understanding of the behavior of the maize elements has provided clues to the function of cryptic elements in all maize genomes.


The Galapagos triple junction is a ridge-ridge-ridge triple junction where the Cocos, Nazca, and Pacifi c plates meet around the Galapagos microplate. Directly north of the large scarps of the Cocos-Nazca Rift, a 250-km-long and 50-km-wide band of northwest-southeast‐trending cracks with volcanics at their western ends crosscuts and blankets the north-south‐trending abyssal hills of the East Pacifi c Rise. It appears that the roughly northeast-southwest extension of East Pacifi c Rise‐generated seafl oor has been accommodated by a succession of minor rifts that, during at least the past 4 m.y., had their triple junctions with the East Pacifi c Rise at distances of 50‐100 km north of the tip of the propagating Cocos-Nazca Rift. We propose that the rift locations are controlled by stresses associated with the dominant Cocos-Nazca Rift, and scaled by the distance of its tip to the East Pacifi c Rise. We speculate that similar ephemeral rifts occurred south of the Cocos-Nazca Rift and were instrumental in the origin of the rotating Galapagos microplate ca. 1.5 Ma.


Afterlife expert and bestselling author Jacky Newcomb knows that the spirit world is real. Thousands of people have experienced contact from the departed or seen the afterlife themselves. After collecting these experiences for 12 years, Jacky answers key questions in Heaven, like: What happens to the soul once the body dies? Do our experiences on earth and our beliefs affect the next part of the journey? Did our loved ones make it safely to heaven? Can we communicate with the departed? In "Heaven", Jacky Newcomb will bring peace, reassurance and hope to everyone who has ever wondered about life after death. Jacky Newcomb is the UK's leading expert on the afterlife, having dedicated her life to the subject. She is a "Sunday Times" bestselling author with numerous awards to her name, a regular columnist for "Take A Break's Fate & Fortune" magazine, and is a regular on ITV's "This Morning", Lorraine Kelly' show and "C5 Live" with Gabby Logan.


Abstract The purpose of this paper is first to discuss the methods developed in our three-dimensional pressurized water reactor core dynamics code SIMTRAN and its coupling to the system code RELAP-5 for general transient and safety analysis. Then, we summarize its demonstration application to the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA)/Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Benchmark on Main Steam Line Break (MSLB), co-sponsored by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and other regulatory institutions. In particular, our work has been supported by the Spanish "Consejo de Seguridad Nuclear" (CSN) under a CSN research project. Our results for the steady states and the guided-core transients, proposed as exercise 2 of the MSLB benchmark, show small deviations from the mean results of all participants, especially in core average parameters. For the full-coupled core-plant transients, exercise 3, a detailed comparison with the University of Purdue–NRC results using PARCS/RELAP-5, shows quite good agreement in both integral and local parameters, especially for the more extreme return-to-power scenario.


In this note, we provide a brief outline of the recent developments in wage measures in Canada. We then assess whether wage growth is consistent with its fundamentals. Our analysis indicates that wage pressures remain subdued and almost all measures show that wage growth has remained below its historical average since mid-2015. With respect to the relationship between wage growth and its fundamentals, we find that the wages and total compensation growth was weaker than expected considering the rate of unemployment observed since 2015. This is partly due to the weak labour productivity growth. Finally, we observe that pressures on domestic production costs coming from wages remain modest.


Homeownership Assistance Act of 1989 - Amends the National Housing Act to create a special mortgage insurance program for first-time homebuyers, including homebuyers of manufactured homes. Authorizes the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to insure a mortgage loan of up to 97 percent of appraised value for the first $50,000 (currently $25,000) of a home's value. Repeals the current dollar cap on FHA insured mortgages in high cost areas. Authorizes the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure adjustable rate mortgages with annual interest rate increases of up to two percent (currently one percent). Repeals the aggregate annual limit on such insured loans. Defines first-time homebuyer as an individual who or whose spouse has not owned a principal residence during the 18 months prior to an FHA insured home purchase. Authorizes an FHA demonstration program to insure mortgages for first-time homebuyer downpayments where the purchase is primarily financed or assisted by tax-exempt or other government assistance. Amends the Federal National Mortgage Association Charter Act to authorize the Government National Mortgage Association to create a secondary market for first-time homebuyer downpayment loans. Authorizes an FHA demonstration program to insure 100 percent of a home's value for a first-time homebuyer provided that the downpayment will be paid within three years by an additional monthly payment. Requires participants to receive financial counseling. Amends the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 to empower the Internal Revenue Service to confiscate defaulting taxpayers' tax refunds. Requires the Secretary to submit annual program reports to the Congress.


This paper undertakes to make some comparative observations on the thought of Murray N. Rothbard and Leo Strauss. It hinges around Rothbard and Strauss's different views on such subjects as the philosophy of Hobbes, Locke and Hume, the meaning of natural law, natural rights, and natural equality, the roots of liberalism, conservatism and totalitarianism, and la querelle entre les anciens et les moderns. While sharing a common commitment to reason and its power to explain our world and a common rejection of modern relativism, subjectivism, scepticism, nihilism and "postmodernism," Strauss and Rothbard part company on a series of vital questions. The nub of their disagreement is to do with the compatibility of the doctrine of modern, "Lockean" natural rights with the pre-modern tradition of natural law and its claim that there are natural obligations or duties of equal or higher importance than natural rights. While himself not being a natural law thinker Strauss nevertheless insists against those who take the "Rothbardian" view that the doctrines of modern natural rights and pre-modern natural law, to say nothing of classical natural right, are incompatible. This difference on the history of western philosophy is reflected in the political disagreement between Rothbard and Strauss on the nature and meaning of modern liberal democracy. While Strauss is only a qualified supporter of modern liberalism given its premise of the absolute priority of the "self" or the Cartesian ego in more technical terms, Rothbard is a vigorous supporter of modern liberalism precisely because it accords absolute superiority to the "self" or ego. For Rothbard liberal democracy is estimable to the very extent to which it is prepared to push hard for the sovereignty of the "Lockean" absolute "self" and less so to the extent it does not. But for Strauss, this commitment to the primary and radical detachment of the individual from all social or political connection is exceedingly problematic precisely because it is a political reflection of the radical subjectivism of modern philosophy which radical subjectivism he takes to be at the root of liberal democracy's most evident evils. In short, Rothbard pits the radically free and unencumbered self against the Leviathan state while Strauss pits classical vision of man as a naturally political or social animal against them both. While Strauss sees a necessary connection between "metaphysics" or "natural theology" and the good society, Rothbard sees any such connection as a implicitly representing an authoritarian or even totalitarian threat to "Lockean" rights and individual freedom, which rights and freedom he takes to be man's highest achievement.


This project has been successful in developing new approaches for the production of juvenile prawns at high densities (> 2,000 prawns.m-3) at both experimental and semi-commercial scales in Exmouth Gulf. This new production technology could lead to a 3 phase approach to the production of prawns: hatchery, nursery and grow-out. Surveys of benthic habitats and juvenile prawns and their predators, combined with information from fishery independent surveys, identified seagrass beds in the southern and south-eastern Exmouth Gulf as the best potential release sites for juvenile prawns. These surveys also found that the extensive loss of seagrass following Cyclone Vance is likely to have led to very low catches in the tiger prawn fishery and future work will investigate estimating the extent of the seagrass nursery habitat for inclusion as an environmental variable in evaluating stock recruitment relationships. Eight reliable microsatellite markers have now been developed for P. esculentus and tested to determine their effectiveness for identifying released ("domesticated") from wild prawns using new statistical methods. Results showed that these eight loci alone would not enable reliable discrimination between released and wild prawns unless the identity of the released-stock's fathers could be determined. This could be achieved in a cost-effective manner if the fathers' genotypes could be deduced by genotyping a single mixed batch of larvae from each spawning, given the maternal genotypes. The results from the bio-economic model show that enhancement is only "profitable" about 50% of the time (excluding capital costs and depreciation), but highlighted that little is known of the values for density-dependent mortality and mortality due to harvest, transport and immediately after release.


The pace and sophistication of data breaches is growing all the time. Anyone with valuable secrets can be a target, and likely already is. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, at the time of this writing, 884,903,517 records were breached in 4,621 incidents documented since 2005. This number is just an estimate based on publicly disclosed and well-documented incidents; the real number is likely much higher. According to data available from datalossdb.org, the size of the major breaches over the past several y...


A document proposes that future spacecraft for planetary and space exploration be designed to enable reuse of drained propellant tanks for occupancy by humans. This proposal would enable utilization of volume and mass that would otherwise be unavailable and, in some cases, discarded. Such utilization could enable reductions in cost, initial launch mass, and number of launches needed to build up a habitable outpost in orbit about, or on the surface of, a planet or moon. According to the proposal, the large propellant tanks of a spacecraft would be configured to enable crews to gain access to their interiors. The spacecraft would incorporate hatchways, between a tank and the crew volume, that would remain sealed while the tank contained propellant and could be opened after the tank was purged by venting to outer space and then refilled with air. The interior of the tank would be pre-fitted with some habitation fixtures that were compatible with the propellant environment. Electrical feed-throughs, used originally for gauging propellants, could be reused to supply electric power to equipment installed in the newly occupied space. After a small amount of work, the tank would be ready for long-term use as a habitation module.


This topical book explores the global experiences of responding to climate change, with perspectives from Australia, China, the European Union, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the United States, as well as the International Energy Agency.


This study introduces the term sales bottleneck, defined as a stage in a total production or service delivery process that limits sales. After analyzing the suitability of traditional methods to find sales bottlenecks, the study proposes the bottleneck accounting model as a method to determine sales bottlenecks and calculate the effect of each of these bottlenecks on profit. Analytical verification shows that this method finds all sales bottlenecks and determines the exact effect on profit. Finally, the method's effectiveness is tested in practice by means of a case study performed within the Rabobank.


This collection of studies analyzes developments in nonprice external competitiveness of France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. While France, Italy, and Portugal have experienced substantial export market share losses, Greece and Spain performed relatively well. Export market share losses appear associated with rigidities in resource allocation (sectoral, geographical, technological) relative to peers and lower productivity gains in high value-added sectors. Disaggregated analysis of goods and services export markets provides insights on aspects such as quality, market concentration, growth of destination markets, and geographical and sectoral diversification. Also, increased import penetration, offshoring and FDI could improve productivity and export performance.


The UV laser properties of trivalent cerium-doped LiSrAlF6 (Ce:LiSAF) and LiCaAlF6 (Ce:LiCAF) are reported. The polarized absorption, emission, and excited-state absorption cross sections for both Ce:LiSAF and Ce:LiCAF were determined for the 266-nm pump and 290-nm laser emission wavelengths. The single-exponential emission lifetime was measured to be 28 ± 2 and 25 ± 2 ns for Ce:LiSAF and Ce:LiCAF, respectively. The gain was found to be highest when the probe was polarized parallel to the optical axis of the crystal, owing to the anisotropic nature of the excited-state absorption. The excited-state absorption was ascribed to a transition from the 5d orbital of Ce3+ to the conduction band of the host. Laser slope efficiencies as high as 29% and 21%, respectively, were measured for Ce:LiSAF and Ce:LiCAF when the 266-nm pulsed pump beam was polarized parallel to the optical or the c axis. These are the highest laser slope efficiencies yet observed to our knowledge for any known solid-state UV laser material. When the pump beam was polarized perpendicular to the optical axis of the crystals, the gain and the laser efficiencies dropped by as much as an order of magnitude. The magnitude of pump-induced solarization was found to be highly variable for different crystals and to have an insignificant effect on the laser performance when favorable crystals were used.


Bigbury and Oldbury are two significant monuments of the Iron Age, yet their dates, use and importance are not well understood. This Thesis has employed a series of methods and approaches, with the aim of addressing the shortfall in our knowledge. The results help to place these sites in a wider landscape and contextual setting.
Oldbury, at an area of 50ha, is one of the largest Hillforts in Britain; despite the scale of endeavour in constructing its massive earthwork circuit, it has been suggested by its excavators that it was probably not permanently occupied. This research, (in particular by the application of an extensive geophysics survey of over 50% of the interior), revealed that this suggestion requires further examination. The survey identified potential zones of activity within the interior and a possible indication that there may have been a smaller Hillfort or enclosure before the present ramparts were constructed. The research also brings together all of the available previous studies of the site for comparative analysis as well as relevant finds data from the Kent HER and other sources. Coupled with this data, the study investigates the location and visibility of Oldbury within the Iron Age landscape to understand the possible uses of the monument.
Famous for its multifarious ironwork hoard, the Hillfort at Bigbury is thought by some to have been a forerunner to present day Canterbury and there is a consensus amongst the modern commentators that Bigbury was the Hillfort attacked by Caesar during his 54BC campaign in Britain (though this remains unproven). In fact, beyond the ramparts, little detail is known of the pre-historic character of Bigbury or the hinterland of Bigbury and how the monument sits within the much wider Iron Age landscape. This research, using a combination of disciplines, shows that stratified and dateable archaeology exists around the immediate Hillfort environs, much of it at depth not easily detectable with standard geophysics equipment. The results of the present study also reveal a much longer chronology to the site than hitherto realized, showing that an area just outside of the ramparts was occupied probably during the Bronze Age and through to the early Iron Age. When this is coupled with the evidence of Middle and Late Iron Age activity previously discovered on the ridge (a probable ancient route way), which the ramparts straddle, it clearly demonstrates a continuity of settlement in and around the Hillfort for at least 1500 years before the Romans arrived.
This study also shows that the complex at Bigbury is not only the visible, spatially discrete, centred ramparts we see today but was probably part of a two tier complex of linear earthworks. One of these two is around 150m from the south eastern ramparts and could define the extent of the Hillfort overlooking the River Stour and the second is more extensive, stretching back west along the ridge several kilometres, putting Bigbury potentially in a similar category to that of the oppida at Chichester and Colchester with their associated dyke system.


This paper discusses the interactions between an ICT vendor and a client organization in the commissioning and execution of an ERP requirements determination project. The focus is on the early stages of the project involving the joint selection and adoption of process modeling technology, methods and techniques. Based on case study material, including email transcripts of interactions among participants, the paper uses the concept of technological frames to highlight how process modeling was used to enhance discourse and communication and enable goal congruence between the client and the ICT vendor. Findings indicate that a technological framing approach can be used to illustrate the degree of goal incongruence between clients and IT vendors and help provide more sustainable strategies to reconcile complex business relationships.


We evaluate the application and investigate various formulae (and the associated parameter sensitivities) using the constant head well permeameter method to estimate field-saturated hydraulic conductivity ( Kfs ) in a previously glaciated temperate landscape in the Scottish Borders where shallow soils constrain the depth of augering. In finer-textured soils, the Glover equation provided Kfs estimates nearly twice those of the Richards equation. For this environment, we preferred the Glover equation with a correction factor for the effect of gravity, which does not include soil capillarity effects because: (1) the low depth to diameter ratio of the auger holes (AH) required in the shallow stratified soils of temperate glaciated environment needs a correction for gravity; (2) the persistently moist environment and the use of long pre-wetting times before measurements seem to reduce the effect of soil capillarity; (3) the Richards equation is dependent on accurate α* values, but the measured AH intersected soil horizon boundaries that had different soil structure and texture, causing difficulty in selecting the most appropriate α* value; (4) when comparing the different solutions to estimate Kfs using the constant-head well permeameter method against the AH method and ponded permeameter measurements, the Glover solution with a correction for gravity gave the best comparable result in fine-textured soil.


Objective To investigate the effect of TRAIL on NB4 and K562 cell lines, and its relationship with TRAIL releptors.Methods Jurkat cells were used as positive control,NB4 and K562 cells were treated with different concentrations of TRAIL. Cell morphologic changes were monitored. The cell proliferation was evaluated by MTT assay. The expression of TRAIL receptor were determined by flow cytometry.Results MTT assay showed that TRAIL inhibited the growth of NB4 and Jurkat cells in vitro in a dose-and time-dependent manner,but the effect of TRAIL on Jurkat cells was stronger than that on NB4 cells.However, the growth of K562 was not inhibited. Flow cytometry analysis revealed that DR4,DR5 and DcR1 were expressed higher in NB4 and K562 cells, but the levels of DR4 and DcR1 were very low in K562 cells.DR5 was expressed in Jurakat cells with low level. No DcR2 was detected on the surface of all the three cell lines.Conclusion NB4 cell line is moderately sensitive to TRAIL,and K562 cell line is resistant to TRAIL.The sensitivity of NB4 cells to TRAIL may be associated with the expression of DcR1, but the sensitivity of K562 cells have nothing to do with the expression of TRAIL receptors.

Key words:
NB4 cells; K562 cells; Tumour necrosis factor related apoptosis-inducing ligand; Death receptor; Decoy receptors


In this work we focus on the task mapping problem for many-core real-time systems. The growing number of cores connected by a Network-on-Chip (NoC) calls for sophisticated mapping techniques to meet the growing demands of real-time applications. Hardware should be used in an efficient way such that unnecessary resource usage is avoided. Because of the NP-hardness of the problem, heuristic and meta-heuristic techniques are used to find good solutions. We further consider periodic communication between tasks and we focus on a static mapping solution.


Since the end of the Cold War, European Union (EU) efforts in transforming Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been enormously successful. The 2004 enlargement is widely regarded as the single most effective foreign policy strategy in the Union's history, and the recent European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was designed to repeat that success in countries located on the EU's new Eastern borders. Although the ENP has been the subject of substantive discussion in European academia, Belarus is the one country in Eastern Europe that has largely escaped scholarly attention. This article takes stock of recent developments in EU—Belarus relations and seeks to explain the very limited leverage of the EU over the country. We first examine the EU's relations with Belarus through the theoretical lens of external governance. By taking for granted the EU's ability to transfer its norms and values, however, the governance perspective does not account for the EU's very limited success in changing Belarus. We therefore revisit Michael Smith's notion of `boundaries of order' to highlight the impact of legal/institutional, transactional, cultural and geopolitical factors on EU—Belarus relations. We argue, in particular, that the existence and the construction of boundaries between the Union and its neighbouring states are essentially mutually constitutive processes. Besides shifting its own boundaries (and thereby extending its rules to outsiders), the EU is itself subject to the boundaries enacted by neighbouring states. In our conclusion, we juxtapose the notion of external governance as `rule transfer' with `partnership' as a more suitable mode of interaction between the EU and Belarus.


Mr. Barry Bonds hit his record seventy-third home run on October 7, 2001. Mr. Alex Popov was smart enough to be in the standing room only area at San Francisco's Pacific Bell Park behind the right field bleachers known as the Arcade, where Mr. Bonds had hit many of his home runs. Mr. Popov was lucky enough to be located almost precisely where the ball was hit, needing only to take one step back. He also had brought a softball glove to the park, as well as a small earbud radio on which he could listen to the play-by-play of the games. He was also skilled enough when the ball sailed 380 feet over the bleachers and into the walkway to extend the glove fully over his head and catch the ball in the glove's webbing. The catch caused a loud smack and stopped the ball's trajectory. With the ball motionless in the webbing, Mr. Popov brought the glove down, holding the ball for six tenths of a second. But, he was not strong enough to fight off the mob. Mr. Popov testified that as he turned the glove and started bringing it to his chest, the mob tackled him, threw him to the ground, hit and punched and kicked him, and then fell on top of him. He said he felt someone grabbing in the area of his glove, and someone stripped him of the ball. He had difficulty breathing. Someone ripped off his headphones. A lens in his glasses fell out. Security guards had to pull the mob off of him. Some resisted. Guards had to pull one man off by his hair. The court pulled no punches in characterizing this scene: "The videotape clearly establishe[d] that this was an out of control mob, engaged in violent, illegal behavior." A San Francisco television station called the scene it recorded "a brutal melee." Meanwhile, in an arcade nearby was another gentleman by the name of Mr. Patrick Hayashi. As the ball descended towards Mr. Popov and the crowd began to surge in that direction, Mr. Hayashi was carried along with the surge and knocked to the ground, when his fortune improved immeasurably. For there on the ground within reach was the loose ball. At least, that is what he said, and the court accepted his testimony as true. He grabbed it, stood up, put it in his pocket, and motioned to a television camera man named Mr. Josh Keppel, who was standing nearby recording the scene, to tum the camera on him. Eventually Mr. Keppel complied, and Mr. Hayashi showed the ball to the camera. Mr. Popov, now standing, grabbed for the ball, but Mr. Hayashi pulled it away as security guards took Mr. Hayashi and the ball to a safe area. Mr. Popov, addressing the security guards and speaking of Mr. Hayashi with a certain degree of irritation, told the court: "I said, 'I f--ing caught that ball, and he f-ing took it out of my glove." The court found that Mr. Hayashi was an innocent bystander, not a member of the mob, and "committed no wrongful act." The ball was eventually placed in a safety deposit box under the control of the court. There is only one ball in the world of baseballs that Mr. Bonds hit out of the park for the seventy-third time in one season, a record that eclipsed Mr. Mark McGwire's 1998 record of seventy home runs. The demand for the Bonds's seventy-third record baseball far exceeds this supply. Judge McCarthy noted that the ball might be worth one million dollars. Mr. McGwire's seventieth home run ball sold for three million dollars at an auction in 1998. Trial witnesses testified that on October 7, 2001, when Mr. Popov momentarily caught and then lost the ball, Mr. Popov picked up a sucker ball, while Mr. Hayashi got the right one. The court, however, found that the ball Mr. Popov held momentarily was the one hit by Mr. Bonds. Using the facts of the Barry Bonds baseball case as the basis for discussion, this Article argues that it is apparent that Major League Baseball has to address the potential problems of home run baseball possession. In section two, this Article discusses the court's involvement in the Popov v. Hayashi case and analyzes its underlying rationale. Section three puts the court's resolution to the test through empirical experiments. Section four identifies potential solutions to the problem of possession after reviewing the implications of the court's decision in Popov. Finally, section five addresses the fulfillment of the court's orders and its effect on each person involved.


In this paper, we define a new problem domain, called visual growth tracking, to track different parts of an object that grow non-uniformly over space and time for application in image-based plant phenotyping. The paper introduces a novel method to reliably detect and track individual leaves of a maize plant based on a graph theoretic approach for automated leaf stage monitoring. The method has four phases: optimal view selection, plant architecture determination, leaf tracking, and generation of a leaf status report. The method accepts an image sequence of a plant as the input and automatically generates a leaf status report containing the phenotypes, which are crucial in the understanding of a plant's growth, i.e., the emergence timing of each leaf, total number of leaves present at any time, the day on which a particular leaf ceased to grow, and the length and relative growth rate of individual leaves. Based on experimental study, three types of leaf intersections are identified, i.e., tip-contact, tangential-contact, and crossover, which pose challenges to accurate leaf tracking in the late vegetative stage. Thus, we introduce a novel curve tracing approach based on an angular consistency check to address the challenges due to intersecting leaves for improved performance. The proposed method shows high accuracy in detecting leaves and tracking them through the vegetative stages of maize plants based on experimental evaluation on a publicly available benchmark dataset.


The aim of the this study is to present some performance tests of a novel 256-channel electroencephalographic data-acquisition system. The common mode rejection ratio of the system was measured as 102 dB for signals in the electroencephalography frequency range and 154 dB for dc signals. System electrical noise (referred-to-input) is 1.76 µV (rms)(0.21 µV/√Hz for 70-Hz bandwidth). The cross-talk rejection was found to be at 58 dB. The dynamic range of the system was found 108 dB. The performance tests and recorded experimental EEG data show that the developed system can be used in conducting source localization experiments.


The international War on Terror and recent events in our immediate region, particularly Indonesia, have thrown a sudden spotlight on Australian reporting of the Asia Pacific. But Australia has a long history of journalism, travel writing and documentary filmmaking here. This paper draws on Edward Said's writings on 'orientalism' to bring an historical perspective to bear on contemporary factual genres and practices. It highlights three cases, focusing on Indonesia and Papua New Guinea: the travel writing and journalism of Frank Clune in the late thirties and early forties (To the Isles of Spice, 1944), the agit-prop filmmaking of Joris Ivens and the Waterside Workers Federation (Indonesia Calling, 1948), and the explosion of documentary work that came out of Papua New Guinea, Australia's only true colony, from the early 1970s. In conclusion, the paper offers a caveat to factual crafts and genres — in both journalism and filmmaking — that deal with these geographically close, but culturally 'other', Australian neighbours, whom we must learn to live with. Empires of information are always, simultaneously, empires of imagination. 2 Empires need more than armies and navies to exercise control over their conquests. The recent Iraq war was fought on two battlefields. The first was won with tanks and cruise missiles. The second was an even more lopsided contest between a crude third world propagandist and a sophisticated information superpower. U.S. President George Bush's crusade for an abstracted "freedom" resonated widely among Arab countries, but perhaps as a result of their colonial experiences, not entirely in ways that he intended. Such rhetoric carries much historical baggage, and cannot easily cross cultural borders untouched, unexamined. And if the last century has taught humanity anything at all, it has surely warned of the dangers of thinking in absolutes — including calls for 'liberty', 'democracy', and 'justice'. In colonial times, Westerners who chose to govern 'natives' argued moral and intellectual superiority to rationalise their governance: on one hand to underpin the recruitment of local administrators, and on the other, hopefully, to keep the conquered submissive. Such ideas of superiority — coded as 'civilisation', 'modernity', 'progress', 'development', 'liberty' — are fundamental to colonial governments, which set out early in the imperial mission to build an apparatus for transmitting them both locally and globally. Far from simple, crude methods of 'mere' government propaganda, this apparatus is sophisticated, commonly comprising 'modern' administrative, educational, medical, communication and legal institutions which replace existing traditional or 'primitive' systems of knowledge. And this cosmos of dominance is relentlessly reinforced locally through imported cultural packages, which may include literature, movies, art, music, and fashion. More importantly, narrative genres that present themselves as 'objective' 3 and 'factual' accounts — such as news and documentary — must also be seen as part of the same project. This paper concerns itself with these latter, 'factual' genres, for the cultural packages of imperialism continue their work long after formal colonial government has ended, resulting in the old metropolitan centres maintaining post-colonial influence over their former subjects. And the sophisticated modern technologies and rhetorics of actuality, reality, neutrality and objectivity deployed by contemporary global news text and image empires are particularly difficult to avoid, analyse or verify at the local level — at their margins.


Objectives: Interventional elimination of chronic persistent atrial fibrillation (AFib) remains difficult. An animal model mimicking the clinical situation is important. Methods and Results: Twenty-five adult pigs were implanted with a high-speed atrial pacemaker. After continuous pacing at 600 bpm for 6 weeks, 20 (91%) of the 22 survivals developed sustained AFib lasting for at least 24 h. Epicardial dense mapping revealed multiple coexisting reentrant wavelets in the left and the right atrium (LA and RA, respectively; 10.6 ± 2.9 vs. 7.6 ± 2.4 wavelets/cm2/s; p < 0.002). The mean local A-A intervals were 87.2 ± 14.6 ms in the LA and 103.3 ± 19.0 ms in the RA (p < 0.0002). Acute termination of sustained AFib was successful in 3 of the 5 pigs by propafenone, but in none of the 6 by dl-sotalol. Epicardial cryothermal ablation failed to terminate any AFib by compartmentalization of the RA free wall alone (4 pigs) or together with the LA appendage (4 pigs). Electron microscopic examination demonstrated diffuse perinuclear myolysis, myofibrillar fragmentation and mitochondrial crystal disruption in the atrium. Conclusions: Pacing-induced sustained AFib (≧24 h) in adult pigs is a feasible and efficient animal model with electrophysiological and histological characteristics closely similar to those seen in humans.


Based on existing information concerning the effects of pressure on the biodegradability of sanitary sewage, a model activated sludge reactor was used in conjunction with pressurization to determine the viability of pres surization as a primary sewage treatment process. Municipal sewage samples were pressurized at 40 psig for one hour with an excess of oxygen. An air compressor and a steel drum were used for sample pressurization. A non-pressurized control sample was maintained. After pressurization, the samples were fed into separate model activated sludge reactors. Biodegradability of both types of effluent was measured by determining their five day biochemical oxygen demands (B.O.D.). Other tests were performed on the samples to measure turbidity, ammonia content, and long term B.O.D. It was found that after treatment in the reactor, no definitive measured effect due to pressurization was ob served in the five day B.O.D. test. However, the pressurized effluent was found to be more turbid, and to have a higher ammonia content than the non-pressurized sample. The long term B.O.D. tests indicated some divergence between the pressurized and non-pressurized effluent B.O.D. curves. APPROVAL OF THESIS THE EFFECTS OF PRESSURE ON THE BIODEGRADABILITY OF SANITARY SEWAGE IN A MODEL ACTIVATED SLUDGE REACTOR BY NICHOLAS A. MEZEI FOR DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL ENGINEERING NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY


PHILIPPE KIRSCH, Q.C. [*] I INTRODUCTION The creation of a permanent international criminal court has been seen as a desirable objective for a long time. Although the issue was actively considered soon after World War II, historical circumstances, particularly the Cold War, have prevented agreement on its establishment until a conference held in 1999 in Rome. By the time the Rome Conference began, there was wide agreement on the general objectives of such a court. Nevertheless, the Conference was difficult, as it became the theater of a number of conflicts between different legal systems and political interests. The Statute of the Internal Criminal Court (the "ICC") that emerged relected an effort to find a balance between those interests, but could not be adopted by consensus because of the opposition of a few states, notably the United States. This essay develops four themes: (1) the objectives behind the establishment of an international criminal court; (2) the Rome Conference and the ICC Statute; (3) the future of the ICC, including signature a nd ratification and the work of the Preparatory Commission; and, finally, (4) the relationship between the ICC and the United States. II THE OBJECTIVES OF AN INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT The basic objective of the establishment of an international criminal court was to replace a culture of impunity for the commission of very serious crimes, which has existed and still exists to a large extent, with a culture of accountability. The establishment of an international criminal court is in many ways the culmination of a series of international efforts in that direction. Those efforts, however, have often been frustrated for a variety of reasons, and, in any event, have been highly selective. After World War II, the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals raised real expectations about a culture of accountability, but the realities of cold war paralysis quickly settled in. The notion that those violating the most serious laws of humanity must be prosecuted faded, and a culture of impunity re-emerged. This paralysis began to change with the end of the Cold War, not only because the major powers could begin to cooperate on more issues, but also because events in several conflicts, primarily internal, demonstrated tragically that there was a continuing need to take steps to try to put an end to the abominable crimes that continued to be committed. In this short time, the change has been remarkable. Humanitarian considerations are now a normal part of state policies in a number of broader areas, including the maintenance of international peace and security. The ad hoc Tribunals for Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda were established but necessarily limited in scope. The idea of a permanent international criminal court continued to develop, partly as a result of "tribunal fatigue," [1] but also, whether we like it or not, because a number of states wanted to remove the Security Council's monopoly on international tribunals, which the states saw as being too selective in distributing justice. The question of the relationship between the international criminal court and the Security Council was settled in principle at the Rome Conference, but some of its aspects are likely to remain the subject of debate for some time to come, notably the role of the Security Council, if any, with respect to the crime of aggression. Despite what was earlier identified as the shared objective--moving from a culture of impunity to a culture of accountability--there remains differences on modalities, and, rightly or wrongly, continuing and often successful attempts to maintain a high degree of selectivity in international justice. Nevertheless, a number of events in the past year alone demonstrate unprecedented and growing momentum for the punishment of past, present, and future crimes. There is an ongoing argument on the deterrent effect, if any, of the action of international tribunals. …


: The southeastern United States represents one of the richest collections of aquatic biodiversity worldwide; however, many of these taxa are under an increasing threat of imperilment, local extirpation, or extinction. The pearl darter Percina aurora is a small-bodied freshwater fish endemic to the Pearl and Pascagoula river systems of Mississippi and Louisiana (USA). The last collected specimen from the Pearl River drainage was taken in 1973, and it now appears that populations in this system are likely extirpated. This reduced the historical range of this species by approximately 50%, ultimately resulting in federal protection under the US Endangered Species Act in 2017. To better understand the current distribution and general biology of extant populations, we analyzed data collected from a series of surveys conducted in the Pascagoula River drainage from 2000 to 2016. Pearl darters were captured at relatively low abundance (2.4 ± 4.0 ind. per collection) from 57% of 308 collections. We identified strong relationships between local habitat variables and occurrence and catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) of pearl darters. Pearl darters were frequently encountered and in greater abundance in depositional areas characterized by low-velocity habitats and finer substrates. Patterns of occurrence and CPUE were spatiotemporally variable across years; however, repeated collections from a subset of localities collected across a decade or more indicated long-term persistence and stability, suggesting population resilience throughout the Pascagoula River drainage.


Design of the Blackfoot 3C-3D seismic program was reviewed by evaluating presurvey and post-survey fold plots, and comparing predicted fold with the stacking fold extracted from the processed data volume. The survey was designed initally using asymptotic binning and Flexi-bin® acquisition geometry with a sub-bin interval of 10 m for the P-S data. The survey consisted of 1395 sourcepoints and 903 receivers, recorded in 2 fixed patches with up to 700 receivers per patch. Processed stacking fold distribution matched closely the pre-survey depth-variant fold distribution computed using an offset range of up to 2300 m for the P-S data. Maximum fold for 30 m x 30 m bins at the Glauconitic target level reached 100 in the centre of the Glauconitic patch, and greater for later events. Fold distribution was good, with relatively minor bin-to-bin and sample-to-sample variations within the volume from the Glauconitic patch. Some fold striping parallel to the receiver lines was noticeable over the Beaverhill Lake patch where a receiver line interval of 495 m was used.


The prevalence of poverty in advanced economies represents a challenge, both to economic theory and to society. We know that poverty is perpetuated by low levels of educational investment amongst disadvantaged children, but we have no credible theoretical explanation for the observed degree of that apparent underinvestment, and we have not yet developed sufficient policy tools to break the intergenerational cycle of deprivation. In response, this thesis undertakes theoretical and empirical analyses of the pathways that perpetuate poverty. I demonstrate that divergently low educational investment could arise as an equilibrium response to a grades-focussed educational system; I develop the existing state-of-the-art technique in econometric estimation of the educational production function; and I apply that technique to find strong empirical support for my theoretical model. In addition my results show that the average child's propensity to think analytically has a substantial influence over their developmental pathway, which suggests that models of educational investment should adopt a generalisation of Expected Utility Theory that allows agents to maximise one of two possible objective functions.


Introduction. This paper is intended to present certain general conclusions reached in the course of a preliminary study of the stratigraphy and paleontology of the Pottsville series along New river in West Virginia. While concerned mainly with paleontologic correlations, it touches incidentally on the stratigraphic position of the well-known New River coals mined at numerous points from Quinnimont down to Hawks Nest. Use of term "Pottsville" and Formations included in "Pottsville Series." The Pottsville series, or the " Conglomerate series," as it is perhaps better known in West Virginia, embraces the group of sandstones, conglomerates, sandy shales and coals lying between the green and red calcareous Mauch Chunk shales below, and the softer, more argillaceous terranes of the "Lower Productive Coal Measures" above. It is essentially a sandstone series, though it includes some of the most valuable soft coals of the Appalachian region. Its massive ledges, rising often abruptly at . . .


Taxation, aid and democracy are closely related in poor aid-dependent African countries. The way they tackle the issue of domestic revenue mobilisation significantly influences their potential for economic growth and democratic consolidation. This proposition is based on the reading of historical, political and economic literature, and it forms the general basis for a three-year research programme recently started. Namibia, Tanzania and Uganda are the case countries. The research aims to contribute to a better understanding of the evolution of tax systems in African countries. Furthermore, it aims to explore the constraints and options available for policy making on revenue mobilisation and democratisation. This paper presents the general outline of the research programme, and the major areas of research to be dealt with.


The scale of computing systems has extensively grown over the past few decades in order to satisfy emerging business requirements. As a result of this evolution, the complexity of these systems has increased significantly, which has led to many difficulties in managing and administering them. The solution to this problem is to build systems that are capable of managing themselves, given high-level objectives. This vision is also known as Autonomic Computing. A self-managing system is governed by a closed control loop, which is responsible for dynamically monitoring the underlying system, analyzing the observed situation, planning the recovering actions, and executing the plan to maintain the system equilibrium. The realization of such systems poses several developmental and operational challenges, including: developing their architecture, constructing the control loop, and creating services that enable dynamic adaptation behavior. Software frameworks are effective in addressing these challenges: they can simplify the development of such systems by reducing design and implementation efforts, and they provide runtime services for supporting self-managing behavior. This dissertation presents a novel software framework, called StarMX, for developing adaptive and self-managing Java-based systems. It is a generic configurable framework based on standards and well-established principles, and provides the required features and facilities for the development of such systems. It extensively supports Java Management Extensions (JMX) and is capable of integrating with different policy engines. This allows the developer to incorporate and use these techniques in the design of a control loop in a flexible manner. The control loop is created as a chain of entities, called processes, such that each process represents one or more functions of the loop (monitoring, analyzing, planning, and executing). A process is implemented by either a policy language or the Java language. At runtime, the framework invokes the chain of processes in the control loop, providing each one with the required set of objects for monitoring and effecting. An open source Java-based Voice over IP system, called CC2, is selected as the case study used in a set of experiments that aim to capture a solid understanding of the framework suitability for developing adaptive systems and to improve its feature set. The experiments are also used to evaluate the performance overhead incurred by the framework at runtime. The performance analysis results show the execution time spent in different components, including the framework itself, the policy engine, and the sensors/effectors. The results also reveal that the time spent in the framework is negligible, and it has no considerable impact on the system's overall performance.


In mechanized ground-based forestry, machines operate on rough soils that, ideally, should remain unaffected by the operation. This implies small (that is, light) loads and careful driving are required. However, economical rationality implies large loads and high speeds. Recently, the concept of adding a trailer to a conventional forwarder has been revived, with the objective of addressing both concerns, and fitting into the current, mechanized, cut-to-length system. Here we present the theoretical benefits of the forwarder-trailer concept compared to conventional forwarding for final-felling operations. The analysis addresses the trailer potential in terms of break-even extraction distances under different scenarios, and estimates the abundance of favorable conditions (as a percentage of final-felling volume) in Swedish final fellings. The results show that the forwarder-trailer concept has potential to reduce costs, and especially if there are restrictions on axle loads. However, the viability of the trailer concept is highly sensitive to changes in the increased purchase costs and the increased work-element time-consumption. That is, small changes in these variables result in large changes in viability. In the scenarios presented here, the increase in time consumption was more influential than the purchase cost. It can be concluded that there are potential economic and possibly also environmental benefits that warrant further investigation of the forwarder-trailer concept, which is currently being evaluated in practice in Sweden.


As China's economy has developed, its companies, both state-owned and privately held, have moved to expand their operations in the United States to the point where many now seek to invest in—and on occasion, acquire—U.S. counterparts. This trend has set off alarm bells over fears that China's unique political and economic system, which gives the state extensive influence over all corporations regardless of their ownership structure, renders such transactions national security threats. Recent hostility toward Chinese-led inbound investment is not a new trend; Congress has attempted to assert itself into the screening process undertaken by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) since its establishment. This Note examines both the framework the U.S. government has utilized to screen potential national security threats posed by foreign investment and how the eccentricities of China's state-capitalist system present unique challenges to that framework. It argues for an executive order to mandate CFIUS review for transactions in sensitive industries which touch upon national security issues, particularly telecommunications in an age of increasing cyberwarfare. This will prepare CFIUS to handle the challenges posed by increasing investment in the United States by Chinese corporations without needlessly constructing barriers to the same where no real security threat exists.


Shoulder surfing or adversarial eavesdropping to infer users' keystrokes on physical QWERTY keyboards continues to be a serious privacy threat. Despite this, practical and efficient countermeasures against such attacks are still lacking. In this paper, we propose keyboard randomization as a simple, yet effective, countermeasure against various types of keystroke inference attacks. Our proposal consists of several keyboard randomization strategies which randomizes or changes the position of keys on the keyboard. The randomized keyboard is then projected to the typing user by means of an augmented reality wearable device. As the randomized keyboard is visually superimposed over the actual physical keyboard, and is visible only to the typing user through the augmented reality device, it acts as an effective countermeasure against both side-channel and visual-channel based keystroke inference attacks. We implement our proposed solution on a commercially available augmented reality device and conduct preliminary evaluations to validate its performance and effectiveness.


Do different cells that reside in the same extracellular matrix have discussions about remodeling their environment? Swartz et al. suggest that epithelial cells and fibroblasts might to do just that by sending each other soluble signals. As a way to understand the remodeling that occurs in the bronchial airways of asthma patients, the group designed an artificial system that allows epithelial cells to experience the mechanical stress of airways. Epithelial cells exposed to transmembrane stress secreted fibronectin. At the same time, fibroblasts that were cocultured with the epithelial cells, but not exposed to stress, and also separated from epithelial cells by a porous membrane and culture medium, responded by producing collagen and matrix metalloproteinase-9. These fibrotic responses mimic those observed in asthma patients. The fibroblasts did not respond to conditioned medium from epithelial cells exposed to stress, suggesting that both cell types actively send soluble signals to each other in response to mechanical stress experienced by only one cell type. M. A. Swartz, D. J. Tschumperlin, R. D. Kamm, J. M. Drazen, Mechanical stress is communicated between different cell types to elicit matrix remodeling. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 98, 6180-6185 (2001). [Abstract] [Full Text]


In modern telecommunication systems like hands-free and teleconferencing systems, the problem arise during conversation is the creation of an acoustic echo. This problem degrades the quality of the information signal. All speech processing equipments like noise cancelling headphones and hearing aids should be able to filter different kinds of interfering signals and produce a clear sound to the listener. Currently, echo cancellation is a most interesting and challenging task in any communication system. Echo is the delayed and degraded version of original signal which travels back to its source after several reflections. Eliminating this effect without affecting the original quality of the speech is a challenge of research in present days. Echo cancellation in voice communication is a process of removing the echo to improve the clarity and quality of the voice signals. In our thesis we mainly focused on the acoustic echo cancellation in a closed room using adaptive filters. The Acoustic echo cancellation with adaptive filtering technique will more accurately enhance the speech quality in hands free communication systems. The main aim of using adaptive algorithms for echo cancellation is to achieve higher ERLE at higher rate of convergence with low complexity. The adaptive algorithms NLMS, APA and RLS are implemented using MATLAB. These algorithms are tested with the simulation of echo occurring environment by using constant room dimensions , microphone and source positions. The performance of the NLMS, APA and RLS are evaluated in terms ERLE and misalignment. The results show that RLS algorithm achieve good performance with more computational complexity comparing with the NLMS and APA algorithms. The NLMS algorithm has very low computational complexity comparing to RLS and APA algorithms. The results are taken for both input signal as speech signal and noise separately and plotted in the results section.


"Top agricultural scientists from around the world have taken up the challenge of sustainable agriculture, with the specific focus on integrating agronomic, climatological, biophysical and socio-economic perspectives and processes. Every chapter (of the Handbook) contributes to addressing the growing food-security challenges facing the world."Foreword by Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia UniversityClimate effects on agriculture are of increasing concern in both the scientific and policy communities because of the growing population and the greater uncertainty in the weather during growing seasons. Changes in production are directly linked to variations in temperature and precipitation during the growing season and often to the offseason changes in weather because of soil water storage to replenish the soil profile. This is not an isolated problem but one of worldwide interest because each country has concerns about their food security.The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) was developed to evaluate agricultural models and intercompare their ability to predict climate impacts. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, South America and East Asia, AgMIP regional research teams (RRTs) are conducting integrated assessments to improve understanding of agricultural impacts of climate change (including biophysical and economic impacts) at national and regional scales. Other AgMIP initiatives include global gridded modeling, data and information technology (IT) tool development, simulation of crop pests and diseases, site-based crop-climate sensitivity studies, and aggregation and scaling.


This workshop paper presents lessons learned from a recent experiment to compare several test strategies. The test strategies were compared in terms of the number of tests needed to satisfy them and in terms of faults found. The experimental design and conduct are discussed, and frank assessments of the decisions that were made are provided. The paper closes with a summary of the lessons that were learned.


This comparative study discusses whether selected foreign countries -- Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany -- have a history of a movement toward the establishment of a national information center. The author examines the development of existing law libraries and libraries with large legal collections, analyzes the role played by the national library of each country, and describes some cooperative accomplishments at the regional and national level. Comparisons are drawn with what is expected of a national legal information center in the United States.


Long established as a must-have guide for Photoshop users upgrading to the newest version, Up to Speed goes right to the heart of Photoshop CS4 what has changed, what is new, and how you can get the most out of the features as quickly as possible. Rather than sift through hundreds of pages detailing every last Photoshop feature and function (both old and new), you can go directly to the new features that interest you the most and get the explanations you desire in the classic Ben Willmore style-- intuitive, crystal clear, and in-depth. By focusing on a single topic--what's new in this version--the award-winning author provides precisely what experienced Photoshop users have been clamoring for, in exactly the depth they demand. After reading this book even if you've been using CS4 for awhile don't be surprised to hear yourself say, I didn't know CS4 did that! In addition to learning the new features in no time flat, a welcome side effect of learning from Ben is that you can expect to become a better, faster and more efficient Photoshop user, and few things are more fun than becoming better at Photoshop!


International audience

 Introduced by Kawanaka in order to find the unipotent representations of finite groups of Lie type, gener- alized Gelfand–Graev characters have remained somewhat mysterious. Even in the case of the finite general linear groups, the combinatorics of their decompositions has not been worked out. This paper re-interprets Kawanaka's def- inition in type A in a way that gives far more flexibility in computations. We use these alternate constructions to show how to obtain generalized Gelfand–Graev representations directly from the maximal unipotent subgroups. We also explicitly decompose the corresponding generalized Gelfand–Graev characters in terms of unipotent representations, thereby recovering the Kostka–Foulkes polynomials as multiplicities.


THE STEM CELL DIVIDE: THE FACTS, THE FICTIONS, AND THE FEAR DRIVING THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC, POLITICAL, AND RELIGIOUS DEBATE OF OUR TIME Micheal Bellomo New York: AMACOM Press, 2006, 254 pp., $24.95 (hardcover). Over the past several years, public debate about the ethical and scientific merit of human stem cell research has become increasingly heated. The stakes of this debate were perhaps most clearly marked in August 2001 when President George W. Bush announced his administration's policy on extending federal funding to certain kinds of stem cell research. By allowing federal funding for research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells, the Bush administration effectively loosened earlier legislation that "prohibited the federal government from using taxpayer dollars to support any research in which human embryos are harmed or destroyed." 1 Not surprisingly, the administration's policy met with mixed reactions. Some commentators viewed the reluctance of the administration to extend funding to all embryonic stem cell research as an objectionable compromise to the religious right. On this view, the administration's policy would seriously limit important life-saving research in the service of controversial views about the moral status of the embryo. Other commentators, however, read the policy more charitably. They claimed that the administration's policy reflected "a perfectly appropriate exercise of governmental powers in a liberal democracy." 2 After all, the policy did not ban human embryonic stem cell research. It left open the possibility for scientists to seek other nonfederal sources of funding for their research. Michael Bellomo's book, The Stem Cell Divide, does not spend too much time dwelling on the details of the now famous "Bush Compromise." Instead, he aims to provide readers with a broader look at the scientific, economic, and political aspects of stem cell research. His hope is that this approach will provide readers with enough background information to assess knowledgeably current and future policies affecting stem cell research. There is much useful information in the book, and readers will profit from the balanced and detailed treatment of the background context of the stem cell debate. The book is divided into three main sections. Section I focuses on the historical scientific developments that led to the earliest research on cellular growth and regeneration. At the start of this section, Bellomo details how the work of Abraham Trembley in the 18th century laid the early foundation for the stem cell research that currently engages contemporary scientists. His brief discussion of the work of other scientists in this era reveals that stem cell research is not a brand new development-a product solely of 20th and 21st century science. Nonscientists will appreciate the straightforward manner in which Bellomo describes the nature of stem cells. Indeed, this aspect of section 1 is perhaps the most important, since so much of the ethical and public controversy over stem cell research has to do with where the really valuable stem cells are to be found. Generally speaking, stem cells are cells that "have the ability to divide for indefinite periods in culture and to give rise to specialized cells" (Bellomo, p. 252). But stem cells can come from a variety of sources. As Bellomo explains, the drive to use embryonic stem cells is compelling because stem cells derived from this source retain the highest degree of pluripotency. These cells are still undifferentiated and therefore have the potential to develop into a wide variety of specialized cell types (p. 245). Embryonic stem cells, however, can only be obtained by removing the inner cell mass of the blastocyst, thereby destroying the embryo. Adult stem cells, by contrast, are not derived from embryos and are therefore not subject to the same moral controversy as embryonic stem cells. These cells can be found in various parts of the body such as the brain cells, bone marrow cells, and digestive cells. …


mazEF is a toxin-antitoxin module located on many bacterial chromosomes, including those of pathogens. Here, we report that Escherichia coli mazEF-mediated cell death is a population phenomenon requiring a quorum-sensing molecule that we call the extracellular death factor (EDF). Structural analysis revealed that EDF is a linear pentapeptide, Asn-Asn-Trp-Asn-Asn. Each of the five amino acids of EDF is important for its activity.


The application of Lean philosophy and practices in New Product Introduction (NPI) and extended supply chain space is becoming a norm world over. There is a constant pressure for faster NPI, smarter supply chains and cost effective products, dictated by customer and competition, which compels organizations to think Lean.

Value Stream Mapping (VSM), a process of visual depiction of material and information flow in a defined value stream, is implemented by many Lean thinking organizations. Discrete Event Simulation (DES) tools have also been used to build credible models, observe the behavior of systems and optimize processes and systems.

This paper introduces a new approach known as the 'simulation aided Value Stream Mapping' (saVSM), which combines two powerful tools, VSM and Simulation, to ensure effectiveness, in any Lean implementation. A simulation tool in saVSM, is used for quick and efficient data analysis and for facilitating continuous VSM updation.

The Test Operations group, in an Engine Product Development environment, primarily supports testing of new development and upgrade project engines. The utilization of test beds (cells), used to carry out the engine test is the most critical performance index for this group. This paper, illustrates a case study, showcasing the successful application of saVSM approach, at a global Engine Manufacturer's Test environment.


This article presents a new approach to the study of public contestation through social media. Developing this approach, we make three conceptual moves. First, to capture the dynamic character of contemporary contestation, we shift attention from publics to publicness as an interactive process. Second, we turn the focus from the "counter," as a public or space distinct from the dominant sphere, towards distributed forms of contention. Finally, instead of considering media as arenas of claims, we investigate how media are constitutive of contentious publicness, which can be studied along its material, spatial, and temporal dimensions. These moves lead to an analytical framework through which trajectories of contentious publicness can be systematically traced and evaluated. Through case studies on the 2011 Egyptian uprising and the Occupy protests, we demonstrate how this framework can be employed to examine the construction of new contentious actors and evaluate their democratic legitimacy as claim-makers.


OBJECTIVES
To describe the development process of an instrument to assess the ability to manage daily oral hygiene and the cause of impaired oral hygiene. The instrument is initially aimed for use by the dental team in the ageing population.

BACKGROUND
Oral hygiene is an important component of oral health. Inability to manage oral hygiene combined with other risk factors often results in poor oral health and impaired quality of life.

METHODS
A guideline for instrument development was used during the construction of the instrument. The method included three phases: I. planning: the purpose and target group of the instrument were determined, and a literature review and qualitative focus-group study were conducted; II. construction: objectives were formulated, and a pool of items was built; and III. evaluation and validation, which included two pilot studies, interviews, item analyses and revision of the instrument.

RESULTS
The planning and construction phases resulted in an instrument with 47 items comprising three parts: (a) interview, (b) clinical examination and (c) observation of activities of daily living (oral hygiene). After two pilot studies, the instrument was found to have good content validity. Analyses of qualitative and quantitative data resulted in a reduction in the number of items to 33.

CONCLUSION
OHAI can be a valuable tool as a preventive method to identify older adults at risk of impaired oral health. However, the instrument needs further evaluation before wider use.


Trade balance is one of the important indicators of economy because it helps economists and investors to determine the economic relative power in a certain country compared to others. Furthermore, trade balance is also useful for policy makers and other relevant parties to delve information on the performance of export and import of a certain country in a certain period. However, many did not know that the trade balance data often does not reflect the real condition of export and import because of recording manipulation by exporters and importers, thus the reason why illicit financial flow occurred.

In general, illicit financial flow is a form of movement of money or capital that occurs when it is illegally earned, transferred, or utilized (Baker, 2005). Within the last few years, illicit financial flow was understood to be the cause of economic slowdown in developing countries since it causes the loss of potential fund for investment sourced from tax or non-tax revenue. This issue then receives a global attention and became one of the key issues in Sustainable Development Goals number 16 and indicator 16.4 where minimizing the illicit financial flow is one of the indicators to be achieved.

In Indonesia, the issue of illicit financial flow is a necessary and crucial matter to overcome since Indonesia is on its way to become a developed country but challenged by a low ratio of tax to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 2017, income per capita in Indonesia still hovering around USD 3,540 which is considered to be a lower-middle country. On the other hand, the ratio of tax to GDP has stagnated within the range of 10-13 percent within the last 20 years.

In the last few decades, the driving force of Indonesian exports came from non-oil and gas commodities (extractive, manufacture, and agriculture), specifically the top six commodities which were coal, copper, palm oil, rubber, coffee, and crustaceans. Unfortunately, we never discover whether the Indonesian economy so far received the maximum benefit from the contribution of those top six export commodities. This document is a policy brief to highlight leakage in trading in a form of illicit financial flow of the top six export commodities and provide policy recommendations which will address the matter of illicit financial flow in Indonesia.


Large scale parallel simulations are fundamental tools for engineers and scientists. Consequently, it is critical to develop both programming models and tools that enhance development time productivity, enable harnessing of massively-parallel systems, and to guide the diagnosis of poorly scaling programs. This thesis addresses this challenge in two ways. First, we show that Co-array Fortran (CAF), a shared-memory parallel programming model, can be used to write scientific codes that exhibit high performance on modern parallel systems. Second, we describe a novel technique for analyzing parallel program performance and identifying scalability bottlenecks, and apply it across multiple programming models.
Although the message passing parallel programming model provides both portability and high performance, it is cumbersome to program. CAF eases this burden by providing a partitioned global address space, but has before now only been implemented on shared-memory machines. To significantly broaden CAF's appeal, we show that CAF programs can deliver high-performance on commodity cluster platforms. We designed and implemented cafc, the first multiplatform CAF compiler, which transforms CAF programs into Fortran 90 plus communication primitives. Our studies show that CAF applications matched or exceeded the performance of the corresponding message passing programs. For good node performance, cafc employs an automatic transformation called procedure splitting, for high performance on clusters, we vectorize and aggregate communication at the source level. We extend CAF with hints enabling overlap of communication with computation. Overall, our experiments show that CAF versions of NAS benchmarks match the performance of their MPI counterparts on multiple platforms.
The increasing scale of parallel systems makes it critical to pinpoint and fix scalability bottlenecks in parallel programs. To automatize this process, we present a novel analysis technique that uses parallel scaling expectations to compute scalability scores for calling contexts, and then guides an analyst to hot spots using an interactive viewer. Our technique is general and may thus be applied to several programming models; in particular, we used it to analyze CAF and MPI codes, among others. Applying our analysis to CAF programs highlighted the need for language-level collective operations which we both propose and evaluate.


We analyze the transmission of an interest rate shock to households in the context of a stress-test module. We examin standard mitigants, such as delays due to a future interest-rate-reset-date, tax deduction of the interest paid on mortgages, the amortization of different mortgage types and conjunctural factors. We also include the possibility of behavioral responses, where households can alleviate the effect of a shock by reducing debt using voluntary repayments. We estimate a Cragg log-normal hurdle model on loan-level data for the Dutch mortgage market. We simulate debt 30 years into the future under different scenarios for the development of the interest rate and simulating both contractual and voluntary amortization. This study finds a significant dampening role of voluntary repayments on the effects of an interest rate shock.


User interfaces to expert systems represent a bottleneck since consultation time is proportional to the amount of information the system asks the user to supply. An efficient, rather than exhaustive, strategy to direct user questioning will reduce consultation time and effort. An intelligent strategy to minimize questioning, the merit system, has been successfully implemented in Battle, an expert consultant system developed for the Marine Corps. The merit strategy enables Battle to focus the consultation process on the most meritorious questions allowing the military commander to respond quickly awith the most pertinent information. The merit system, originally denned for logical functions in the Multiple program, has been extended to the Mycin style of propagation and to the method of subjective Bayesian assignments used by Prospector. A procedure for merit calculations with any differentiable, real-valued assignment function is presented. Our experience has shown that merit values provide an efficient flow of control for expert consultation.


ABSTRACT We examined aging effects in reconsolidation and interference in episodic memory by reactivating memories for well-learned items in young and healthy older adults while controlling memory strength and the degree semantic processes contributed to memory. In Experiment 1, young and old adults learned pairs of real words and images to a strict criterion. After 24-hours, half of the images were reactivated and new words were paired with the images and learned to criterion. Following a 1-week delay, recognition and source monitoring were measured for both sets of pairings. Experiment 2 was a replication of Experiment 1, but using previously unknown novel words and unusual images. As predicted, older adults needed more trials to learn both the A-B and A-C pairings. Older adults required more trials to learn the new associations for reactivated than the not reactivated pairs, although there was no main effect of reactivation and no Age x Reactivation interaction for measures of recognition one-week later. These results are inconsistent with previous findings concerning age differences in reactivation effects in episodic memory. Instead, they suggest that once memory strength and input from semantic memory are better controlled, young and old adults perform similarly on tests of long-term recognition memory.


The Open University delivers distance learning to its students. Traditionally, its students work independently of each other. Looking to enhance their students learning, two postgraduate courses have introduced authentic, collaborative activities. This is easier to achieve now because of the availability of wikis: a lightweight, web-based collaborative authoring environment. This paper examines the effect of the wikis' functionality on the students' use of the tool, and the consequences for the students' engagement with the activities and learning opportunities. This is a relatively large scale study involving 56 wikis produced by over 250 students. The data was drawn from the two courses using a variety of methods. A qualitative inductive analysis was used to look for emergent themes. These were validated by cross referencing, to match recorded comments with wiki content. We found that the limited functionality of wikis influenced how students engaged with the collaborative activities. While all groups were able to collaboratively author the documents required for assessment, they were not always produced in the way intended by the course teams. This meant the expected benefits of collaborative learning were not always realised. This paper will be of interest to academics aspiring to employ wikis on their courses and to practitioners who wish to realise the potential of wikis in facilitating information sharing and fostering collaboration within teams.


We show that a GPT-3 model can learn to express uncertainty about its own answers in natural language -- without use of model logits. When given a question, the model generates both an answer and a level of confidence (e.g."90% confidence"or"high confidence"). These levels map to probabilities that are well calibrated. The model also remains moderately calibrated under distribution shift, and is sensitive to uncertainty in its own answers, rather than imitating human examples. To our knowledge, this is the first time a model has been shown to express calibrated uncertainty about its own answers in natural language. For testing calibration, we introduce the CalibratedMath suite of tasks. We compare the calibration of uncertainty expressed in words ("verbalized probability") to uncertainty extracted from model logits. Both kinds of uncertainty are capable of generalizing calibration under distribution shift. We also provide evidence that GPT-3's ability to generalize calibration depends on pre-trained latent representations that correlate with epistemic uncertainty over its answers.


Chinese engagement in African states has increased tremendously over the last decade, much in line with Chinese globalisation strategies and supported by state encouragement and financial support. The size and potential of China as a world power leads to the level of expectations the country faces from the developing world. However, some elements of these expectations are also created through political discourses which emphasise differences with Western countries. The types of promises that the Chinese leadership makes to create such enthusiastic welcome amongst African political leaders are linked closely to the discourse on South–South cooperation. Albeit different from Western development assistance promises and parallel attempts to produce moderate expectations, the current discourse is thus partly sowing the seeds for future disappointment. This article takes a closer look at the discussions around South–South cooperation in China–Africa relations and at key rhetorical features ('mutual benefit'; 'non-interference') and at the practice of this cooperation. It concludes that the Chinese discourse is creating large public expectations in African countries and while China delivers on many projects, its impact on development is less certain. The overall development success of this strategy builds on longer-term success and is implicitly linked to the occurrence of more reforms in Africa. Chinese policy thus 'bets on the future' in their foreign relations with Africa; the success of this strategy is dependent on political circumstances among the partners that are largely beyond Chinese control. In a number of cases, it can thus be expected that currently up-beat political rhetoric is going to meet obstacles that will require adjustments in a discourse that, in its current form, might undermine Chinese credibility if not the core elements of South–South cooperation altogether.


Abstract A hybrid quasi-optical waveguide resonating device providing millimeter-wave beam switching and combination at high power is described in this paper. It can be realized, starting from the beam-splitting properties of the rectangular corrugated waveguide with aperture much greater than the wavelength λ, by arranging the waveguides in a resonating ring configuration. This kind of waveguide, cut at an appropriate length, has been proposed for the remote steering (RS) system of the ITER upper electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) launcher, because of its imaging properties. In fact, beam steering can be performed far from the plasma edge since an input beam is transformed into an output beam with the same angle with the waveguide axis as the input one. Multiple imaging properties, derived by the fractional Talbot effect, are applied at waveguide sections cut at fractional lengths and lead to 3-dB beam-splitting properties for a length equivalent to half the length of an RS waveguide. Ring-type resonant devices with two outputs are obtained by setting two or more waveguides in properly arranged loops. The power distribution in the two output channels available can be controlled either mechanically, moving the mirrors used to couple the different sections by fractions of the wavelength λ, or varying the source frequency by a fraction Δε/ε ≪ 1. The exploitation of a second input port allows beams of different gyrotrons with nearly the same frequency to be coupled to the same transmission line. This relatively compact device can be evaluated for application into the ITER ECRH transmission line, with advantages on beam routing control.


In the transition from industrial to service robotics, robots will have to deal with increasingly unpredictable and variable environments. We present a system that is able to recognize objects of a certain class in an image and to identify their parts for potential interactions. The method can recognize objects from arbitrary viewpoints and generalizes to instances that have never been observed during training, even if they are partially occluded and appear against cluttered backgrounds. Our approach builds on the implicit shape model of Leibe et al. We extend it to couple recognition to the provision of meta-data useful for a task and to the case of multiple viewpoints by integrating it with the dense multi-view correspondence finder of Ferrari et al. Meta-data can be part labels but also depth estimates, information on material types, or any other pixelwise annotation. We present experimental results on wheelchairs, cars, and motorbikes.