Relatively little is known about the trading volume in derivatives relative to the volume in underlying stocks. We study the time-series properties and the determinants of the options/stock trading volume ratio (O/S) using a comprehensive cross-section and time-series of data on equities and their listed options. O/S is related to many intuitive determinants such as delta and trading costs, and it also varies with institutional holdings, analyst following, and analyst forecast dispersion. O/S is higher around earnings announcements, suggesting increased trading in the options market. Further, post-announcement absolute returns are positively related to pre-announcement O/S, which suggests that at least part of the pre-announcement options trading is informed.


An economic Cu-Zn volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) deposit was modeled in flow-through columns to examine the microbial controls on ore weathering and soil anomaly development. The presence of microorganisms, especially S- and Fe-oxidizing bacteria, increased the rate of weathering and metal release from ore. To examine the development of soil metal anomalies overlying the VMS deposit, flow-through experiments modeling the full overburden profile were completed. Selective extractions on the soil demonstrated that enhanced metal anomalies in the biotic column were developing in the reactive Fe- and Mn- oxide phases. These experimental results are linked to in situ biogeochemical processes through the use of Fe-oxidizing bacteria isolated from the deep subsurface of Triple 7 Cu-Zn VMS mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba, Canada, in direct proximity to where the ore material was collected. These results demonstrate that the rates of metal mobility in the subsurface and soil metal anomaly development at the surface are increased by the presence and activity of microorganisms when compared to control experiments.


BACKGROUND & AIMS
Genetic variations that affect innate immunity increase risk of ileal Crohn's disease (CD). However, the penetrance of susceptibility genes, including NOD2, is low, suggesting additional risk factors. Neutralizing autoantibodies (Ab) against granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF Ab) reduce neutrophil antimicrobial function in patients with primary alveolar proteinosis (PAP). We investigated whether GM-CSF Ab regulates neutrophil function in CD.

METHODS
Serum samples from 354 adult and pediatric patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) were analyzed for GM-CSF Ab and IBD markers. Levels of GM-CSF Ab were compared with patients' CD features and neutrophil function. Intestinal barrier function and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-induced injury were assessed in GM-CSF-null and NOD2-null mice.

RESULTS
Median GM-CSF Ab levels increased from 0.4 microg/mL in control serum to 2.4 microg/mL in pediatric CD and 11.7 microg/mL in adult CD serum and were associated with ileal involvement (P<.001). Ileal location, duration of disease, and increased GM-CSF Ab levels were associated with stricturing/penetrating behavior (odds ratio, 2.2; P=.018). The positive and negative predictive values of GM-CSF Ab for stricturing/penetrating behavior were comparable with that of other IBD serum markers. CD patients with increased GM-CSF Ab had reduced neutrophil phagocytic capacity and increased accumulation of pSTAT3+ neutrophils in the affected ileum. GM-CSF-null mice and NOD2-null mice in which GM-CSF was neutralized had defects in mucosal barrier function and developed a transmural ileitis following NSAID exposure.

CONCLUSIONS
GM-CSF regulates ileal homeostasis in CD and in mouse models. CD patients with increases in serum GM-CSF Ab might benefit from GM-CSF administration.


The project aims to implement a PSoC DVK based DAS system learning resource. The idea is to provide a way to develop signal acquiring basic knowledge, as well as a tool to implement simple measures.
In order to do it, hardware and software have been implemented. Hardware consists of PSoC DVK, which has the functions of AC and DC signal acquiring and generating, showing information about the selected function and the acquired signal through a display, and transmitting the acquired samples through the RS-232 communication. Software allows PSoC interacting and showing the acquired samples over the time and in a histogram.
The system provides the capability for selecting the ADC type between an integrating, a SAR and a dual integrating. Also, different resolutions and sample rates can be selected. This allows having several configurations in order to study some signal acquiring features, such as the interference rejection capability of the integrating ADC compared to the SAR and the analog circuit response, or to study each ADC type signal acquiring.
Finally, the system allows selecting the number of samples to be acquired between some preset quantities. It allows showing a detailed temporal representation of the samples acquired. Also, the input can be scaled in order to profit the ADC resolution for small amplitude signals.


Abstract. This article gives an overview of capacity development (CD) elements for fast-growing geospatial technologies and their applications (GSTA). While the Earth observation data and spatial analytics software tools are getting more open and accessible, lack of skilled workforce and institutional capacities are limiting effective applications. A systematic process is essential in realising required capacity at individual and institutional levels, in maintaining and upgrading technological infrastructures, and in updating geospatial data and strengthening human resources for sustainable supply of workforce. This article discusses on different user sectors and their competencies that are expected to meet their demands. It is also important to take stock of different modes of CD along with a variety of methods to select the appropriate suitable for the different users' groups for efficient knowledge transfer. In addition, this article describes briefly on two methods of building curriculum design of courses based on two different body of knowledge objectives. The importance of coordinated effort in CD programs is stressed for promoting GSTA for national and international flagship development programs such as the 2030 global sustainable development agenda. It briefly discusses on the issue of gender diversity and points out ways to increase the women participation in GSTA CD programs.


Gangliosides are a family of sialic acid-containing glycosphingolipids that are enriched in the nervous system. They are located in the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane within lipid rafts and are thought to be involved in numerous cellular events, including proliferation, differentiation, migration and neurite outgrowth. Gangliosides have also been shown to have neuroprotective actions and have been considered as candidates for the treatment of several neurodegenerative disorders.
In this thesis, the role of gangliosides in glial proliferation, migration and differentiation as well as the regeneration of the olfactory system and myelination were studied using mice lacking enzymes involved in ganglioside biosynthesis. Regeneration of the olfactory system in ganglioside knockout mice was similar to that of wild-type mice. However, proliferation of olfactory ensheathing cells grown on collagen and the migration of Schwann cells grown on laminin or collagen was increased in Sia T -/- mice, which lack b-series gangliosides but have increased levels of a-series gangliosides. These findings suggest that complex gangliosides modulate glial cell function to some extent. However, since the effects observed were subtle, it is possible that simpler gangliosides are able to compensate for the lack of complex gangliosides.
Axonal density and myelination were unaffected in ganglioside knockout mice. However, the localisation of sodium channels at the node of Ranvier and potassium channels at juxtaparanode was retarded in GalNAc T -/- mice lacking all complex gangliosides, suggesting that complex gangliosides modulate the formation of nodes of Ranvier. In addition, GalNAc T -/- mice had significantly lower numbers of NG2 positive early oligodendrocyte progenitors compared to wild-type and Sia T -/- mice, suggesting that complex gangliosides may affect early progenitor differentiation, proliferation or survival.


The aim of this thesis is to analyse the scientific basis for diverging recommendations in environmental management. A further aim of this study is to discuss the links and interactions between disciplines related to science of environmental issues, and between natural science and practice in dealing with environmental management and ecological sustainability. The question at issue was whether ontological (how the world is constituted) and epistemological (how achieve knowledge about the world) differences between disciplines lead to opposing conclusions. Scientific disputes were selected systematically to examine and analyse the theoretical characteristics and reasons of these disputes. Two case studies were selected: forest nitrogen fertilisation and constructed wetlands. Content analysis was used to study the theoretical content of and the reasons for the disputes within these two scientific areas. Research articles published in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and publications in anthologies were chosen as the empirical material. The results show that theoretical disputes arise from the diversity of disciplines and fragmentation of theoretical frameworks. The conclusions are that one way to overcome scientific disputes and achieve common knowledge and solutions to environmental problems is to identify and compare values and principles of the different scientific research traditions.


Pseudogenization is a widespread phenomenon in genome evolution, and it has been proposed to serve as an engine of evolutionary change, especially during human origins (the "less-is-more" hypothesis). However, there has been no comprehensive analysis of human-specific pseudogenes. Furthermore, it is unclear whether pseudogenization itself can be selectively favored and thus play an active role in human evolution. Here we conduct a comparative genomic analysis and a literature survey to identify 80 nonprocessed pseudogenes that were inactivated in the human lineage after its separation from the chimpanzee lineage. Many functions are involved among these genes, with chemoreception and immune response being outstandingly overrepresented, suggesting potential species-specific features in these aspects of human physiology. To explore the possibility of adaptive pseudogenization, we focus on CASPASE12, a cysteinyl aspartate proteinase participating in inflammatory and innate immune response to endotoxins. We provide population genetic evidence that the nearly complete fixation of a null allele at CASPASE12 has been driven by positive selection, probably because the null allele confers protection from severe sepsis. We estimate that the selective advantage of the null allele is about 0.9% and the pseudogenization started shortly before the out-of-Africa migration of modern humans. Interestingly, two other genes related to sepsis were also pseudogenized in humans, possibly by selection. These adaptive gene losses might have occurred because of changes in our environment or genetic background that altered the threat from or response to sepsis. The identification and analysis of human-specific pseudogenes open the door for understanding the roles of gene losses in human origins, and the demonstration that gene loss itself can be adaptive supports and extends the "less-is-more" hypothesis.


While pioneer animator Ub Iwerks has often been praised as a driving force behind the early success of the Walt Disney Company, his independent work has received scant attention. That relative omission from animation history seems curious given two key features of his cartoon work: an emphasis on gags involving protean, transformative effects – a characteristic often linked to avant-garde filmmaking; and his pioneering work on a multiplane camera – a device that would become crucial to a developing realist aesthetic in American animation. This article examines these features to situate his work in terms of American animation's shifting aesthetic in the 1930s. It suggests that we see Iwerks' cartoons as symptomatic of a larger struggle in this period between the avant-garde and an emerging realism, closely linked to the classical narrative mode of live-action cinema, and the relative failure of his films as indicative of an inability to negotiate between these different pulls.


Long memory (long-term dependence) of volatility counts as one of the ubiquitous stylized facts of financial data. Inspired by the long memory property, multifractal processes have recently been introduced as a new tool for modeling financial time series. In this paper, we propose a parsimonious version of a bivariate multifractal model and estimate its parameters via both maximum likelihood and simulation based inference approaches. In order to explore its practical performance, we apply the model for computing value-at-risk and expected shortfall statistics for various portfolios and compare the results with those from an alternative bivariate multifractal model proposed by Calvet et al. (2006) and the bivariate CC-GARCH of Bollerslev (1990). As it turns out, the multifractal models provide much more reliable results than CC-GARCH, and our new model compares well with the one of Calvet et al. although it has an even smaller number of parameters.


With a century of solid theory behind it, tax law at the threshold of the twenty-first century confronts a new reality: the weakening of the tenacious link between the sovereignty of states and taxation. Yet it is to the continuity of certain themes and principles inherent in the various national tax systems that tax law scholarship continues to look, even as it develops new principles designed to meet the expanding processes of internationalisation. This collection of eleven essays offers an expert comparative analysis, conducted by a sample of the best international tax law scholars, of the fundamental theory of tax law and of the prospects in the near future of tax legislative systems. The emphasis falls naturally on tax theory, jurisprudence, and legislative development in the Member States of the European Union (particularly in Italy, Germany, and Spain), where the process of tax harmonisation has been under way for many years. The effect of these processes, via the relevant tax treaties, on the tax systems of Japan and the United States provides a secondary emphasis. Practitioners and academics in tax law will find in this book an invaluable understanding of the challenges that tax law theory strives to meet at this crucial moment of economic history. The essays present a full and reliable exposition of the current theoretical approaches adopted by the various schools of thought in the field, as well as of the main contributions of jurisprudence. Extensive bibliographies are included. This volume translates and summarizes material in the editor's major five-volume work "Trattato di diritto tributario" (1994). Professor Amatucci has added an important new preface.


We propose a semi-direct monocular visual odometry algorithm that is precise, robust, and faster than current state-of-the-art methods. The semi-direct approach eliminates the need of costly feature extraction and robust matching techniques for motion estimation. Our algorithm operates directly on pixel intensities, which results in subpixel precision at high frame-rates. A probabilistic mapping method that explicitly models outlier measurements is used to estimate 3D points, which results in fewer outliers and more reliable points. Precise and high frame-rate motion estimation brings increased robustness in scenes of little, repetitive, and high-frequency texture. The algorithm is applied to micro-aerial-vehicle state-estimation in GPS-denied environments and runs at 55 frames per second on the onboard embedded computer and at more than 300 frames per second on a consumer laptop. We call our approach SVO (Semi-direct Visual Odometry) and release our implementation as open-source software.


Aim: In most studies the methodology used to study growth in relation to breastfeeding patterns cannot ensure that exclusive breastfeeding has in fact occurred since birth. The aim of this study was to investigate the growth of healthy infants in Sweden in whom exclusive breastfeeding for the first 4–6 mo was ascertained through daily feeding records and to compare the results with the World Health Organization (WHO) "12‐month breastfed pooled data set" and the Euro‐Growth references for exclusively breastfed infants, as well as with the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)/WHO reference. Methods: 147 exclusively breastfed infants and 325 non‐exclusively breastfed Swedish infants, with a birthweight of ≥3 kg, were included. The mothers had previous breastfed at least one infant for at least 4 mo. Weight was recorded fortnightly and length monthly. Results: Infants exclusively breastfed since birth showed similar growth in weight and height to that of the non‐exclusively breastfed infants. During the first 6 mo of life the growth of exclusively breastfed infants was also similar to that of the infants regularly receiving formula at 12–16 wk of age, mostly in addition to breast milk. The monthly growth increments were fairly similar to those of the "WHO pooled breastfed data set" and the Euro‐Growth references for exclusively breastfed infants.


We report a simple synthetic method of carbon-based hybrid cellular nanosheets that exhibit outstanding electrochemical performance for many key aspects of lithium-ion battery electrodes. The nanosheets consist of close-packed cubic cavity cells partitioned by carbon walls, resembling plant leaf tissue. We loaded carbon cellular nanosheets with SnO2 nanoparticles by vapor deposition method and tested the performance of the resulting SnO2-carbon nanosheets as anode materials. The specific capacity is 914 mAh g(-1) on average with a retention of 97.0% during 300 cycles, and the reversible capacity is decreased by only 20% as the current density is increased from 200 to 3000 mA g(-1). In order to explain the excellent electrochemical performance, the hybrid cellular nanosheets were analyzed with cyclic voltammetry, in situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. We found that the high packing density, large interior surface area, and rigid carbon wall network are responsible for the high specific capacity, lithiation/delithiation reversibility, and cycling stability. Furthermore, the nanosheet structure leads to the high rate capability due to fast Li-ion diffusion in the thickness direction.


The New York Family Court this year celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. Hailed as an "experimental" tribunal, designed to resolve society's most intractable problems, including family dissolution, delinquency and child neglected, the court has been perceived as a radical development which altered the then existing legal rules governing family affairs. The Family Court Act indeed incorporates several creative provisions. But the court's foundations were built upon solid jurisprudential underpinnings, principles which had evolved over the course of the preceding century. Establishment of the court was neither radical nor experimental; in reality, Family Court represents the latest increment in the development of legal principles to protect children and adjudicate family disputes. In view of the controversies which have surrounded the court since its inception, an historical silver anniversary analysis may be helpful.


Understanding household consumption spending is crucial for modelling business cycles and designing macroeconomic policy. This paper investigates how household debt affects the marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth. We use microdata from Statistics New Zealand's "Household Economic Survey" (HES) to investigate how household leverage affects the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of housing wealth. HES data provide detailed information on household spending, income and loans. Empirically, estimating the effect of housing wealth changes on household expenditure faces two types of endogeneity issues. First, any evidence of an association between housing wealth variations and consumption changes could be driven by unobservable confounding factors such as future income expectations or household preferences. Second, naive regressions with total household spending can suffer from reversed causality, in which high housing-related spending leads to higher property values. We combine HES data with Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) micro house price data to address the endogeneity issues that arise from using household-level cross-sectional data. In the empirical analysis, we first assess the validity of average local house prices as an instrument for individual house prices. The first stage regression suggests that the instrument can explain up to 22 percent of the variation in individual house prices reported in HES. We then run a benchmark regression of total household expenditure excluding housing-related spending on housing wealth. The IV estimation suggests that using household-level prices leads to downward bias, which is the result of various causes of endogeneity issues discussed above. The average MPC out of a one-dollar increase in exogenous housing wealth is around 2.2 cents. All regressions control for income, household characteristics, and regional and time fixed effects. We also split non-housing expenditure into durables and non-durables. In line with other studies in the literature, we find that durable consumption is more sensitive to changes in housing wealth than non-durables. We then focus on the role of household leverage in determining the MPC out of housing wealth. In this analysis, we study how leverage measures, such as the loan-to-house-value ratio (LVR) and the DTI, affect the estimated MPC out of housing wealth. Overall, we find that household leverage weakens the MPC associated with housing. To examine the robustness of these findings, we investigate whether household spending responds differently depending on the age and type 5 of home ownership. The findings confirm that the consumption of mortgagors is less sensitive to housing wealth as compared to outright homeowners. The regression with an age-housing wealth interaction also shows that the response of younger households to changes in their housing wealth is weaker than the response of older households, which tend to be less leveraged.


Abstract Bulbothrix bulbillosa is recorded for the first time in Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul State. The species was described recently from the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador and known only from the type locality. All specimens found belong to the gyrophoric acid chemotype, whereas material from Galapagos contains either gyrophoric or lecanoric acid.


Mineral Resources Map of Northern Ireland - A key aspect of sustainable development is the conservation and safeguarding of non-renewable resources, such as minerals. There is a need to ensure that these resources are not needlessly sterilised by other development thus reducing access to supplies for future generations. The purpose of the maps in this series, therefore, is to show the broad distribution of those mineral resources which may be of current or potential economic interest. The maps are intended to assist strategic decision making in respect of mineral extraction and the protection of important mineral resources against sterilisation. They bring together a wide range of information, much of which is scattered and not always available in a convenient form. The maps have been produced by the collation and interpretation of mineral resource data principally held by the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland.

The British Geological Survey and counterpart, The Geological Survey of Northern Ireland, have produced the maps via a commission from the Department of the Environment. This map, along with one for each of the five other counties (including county boroughs), was completed in 2012 and a series of six digitally generated maps at a scale of 1:100 000 are available. The mineral resource data depicted on these maps are also available in a digital format for use within a Geographical Information System (GIS).


Activity recognition aims to discover one or more users' actions and goals based on sensor readings. In the real world, a single user's data are often insufficient for training an activity recognition model due to the data sparsity problem. This is especially true when we are interested in obtaining a personalized model. In this paper, we study how to collaboratively use different users' sensor data to train a model that can provide personalized activity recognition for each user. We propose a user-dependent aspect model for this collaborative activity recognition task. Our model introduces user aspect variables to capture the user grouping information, so that a target user can also benefit from her similar users in the same group to train the recognition model. In this way, we can greatly reduce the need for much valuable and expensive labeled data required in training the recognition model for each user. Our model is also capable of incorporating time information and handling new user in activity recognition. We evaluate our model on a real-world WiFi data set obtained from an indoor environment, and show that the proposed model can outperform several state-of-art baseline algorithms.


Recipient of the Prize of the Minister of Science, Culture, and Sport [of the State of Israel] for classical literature for the year 5762 [2001]. The commentary, which accompanies the Hebrew biblical text and the JPS translation, approaches the Book of Esther from a fresh literary point of view. It includes essays entitled "When and Where Was the Book of Esther Written?," "Sex and Spies," and "Rabbinic Interpretation."


The growing popularity of micro-blogs has drawn an increasing amount of attention from users keen to expand friendship, facilitate information sharing and information seeking. Given the extensive use of micro-blog services, there is a pressing need to understand users' behavioral intentions in microblog services. Although there are some studies exploring the factors explaining micro-blog users' acceptance, none of research has been reported from both of the technological characteristics and network effects of micro-blog services. This study extended motivational model with socio-technical approach as a theoretical framework to examine the roles of technological factors and network effect factors in determining micro-blog users' behavioral intentions. This study suggests that interactivity, convenience, accessibility, network size, existing social contacts, performance expectancy, sense of belonging and hedonic expectancy together provide a strong explanation for micro-blog use intention. The results of this study provide directions for system administrators and service providers to achieve higher levels of micro-blog usage by developing multi-faceted strategies.


Due to the development of media information technologies and the proliferation of mobile devices, the Internet has rapidly moved to the center of news readership. In contrast to traditional media, Internet news is often coupled with commenting platforms that can accommodate readers' immediate feedback to news stories. However, a side-effect of this feature—malicious comments—is becoming an increasingly serious social problem. To alleviate this problem and increase the likelihood of comments functioning as deliberative discussion, we suggest two moderation policies—a policy of providing high-quality seed comments and a policy of increased identifiability through social networking service accounts—and examine their effects through a longitudinal online experiment. We designed experimental groups according to a 2 x 2 between-subjects factorial design. For our experiment, a total of 137 subjects read news stories and commented on them over 15 days by using a mobile Android application developed specifically for the experiment. We found the following relationships. First, both seed quality and identifiability improve the quality of user comments in terms of deliberative discussion. Second, these effects are comparable in magnitude. Third, there are no significant interaction effects between seeds and identifiability. Fourth, the effects of high-quality seeds disappear early with anonymous users but persist when users are identified by social media accounts. Fifth, the negative effects of low-quality seeds are present and persistent only when combined with anonymity. Otherwise, the negative effects of low-quality seed comments are canceled out by the positive effects of identifiability. Finally, anonymous males are easily provoked to respond to low-quality seed comments, but most females do not respond to such comments even in anonymous situations.


For ectotherms living in seasonal environments, time available for development and growth is often constrained by the length of the growth season. Declining season length towards higher latitudes often select for latitudinal clines in development and growth rates, exhibiting increasing growth and developmental rates towards the north. However, the physiological and ecological factors enabling these clines are poorly understood.Our study system included eight populations of Rana temporaria along a 1500 km latitudinal gradient. We found increased growth rates in populations at higher latitudes to be the result of higher growth efficiency, partly due to increased relative gut length. Populations with higher growth rates also exhibited lower standard metabolic rates, implying that fast-growing individuals are able to achieve high growth rates by spending less energy on maintenance metabolism under low activity conditions.Predator densities, and antipredatory defenses in prey, are assumed to decrease towards higher latitudes. While all study populations responded to predator presence by decreasing activity and foraging, high latitude populations maintained higher activity levels in the presence of the predator. In trials with a free-ranging predator, high latitude tadpoles experienced higher mortality than those from the low latitudes. The higher activity level in the northern populations increases mortality under predation risk, but is probably needed to maintain high growth and development rates.When competing over resources, tadpoles from the low latitude population were inferior competitors, as indicated by their longer development time when raised together with high latitude tadpoles. We found no effect of latitude on size-corrected burst speed. The general effect of predator presence on burst speed depended on food availability, with well fed tadpoles being faster in the absence, and food restricted being faster in the presence of a predator.


The workforce scheduling and routing problem (WSRP) arises in many scenarios in which skilled workers need to deliver services at different locations. Examples of these scenarios include nurses visiting patients at home, technicians carrying out repairs at customers' locations, security guards performing rounds at different premises, etc. Hence, finding a solution to this type of problem involves tackling both the \emph{scheduling of tasks} to be carried out and the \emph{routing of workers} to visit the locations of tasks. The focus of this thesis is a challenging real-world problem in the planning and scheduling of healthcare delivery, denoted by home healthcare (HHC) problem. The first intended contribution of this PhD research is to provide to the research community six benchmark datasets for a real-world workforce scheduling and routing problem arising in healthcare delivery as well as benchmark results obtained with heuristic methods. The next contribution is an algorithm to obtain lower bound values for the HHC problem that is capable of providing results when mathematical techniques are not applicable. The lower bounds are obtained by splitting and relaxing the problem into a scheduling and a routing subproblems, and calculating individual lower bounds for each subproblem. In order to further understand the HHC problem, its multiobjective characteristics were assessed. Understanding the relationships between objectives in a multiobjective optimisation problem is important for developing tailored and efficient solving techniques. In particular, when tackling combinatorial optimisation problems with many objectives that arise in real-world scenarios, better support for the decision maker can be achieved through better understanding of the often complex fitness landscape. This thesis makes a contribution in this direction by presenting a technique that allows a visualisation and analysis of the local and global relationships between objectives in optimisation problems with many objectives. The proposed technique uses four steps: first the global pairwise relationships are analysed using the Kendall correlation method; then the ranges of the values found on the given Pareto front are estimated and assessed; next these ranges are used to plot a map using Gray code, similar to Karnaugh maps, that has the ability to highlight the trade-offs between multiple objectives; and finally local relationships are identified using scatter-plots. Results show that each dataset has different characteristics, and the relationships between objectives and their importance vary across datasets; also, instances of the same dataset share similar fitness landscapes. A Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) metaheuristic algorithm is proposed to tackle the HHC problem, incorporating three heuristics tailored to the problem-domain. The first heuristic restricts the search space using a priority list of candidate workers; the second heuristic seeks to reduce the violation of worker availabilities soft constraints; the third heuristic estimate the objective costs of all possible individual assignments and uses the estimated costs instead of the objective function, hence substantially increasing the speed of the search. Two greedy constructive heuristics are presented to give the VNS a good starting point. It is shown that the proposed VNS obtains substantial improvements in the quality of solutions regardless of the datasets unique features. The proposed VNS provides the current benchmark results for the set of real-world HHC scenarios considered. The last contribution of this thesis is a multiobjective solving methodology that exploits the fact that instances of the same dataset share similar fitness landscapes. The methodology consists of obtaining an approximation set of a single instance and using that approximation set, goal programming and the proposed VNS to reach target solutions in the remaining instances. Results show that the methodology is accurate enough to reach the target solution and is able to provide quick results when multiobjective algorithms take long computational times.


This paper presents two models that use interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2 FSs) for representing the meaning of words that refer to emotions. In the first model, the meaning of an emotion word is represented by IT2 FSs on valence, activation, and dominance scales. In the second model, the meaning of an emotion word is represented by answers to an open-ended set of questions from the game of Emotion Twenty Questions (EMO20Q). The notion of meaning in the two proposed models is made explicit using the Frege an framework of extensional and intensional components of meaning. Inter- and intra-subject uncertainty is captured by using IT2 FSs learned from interval approach surveys. Similarity and subsethood operators are used for comparing the meaning of pairs of words. For the first model, we apply similarity and subsethood operators for the task of translating one emotional vocabulary, represented as a computing with words (CWW) codebook, to another. This act of translation is shown to be an example of CWW that is extended to use the three scales of valence, activation, and dominance to represent a single variable. We experimentally evaluate the use of the first model for translations and mappings between vocabularies. Accuracy is high when using a small emotion vocabulary as an output, but performance decreases when the output vocabulary is larger. The second model was devised to deal with larger emotion vocabularies, but presents interesting technical challenges in that the set of scales underlying two different emotion words may not be the same. We evaluate the second model by comparing it with results from a single-slider survey. We discuss the theoretical insights that the two models allow and the advantages and disadvantages of each.


This paper uses the quantitative spatial model with heterogeneous locations linked by costly goods trade, migration and commuting developed in Monte et al. (2018) to address the workings of local labor markets in Germany. One key contribution concerns the analysis of the role of the expenditure share of housing in the economy. We provide arguments that, in accordance with Rognlie (2015), for an economy-wide quantitative exercise, this share should be chosen lower than stipulated in much of the extant research. Our analyses show that the local general equilibrium employment and resident elasticities with respect to local productivity shocks are significantly higher with a lower housing share. Moreover, simple ex-ante observable commuting measures have very little predictive power for these general equilibrium elasticities when the housing share is small. The size of the housing share turns out to play no crucial role for two further results, however. First, employment and resident elasticities are very heterogeneous across German local labor markets, irrespective of the housing share. Second, the housing share has only little influence on the welfare effects and location patterns of counterfactual commuting cost reductions.


Vaccination against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) was successfully introduced in the Danish childhood vaccination program in 2009 for girls aged 12 with coverage reaching approximately 90%. However, media attention focusing on vaccine safety resulted in a rapid drop in vaccination coverage from 2015. In May 2017, a national campaign "Stop HPV - stop cervical cancer" with aim to regain trust in the official HPV vaccine recommendation and to increase vaccination coverage, was launched. The primary target group of the campaign are mothers in doubt whether to HPV vaccinate their daughter. One of the main elements of the campaign is the social media strategy which includes a Facebook (FB) page "Stop HPV - stop cervical cancer". New content is made for the page one or twice weekly with a wide range of different post styles used. The FB page is staffed throughout the week and every comment made on the FB page personally answered by the staff. The communication strategy used for the campaign is "heart-brain" with a strategy of communicating "brain" facts about safety and effectiveness of the vaccine while on the other hand telling narrative "heart" stories, such as personal stories of women with cervical cancer. The strategy is in line with recommendations from World Health Organization (WHO) who acknowledge health communication related to vaccines is not only about telling facts, but also about eliciting emotions, creating trust and ensuring genuine understanding by the target group. Communicating on FB about the Childhood vaccination programme has not been used by the Danish Authorities before and there has been a keen interest to learn from the campaign initiative. To quantify and qualify the interaction on Facebook, engagement rates and sentiment analysis to the different types of FB posts have been evaluated and focus groups used to describe the preferred communication style. Data from the evaluation and the impact of the campaign will be presented at the workshop.


James Backhouse Correspondence
1831 - 1838
RS.58
James Backhouse (1794-1869) was a Quaker missionary, of Darlington,
and later, York, England. In 1831 he sailed for Australia, accompanied
by George Washington Walker (1800-1859), with the financial support
of the London Yearly Meeting. They arrived in Hobart in February
1832 and from then until their departure from Australia in 1838
they visited most of the scattered settlements throughout Australia.
They spent three years in Van Diemens Land where they visited the
penal settlements, reported to Lieut.-Governor Arthur on conditions
and made suggestions for improvement of the prisons, chain gangs,
assigned servants etc. They also encouraged the formation of benevolent
services, such as the Ladies Committees for visiting prisoners on
Elizabeth Fry's model, inspected hospitals and recommended humane
treatment for the insane, as well as distributing religious tracts
and school books. In 1833 they established a Monthly Meeting of the
Society of Friends in Hobart and in 1834 the Hobart Yearly Meeting.
In 1837 they bought property for a Meeting House in Hobart. James
Backhouse also collected many botanical specimens and continued to
correspond with the Tasmanian Society and the Royal Society. After
his return to England, Backhouse published an account of his journeys
as A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London, 1843)
(See Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 1.)
The correspondence consists of letters addressed to James Backhouse
and his companion relating to their missionary journey. Most are
from people in official positions thanking the missionaries for their
work, acknowledging books and reports, replying to requests for
information or offering int~oductions, help and hospitality and also
some discussion of religious matters and references to botany in
which J.B. was interested. A later letter of 1844 acknowledges
Backhouse's gift of his book to the Tasmanian Society.
The letters were kept by the Backhouse family until 1933 when a
grandson of James Backhouse, A.J. Crosfield, presented letters of
Australian interest to the Royal Society of Tasmania through Ernest
E. Unwin, headmaster of the Friends' School, Hobart. With them were
a few other letters not connected with James Backhouse but of the same
period and also of Australian interest. These (numbers 29-37) are
mainly addressed to John Gould and refer to his study of Australian
birds. It is unlikely that they were ever in the possession of James
Backhouse who died some years before Gould, but they were probably collected by a younger member of the family. Apart from their interest
in connection with John Gould and ornithology, many are signed by or
include references to well known explorers. Many of the letters bear
a pencil note in a later hand identifying the writer, often by a
position or title received some years after the date of the letter.
About the time of their presentation to the Society the manuscripts
were professionally guarded on to mounting paper and bound into a
volume entitled "Autograph Letters". At the front, typed directly
on to the mounting paper, is a list of the letters, probably copied by
the binder from a handwritten draft as it contains a number of misreadings,
such as Bushy for Busby, Benk for Back, Hirst for Stirt, Jawler for
Gawler, etc. Also typed on to the mounting paper is an "introduction"
by Mr. Unwin:-
The letters contained herein are original autograph letters
which have been preserved by the family of James Backhouse.
They came into the possession of Albert J. Crosfield of
Cambridge, England, a grandson of James Backhouse, on the
death of his brother James Backhouse Crosfield, and were
offered to the Library of the Royal Society of Tasmania
through Ernest E. Unwin, Headmaster of the Friend's School,
Hobart, who was consulted by Mr. A.J. Crosfield in the
matter.
Most of the letters are addressed to James Backhouse or
to James Backhouse and George Washington Walker from
prominent people in this and mainland states mostly
during the years 1832 to 1838. There are also a few letters
addressed to other persons, which were probably collected
by James Backhouse for their autographic value.
Ernest E. Unwin.
Presented to the Roya1 Society, September 1933. II
Other papers of James Backhouse are in the Friends' Library, London.
RS 58


Recently there has been greater interest from academics and practitioners in the role of 'traditional' justice mechanisms in politics of peace, reconciliation and transitional justice efforts after a period of large-scale human rights violations. However, this call for 'culturally sensitive' approaches remains at a rhetorical level. This article attempts to fill the knowledge gap of empirical local studies and focuses on post-conflict processes in Guatemala. It explores the actual and potential role of particularities of Mayan Q'eqchi' culture in local social reconstruction processes after the internal armed conflict. Based on extensive ethnographic field research, the article explores how concepts of justice and reconciliation are locally and culturally understood. It uncovers the existence of multiple ways of understanding these concepts and further, the fact that they are perceived very differently from interpretations in international law and transitional justice studies. Impunity, as defined by international law, is not the end of accountability, nor truth recovery or reparation. Here, the internal logic of the cosmos through an invisible spiritual force, fosters social and spiritual repair at community level, contributing to the lack of demands of justice by Q'eqchi' survivors.


Photonic crystals and microcavities act as on-chip nano-optical tweezers for identification and manipulation of biological objects. Until now, optical trapping of virus and bacteria has been achieved and their presence in the vicinity of the optical resonator is deduced by the shift in the resonant wavelength. Here, we show trapping and identification of bacteria through a properly tuned silicon on insulator microcavity. Through the spatial and temporal observations of bacteria–cavity interaction, the optical identification of three different kinds of bacteria is demonstrated.


This study involves the development of safety performance functions (SPFs) for signalized and stop-controlled intersections located along urban and suburban arterials in the state of Michigan. Extensive databases were developed that resulted in the integration of traffic crash information, traffic volumes, and roadway geometry information. After these data were assembled, an exploratory analysis of the data was conducted to identify general crash trends. This included assessment of the base models provided in the Highway Safety Manual (HSM), as well as a calibration exercise, which demonstrated significant variability in terms of the goodness-of-fit of the HSM models across various site types. Michigan-specific SPFs were estimated, including simple models that consider only annual average daily traffic (AADT). More detailed models were also developed, which considered additional geometric factors, such as posted speed limits, number of lanes, and the presence of medians, intersection lighting, and right-turn-on-red prohibition. Crash modification factors (CMFs) were also estimated, which can be used to adjust the SPFs to account for differences related to these factors. Separate SPFs were estimated for intersections of only two-way streets and for those where at least one of the intersecting streets was one-way as the factors affecting traffic safety were found to vary between these site types. Severity distribution functions (SDFs) were also estimated, which can be used to predict the proportion of injury crashes which result in different injury severity levels. The SDFs may include various geometric, operation, and traffic variables that will allow the estimated proportion to be specific to an individual intersection. Ultimately, the results of this study provide Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) with a number of methodological tools that will allow for proactive safety planning activities, including network screening and identification of high-risk sites. These tools have been calibrated such that they can be applied at either the statewide level or within any of MDOT's seven geographic regions, providing additional flexibility to accommodate unique differences across the state. The report also documents procedures for maintaining and calibrating these SPFs over time, allowing for consideration of general trends that are not directly reflected by the predictor variables.


Early methods of radioactive waste (RW) management in the former Soviet Union (FSU) were plagued with serious problems, which eventually prompted investigations into RW disposal methods that could provide a more reliable isolation of wastes from humans and the accessible environment. Deep well injection was chosen as a potential method of RW disposal, and, after extensive testing of the concept and numerous calculations of the likely consequences, discharges into deep geological formations at Krasnoyarsk-26 began between 1967 and 1969.

This study was initiated because there were no published, independent assessments of the deep well injection systems at Krasnoyarsk-26 that used site-specific geology and data. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in cooperation with Russian experts, undertook independent analyses of waste migration at the site, using data gathered by official Russian organizations over a 40-year period of exploration and exploitation of the repositories.

The results of the modeling efforts carried out by IIASA and the Russian organizations -- VNIPIPT and IGEM -- indicate that the existing system of deep well injection at Krasnoyarsk is functioning as designed. Under the current best understanding of site conditions, there is very little likelihood that the injected wastes would reach the earth's surface prior to the time that the radioactive materials had been absorbed, decayed, or dispersed to concentrations far below standards set for drinking water.


Device-to-device (D2D) communications is a cell-free enabler of 5G and rising wireless communications demand between low-orbit satellite constellation, self-driving vehicles and unmanned aerial systems. Distributed computation (where channel state information is not available) schemes facilitate direct exchanges between mobile user equipment (UE) and if necessary a UE can serve as a relay. Thus, it is essential to develop robust D2D communications frameworks agnostic to the channel distribution which can deliver scalable data rates to self-driving vehicles while the spectral efficiency(SE) is non-asymptotic and energy consumption is increasing to yield an energy efficiency (EE) that is a unimodal function. In this paper, we evaluate the optimal EE by using the computation of the SE in distributed multiple input- multiple output (MIMO) wireless communications. A generalized water-filling framework over arbitrary channel distribution is used to evaluate the SE and then the EE to compare with single-input single-output optimized approximate schemes based on Taylor expansion. The computation yields the optimal power allocation at the transmitters which is derived to illustrate the performance gain of the generalized water-filling distributed MIMO over the approximate scheme. Our simulations results show novel achievable EE linear growth as a function of SE and robust trade-offs in performance gains determined by the total power consumption optimal profile when switching MIMO dimensions. Our trade-off prevents power consumption while EE is decreasing. Thus by switching the number of MIMO operating antenna elements at both the receiver and transmitter sides, EE is no more a unimodal function as illustrated in the literature.


Heat and drought were extreme in summer 2003 in Europe. Climatic data show that most extreme were maximum air temperatures in June and August; maps of these two months show a striking similarity in geographical range. Over wide regions, monthly mean temperatures were more than 4 ◦C above the long term mean values. The heat lasted from May to September in large parts of western and central Europe. The lack of precipitation was most severe in summer 2003 but precipitation was generally below normal from February 2003 until June 2004 (with the exception of two months). Sunshine duration was above normal, particularly in regions which usually have rainy and cloudy episodes in summer, and relative air humidity was below normal during the whole year of 2003. The drought experienced by the vegetation in summer 2003 was exacerbated by the length of the period with scarce precipitation and humidity, by the heat during the summer and by long sunshine duration.


Stakeholders are coming together to develop a vision for increasing access to family planning (FP) by 2030. Of the 923 million women in the developing world who wish to avoid a pregnancy, 218 million women are not using a modern contraceptive (Guttmacher Institute, 2020). In 2016, over 3.4 billion people were using the internet (https://ourworldindata.org/internet 2016). Moreover, internet users in the developing world use social media more frequently than Internet users in the U.S. and Europe. Of the many proposed actions to accelerate progress in family planning, the use of Twitter should be a key component. In this commentary, we describe the use of Twitter in a select group of low-and-middle-income countries that have made commitments to the family planning 2020 initiative (FP2020 countries and have the potential to leverage Twitter with current and potential family planning users. We examine Twitter feeds in eight key FP2020 countries, and we look at the content of Tweets issued by the ministries of health in most of these same countries. Our view is that it is feasible and easy to access Twitter feeds in low-and -middle income countries. We base our view on the types of reproductive health and family planning terms discussed in a public forum such as Twitter by current and potential users and their partners and ministries of health. We highlight two broad considerations that merit discussion among interested stakeholders, including policy makers, program designers, and health advocates. The first relates to the use of Twitter within family planning programs, and the second relates to themes that require more significant research. Data coupled with analytical capacity will help policy makers and program designers to effectively leverage Twitter for expanding the reach of family planning services and influencing social media policy. Our aim is to not only to contribute to the body of knowledge but also to spur greater engagement by program personnel, researchers, health advocates and contraceptive users.


Abstract. Biophysical conditions, the lack of governance and the weak applications of planning and territorial planning policies are aggravating factors of affections caused by natural disasters in Latin America. In Ecuador, landslides have caused not only material but also human losses, which shows the lack of immediate actions to avoid human settlements in risk areas or more controlled evacuations protocols, in case of early detection of risk areas due to this type of events. This article is part of an applied research project for the City of Cuenca allowing to take advantage of the information provided by citizens with a PPGIS. Furthermore, remote sensor images are analyzed, in order to identify in a semi-automated way, risk areas due to mass movements problems. Two approaches for semi-automated detecting areas where mass movements happen have been explored, i) Temporal images obtained by a LiDAR; and ii) Temporary images obtained by flights of an unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV. This paper present the procedure followed by comparison of image outcomes. The resulting analysis clearly presents the applicability of the two techniques thus allowing the determination of maps and early detection of landslides.


Abstract One of the most salient hallmarks of construction grammar is its approach to argument structure and coercion: rather than positing many different verb senses in the lexicon, the same lexical construction may freely interact with multiple argument structure constructions. This view has however been criticized from within the construction grammar movement for leading to overgeneration. This paper argues that this criticism falls flat for two reasons: (1) lexicalism, which is the alternative solution proposed by the critics, has already been proven to overgenerate itself, and (2) the argument of overgeneration becomes void if grammar is implemented as a problem-solving model rather than as a generative competence model; a claim that the paper substantiates through a computational operationalization of argument structure and coercion in Fluid Construction Grammar. The paper thus shows that the current debate on argument structure is hiding a much more fundamental rift between practitioners of construction grammar that touches upon the role of grammar itself.


Learning networks, groups or communities are seen as having the potential to provide supportive, integrative and deep learning processes which can enhance student performance and support transition to university (Peat, Dalziel and Grant 2001; Zhao and Kuh 2004). The provision of a learning environment with opportunities for meaningful academic and social interactions is characteristic of higher education and collaborative learning strategies are frequently used to encourage student selfmanagement, independence and the general development of group skills. Whilst the value-added potential of learning groups is well documented (Peat et al. 2001; Zhao and Kuh 2004; Lizzio and Wilson, 2006), the nature of the course subject is rarely considered as potentially significant to the effectiveness of the group process; the emphasis in research studies being more frequently concerned with generic academic or pastoral
functions. The Early Childhood degree at the University of Worcester established learning groups in 2002 as a specific learning and teaching strategy aligning the pedagogic and andragogic philosophy of the subject to promote academic and
professional characteristics required as transferable skills for work in the sector. The social constructivist philosophy underpinning the subject and practice of early childhood provided the common, connecting thread for learning groups to have relevance and meaning for personal, academic and professional development.
This study investigated the experience and perceived value of learning groups for the first cohort in 2002/3 through a questionnaire, and by interviews focussed more openly
on their general first year experience with a sample group of year 1 students in 2008.
The findings revealed an overall highly positive perception indicating that learning
groups had scope and value as a forum for:-
• Building strong relationships and social identity
• Co-construction of a learning culture
• Reciprocal learning and skill development
• Empowerment of adult learners and development of confidence
• Enhancing professional development
The most useful transferable skills and knowledge gained during the first year came from sharing ideas and relationship building in small group work which gave the students confidence. The findings demonstrate that peer learning groups provide mutual support and learning opportunities which develop skill in working with others which, in turn, students regard as the predominant quality required for their future professional lives.


The Mafungautsi Forest Area (MFA) is the site of land and resource use conflicts involving people living in adjacent communal areas. This study used qualitative case study information and questionnaire survey data to explore and describe how displaced people and other communities living adjacent to the MFA perceive and use forest resources. The results of the study indicate that the displacement of people from MFA has caused land shortage problems for communities that accommodated them. The same communities overwhelmingly depend on forest resources for their livelihood. Land was ranked as the most important use of the forest, followed by grazing and then by timber. Results also indicate that a unit that is responsible for monitoring illegal activities by communities could not stop their depredations on the MFA. In terms of forest management, the results point to the need to develop joint management strategies that benefit both the FC and local communities.


Consortia and publishers invest a lot of time and expertise in the negotiation process. A well-drafted read and publish contract is, however, not enough to guarantee an optimal open access publishing service. The Dutch UKB consortium uses several tools and practices to actively monitor and manage open access uptake during an agreement. Library help desks are provided with a knowledge base covering most frequently asked questions from authors. A journal list gives an integral overview of the more than 11,000 journals that are part of 16 consortium deals. Because researchers wanted to know about open access publishing possibilities from a journal perspective, a journal browser was developed. Workflow improvement and retrospective open access are regular topics in mid-term meetings with publishers, resulting in increased open access uptake. A purpose-built datahub provides the consortium and libraries with publication data that helps monitoring and managing output on both article and deal level. Finally, licence choice including funder compliance is taken into account, resulting in an increasing percentage of CC BY versus the more restricted CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND options.


Can the results of the teaching of the four fundamental operations in arithmetic be improved? This is an important question that confronts most teachers of arithmetic. How can the teacher eliminate the difficulties which interfere with pupil progress, and reduce the number of failures in arithmetic? A group diagnostic test will show not only the level of ability of pupils in the various operations, but will point out weaknesses so that the teacher may organize her work in such a way as to give time to those who are below the standard and omit deadening drill for those who are above. In order to determine what results might be obtained in respect to the problem, a study was undertaken in the Dodge City Junior High School during the year of 1937-1938 to determine specifically where eighth grade pupils are most deficient in the fundamental operations in decimals and to design a special remedial program to eliminate these deficiencies. It is the teacher's task to reduce the number of failures in arithmetic without lowering the standards.


In the last few years, the Internet and World Wide Web (Web) have had a major effect on the way businesses and customers conduct business. The study aimed to enhance our understanding on how the transactions between customers and service providers take place on the Web. To accomplish this goal, the present study explored the antecedents of customer satisfaction with product-related services and pure services on the Web.
Methodologically, the study implemented a self-administered Web survey instrument using the critical incident elicitation technique. The study identified three meta-categories, six categories, and 33 sub-categories as antecedents of satisfaction with online service encounters.
The present research contributed at a theoretical level by (1) providing a deeper understanding of the transactions between customers and service providers on the Web; (2) providing an initial conceptual framework for future investigation of electronic service encounters; (3) pointing to novel forms of service encounters in the electronic environment.
The present research contributed at a pragmatic level by (1) re-iterating the importance of the user-based approach; (2) presenting online service providers with a list of factors that customers deemed important in their purchasing experiences. This list can be used to improve their service to customers; (3) presenting online service providers with the means to improve customer-contact employees' skills in dealing with online customers.


The objective of this investigation is to assess the impacts of climate change on the hydrology of the Lech Valley (1,000 km 2 ), a sub-catchment of the Danube River basin located in the northern Alps. An ensemble of nine climate projections is used to simulate the climate of a mid-21st-century scenario period (2040–2069) and an end-21st-century scenario period (2070–2099). The delta change approach overcame the gap between regional climate models (RCMs) and the hydrological model. An observed 30-year time series (1971–2000) of precipitation and temperature was perturbed according to mean monthly changes between the RCM runs. The hydrological simulations have been employed with the semi-distributed model HQsim in an off-line mode. The climate scenarios show an increase in monthly temperatures and accompanying significant changes in the seasonal precipitation patterns, including an increase in the precipitation during winter and spring and a considerable decrease in the precipitation during summer. The resulting effects on the runoff indicate large, seasonal varying changes. A decrease in monthly runoff during summer and increases in winter minimize the inter-annual disparities between low runoff in winter and high runoff in spring and summer. The overall agreement of RCM runs suggests confidence in the projections.


The construction characteristics and corresponding outcomes of community health management information system based on resident electronic health record (EHR) in Town J of Ningbo city were analyzed in the paper. The results showed that a intensive, scientific community health management information system based on EHR, which merged multiple functions including basic medicine, public health service, medical insurance, medical cooperation, performance assessment and health administration into an integral whole, was developed in Town J. The new-type lifetime digitalization community health service and health management model was innovatively built. The new model has facilitated the sharing of resident health information. Better social and economic benefits have been obtained. Work efficiency of community health service has been obviously enhanced. The average drug expense per patient was obviously dropped out. It was deserved to apply in a large scale.


Introduction The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that buildings are responsible for nearly half (48%) of all greenhouse gas emissions annually. Seventy-six percent of all electricity generated by US power plants goes to supply the building sector. Edward Mazria, architect, environmentalist, and founder of Architecture 2030, a non-profit organization dedicated to research and providing innovative solutions in architecture and planning to address global climate change, said, "We know from our research that the building industry is the largest energy-consuming and greenhouse gas emitting sector; close to double any other sector, it's important for us to understand that we (architects and designers) are a large part of the problem, but we are also a large part of the solution." (1) It has been nearly four decades since the state of the natural environment began being framed as a "problem"--something of negative consequence requiring a solution. Today, we see the escalation of what was once defined as a problem, now being referred to as a global environmental crisis. Much has been done, but there is still much to do to reduce the human impact on the environment. Technology, population growth, and increasing consumption have all been identified as the root causes for the deterioration of the natural environment. There is an increasingly desperate need for both human response and human action to initiate the necessary changes to stop the escalating damage set in motion by the behaviors of the human race. In the early seventies, psychologists, social scientists, educators and other researchers began efforts to clearly define the problem of poor human response and, hence, initiate studies to unlock the mystery of human disregard. Some of these researchers have framed the problem of poor human response and environmental irresponsibility as caused by simple lack of knowledge. (2) Still others have offered theories which look at the cause as attitude-based (3) or grounded in values and beliefs systems. (4) The research conducted in this study used, as a basis, the results of past research on the characteristics of individuals found to be correlated with environmentally responsible behavior. However, this research focused on a population of individuals who have a significant potential for dramatic change in the current state of environmental crisis. These individuals are the designers and planners of the built environment (i.e., architects, designers, and engineers, herein simply referred to as designers.) These professionals have a great deal of influence on the degree to which the building industry impacts the natural environment. Designers specify building materials and processes that can and do contribute to the destruction of the natural environment by pollution and depletion of nonrenewable natural resources. Even though there is overwhelming evidence that environmentally responsible design and building practices can have a dramatic impact on a variety of local, regional, and global environmental problems, many design professionals are still failing to adopt practices that could significantly improve environmental conditions at all levels. Based on past research, several factors have been identified that might explain this resistance to adopt environmentally responsible behaviors. This research has attempted to determine which of these factors are most closely correlated with environmentally responsible behaviors. When we know which of these factors have the greatest influence on ERB, education and training programs can be created to influence designers to employ such behaviors in their professional practices. Summary of Past Research Maloney and Ward, in 1973, and again in 1975 (5), attempted to conceptualize the problem of environmental irresponsibility as one of maladaptive behavior and proposed that it was purely a problem that could be treated psychologically. …


We deal with an existing framework for updating privileges and creating management structures by means of authority certificates. These are used both to create access-level permissions and to delegate authority to other agents. Here we extend the framework to support a richer set of revocation schemes. The discussion of revocation follows an existing classification in the literature based on three separate dimensions: resilience, propagation, and dominance. The first one does not apply to this framework. The second one is specified straightforwardly. The third one can be encoded but raises a number of further questions for future investigation.


A number of authors have documented an increase in earnings or income inequality in New Zealand during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period of major economic reform, however no study has evaluated changes in inequality during the post-reform era. This paper applies a recently-developed method for decomposing changes in inequality to New Zealand income and earnings data and extends it to analyse changes in inequality between men and women. Across the total working-age population, income inequality rose among both males and females between 1998 and 2003. In both cases, the majority of this was unexplained by changes in the observed determinants of income, however shifts in the distribution of education and the associated returns were responsible for part of the increase. Among the subset of workers, earnings inequality increased significantly for both genders. Although changes in the returns to measured characteristics contributed to the rise in inequality, this was partially offset by changes in the distribution of these characteristics. Between-gender inequality fell with respect to both samples. In contrast to within-gender inequality, this was largely explained by changes in the returns to the observed characteristics. Overall, there is evidence that the male and female income distributions are converging, although both are becoming more dispersed.


A ""brotherhood of self sacrifice and service""? Interrelations on commando during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. During the Anglo-Boer War of1899-l902 the burghers on commando were obliged to be in one another's company for more than two and a half years. Despite the traditional individuality of the burgher, a strong bond and a feeling of togetherness came into being on commando because of the war conditions. Together they cherished the same ideals of self-preservation and independence. The unit in which this collaboration occurred particularly, was the corporalship which was made up of twelve to eighteen men and which was sometimes divided into two or three sections. Within this corporalship or section the burghers often grouped themselves into twos as so-called buddies. A willingness to share within sections or groups was to many, a way of life. And yet in most cases there was an unwillingness to admit a stranger, who would draw from their resources, into the section. Although only males between sixteen and sixty years of age were liable for military service, there were a number of boys younger than sixteen and men older than sixty on commando. Boys, who were too young to handle a rifle, had to look after the livestock or the horses. The men over sixty had a tough time in the veld. The older burghers often treated the young with a self-sufficient patriarchism, while the latter usually treated the older men with respect. Relations between the Free Staters and Transvalers on commando depended on the situation and were not experienced the same way by all burghers. Those inspired by nationalism regarded themselves from the outset as one nation. Military setbacks like the surrender of General P .A. Cronje were, however, a blow to the good relations. After the British occupation of Pretoria in June 1900 the relationship improved, partly because of the realization amongst the 'bittereinders' that they were fighting for a common cause.


This first major empirical work on the semiotics of social action goes a long way toward answering substantive, theoretical and pragmatic questions on how codes actually operate in a specific social setting. It underscores the important yet often ignored role of the police as "sign" or "information workers."Calls to the police represent a rich variety of human troubles, concerns, and needs by focusing on how police handle calls from the public, how they ascertain what a call means and what should be done with it, and how this is transformed through subsystems within the organization, Peter Manning provides a novel way of looking at organizational communication."Symbolic Communication "provides examples of how members of an organization interpret their environment - in this instance, how the meaning of a call to the police is transformed as it moves across the boundaries of the organization (a transformation that involves a series of codings and recodings ensuring a continuous loose linkage of organization and environment). Manning shows why the police act in ways that differ from the way citizens and politicians would have them act, revealing the uncertainties that surround a policy agency's responsiveness. And he points out how today's computer technologies constrain the coding process, limiting in particular the effectiveness of the 911 systems used in most of our major cities.Peter K. Manning is a Professor of Psychiatry and of Sociology at Michigan State University and a member of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford. "Symbolic Communication "brings to fruition themes and ideas introduced in his previous books, "Police Work "and "The Narc's Game. Symbolic Communication" is included in the Organization Studies series, edited by John van Maanen.


Coletti and Lalonde compare inflation targeting and price-level targeting in the context of a small open economy subject to sizable terms-of-trade shocks. The authors summarize recent research that compares the ability of price-level targeting and inflation targeting to stabilize the macroeconomy when confronted with shocks similar to those experienced by Canada in recent years. Their preliminary results suggest that price-level targeting may represent a feasible alternative to traditional inflation targeting. Their article also provides insight into the direction of current research in this area at the Bank.


Licorice extracts contain various useful substances for oral health. Alkaline extract showed potent anti‐HIV activity, whereas flavonoid‐rich water extracts showed potent anti‐HSV activity, closely correlated with polarizability, ionization potential, a number of ring systems, atomic number and mass. Licorice flavonoids showed higher tumor‐speci ‐ ficity against human oral squamous cell carcinoma as compared with human normal oral mesenchymal cells. Glycyrrhiza, at noncytotoxic concentrations, potently inhibited the IL‐1β‐induced inflammation in cultured human gingival and periodontal ligament fibroblasts. Glycyrrhizin, a major component of Glycyrrhiza, showed the highest UV‐ protected activity. The results suggest the possible applicability of licorice extracts for several oral diseases and cosmetic products.


The Kurdish media in Kurdistan Region- especially recently- has paid a great attention to the coverage of the Turkish issues, when you follow the( visual, audible , written and electronic) kurdish media,  you obviously see the great amount of news, reports, pictures, articles , press interviews and other press editing arts, in a way or another shed light on an aspect of Turkish issues and analyse it. It is clear that the concern and coverage are from both sides. Which means that Turkish media also focus on Kurdistan Region' s issues, and covers the political, economical and social aspects of Kurdistan Region. So that it is the responsibility of the researchers and the academists to analyse the level , distance and  content of this attention and reach some scientific and informational results.
The significance of this study lies also on the academic and scientific need in Kurdistan Region of Iraq for such Studies to know how much kurdish media concern about Turkish issues. This study tried to reach some of this aim. The research is of three sections: the first one is the method of the study. The second section is the theory of the study which is about covering different issues. And in the third section, the researcher uses ( content analysis) method, in which he analysis why does the kurdish media concern about Turkish issues and did the practical part of the study


This paper studies motivational crowding-out effects after financial incentives are lowered. In a real-effort setting, workers receive a piece rate before financial incentives are substituted by a one-time payment. Under the fixed payment, effort is significantly lower only when preceded by piece-rate incentives. The decrease is driven by a fraction of men who reduce their effort by 12%, whereas women constantly perform well. We find that this motivational crowding-out effect disappears when men do not have prior experience of a piece rate. In a series of control treatments, we discard all alternative explanations besides from motivational crowding out.


Background The GGGGCC-repeat expansion in C9orf72 is the most frequent mutation found in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Most of the studies on C9orf72 have relied on repeat-primed PCR (RP-PCR) methods for detection of the expansions. To investigate the inherent limitations of this technique, we compared methods and results of 14 laboratories. Methods The 14 laboratories genotyped DNA from 78 individuals (diagnosed with ALS or FTD) in a blinded fashion. Eleven laboratories used a combination of amplicon-length analysis and RP-PCR, whereas three laboratories used RP-PCR alone; Southern blotting techniques were used as a reference. Results Using PCR-based techniques, 5 of the 14 laboratories got results in full accordance with the Southern blotting results. Only 50 of the 78 DNA samples got the same genotype result in all 14 laboratories. There was a high degree of false positive and false negative results, and at least one sample could not be genotyped at all in 9 of the 14 laboratories. The mean sensitivity of a combination of amplicon-length analysis and RP-PCR was 95.0% (73.9–100%), and the mean specificity was 98.0% (87.5–100%). Overall, a sensitivity and specificity of more than 95% was observed in only seven laboratories. Conclusions Because of the wide range seen in genotyping results, we recommend using a combination of amplicon-length analysis and RP-PCR as a minimum in a research setting. We propose that Southern blotting techniques should be the gold standard, and be made obligatory in a clinical diagnostic setting.


Road fatalities are rare outcomes of events that occur in a small time-space region. Although the exact chain of events for each fatality is unique, there are inherent similarities between road fatalities. The science of road safety is dedicated to identifying such similarities, mainly using statistical analysis tools. Researchers typically analyze patterns that emerge over space, such as hot-spot studies, or patterns that emerge over time, such as before-after studies. Traffic research enumerates 84 parameters that characterize a road fatality. A vast number of papers have tried to find the correlation between one or two parameters. In those studies quite often the contribution of other factors is omitted. In this research the authors utilize a clustering graph theoretic method, known as graph-cuts, for segmenting a very large crash dataset (i.e., all fatal car crashes in the last 2, 5, or 10 years), while incorporating all available crash information into the process. The analysis of the clusters allows one to find subtle trends and significant causes for traffic fatalities. With this method, for example, the authors have found high correlation between hit-and-run and pedestrians fatalities, which was overlooked by previous studies. An additional output of the research is a full description of the typical fatality, thus all factors that characterized the representative crash in a cluster. Language: en


The idea of in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and its possible ramifica‐ tions were proposed at the very dawn of electron microscopy, but the translation from theory to practice encountered many technological setbacks, which hindered the feasibility of the most elaborated approaches until recent times. However, the several technological improvements achieved in the last 10–15 years filled this gap, allowing the direct observation of the dynamic response of materials to external stimuli under a vast range of conditions going from vacuum to gaseous or liquid environment. This resulted in a blossoming of the in situ TEM and scanning TEM (STEM) techniques to a new youth for a vast, growing range of applications, which cannot be rightfully detailed in a short span; therefore, this chapter should be intended as a guide highlighting a selection of the most inspiring, recently achieved results.


Non-smooth regularized convex optimization procedures have emerged as a powerful tool to recover structured signals (sparse, low-rank, etc.) from (possibly compressed) noisy linear measurements. We focus on the problem of linear regression and consider a general class of optimization methods that minimize a loss function measuring the misfit of the model to the observations with an added structured-inducing regularization term. Celebrated instances include the LASSO, GroupLASSO, Least-Absolute Deviations method, etc.. We develop a quite general framework for how to determine precise prediction performance guaranties (e.g. mean-square-error) of such methods for the case of Gaussian measurement ensemble. The machinery builds upon Gordon's Gaussian min-max theorem under additional convexity assumptions that arise in many practical applications. This theorem associates with a primary optimization (PO) problem a simplified auxiliary optimization (AO) problem from which we can tightly infer properties of the original (PO), such as the optimal cost, the norm of the optimal solution, etc. Our theory applies to general loss functions and regularization and provides guidelines on how to optimally tune the regularizer coefficient when certain structural properties (such as sparsity level, rank, etc.) are known.


The aim of this study was to estimate the frequency of human toxocariosis in a child population from Morrope district, Lambayeque, Peru. From October to December 2005, 182 school children (96 male and 86 female) were studied. Blood samples were collected for Toxocara ELISA-IgG test and hematological examination. Additionally, stool samples were collected for coproparasitological examination to check cross reactions. We found frequency of positives in 32.4% (59/182) with a significant higher proportion of positivity in male children (p < 0.00001). 71.2% of the children with positive serology (52 male and seven female), were between five and 10 years old, 77.96% had respiratory symptoms, 61.02% had ocular manifestations, 38.98% had hepatic symptoms, 38.98% had mild or moderate eosinophilia, signs statistically associated with seropositivity. 83.5% of studied population had some intestinal parasite, such as: Blastocystis hominis (53.3%), Giardia lamblia (31.3%), Entamoeba coli (29.1%), Entamoeba histolytica/E. dispar (1.1%), Hymenolepis nana (5.49%), and Ascaris lumbricoides (3.3%), but they had not any association with serology results. The ownership of dogs or/and cats were significantly associated with seropositivity to anti-Toxocara antibodies although the presence of such pets within the house was not. In conclusion, clinical and serological evidence of Toxocara infection exists in the studied population.


A hierarchical module system is an effective tool for structuring large programs. Strictly hierarchical module systems impose an acyclic ordering on import dependencies among program units. This can impede modular programming by forcing mutually-dependent components to be consolidated into a single module. Recently there have been several proposals for module systems that admit cyclic dependencies, but it is not clear how these proposals relate to one another, nor how one might integrate them into an expressive module system such as that of ML.To address this question we provide a type-theoretic analysis of the notion of a recursive module in the context of a "phase-distinction" formalism for higher-order module systems. We extend this calculus with a recursive module mechanism and a new form of signature, called a recursively dependent signature, to support the definition of recursive modules. These extensions are justified by an interpretation in terms of more primitive language constructs. This interpretation may also serve as a guide for implementation.


A method of preparing a recombinant influenza vaccine using DNA technology is provided. The resulting vaccine is a multivalent, preferably trivalent, influenza vaccine based on a mixture of recombinant hemagglutinin antigens cloned from influenza viruses having epidemic potential. The recombinant hemagglutinin antigens are full length, uncleaved (HA0), glycoproteins produced from baculovirus expression vectors in cultured insect cells and purified under non-denaturing conditions. The recombinant vaccine can be developed from primary sources of influenza, for example, nasal secretions from infected individuals, rather than from virus adapted to and cultured in chicken eggs. The process for cloning influenza hemagglutinin genes from influenza A and B viruses uses specially designed oligonucleotide probes and PCR. In the preferred embodiment, the cloned HA genes are then modified by deletion of the natural hydrophobic signal peptide sequences and replacing them with a new baculovirus signal peptide. A general approach for the efficient extraction and purification of recombinant HA protein produced in insect cells is also disclosed for the purification of rHA proteins from A sub-types and B type influenza viruses. The procedure produces substantially pure rHA which is a biologically active hemagglutinin, non-denatured, and suitable as a component in human or other animal influenza vaccines.


The strong vertical gradient in soil and subsoil saturated hydraulic conductivity is characteristic feature of the hydrology of catchments. Despite the potential importance of these strong gradients, they have proven difficult to model using robust physically based schemes. This has hampered the testing of hypotheses about the implications of such vertical gradients for subsurface flow paths, residence times and transit time distribution. Here we present a general semi‐analytical solution for the simulation of 2D steady‐state saturated‐unsaturated flow in hillslopes with saturated hydraulic conductivity that declines exponentially with depth. The grid‐free solution satisfies mass balance exactly over the entire saturated and unsaturated zones. The new method provides continuous solutions for head, flow and velocity in both saturated and unsaturated zones without any interpolation process as is common in discrete numerical schemes. This solution efficiently generates flow pathlines and transit time distributions in hillslopes with the assumption of depth‐varying saturated hydraulic conductivity. The model outputs reveal the pronounced effect that changing the strength of the exponential decline in saturated hydraulic conductivity has on the flow pathlines, residence time and transit time distribution. This new steady‐state model may be useful to others for posing hypotheses about how different depth functions for hydraulic conductivity influence catchment hydrological response. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


In the midst of continued guerilla warfare against coalition forces, escalating terrorist activity throughout the country, and shortages of even basic resources like electricity and water, there is at least one sign that US President George Bush's war in Iraq has had some positive impact. An Iraqi media once completely controlled by Saddam Hussein's regime now enjoys freedoms unheard of just six months ago, and the number of news sources is burgeoning. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Worldwide reports that some 180 newspapers and other publications are currently available to Iraqi readers. The fare ranges from the Iraqi Communist Party monthly journal to tabloids with full-page spreads of international pop stars. Even a national radio and television network has formed at a time when local stations are slowly struggling to get off the ground. While the recent changes in the media market reflect significant progress, this first step poses many new problems. Civil libertarians in the United States often point to the US Constitution's First Amendment, which grants freedom of the press, as one of the hallmarks of a healthy democracy. Part of the argument is that a well-informed populace is the best defense against tyranny, and a thriving free media helps educate the public. Yet though the Iraqi people may be receiving more information than ever before, the quality of the country's infant journalistic institutions is far from topnotch. Of course, one might easily raise a similar critique of the US media (or that of any other state), particularly regarding coverage of divisive and controversial issues. Why then even raise the issue so prematurely if the debate could carry over to any state's media? The difference in Iraq is the heavy-handed role of the US-led coalition--and perhaps a UN presence in the future--in creating a vibrant Iraqi civil society. The practices of the media in Western states may be questioned, but in the here and now, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) wields an immense power to create practices that heretofore have never existed in Iraq, or, for that matter, in a large swath of the Middle East. What, then, are the current problems, and what is the CPA's proposed solution? Most troubling is the paucity of sources that attempt (or even pretend) to undertake objective, facts-based journalism. Rumors are often reported without substantiation. For example, one recent paper reported that Jews will soon be hoarding Baghdad real estate in the hopes of creating a new West Bank-type settlement, while another asserted that US soldiers were raping women and spreading AIDS. The August 29, 2003, bombing of a Shi'a mosque in Najaf saw no shortage of accusations of US covert involvement. The rapid rise of news outlets in what was previously a media vacuum filled only by Saddam's voice has created a chaotic picture of daily events. Even a potentially accurate report, like one detailing Israeli contingency plans to use Iraqi airspace for air attacks against Iran in the event of a nuclear crisis, loses credibility in this kind of environment. …


ABSTRACT Investigating short-term effects of subconcussive impacts on neurocognitive functioning, we employed a repeated measures multivariate model and regression-based measure to examine neurocognitive changes in 771 contact and noncontact high school athletes over a two-year period. Results reveal significant changes in Visual Motor Speed for both groups over a two-year period, with small effect sizes. According to regression-based measures, differences in contact sport athletes' expected Time 2 performances were significant for Visual Motor Speed, also with minimal effects. Results do not conclusively implicate subconcussive hits as the offending factor in differences observed, with gender and sport-type possibly contributing to the small effects.


In this study, two series of novel chiral liquid crystal compounds derived from (−)-menthol with different lengths of alkyl or alkoxy as terminal groups were successfully synthesized. Their chemical structure and liquid crystal properties were investigated by various experimental techniques. Series I, except for compound If, exhibits monotropic properties and the whole series II shows enantiotropic mesogenic properties. Both series I and series II display a platelet texture of a BP and a focal conic texture of an N* phase upon cooling. In addition, series II displays an iridescent oily streak texture along with selective reflection upon heating. The selective reflection wavelengths of series II shift to a shorter wavelength region with increasing temperature in the N* phase. For both series I and series II, a pronounced odd–even effect on the clearing temperature is observed when the parity of the terminal chain is varied. Series I with an odd number of terminal chains and series II with an even number have better order.


: Conservation strategies are necessary for cities to meet regional goals of sustainability, but commitments and collaborative efforts among influential stakeholders for economic and developmental growth frequently hinder conservation efforts. This study analyzes how planning documents influence conservation at the University of Central Florida (UCF). I use an inductive method of analysis to explore the stated conservation goals and commitments of UCF's Campus Master Plan. I then compare these objectives with the behaviors of the institution. This research indicates that the absence of collaborative efforts among agencies has resulted in UCF undermining its academic mission. Intensive land-use has sparked global environmental concerns to protect and restore lands of environmental significance, and institutions of higher education are considered essential in achieving such goals of sustainability. I provide two theories of social environmental change as well as two major components influencing the progress of conservation at UCF. Limited financial investments and excessive threats of amendments undermine conservation efforts at UCF. The Campus Master Plan lacks harmony between the Capital Improvements, Future Land-Use, and Conservation Elements. In UCF's Campus Master Plan, development encroaches upon environmentally significant lands. My research describes why issues of land management exist and how cooperative efforts among stakeholders can improve conservation at UCF while enhancing its academic and economic missions.


Women can now serve in ground close combat (GCC) roles, where they may be required to operate alongside men in hot environments. However, relative to the average male soldier, female soldiers are less aerobically fit, with a smaller surface area (A D), lower mass (m) with higher body fat and a larger A D/m ratio. This increases cardiovascular strain, reduces heat exchange with the environment and causes a greater body temperature increase for a given heat storage, although a large A D/m ratio can be advantageous. Physical employment standards for GCC roles might lessen the magnitude of fitness and anthropometric differences, yet even when studies control for these factors, women sweat less than men at high work rates. Therefore, the average female soldier in a GCC role is likely to be at a degree of disadvantage in many hot environments and particularly during intense physical activity in hot-arid conditions, although heat acclimation may mitigate some of this effect. Any thermoregulatory disadvantage may be exacerbated during the mid-luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, although the data are equivocal. Likewise, sex differences in behavioural thermoregulation and cognition in the heat are not well understood. Interestingly, there is often lower reported heat illness incidence in women, although the extent to which this is influenced by behavioural factors or historic differences in role allocation is unclear. Indeed, much of the extant literature lacks ecological validity and more work is required to fully understand sex differences to exercise heat stress in a GCC context.