Introduction The consideration of aesthetic values in North American resource and environmental management is generally cited as having emerged in the 1960s (Priestly 1983; Dearden and Sadler 1989). With growing attention to environmental issues on the social and political agendas of the time, the quality--or, more fittingly, the deteriorating quality--of the environment round a place in the consciousness of North Americans. It was not long before environmental protection legislation was introduced in response to environmental quality concerns, most notably with the landmark US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 calling for 'presently unquantified environment amenities and values [to] be given appropriate consideration in decision-making along with economic and technical considerations' to assure 'safe, healthful, productive and aesthetically and culturally pleasing surroundings' (Cutler 1979, 13). Canadian policy in land use, forest practices and environmental assessment since then has included the need to recognize these intangibles, including the aesthetic dimension of environment. Resource and environmental management and land-use agencies began to manage and plan for the aesthetic, conceived of primarily in visual terms as scenic beauty (and diminished aesthetic quality as visual blight). Practitioners measured and managed the 'visual resource' (e.g., USDA Forest Service 1974; Yeomans 1983), researchers studied people's perceptions of and preferences for landscape scenes (e.g., Shafer et al. 1969; Kaplan 1985) and theorists sought explanations for how and why we appreciate particular landscapes (e.g., Appleton 1975). Practical assessment techniques, management programs and research endeavours formed a loose but unified field, referred to here as 'landscape assessment' and by others as 'assessment of landscape quality' (Daniel and Vining 1983), 'environmental aesthetics' (Porteous 1982, 1996) and 'landscape perception research' (Zube et al. 1982). (1) By the 1990s, aesthetic considerations had become institutionalized--indeed, entrenched--in environmental and resource- management practice as visual resource management (VRM). This paper challenges the dominant entrenched view of landscape aesthetics, which is beginning to be questioned in the literature (e.g., Sheppard and Harshaw 2001). In the first part of this paper, a context for the consideration of landscape aesthetics is established. The evolution of landscape assessment in environment and resource management is discussed, and a simple conceptual framework for organizing various approaches is offered. Next, an empirical study, in which an experiential approach to landscape was developed and applied, is presented. The experiential method and its outcomes are then discussed in relation to the conventional expert approach to landscape assessment, with the British Columbia Ministry of Forests visual-landscape management program as the exemplar. In the closing sections, opportunities offered by an experiential approach to supplement and enrich current landscape assessment and visual management, and to support and direct the reorientation of resource and environmental management more broadly, are highlighted. The Evolution of Landscape Assessment While the alliance of aesthetics and resource management is fairly recent, the idea of our environs as a source of pleasure or motivation for aesthetic response has been the topic of works of art, writing and intellectual thought in the Western world since at least the time of the ancient Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle (Eaton 1989). During the Sixteenth century, depictions of beautiful countryside came to be the focus of, rather than the backdrop for, painting and drawing. By the eighteenth century, these 'landscapes' found physical expression in the work of naturalistic landscape gardeners, such as Capability Brown. Throughout the nineteenth century, gardening and architecture, influenced greatly by Romanticism, were the dominant ways of manipulating the physical environment for aesthetic purposes. …


The advancement of modern computers, networks and internet has led to the widespread adoption and application of Information Communication Technology in modern organizations. As a result, large amount of information is generated, processed and distributed through digital devices. On the other side, digital crimes have increased in number and sophistication and they compromise the organization's critical information infrastructure affecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of its information resources. In order to detect these malicious activities, organizations deploys multiple Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) in their corporate networks. They generate huge amount of low quality alerts and in different formats when an attack has already taken place. Thus Alert and event correlation is required to preprocess, analyze and correlate the alerts produced by one or more network intrusion detection systems and events generated from different systems and security tools to provide a more succinct and high-level view of occurring or attempted intrusions. This work will review current alert correlation systems in terms of approaches and propose design consideration for an efficient alert correlation technique. We conclude by highlighting the opportunity to include attack prediction component in a real time multiple sensors environment.


The performance of face verification systems has steadily improved over the last few years, mainly focusing on models rather than on feature processing. State-of-the-art methods often use the gray-scale face image as input. In this paper, we propose to use an additional feature to the face image: the skin color. The new feature set is tested on a benchmark database, namely XM2VTS, using a simple discriminant artificial neural network. Results show that the skin color information improves the performance and that the proposed model achieves robust state-of-the-art results.


This article investigates the participating students' evaluation of a teacher training seminar about heterogeneity in the classroom at Bielefeld University, Germany. The evaluation made use of a short questionnaire and an end-of-term test of the students' knowledge on the subject matter. The questionnaire is tested for objectivity, reliability, and validity and is shown to be a suitable tool. The test is shown to have certain weaknesses, but ways of improving it for future use are suggested. The method of evaluation used in this study can be adapted for other university courses. The importance of using empirical methods such as the one employed in this study for the improvement of teacher training is stressed. The seminar in question is shown to be largely successful and to contribute to the development of central diagnostic skills defined by the German conference of ministers of education.


Ours is a century of uprootedness, with fewer and fewer people living out their lives where they are born. At such a time, in such a world, what does it mean to be "at home?" Perhaps among a nomadic people, for whom dwelling is not synonymous with being housed and settled, the search for an answer to this question might lead to a new way of thinking about home and homelessness, exile and belonging. At Home in the World is the story of just such a search. Intermittently over a period of three years Michael Jackson lived, worked, and traveled extensively in Central Australia. This book chronicles his experience among the Warlpiri of the Tanami Desert.

Something of a nomad himself, having lived in New Zealand, Sierra Leone, England, France, Australia, and the United States, Jackson is deft at capturing the ambiguities of home as a lived experience among the Warlpiri. Blending narrative ethnography, empirical research, philosophy, and poetry, he focuses on the existential meaning of being at home in the world. Here home becomes a metaphor for the intimate relationship between the part of the world a person calls "self" and the part of the world called "other." To speak of "at-homeness," Jackson suggests, implies that people everywhere try to strike a balance between closure and openness, between acting and being acted upon, between acquiescing in the given and choosing their own fate. His book is an exhilarating journey into this existential struggle, responsive at every turn to the political questions of equity and justice that such a struggle entails.

A moving depiction of an aboriginal culture at once at home and in exile, and a personal meditation on the practice of ethnography and the meaning of home in our increasingly rootless age, At Home in the World is a timely reflection on how, in defining home, we continue to define ourselves.


Hourly sea level records from 1954 to 2012 at 20 tide gauges at and adjacent to the Chinese coasts are used to analyze extremes in sea level and in tidal residual. Tides and tropical cyclones determine the spatial distribution of sea level maxima. Tidal residual maxima are predominantly determined by tropical cyclones. The 50 year return level is found to be sensitive to the number of extreme events used in the estimation. This is caused by the small number of tropical cyclone events happening each year which lead to other local storm events included thus significantly affecting the estimates. Significant increase in sea level extremes is found with trends in the range between 2.0 and 14.1 mm yr−1. The trends are primarily driven by changes in median sea level but also linked with increases in tidal amplitudes at three stations. Tropical cyclones cause significant interannual variations in the extremes. The interannual variability in the sea level extremes is also influenced by the changes in median sea level at the north and by the 18.6 year nodal cycle at the South China Sea. Neither of PDO and ENSO is found to be an indicator of changes in the size of extremes, but ENSO appears to regulate the number of tropical cyclones that reach the Chinese coasts. Global mean atmospheric temperature appears to be a good descriptor of the interannual variability of tidal residual extremes induced by tropical cyclones but the trend in global temperature is inconsistent with the lack of trend in the residuals.


The Consumer Price Index Manual: Concepts and Methods contains comprehensive information and explanations on compiling a consumer price index (CPI). The Manual provides an overview of the methods and practices national statistical offices (NSOs) should consider when making decisions on how to deal with the various problems in the compilation of a CPI. The chapters cover many topics. They elaborate on the different practices currently in use, propose alternatives whenever possible, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each alternative. The primary purpose of the Manual is to assist countries in producing CPIs that reflect internationally recommended methods and practices.


Effective modeling of electronic health records (EHR) is rapidly becoming an important topic in both academia and industry. A recent study showed that using the graphical structure underlying EHR data (e.g. relationship between diagnoses and treatments) improves the performance of prediction tasks such as heart failure prediction. However, EHR data do not always contain complete structure information. Moreover, when it comes to claims data, structure information is completely unavailable to begin with. Under such circumstances, can we still do better than just treating EHR data as a flat-structured bag-of-features? In this paper, we study the possibility of jointly learning the hidden structure of EHR while performing supervised prediction tasks on EHR data. Specifically, we discuss that Transformer is a suitable basis model to learn the hidden EHR structure, and propose Graph Convolutional Transformer, which uses data statistics to guide the structure learning process. The proposed model consistently outperformed previous approaches empirically, on both synthetic data and publicly available EHR data, for various prediction tasks such as graph reconstruction and readmission prediction, indicating that it can serve as an effective general-purpose representation learning algorithm for EHR data.


Anthropological studies highlight the importance of food in constructing and negotiating various aspects of individual and group identity, including social status. Archaeologists have also explored this topic, working with various types of evidence and frequently applying a diachronic perspective that is usually inaccessible to other disciplines interested in foodways, such as anthropology. Previous studies examining how social status was established, maintained, or negotiated in Early Mycenaean Greece have relied heavily or solely on mortuary data, a necessity given the early focus on mortuary contexts for excavation and publication. In this article, I take a different approach and concentrate on settlement data, in particular the data deriving from those sites that have yielded evidence for the emergence of social inequality. Through the analysis of the cooking pottery repertoire, I investigate the issue of how food was manipulated by those competing for status. I argue that the appearance of innovative cooking utensils and their sets can be associated with changes in food-preparation practices, leading to more elaborate cuisine. Such a cuisine constituted a very effective means of social differentiation and was extensively used in the highly competitive environment of Early Mycenaean polities.


ABSTRACT:Two centuries of Greek debt crises highlight the pitfalls of relying on external financing. Since its independence in 1829, the Greek government has defaulted four times on its external creditors—with striking historical parallels. Each crisis is preceded by a period of heavy borrowing from foreign private creditors. As repayment difficulties arise, foreign governments step in, help to repay the private creditors, and demand budget cuts and adjustment programs as a condition for the official bailout loans; political interference from abroad mounts, and a prolonged episode of debt overhang and financial autarky follows. We conclude that these cycles of external debt and dependence are a perennial theme of Greek history, as well as in other countries that have been "addicted" to foreign savings. At present, there is considerable evidence to suggest that a substantial haircut on external debt is needed to restore the economic viability of Greece. Even with that, a policy priority for the country should be to reorient, to the extent possible, toward domestic sources of funding.


We analyze efficient risk-sharing arrangements when the value from deviating is determined endogenously by another risk sharing arrangement. Coalitions form to insure against idiosyncratic income risk. Self-enforcing contracts for both the original coalition and any coalition formed (joined) after deviations rely on a belief in future cooperation which we term "trust". We treat the contracting conditions of original and deviation coalitions symmetrically and show that higher trust tightens incentive constraints since it facilitates the formation of deviating coalitions. As a consequence, although trust facilitates the initial formation of coalitions, the extent of risk sharing in successfully formed coalitions is declining in the extent of trust and efficient allocations might feature resource burning or utility burning: trust is indeed a double-edged sword.


Nowadays we are witnessing the rapid penetration of non-invasive prenatal diagnostics into routine practice. In the past two years many types of cfDNA tests both commercial kits and "homemade" tests have appeared on the market. The aim of our contribution is to bring your attention to the significant differences in quality of available non-invasive tests (NIPT) from molecular and clinical perspective.


We have analyzed the recent seismicity of Mt. Vesuvius, with particular emphasis on the period 1999-2012. Since 1972 continuous observations with electromagnetic seismometers allowed the compilation of a detailed earthquake catalogue for the station OVO. Furthermore since 1999 another, more complete, catalogue for the station BKE, closer to the crater, is available. The Gutenberg-Richter distribution of magnitudes shows a temporal decrease of the b-value since 1985, with current values close to 1.0. The temporal pattern of the strain release shows a non-stationary behavior with periods of increased release rates (as in 1989-1990, 1995-1996 and 1999-2000). The spatial distribution of the seismicity consists in two main seismogenic volumes, one with hypocenters clustered below the Mt. Vesuvius crater at depths mostly between 1-6 km, and another with hypocenters clustered within the Gran Cono volcanic edifice, with depths above the sea level. We compare the statistical properties of the seismicity occurring within these two volumes and their spatial and temporal patterns. Moreover we analyze the statistical distribution of focal mechanisms for each volume. Our results point to gravity-induced stresses as the source of the shallow seismicity and of a combined effect of crustal heterogeneities, regional stress and hydrothermal dynamics for the deeper seismicity. Finally we discuss possible future developments of the seismic monitoring system in the light of the past and current seismicity.


Fairtrade has become one of the most significant market-based initiatives to reduce the poverty and vulnerability of producers in developing countries. yet with the increasing participation of global food giants and retailers such as McDonalds, Nestle, Kraft, Tesco, and Sainsbury in Fairtrade marketing, new questions are emerging about the extent to which Fairtrade is actually "guaranteeing a better deal for third-world producers". Recent research suggests that this process of mainstreaming may threaten the founding mission of Fairtrade, and undermine the principles of partnership and empowerment it aspires to achieve (Smith, 2008; Raynolds, 2007; Sexsmith, 2008). In this article, I examine some of the challenges posed by the growing commercialisation of Fairtrade through a case study of Fairtrade tea in Kenya.


In this letter, we extend the results previously found in near field imaging with aperture [Opt. Express 14, 11566 (2006)], where we demonstrated that interaction between light and sample can be divided into two main areas: the true near field and the contrast near field domain. Here, we show that in near field with a probe, the same division of space exists, and thus we show that a much simpler way to model theses experiments can be given.


Knowledge of the channel over which signals are sent is of prime importance in modern wireless communications. Inaccurate or incomplete channel information leads to high error rates and wasted bandwidth and energy. Although active channel measurement is commonly used to gain channel knowledge, it can only accurately represent the channel at the time the measurement was taken, makes energy and bandwidth demands, and adds significant complexity to the radio system. Due to the highly time variant nature of wireless channels, active measurements become invalid almost as soon as they are taken, making alternative approaches to predicting future behaviour highly attractive. Such systems would allow maximum advantage to be taken of the limited bandwidth available and make significant power savings. This thesis investigates a number of complementary technologies, leading towards a channel prediction scheme suitable for mobile devices. As a first step towards channel prediction, anomaly detection is investigated within periodic wireless signals to establish when radical changes in the channel occur. In previous experiments, long monotonic sequences had been observed to coincide with certain anomalies but not others when using Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) analysis, possibly allowing the characterisation of anomaly types. An investigation is described to explain the origin of these features in a rigorous mathematical sense. A proof is given for the causes of the monotonic sequences, followed by a discussion of the types of signal anomaly which would underly such a feature and the value of this information. The second part describes a novel channel characterisation method which uses a class of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) called an Echo State Network (ESN). Using this tool, a channel characterisation system can be constructed without an explicit statistical or mathematical model of the wireless environment, relying instead on observed data. This approach is much more convenient than existing models which require detailed information about the wireless system's parameters and also allows for new channel classifications to be added easily. It is able to achieve double the correct classification rate of a conventional statistical classifier, and is computationally simple to implement, making it ideal for inclusion on low-power mobile devices. Following their successful use in characterisation, ESNs are used in the final part in an investigation into channel prediction in a number of different scenarios. They were however found to be unable to produce useful predictions for all but the most trivial channel models. An alternative method is described for indoor environments using an approach inspired by ray tracing. It is simple and computationally lightweight to implement, again making it suitable for mobile devices. Simulation results show that it can outperform pilot-assisted methods by a significant margin, while not wasting bandwidth on channel measurement.


The vibrations of the metal shell of a brass instrument can be discerned by the player through the player's lips and hands. This is in addition to the vibrotactile feedback to the player's lips from the acoustic vibrations in the air column of the instrument. Many players claim an improvement in playability when the mass of the mouthpiece is increased. Measurements of the body vibrations of a trumpet under playing conditions were obtained with an accelerometer at six locations: at three points on the mouthpiece, and also on the receiver, valve casing, and bell. The greatest amplitudes were observed at the bell. When mass was added to the mouthpiece, while keeping the sound level output of the instrument constant, the vibration amplitudes at the mouthpiece decreased as expected. However, the same degree of decrease was not observed at the other locations. This and other evidence suggests that increasing the mouthpiece mass does not significantly alter the coupling between the air vibrations and the shell vibrations. Thus, it is postulated that the playability benefits derive from a reduction in the conflict between the two channels of feedback to the lips.


Background About 20% of operated clubfeet develop recurrence or show a marked residual deformity. The failure of concentric reduction at the time of initial surgery has to be considered as a main factor. Residual forefoot adduction and supination are the most common persistent deformities. Methods of classification, assessment, and treatment of this problem were advanced over many years. Conventional management techniques tend to have many disadvantages including neurovascular injury, soft tissue problems, and a shortened foot. Patients and methods We present our experience in correction of 20 relapsed clubfeet deformities managed by gradual correction using Ilizarov frame without soft tissue release or bony procedures. The age at the time of operation ranged from 3 to 7 years with a mean of 4.4±1.31 years. The duration of use of fixators for correction ranged from 6 to 8 weeks with a mean of 7.09±0.37 weeks. This was followed by 6 weeks of leg cast. The patient was followed up with the use of custom-made shoes. The follow-up period ranged from 24 to 31 months, with a mean of 27.68±1.91 months. Results In all, 8 ft (40%) achieved excellent results, 6 ft (30%) achieved good results, 4 ft (20%) achieved fair results, and 2 ft (10%) achieved poor results. Complications were reported as pin tract infection in 6 ft, residual forefoot adduction in 4 ft, joint stiffness in 4 ft, toe flexion deformity in 2 ft, and radiological osteopenia in 2 ft. Conclusion The Ilizarov technique in relapsed complex foot deformity correction enables correction of individual components of the deformity at rates that may be tailored to achieve accurate three-dimensional control using an easy-to-handle, light, cheap, and simple frame.


Coordinated problem solving and secure resource sharing in dynamic ensembles of organizations is critically dependent on the concept of virtual organizations (VO). However, as grid systems continue to grow in scale, exhibit greater dynamics, and become more heterogeneous, managing VOs on a grid scale becomes an increasingly difficult challenge. This is not only caused by different VO-philosophies and different middleware technologies, but it is also due to various authentication and authorization schemes. In our work we aim at harmonizing the VO management within and between these heterogeneous setups. To better understand the necessary building blocks we have realized two alternative solutions. The first one is based on an integrated approach, the second one introduces an additional abstraction layer as a proxy between VOs and the grid middleware. Both concepts have their individual advantages and disadvantages. The results of the respective assessment indicates that a combined solution may be beneficial.


Frankenstein's existential dilemmas of humanity and science have led the novel to be upheld as a premonition of the dangers of overreaching technological advancements, a theme that seems more relevant than ever in the current age. Out of the "creative progeny" of Mary Shelley's work, Ahmed Saadawi and Jeanette Winterson's invocations of Frankenstein stand out as they reimagine the text through distinctive political turning points, questioning how horrors of the past can be reworked to fit new terrors. Their respective works, Frankenstein in Baghdad and Frankissstein, contemplate the future of the human body as altered by technology whether incited by warfare or by the introduction of artificial intelligence. Although different in terms of geographical setting and genre, both texts are connected in their reinvestigation of Frankenstein's core concerns of otherness as related to gender and race, responsibility, as well as the future of humanity and literature. Within their works, the relationships of creator and creation, as well as the individual and society, transcend the supernatural elements, revealing a core anxiety about the future of humanity.


Reliable colour constancy
by industry for colour
conducted to quantify
metamerism.
and metamerism indices are highly desired
quality control. Two experiments were
the degree of colour constancy and
In the colour constancy experiment, 240 wool samples were
prepared and scaled using a magnitude estimation method by a
panel of 5 experienced observers under sources D65, A and TL84. 2
corresponding data sets derived from the experimental results were
used to test various chromatic adaptation transforms. The results
clearly show that the BFD transform gave the most precise prediction
than the other transforms. Attempts were also made to derive 4 new
transforms from four independent data sets. These gave similar
performance as that of the BFD, but overcome the BFO's problem
(incapable of predicting some of the high saturated colours). Hence,
these transforms should be used with confidence for predicting the
degree of colour constancy.
This experimental results were also used to test various
uniform colour spaces and colour appearance models. The Hunt94
model gave the most precise prediction to the colourfulness and hue
results. Modification was made to its lightness scale for improving
the fit.
In the metamerism experiment, 76 pairs of wool samples were
prepared and assessed with 20 observations using a grey scale under
7 sources: D65, A, TL84, TL83, P27, W and WW. The experimental
results were used to test 3 types of illuminant metamerism indices
derived here. It was found that calculating colour difference using 3
colour difference formulae, i.e. CMC, BFD and CIE94 gave the most
precise prediction to the visual results. The degree of precision is
quite satisfactory in comparison with typical observer precision.
A new standard deviate observer (SDO) was also derived. This
together with the CIE SDO and 1964 Observer were tested using the
author's and the Obande's data. The results showed that the new SDO
predicted results more accurate than those from the other two CIE
Observers. An Observer Metamerism Index (OMI) was also derived
to indicate the degree of metamerism based upon the new SDO. The
results showed that the new SDO was more suitable for indicating the
degree of observer metamerism.


Meta-training agents with memory has been shown to culminate in Bayes-optimal agents, which casts Bayes-optimality as the implicit solution to a numerical optimization problem rather than an explicit modeling assumption. Bayes-optimal agents are risk-neutral, since they solely attune to the expected return, and ambiguity-neutral, since they act in new situations as if the uncertainty were known. This is in contrast to risk-sensitive agents, which additionally exploit the higher-order moments of the return, and ambiguity-sensitive agents, which act differently when recognizing situations in which they lack knowledge. Humans are also known to be averse to ambiguity and sensitive to risk in ways that aren't Bayes-optimal, indicating that such sensitivity can confer advantages, especially in safety-critical situations. How can we extend the meta-learning protocol to generate risk- and ambiguity-sensitive agents? The goal of this work is to fill this gap in the literature by showing that risk- and ambiguity-sensitivity also emerge as the result of an optimization problem using modified meta-training algorithms, which manipulate the experience-generation process of the learner. We empirically test our proposed meta-training algorithms on agents exposed to foundational classes of decision-making experiments and demonstrate that they become sensitive to risk and ambiguity.


Considering the lifelong implications of a positive human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) test result, physicians should be aware of the limitations of tests for HIV. A 43-year-old man had a reactive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and an indeterminate result on Western blot analysis. The results of subsequent enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and Western blot tests were interpreted as positive, and the patient was informed that he had HIV infection. Persistently undetectable plasma HIV-1 RNA, combined with normal physical examination findings, CD4(+) cell count, and CD4/CD8 ratio, prompted further testing, which revealed that the patient was not infected with HIV. False-positive HIV test results are uncommon, but they can occur. In the appropriate clinical setting, follow-up and the use of other laboratory tests, such as determination of plasma viral load, may help identify such cases.


The large agglutinated foraminiferan Bathysiphon capillare de Folin (Protista) was an important component of the macrofauna in box core samples recovered at a 950 m site on the southern flank of the Wyville-Thomson Ridge, northern Rockall Trough. The long, narrow, very smooth, flexible tubes of B. capillare reached a maximum length of almost 10 cm. Densities ranged from 100 to 172 ind. m-2, a figure that represents at least 5 to 9% of metazoan macrofaunal densities. This infaunal species usually adopted a more or less horizontal orientation within the upper 5 cm layer of brownish sandy silt. Its cytoplasm yielded a diverse spectrum of fatty acids. These included various monounsaturated fatty acids (39% of total), mainly 18:1(n-7), 20:1(n-9) and 22:1(n-7), the polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) 20:4(n-6), 20.5(n-3) and 22.6(n-3), and non-methylene diene-interrupted fatty acids (NMIDS), particularly 22:2[delta]7,13 and 22:2[delta]7,15. The spectrum of PUFAs is consistent with the ingestion by B. capillare of phytodetrital material. However, the presence of NMIDS, reported here for the first time in a protist, provides evidence for a substantial bacterial component in the diet. Viewed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), the cytoplasm occupied a narrow space between the inner organic test lining and an inner core of detritus around which it formed a sheath. The core material included numerous spherical structures (2 to 10 µm diameter) that we interpret as stercomata (waste pellets composed largely of mineral grains). Taken together, our observations suggest that B. capillare is a deposit feeder, consuming sediment, detritus and associated bacteria. Other deep infaunal foraminiferans probably have a similar diet, leading us to speculate that these protists, which are often abundant in dysoxic settings, may contribute significantly to carbon cycling in the deep sea. Since B. capillare and similar large Bathysiphon species can be recovered in good condition from bathyal depths, they may prove to be ideal experimental subjects for addressing some fundamental issues in the lipid biochemistry of deep-sea benthic organisms.


The book - as the outcome of a research performed by the University of Florence and the United States Institute of Peace of Washington - explores the role of law in the process of democratic transition in South Africa. More specifically it emphasize how constitutional law may contribute to "civilize" apparently unreconcilable conflicts, a part from laying down the foundations of the new legal order and institutions.


Following Cui et al. 2018 (hereafter Paper I) on the classification of large-scale environments (LSE) at z = 0, we push our analysis to higher redshifts and study the evolution of LSE and the baryon distributions in them. Our aim is to investigate how baryons affect the LSE as a function of redshift. In agreement with Paper I, the baryon models have negligible effect on the LSE over all investigated redshifts. We further validate the conclusion obtained in Paper I that the gas web is an unbiased tracer of total matter -- even better at high redshifts. By separating the gas mainly by temperature, we find that about 40 per cent of gas is in the so-called warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM). This fraction of gas mass in the WHIM decreases with redshift, especially from z = 1 (29 per cent) to z = 2.1 (10 per cent). By separating the whole WHIM gas mass into the four large-scale environments (i.e. voids, sheets, filaments, and knots), we find that about half of the WHIM gas is located in filaments. Although the total gas mass in WHIM decreases with redshift, the WHIM mass fractions in the different LSE seem unchanged.


The research project encompassed evaluating the performance of New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) specified aggregates at the respective NJDOT gradation ranges (high end, middle, and low end) and providing guidance as how to modify the gradation ranges to provide better performance in the field. Currently, the NJDOT specifies the use of granular materials by gradation only. However, it is well known that the gradation of granular materials has a dramatic impact on its performance. Therefore, base and subbase materials were sampled from three regions in the state and evaluated under the following performance tests: permeability (falling and constant head conditions), triaxial shear strength, cyclic triaxial loading, California Bearing Ratio (CBR) and resilient modulus. Testing was also conducted on recycled asphalt pavement (RAP) and recycled concrete (RCA) to evaluate their potential use as base and subbase materials. Materials were tested at their respective natural gradations and at manufactured gradations which represented the NJDOT high, middle, and low areas of the gradation specification in order to provide guidance as how to better refine the current NJDOT gradation specification. Testing concluded that the gradation has an impact on each material and source tested. On average, permeability increased with increasing coarse fraction and decreasing percent fines. The triaxial strength increased as coarse fraction increased; however, the permanent deformation measured from the cyclic triaxial test indicated that at the gap-graded high end of the gradation band, instability was prevalent for the rounded subbase aggregates. This is most likely due to rounded aggregate particles not interlocking during loading (The gradation of this type of material is very similar to the non-stabilized open graded base layer that the NJDOT has used in the past). The resilient modulus testing followed a similar trend. Overall, the closer the aggregate gradation was to the middle/high side of the NJDOT gradation specification, the better the performance. The testing of the RAP, RCA, and their blends with the base material, showed that as the % RAP increased in the blend, both the CBR value and permeability decreased. RAP also caused larger permanent deformations during the cyclic triaxial testing. The inclusion of RCA provided the largest CBR, largest resilient modulus, and lowest permanent deformation values. However, as the % RCA increased, the blend's permeability decreased.


High-fidelity renderings of virtual environments is a notoriously computationally expensive task. One commonly used method to alleviate the costs is to adaptively sample the rendered images identifying the required number of samples according to the variance of the area thus reducing aliasing and concurrently reducing the total number of rays shot. When using ray tracing algorithms, the traditional method is to shoot a number of rays and depending on the difference between the radiance of the samples further rays may be shot. This approach fails to take into account that different components of a material reflecting light may exhibit more coherence than others. With this in mind we present a component-based adaptive sampling algorithm that renders components individually and adaptively samples at the component level, finally composting the result to produce a full solution. Results demonstrate a significant improvement in performance without any perceptual loss in quality.


Objective: To assess the prevalence of ectopic pregnancy among women who conceived with assisted reproductive technology and to see if there is increased risk after sequential embryo transfer. Methods: The ectopic pregnancy rate for ART pregnancies was calculated among women who conceived and had ectopic pregnancy after ICSI followed by Sequential embryo transfer from an ART centre. Variation in ectopic risk by patient and ART treatment factors was assessed including Sequential transfer, risk factor for ectopic pregnancy, tubal infertility and previous ectopic pregnancy. Results: Of 1960 women, who underwent ICSI, 1047(53.41%) had positive pregnancy, 22(2.1%) women had an ectopic pregnancy out of which 2(9%) had heterotrophic pregnancy. The mean age was 30.4±4.33. Tubal factor contributed to 31.81% cases and 27.27% had previous history of ectopic pregnancy. Sequential transfer was done in all the patients with more than one embryo transferred. There was no significant increase in the ectopic pregnancy when Sequential embryo transfer was done. Conclusion: Tubal factor infertility and history of previous ectopic pregnancy contributed to risk factor for ectopic pregnancy in our study. Sequential transfer did not increase the risk of ectopic pregnancy.


Secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation from the photooxidation of one monoterpene (α-pinene) and two sesquiterpenes (longifolene and aromadendrene) is investigated in the Caltech environmental chambers. The effect of NOx on SOA formation for these biogenic hydrocarbons is evaluated by performing photooxidation experiments under varying NOx conditions. The NOx dependence of α-pinene SOA formation follows the same trend as that observed previously for a number of SOA precursors, including isoprene, in which SOA yield (defined as the ratio of the mass of organic aerosol formed to the mass of parent hydrocarbon reacted) decreases as NOx level increases. The NOx dependence of SOA yield for the sesquiterpenes, longifolene and aromadendrene, however, differs from that determined for isoprene and α-pinene; the aerosol yield under high-NOx conditions substantially exceeds that under low-NOx conditions. The reversal of the NOx dependence of SOA formation for the sesquiterpenes is consistent with formation of relatively low-volatility organic nitrates, and/or the isomerization of large alkoxy radicals leading to less volatile products. Analysis of the aerosol chemical composition for longifolene confirms the presence of organic nitrates under high-NOx conditions. Consequently the formation of SOA from certain biogenic hydrocarbons such as sesquiterpenes (and possibly large anthropogenic hydrocarbons as well) may be more efficient in polluted air.


Before the civil war, "lynching" signified all forms of group-inflicted punishments, including vigilantism and mob killings. By this definition, lynchings happen in every country. Only in America, however, was lynching widespread and socially accepted. Scholars say this shows that the American commitment to due process often succumbed to "vigilante values," that is, the desire for speedy, certain and severe penalties. They contend that vigilante values triumphed over due process on the frontier, where courts were weak and vigilance committees strong. This article demonstrates that this view must be substantially qualified because due process was of great concern to Americans on the frontier, especially with respect to members of their own communities. The core of the article is a comprehensive study of law in the California gold rush. The thousands of publications on lynching have simply missed this critical chapter in American legal history. Hundreds of accounts of lynchings or "trials" (the miners used the terms interchangeably) indicate that most suspects were tried before a judge and an impartial jury, and some were acquitted. Lynchings or trials in the gold mines thus often resembled those on the overland trail studied by John Reid. This article further suggests that similar trials were common on the frontier. Scholars have failed to distinguish these rather poorly documented proceedings from the activities of vigilance committees, thereby omitting an important factor in their studies of the American legal experience. The importance of due process to Americans, even in crowds, and even beyond the reach of the courts, must now be reassessed.


In 2000, George Fox University expanded its engineering program from a 3/2 program to a complete four year engineering program providing a Bachelor of Science in Engineering with concentrations in both electrical and mechanical engineering. 2004 saw the first graduates from the program which became ABET accredited the following year. Very early in the program development, it was decided that the senior capstone experience would be a multidisciplinary experience. The small class sizes (9-10 seniors in the first three years) also enabled the program to focus on a single project in the initial years and expanded to two projects to accommodate the 17 seniors in the 2006/2007 academic year. While many senior capstone experiences are constructed to focus on the design experience, we decided to expand this focus. By their senior year, George Fox University engineering students have already experienced a number of significant design experiences. This wealth of prior design practice enables the program to use the capstone experience to help students transition from the mindset of a 'student' to that of an engineer. This desire to imitate "real-life" engineering project experience drives the structure and pace of the capstone experience. Students tend to be surprised at all the "non-technical" issues that must be confronted and addressed. The project progress is assessed throughout the two semesters and input is frequently provided by the faculty members and the representative from the industry sponsor. Both the complete team and individual students are assessed. This course serves as an excellent place to measure the overall learning and progress of the students as well as the success of the engineering program. Final oral presentations and demonstration of successful prototype functionality are given at the annual Design Project Day and at the client's industrial site. In this paper we describe the methods used by the George Fox University engineering program to acquire and work with industry sponsors and define the scope of these projects. Additionally, we will describe the specifics of the student group formations and how students have, either effectively or ineffectively, participated in the multidisciplinary experience. We will use the specific examples from the delivered prototypes, using these elements to emphasize those efforts that have worked well and to indicate those areas that have been less successful.


Abstract The study is a descriptive analysis of the constitution of solitude in three novels by Thornton Wilder: The Cabala, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and The Eighth Day. A method of phenomenological close reading is used to explore immanent text-structures. The investigation lets the novels illuminate themselves by showing how each of the literary works has its own way of bringing specific forms of solitude to light. The essay discovers in The Cabala a mode of solitude that mainly deals with personal loneliness as something that fragile individuals undergo when exposed to adversity or isolation. It is found that The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a text of a different order. Here solitude involves feelings that are not limited to character and relational matters. The essay shows that these more spacious modes of solitude state something about human life as such. Solitude is seen as a metaphysical factor of existence rather than as a mere problem in an individual or milieu. In The Eighth Day, finally, solitude is found to be mainly at work on a mid-range level of manifestation that avoids the narrowly character-focussed viewpoint as well as the opposite extreme of metaphysical greatness. On this more balanced, intermediary level the decisive factor at the heart of the constitution of solitude is the mystery of family life as something at once private and sublime. Keywords: Thornton Wilder, solitude, loneliness, family life, predestination, The Eighth Day, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Cabala


The main objective of present study was to screen amino acids as the potential feeding stimulants for marble goby, O. marmoratus. Two separated experiment were conducted. In the first experiment, the stimulatory effect of single and mixtures of amino acids on the gustatory sense of O. marrnoratus were determined by behavioral method. Amino acids were incorporated into the agar gel pellets, fed to the fish and the pellets acceptance ratios were recorded. For single amino acids, L-alanine attained the highest acceptance ratio followed by l-glutamine, l-glycine, and
betaine. On the other hand, L-cysteine, L-glutamic add, L-lysine, l-serine and taurine were totally rejected. The function of betaine, which is a derivative amino
add was studied to determine whether or not It can enhance the feed intake of essential amino adds mixture (EAAM). Betaine and EAAM were originally poorly accepted by the fish, with 0.093 and 0.19 respectively. However, when both of them were mixed, the acceptance ratio of betaine+EAAM agar gel pellet was improved, which was 0.374 although no significant different, Indicated that betaine was taste
Indifferent but It enhanced the palatability of EMM. Therefore, betaine can be used as feed enhancer for juvenile O. marmooratus. Non-essential amino acids mixture (NEMM) achieved the highest acceptance ratio with value of 0.944, suggesting that NEAAM may be the better feeding stimulant compared to EAAM. Based on these results, a prototype feeding stimulant was formulated. In the second experiment, the effectiveness of this prototype feeding stimulant in shortening the pellet-weaning period of wild-caught juvenile O. marmoratus was evaluated. Twelve wild-caught fish
(BW=4.13 g to 8.01 g; BL= 7.7 on to 9.3 an) are divided into 2 groups equally, each group consisted of 6 fish where each fish was kept separately in aquarium. Two diets of protein and lipid levels were 48 % and 7.8 % fo respectivly were formulated, namely, the fish meal (FM) diet and fish meal + protntype feeding stimulant (FM+FS) diet, and were fed to the fish for 14 days. The fish in the FM+FS treatment was
successfully weaned in the shorter period (during first week) than those in the FM treatment (during second week). Such result confirmed that the prototype feeding
stimulant was effective in shortening the pellet weaning period of the juvenile O. marmoratus.


Practical Enterprise Risk Management addresses the real need for organizations to take more managed risks in order to maximise business strategies and achieve long term goals. Based on ISO 31000 and applying current best practice, it provides templates and examples that can be adapted for any industry. Breaking down the theory on enterprise risk management, it helps you see risk as both an opportunity and a threat whilst giving you guidance on how to implement it. It provides models for Risk Adjusted Return on Capital to evaluate R.O.I and measure performance, advice on emergent risks, as well as best practice and advice on risk communication, transparency and protecting the brand.

 Including a comprehensive overview of risk management responsibilities for boards, Practical Enterprise Risk Management lifts the lid on the whole process, helping you to embed ERM into your organization, reach your goals and take more managed risks.


A spiritual experience for some means a mere fabrication of the mind. For others it is pathological and the consequence of psychiatric disturbances and psychological disorders. Others acknowledge that certain role-players are present when spiritual experiences occur. However, the identification of the involvement of these role-players by no means minimises the spiritual experience to a level of being non-significant. A spiritual experience in Christian spirituality assumes as its foundation that a personal relationship with Christ exists. It further signifies spiritual interaction as a result of the relationship. Taking different possibilities into account, this article contends that whatever scientists make of spiritual experience, it can never be reduced to mere fabrications of the mind, or psychological disorders. A spiritual experience in a Christian context signifies the interaction of God. Furthermore, spiritual experience is an important aspect of Christian spirituality that in essence indicates a relationship and interaction between the believer and God.


Jointed rock masses, adverse lithological sequences, often deeply-weathered soil profiles, seasonal rainfall, stream erosion and seismicity have created conditions favourable to the development of landslides in many parts of Ethiopia. Large, deep-seated landslides occupy many hillsides and some may date from the late Pleistocene–mid Holocene. Others are more recent and their activity is controlled by rainfall and, in some cases, the effects of land use change and road construction and widening schemes. The road network of Ethiopia has been expanding significantly over recent decades and has been impacted in many areas by reactivated ground movements and new, first-time failures. The Ethiopian Roads Authority (ERA) has undertaken a number of initiatives to combat these problems, including a research programme aimed at developing mitigation designs for 118 locations on the federal road network of the country. Engineering geological mapping formed the cornerstone of the geotechnical investigations, together with targeted trial pitting, drilling and geophysical investigations, that allowed remedial options to be scheduled. Nevertheless, geotechnical uncertainty prevailed at several locations, especially where ground investigation was precluded by budget constraints. A pragmatic approach had to be applied to the construction contract documentation that made provision for confirmatory ground investigation prior to design finalization and geotechnical inspection and interpretation during construction.


An alternative to traditional informed-consent approaches to human subjects could provide flexibility and increased participation. Genomic biobanks—repositories of human DNA and/or associated data, collected and maintained for biomedical research—present ethical challenges different from those traditionally associated with medical research. Historically, when researchers obtained and used tissue samples, it was for defined purposes and the nature of the research was disclosed to contributors, who were asked to consent to the specific research project. With genomic biobanks, in contrast, the entity holding the samples may not be involved in the research, and future uses of the samples may be unknown. Although traditional research promised confidentiality and/or anonymity to participants, advances in DNA technology may render these safeguards meaningless (1–3). As a consequence, many ethicists argue that traditional informed consent may be illusory if not impossible (1, 4) and that different approaches to the ethics of genetic sample collections are needed (5, 6).


After delimiting the concepts of moral and ethics the author makes a conceptual difference between psychiatry and mental health. He proposes that the former is a medical specialty while the latter is built in the health concept. Psychiatric problems correspond to mental disorders that affect individual persons while mental health problems, such as underdevelopment and poverty, generalized corruption and violence affect the whole society and interfere with human development and economic growth. To mix up both concepts as if they were synonymous, especially in third world countries, leads to scientific, economic and socio-political risks that attempt against their developments as nations.


Computer science is deeply changing methodological aspects of the discovery process in different areas of knowledge. Researchers have at their disposal new capabilities that can create novel research opportunities. Parallel and distributed platforms composed of resources shared between different participants can make these new capabilities accessible to every researcher at every level, delivering computational power that was restricted before to bigger (and wealthy) scientific projects. This work explores four different facets of the rules that govern how organizations engage in collaboration on modern parallel and distributed platforms. Using classical combinatorial tools, multi-objective scheduling and game-theory, we showed how to compute schedules with good trade-offs between the results got by the participants and the global performance of the platform. By ensuring fair results and guaranteeing performance improvements for the participants, we can create an efficient platform where everyone always feels encouraged to collaborate and to share its resources. First, we study the collaboration between selfish organizations. We show how the selfish behavior between the participants imposes a lower bound on the global makespan. We present algorithms that cope with the selfishness of the organizations and that achieve good fairness in practice. The second study is about collaboration between organizations that can tolerate a limited degradation on their performance if this can help ameliorate the global makespan. We improve the existing inapproximation bounds for this problem and present new algorithms whose guarantees are close to the Pareto set. The third form of collaboration studied is between rational participants that can independently choose the best strategy for their jobs. We present a non-cooperative game-theoretic model for the problem and show how coordination mechanisms allow the creation of approximate pure equilibria with bounded price of anarchy. Finally, we study collaboration between users sharing a set of common resources. We present a method that enumerates the frontier of best compromise solutions for the users and selects the solution that brings the best value for the global performance function.


Pausanias, the Greek historian and traveler, lived and wrote around the second century AD, during the period when Greece had fallen peacefully to the Roman Empire. While fragments from this period abound, Pausanias' Periegesis ("description") of Greece is the only fully preserved text of travel writing to have survived. This collection uses Pausanias as a multifaceted lens yielding indispensable information about the cultural world of Roman Greece.


Exercise performed in swimming events can be systematized depending on the supply of oxygen in the aerobic effort (1,500m Freestyle, 10,000m Freestyle), anaerobic effort (50m Freestyle, 100m Freestyle, 200m Freestyle) and mixed effort, where the energy source is provided by both anti-oxidative reactions and oxybiotic reactions, their ratio varying according to exercise intensity and duration (400m Freestyle, 800m Freestyle). One cannot approach exercise capacity without referring to its psychological dimension, with implications on the psychomotor sphere of the athlete. A major challenge faced by performance swimming is early dropout and mental wear, in connection with different forms of motivation. Through the H-902 Waterproof Bone Conduction System, the coach can communicate directly with the athletes during training, encouraging them and influencing a change in the activation level of their positive emotional feelings. Direct communication allows transposing/ strengthening the principles of active and conscious participation and of intuition during training, removes monotony and develops the self-control ability. Examples of technical and tactical components: DAC (distance covered per arm cycle/rate, stroking length and swimming speed), correction of swimming technique, the start and turns, all of them are effectively improved. The device also allows understanding and learning the key-elements of the motor act, and enhances psychomotricity (by the correct representation of body schema and balance), in close connection with the coordination abilities.


The Palaeozoic age Natal Group Sandstone (NGS) that outcrops from Hlabisa (in the north) to Port Shepstone (in the south) and Greytown (to the west) to Stanger (to the east) in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa, is investigated in terms of its hydrogeological characteristics. The NGS, which consists of a Lower Durban Formation and an Upper Mariannhill Formation, forms a secondary/fractured aquifer system that has variable to good productivity across its members. This aquifer is characterised by borehole yields ranging from 0.2 L/s to 25 L/s, with more than 50% of the boreholes having blow yields greater than 3 L/s. Preliminary analysis indicates that higher-yielding boreholes are associated with a network of intersecting fractures and faults, that are recommended targets for future borehole drilling in the area. Groundwater recharge increases from west to east and from north to south. The south-eastern sector receives up to 120 mm/a of recharge compared to the north-eastern sector where recharge declines to less than 30 mm/a. Depth to groundwater decreases southwards commensurate with an increase in the rate of recharge. The general direction of groundwater flow is eastwards, to the Indian Ocean. Groundwater in the NGS is of good quality in terms of major and trace element composition. The electrical conductivity (EC) values measured are mainly less than 100 mS/m except areas north of the Mhlathuze River where EC values as high as 449 mS/m have been determined. EC, total dissolved solids (TDS) and major ion contents in the sandstone aquifer groundwaters decrease from north to south, controlled by geochemical composition of the aquifer material, the rate of recharge and impacts of sugarcane cultivation. Groundwater hydrochemical facies are either Na-HCO 3 or Na-HCO 3 -Cl. The electrical conductivity increases from inland to the coastal zone, indicating marine influences. Environmental isotope data (δ 2 H, δ 18 O, tritium) indicate that the groundwater recharge is from modern precipitation.


Law and neuroscience is approaching an inflection point. It has been roughly ten years since the New York Times Magazine put neurolaw on its cover, since Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky wrote his seminal article, "The Frontal Cortex and the Criminal Justice System"; and since law professor Adam Kolber taught the first law and neuroscience course. The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, which has been one of the epicenters of the field over this same period, will wind down its primary research projects soon.
So what comes next?
In this Article, I sketch out a vision for "Law and Neuroscience 2.0." Neurolaw has built a solid foundation for a lasting intellectual and policy endeavor. But to realize the promise of neuroscience for law and policy, we need to do more to productively encompass the wide variety of ideas, research, and activity that are on-going and forthcoming at the neuroscience-law intersection. At the ten-year mark, neurolaw too often focuses only on criminal responsibility, too infrequently explores technologies beyond fMRI, and has yet to explore many of the ways in which brain science already is posing legal challenges. In short, there is much to do.
The Article proceeds in four parts. Part I provides a brief review of the past decade of law and neuroscience research, distilling some of the lessons we have learned and some of the challenges we have faced. In Part II, I explore the landscape of future neurolaw possibility, offering fifteen different areas of potential investigation. Part III begins to develop a blueprint for how we can get from here to there, with an emphasis on the need for educating a new generation of neuroscience-informed legal thinkers, and creating viable career tracks for those graduates. I conclude in Part IV with a short reflection on why -- despite all its limitations -- the future of neurolaw is bright.


With the Framework Nations Concept, which it introduced to NATO in 2013, Germany attempted to bring the topic of defence cooperation among NATO countries once more to the foreground. The development of multinational units would, in theory, increase sustainability and help preserve military key capabilities. Smaller armies could plug their remaining capabilities into an organizational backbone provided by a larger, "framework" nation. Politically, the concept represents a step towards transatlantic burden sharing. As the initiator of the concept, Germany must now not only show that the well understood obstacles to defence cooperation can be overcome; it must above all else reduce scepticism among those who would like to cooperate, but doubt Berlin's reliability as a military partner.


The southern Western Ghats tropical montane cloud forest sites (Gavi, Periyar, High wavys and Venniyar), which are characterized by frequent or seasonal cloud cover at the vegetation level, are considered one of the most threatened ecosystems in India and the world. Three out of four montane cloud forest sites studied in the southern Western Ghats had experienced diminishing trends of seasonal average and total rainfall, especially during summer monsoon season. The highest level of reduction for summer monsoon season was observed at Gavi rainforest station (>20 mm/14 years) in Kerala followed by Venniyar (>20 mm/20 years) site in Tamil Nadu. Average annual and total precipitation increased during the study period irrespective of the seasons over Periyar area, and the greatest values were recorded for season 2 (>25 mm/28 years). Positive trends for winter monsoon rainfall has been observed for three stations (Periyar, High wavys and Venniyar) except Gavi, and the trend was positive and significant (90%) for Periyar and High wavys. Increase in summer monsoon rainfall was observed for Periyar site and the trend was found to be significant (95%).


A simple temporal network (STN) can often be used to represent the flexibility in the execution of a plan. Nodes represent the execution times of actions and directed edges represent constraints between them. An STN with resources (STNR) is an STN in which each node is associated with production or consumption levels of resources. The upper (lower) resource envelope of an STNR is the maximum (minimum) accumulated resource levels at every time instant over all possible executions. In this paper, we discuss the usefulness of resource envelopes in the context of execution monitoring. We show that they can be used in a tractable framework for forward projection of world states during plan execution. This allows an execution monitor to recognize depletion of resources early and to generate alerts with large look-aheads. It also supports retasking by enabling "what-if reasoning" during plan execution.


In situ/operando studies of a heterogeneous catalyst are particularly valuable for achieving a fundamental understanding of catalytic mechanisms at a molecular level by establishing a correlation between the observed catalytic performance and the corresponding surface chemistry during catalysis. Herein, CO oxidation on cobalt oxides was studied via ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (AP-XPS). During CO oxidation on CoO in the temperature range of 140-180 °C, the active surface phase of CoO progressively transforms to Co3O4. Kinetic studies of CO oxidation on the surface phase CoO at 80-120 °C and on the formed Co3O4 at 160-220 °C show that CoO and Co3O4 exhibit different activation barriers: 49.3 kJ mol-1 for CoO and 36.9 kJ mol-1 for Co3O4. This study demonstrates the transition of the active surface phase of a transition metal oxide-based catalyst under catalytic conditions with no change in the bulk phase of the catalyst.

publisher-specific, author manuscript: http://rsc.li/journals-terms-of-use


Existing ultrasonic stress evaluation methods utilize the acoustoelastic effect for bulk waves propagating in volume, which is unsuitable for a surface treated material, possessing a significant variation in material properties with depth. With knowledge of nonlinear elastic parameters – third-order elastic constants (TOEC) close to the surface of the sample, the acoustoelastic effect might be used with surface acoustic waves. This work is focused on the development of an independent method of TOEC measurement using the effect of nonlinear surface acoustic waves scattering – i.e. the effect of elastic waves interaction in a nonlinear medium. In this paper, the possible three wave interactions of surface guided waves and bulk waves are described and formulae for the efficiency of harmonic generation and mode mixing are derived. A comparison of the efficiency of surface waves scattering in an isotropic medium for different interaction types is carried out with the help of nonlinear perturbation theory. First results for surface and bulk wave mixing with known secondand third-order elastic constants are shown.


BACKGROUND The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in seismic changes in healthcare delivery. As a result of this, hospital footfall required to be reduced due to increased risk of transmission of infection. To ensure patients can safely access healthcare, we introduced orthopaedic clinic telephone consultations in our busy district general hospital. AIM To investigate patients' and clinicians' perspective of telephone consultations during COVID-19, and whether this method of consultation could be a viable option in the post- pandemic future. METHODS This is a single centre, prospective study conducted in a busy National Health Service district general hospital. In May 2020, 100 non- consecutive adult patients were contacted by independent investigators within 48 h of their orthopaedic clinic telephone consultation to complete a telephone satisfaction questionnaire. The questions assessed satisfaction regarding various aspects of the consultation including overall satisfaction and willingness to use this approach long term. Satisfaction and perspective of 25 clinicians conducting these telephone consultations was also assessed via an online survey tool. RESULTS 93% of patients were overall satisfied with telephone consultations and 79% were willing to continue this method of consultation post- pandemic. Patients found telephone consultations to reduce personal cost and inconvenience associated with attending a hospital appointment. 72% of clinicians reported overall satisfaction with this service and 80% agreed that telephone consultations should be used in the future. The majority found it less laborious in time and administration in comparison to face to face consultations. Patients and clinicians expressed their desire for video consultations as a method of further improving their experience with remote consultations. CONCLUSION Our study has shown that telephone consultations are a safe and rapid method of adaptation to the COVID-19 pandemic, achieving the aim of reducing hospital footfall. This method of consultation has resulted in immense clinician and patient satisfaction. Our findings suggest that this tool has benefits in post pandemic healthcare delivery. It has also highlighted that telephone consultations can act as a steppingstone to the introduction of the more complex platform of video consulting.


This
 study deals with political ideology, in the form of Q sorts of 80
self-referent statements provided by more than 50 respondents, the P set
 being cross-sectional. The resulting data set was split up into three
equivalent P samples, each of which was submitted independently to Q
factor analysis. Also, it was split up into four equivalent item
samples, each of which was submitted independently to R factor analysis.
 Comparison of Q analysis loadings with R analysis z-scores and of Q
analysis z-scores with R analysis loadings shows a limited amount of
cross-validity. With respect to (meta-)reliability, the three cases of Q
 factor analysis are strikingly similar; the fours cases of R factor
analysis, however, turn out to be rather dissimilar.


Angular and polarization multiplexing techniques are utilized in both object and reference arms in the digital holographic microscopy system to improve its resolution. The angular multiplexing provides on-axis and off-axis illumination and reference beams with different carrier frequencies. Polarization multiplexing prohibits the occurrence of interference between low and high object spatial frequencies and reference beams. The proposed system does not require special light sources or filtering masks. Experimental results show that the resolution of the synthesized image exceeds the resolution determined by the numerical aperture of the imaging microscope objective.


An analytical circuit model able to predict the input impedance of reconfigurable graphene plasmonic dipoles is presented. A suitable definition of plasmonic characteristic impedance, employing natural currents, is used to for consistent modeling of the antenna-load connection in the circuit. In its purely analytical form, the model shows good agreement with full-wave simulations and explains the remarkable tuning properties of graphene antennas. Furthermore, using a single full-wave simulation and scaling laws, additional parasitic elements can be determined for a vast parametric space, leading to very accurate modeling. Finally, we also show that the modeling approach allows fair estimation of radiation efficiency as well. The approach also applies to thin plasmonic antennas realized using noble metals or semiconductors.


ePortfolio software applications provide a range of functionality that can be used to provide students with structured learning experiences and assessment at individual and group level. To date, the authors have varied their use of ePortfolios in three units, postgraduate and undergraduate, and evaluated the outcomes from student and staff perspectives. Two key intended outcomes from the staff perspective are that individual students analyse and reflect on their contribution to group tasks and that the ePortfolio provides evidence of their individual contribution and enable individualised assessment of group work. This paper describes the use of ePortfolios in two postgraduate and one undergraduate unit. Students enrolled in the postgraduate units submitted two ePortfolios for assessment, each weighted 10%, describing their contribution and reflecting on group practice to provide evidence of contribution to their group. Students in the undergraduate unit submitted an individual ePortfolio as a 20% component of a group assignment worth 30% (six possible marks). In both cases, students were required to use the PebblePad ePortfolio software and access it via a link separate from the University Learning Management System (LMS). From a staff perspective, the objective of using ePortfolio assessment to provide evidence of individual contribution was realised. It facilitated the identification and individual assessment of students whose lack of contribution had not contributed to the group output being assessed. This evidence then resulted in the marks for the group assessment being realigned without the need for face-to-face negotiation and possible confrontation. Postgraduate students responded well to the use of ePortfolios as a separate assessment task with substantial weighting. ePortfolios were integrated with the other assessment pieces providing a holistic approach to the assessment process. However the undergraduate student responses in the unit evaluation provided evidence that the cognitive load required to learn PebblePad software was considered unreasonable for a 6% weighting.

Using the ePortfolio as a component of a group assignment integrated into the assessment has clear benefits in individualising group work. The authors next intend to explore whether use of an ePortfolio tool, embedded in the Learning Management System students are already familiar with, will reduce the perceived cognitive load for those students and result in students perceiving the benefits of increased transparency in assessing individual contributions to group work, even in the case where ePortfolio is a small component of the assessable task.


The 170 GHz gyrotron for ITER demonstrated the stable and steady state 1000s operation with the output power of 0.6 MW and the efficiency of 45% by depressed collector. The remarkable progress was obtained with optimization of a built-in launcher and mirrors for significant reduction of the stray radiation to ˜2% of the output power, improvement of electron beam quality for high oscillation efficiency and control of constant beam current for stable oscillation. The result indicates a promising prospect for development of a 1 MW-CW-50%, 170 GHz ITER gyrotron.


Organizational change is a reality of 21st-century working life, but what psychological effects does it have on individual workers, and what coping strategies can be used to mediate its impact? In today's turbulent work and career environment, employees are required not only to accept changes as passive recipients, but to proactively initiate changes and demonstrate attitudes, behaviours and skills valued by current employers. As a result, organizational psychologists, both researchers and practitioners, have had to acknowledge and understand the myriad of challenges faced by employees as a result of organizational change. In this important new book, an international range of prominent scholars examine the key psychological issues around organizational change at the individual level, including: •health and well-being •performance and leadership •attitudes and implications for the psychological contract. Analyzing and presenting the impact of organizational change, and possible coping strategies to successfully manage change, the volume is ideal for students and researchers of work and organizational psychology, business and management and HRM.


Recent changes in the broadcasting industry and emerging digital media technologies have "disturbed" the traditional economic models supporting the media industry over the last decade, with viewers migrating from traditional media outlets to digital ones causing a severe drop in revenues. Consequently, the competition for viewers' ratings has intensified dramatically over recent years, with new economic models being introduced and others still under development. In this context, the research presented in this thesis describes in detail an innovative computer model for optimising television programming and scheduling to maximise revenues under given constraints. The research methodology combines academic work along with practitioners' experiences to build an integer programming model that helps expert programme schedulers to place television programmes in time slots where they achieve optimum ratings within the limitations of the resources available. In building the model, an extensive literature review and media industry experts' interviews and focus groups discussions were conducted. The value of the model was demonstrated by applying it to a real case as well as hypothetical scenarios for a television station and showing that the model increased potential viewership, on average, between 38% and 63%. The software package used to solve the model should enable the media industry to solve large scale optimisation models using thousands of variables and constraints. This should help media planners and decision makers to plan for months, if not years, ahead.


The practical aspect of this research has been the curation of a series of hybrid exhibitionary spaces. These exhibitionary forms have resulted from creating a series of interfaces under the umbrella of 'that's contemporary',a non-profit organization that I co-founded and have run since 2011.
In this thesis, the practice of curating is taken to be the operation of 'inscribing' a program of actions (i.e.a script) into the design of interfaces; 'prescribing' these actions to the users of these interfaces; and 'describing' how users actually use the interface. My research argues that interfaces, by being used, unfold hybrid exhibitionary spaces. They are hybrid because the interfaces through which the exhibition is used and produced fluctuate between digital and physical space, in a hybrid zone. In this sense, physical exhibitions are curated along with the organization of their multiple replications on digital and non-digital interfaces.
My concept of hybrid exhibitionary space is shaped by theory (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005; Kennedy, 2012)that understands space to be produced by social relations meaning that users create the exhibitionary spaces they inhabit. From this point of view, the exhibition does not pre-exist its users, rather it takes place in an unremitting process of use, opening up the possibility for its multiple descriptions to be made. This idea of use as a form of exhibition production is applied to the concept of 'network curation', which refers to a type of collective curatorial process that is engendered by users, reiterating and re-contextualizing the exhibition along digital networks.
Inspired by Actor Network Theory, the written component of this research has been interlaced together into an exhibitionary description. This method acts to document while, at the same time, it re-performs the'curating' and 'curatorial' processes that originally gave form to these exhibitionary interfaces. In this way, the thesis turns into an interface that mediates between its exhibited objects – my practice – and its users – the readers – while, simultaneously 'enacting' the research along this process of mediation.


Disruption of p53 gene function seems to have a pivotal role in carcinogenesis. p53 gene changes occur before the development of breast cancer and therefore might influence breast cancer risk. We investigated the association between p53 protein accumulation and p53 mutations detected in benign breast tissue and risk of subsequent breast cancer. We conducted a case-control study nested within the cohort of 4,888 women in the Canadian National Breast Screening Study who were diagnosed with biopsy-confirmed benign breast disease during active follow-up. Cases were women with benign breast disease who subsequently developed breast cancer; five controls were matched to each case. p53 protein accumulation was assessed immunohistochemically using sections of paraffin-embedded benign breast tissue from 104 cases and 385 controls; for 82 of these cases and 327 of the controls, DNA was successfully extracted from the breast tissue for p53 gene analysis using PCR-single-strand conformation polymorphism/direct sequencing. p53 protein accumulation was associated with a 2-fold increase in risk of progression to breast cancer [adjusted odds ratio (OR), 2.16; 95% confidence interval (95% CI), 1.08-4.30], whereas p53 nucleotide changes overall were not associated with altered risk (adjusted OR, 1.22; 95% CI, 0.68-2.19); those with both p53 immunopositivity and a p53 nucleotide change had an OR (95% CI) of 3.20 (1.21-8.50). Nonpolymorphic intronic changes were associated with a 2.8-fold increase in risk (OR, 2.84; 95% CI, 1.09-7.41). The results of this study suggest that p53 protein accumulation and nonpolymorphic intronic changes in p53 are associated with increased risk of progression to breast cancer in women with benign breast disease. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2006;15(7):1316–23)


Purpose
We investigate the reflectance properties of the cone mosaic in adaptive optics (AO) images of healthy subjects and subjects with nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR) over time.

Methods
We acquired images of the parafoveal cone mosaic over 5 years in 12 healthy subjects and in six patients with mild NPDR. We analyzed the parameters of the cone intensity histogram distribution (mean, SD, and skewness), two metrics of the cone mosaic texture (sharpness and entropy), and two novel metrics (cone/intercone intensity and slope of the variogram). Each metric was calculated on the same four retinal locations (200 × 200 μm areas, 2° from the fovea along the four meridians) over time for each subject.

Results
The histogram distributions of cone intensities were similar between the two study groups. However, the cone/intercone intensity, slope of the variograms and entropy showed a significant difference between healthy and NPDR subjects (P = 0.036, P = 0.002, P = 0.014, respectively). All parameters, except for mean cone intensity, did not change with time in this study.

Conclusions
We observed significant differences in cone mosaic reflectance properties between healthy eyes and eyes with NPDR, in its spatial organization and in its intensity, especially between directional and nondirectional backscattering. We introduced a novel method for the study of the spatial distribution of cone reflectance, the variogram, which was able to quantify differences of the spatial dependence of cone intensities over a short range between NPDR and healthy eyes.


As technology evolves and electronic data becomes more complex, digital medical record management and analysis becomes a challenge. In order to discover patterns and make relevant predictions based on large data sets, researchers and medical professionals must find new methods to analyze and extract relevant health information.Big Data Analytics in Bioinformatics and Healthcare merges the fields of biology, technology, and medicine in order to present a comprehensive study on the emerging information processing applications necessary in the field of electronic medical record management. Complete with interdisciplinary research resources, this publication is an essential reference source for researchers, practitioners, and students interested in the fields of biological computation, database management, and health information technology, with a special focus on the methodologies and tools to manage massive and complex electronic information.


In this paper a mathematical model that describes macrophage infiltration into avascular tumours is presented. The qualitative accuracy of the model is assessed by comparing numerical results with independent experimental data that describe the infiltration of macrophages into two types of spheroids: chemoattractant-producing (hepa-1) and chemoattractant-deficient (or C4) spheroids. A combination of analytical and numerical techniques are used to show how the infiltration pattern depends on the motility mechanisms involved (i.e. random motion and chemotaxis) and to explain the observed differences in macrophage infiltration into the hepa-1 and C4 spheroids. Model predictions are generated to show how the spheroid's size and spatial structure and the ability of its constituent cells influence macrophage infiltration. For example, chemoattractant-producing spheroids are shown to recruit larger numbers of macrophages than chemoattractant-deficient spheroids of the same size and spatial structure. The biological implications of these results are also discussed briefly.


The work presented in this thesis addresses the parametric study of ion beams emitted from Mather type plasma focus devices and their flourishing utilization in materials processing. Experiments have been performed by using two different plasma focus devices; a conventional 2.3 kJ plasma focus device developed under the joint venture of the United Nations University (UNU) and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) designated as the UNU/ICTP device operational at the GC University Lahore and a modified version called the Nanyang X-ray source-2 designated as the NX2 device (a repetitive plasma focus) operational at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. The measurements of ion parameters such as energy, energy distribution, number density and current density are carried out in the ambient gas pressure by employing a BPX65 photodiode and a Faraday cup (FC) using time of flight technique. A major motivation is to establish the optimum processing conditions for ion nitriding, surface modification, phase changes and carburizing of materials of industrial interest like Ti, AlFe1.8Zn0.8 alloy and SS-321 in plasma environment. The processed samples are characterized for structural and morphological changes, compositional profile and surface hardness by employing X-ray diffraction (XRD) at GC University Lahore, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) at University of Peshawar, field emission SEM (FESEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) at the NIE NTU Singapore, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Singapore, Raman spectroscopy and Vickers microhardness test at Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Pakistan. The SRIM code and microindentation measurements are used to estimate the depth profile of the modified layers. Nanocrystalline spatially uniform TiN thin films with petal like features are developed on Ti substrates exposed to 30 focus shots at various axial positions. The surface roughness and the relative proportion of the TiN films are strongly influenced by the ion beam energy flux. The film acquires eminent appearance with maximum relative proportion of nitrogen at 7 cm axial position. The probable energy of the ions reaching this position is 64 keV with the maximum ion number density of 5.9´1013 cm-3. The corresponding energy flux and current density are 2.69´1013 keV cm-3 nsec-1 and 1142 A cm-2 ix respectively. The grain size of the film is estimated to be about 90 nm while the compound layer thickness is about 0.66 μm. The surface microhardness is also maximum at this axial position with typical value of 7650±10 MPa. The SEM images of a typical microcracked TiN thin film and the SRIM code estimations of ion penetration help in understanding the growth mechanism of the film in terms of ion dose. The granular nanostructures appearing on the substrate surface are grown from nucleates of a few nm size developed by the energetic ions induced collision cascades. The predeposited nitride layer or nitrogen ions interstitially implanted into the substrate surface are also redistributed by the successive pulses of the ion beams leading to layer densification along with possible resputtering. Moreover, the temperature evolution during the DPF ions irradiation also enhances the reactivity of the nitrogen already introduced during the preceding pulses. The residual tensile stresses on the sample surface are transformed to the compressive stresses after DPF ion irradiation. Nitrogen ions induced surface changes in AlFe1.8Zn0.8 alloy are investigated as functions of axial and angular positions for 30 shots. The expanded fcc phase of Al is evolved owing to the incorporation of nitrogen along with Fe and Zn into the Al lattice. A comparatively smooth and crack free nitride layer is formed on the sample treated at 7 cm axial and 100 angular position with 4- to 5-fold increase in Vickers hardness. TiN0.9 and (Fe,Cr)2N are deposited on SS- 21 along with formation of non-stoichiometric (Fe,Cr)xN phase by exposing the samples to multiple focus shots in nitrogen plasma at different axial and radial positions. The transformation from (Fe,Cr)xN to (Fe,Cr)2N is attributed to an increased nitrogen ion dose. The point-like structures of flakes reveal the nucleation of crystal growth with the increased ion doses. The nitride layer is golden in colour and is spatially uniform with improved surface hardness. Multiphase nanocrystalline titanium oxycarbide TiCxOy thin films composed of TiC2, TiO0.325, Ti2O3 and carbon phases are deposited on titanium substrate in CH4 discharges by the UNU/ICTP and the NX2 devices. The nanocomposite films are non-porous and microcrack-free with grain-like surface morphology having spatially uniform carbon distribution. XRD, Raman and XPS results reveal the favorable evolution of multiphase coatings having a stoichiometric TiC2 phase and graphitic carbon adsorbates along with x the residual oxide (TiO0.325, Ti2O3) phases with the lower energy flux and lower repetition rate in the UNU/ICTP treatment. Whereas, the deposition of carbon and a nonstoichiometric TiO0.325 phase is favored due to the improved oxide removal and enhanced disorder in the substrate surface during the NX2 treatment. In addition, TiC2 phase is also suppressed, possibly due to the enhanced substrate temperature caused by the higher energy flux of the ion beams and the higher repetition rate. The granular profile of the films attains a definite coagulation pattern. The energy flux of the ion beam and the repetition rate are found to be critical parameters which influence the preferred evolution of a particular phase during the restructuring of various phases.


Introduction Elevated blood pressure in childhood may predict increased cardiovascular risk in young adulthood. The Task Force on the Diagnosis, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood pressure in Children and Adolescents recommends that blood pressure be measured in children aged 3 years or older at all health care visits. Guidelines from both Bright Futures and the Expert Panel of Integrated Guidelines for Cardiovascular Health and Risk Reduction in Children and Adolescents recommend annual blood pressure screening. Adherence to these guidelines is unknown. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional study to assess compliance with blood pressure screening recommendations in 2 integrated health care delivery systems. We analyzed electronic health records of 103,693 subjects aged 3 to 17 years. Probability of blood pressure measurement documented in the electronic health record was modeled as a function of visit type (well-child vs nonwell-child); patient age, sex, race/ethnicity, and body mass index; health care use; insurance type; and type of office practice or clinic department (family practice or pediatrics). Results Blood pressure was measured at 95% of well-child visits and 69% of nonwell-child outpatient visits. After adjusting for potential confounders, the percentage of nonwell-child visits with measurements increased linearly with patient age (P < .001). Overall, the proportion of children with annual blood pressure measurements was high and increased with age. Family practice clinics were more likely to adhere to blood pressure measurement guidelines compared with pediatric clinics (P < .001). Conclusion These results show good compliance with recommendations for routine blood pressure measurement in children and adolescents. Findings can inform the development of EHR-based clinical decision support tools to augment blood pressure screening and recognition of prehypertension and hypertension in pediatric patients.


Different views exist about whether anthropomorphic ideas assist or hinder learning in biology. This paper discusses the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric ideas children have about micro-organisms, and whether they affect their understanding. The research was carried out in primary and secondary schools in the South of England and involved 414 children aged 7,11 and 14 years. Three different research techniques were used to elicit their ideas. Anthropomorphic and anthropocentric ideas about micro-organisms are apparent in responses from all age groups. Anthropomorphic ideas seem to help children to explain their understanding of some aspects of micro-organisms but the imbalance in children's anthropocentric views of micro-organisms appears to prohibit them considering other aspects of micro-organisms; for example, the importance of their role in decomposition and cycling of matter, or their beneficial technological applications. The focus on the danger micro-organisms are thought to pose to human health creates a hostile view of micro-organisms and this may inhibit future learning.


Mobile transgressive dune systems are often overlooked in the study of coastal
morphodynamics and sediment budgets. Inundation bK sand of abutting agricultural
land and infrastructure has recurred throughout the 2ot 1 century, frequently
accompanied by requests by farming communities to the government to stabilise the
dunes. In addition, the association of sea-beach-coastal dunes provides an attractive
setting for residential I holiday developments on dune systems. Yet little is known
about the pattern of dune mobility in response to changing atmospheric conditions
(rainfall, air temperature and wind speed) and their effect on dune mobility and the
rate of actual and predicted dune migration. The work presented in this thesis
addresses the evolution of a parabolic dune, dune mobility and migration.
Quantitative data were collected to determine process-response in an actively mobile
long-walled asymmetric parabolic dune located on the western coastline of northeast
Tasmania, Australia. The data were acquired over a period of four years from a
composite of geomorphic survey techniques that incorporated repeated surveys of the
ground surface topography using kinematic GPS and arrays of erosion pins, which
were linked to analysis of wind flow patterns acquired from an on-site 2 m high
meteorology station, and analysis of sediment that forms the dune. Wind shear
velocity (u*) and roughness length (zo) were measured close to the ground on
windward slopes, and speed-up ratios were determined. Analysis oftemporallyspaced
ortho-rectified and georeferenced aerial photography extended the duration of
the survey by fifty years to establish the longer term evolution of the parabolic dune,
including the downwind and lateral migration rates of the dune system.
The level of accuracy (planimetric accuracies typically in the range of 2-5 cm and
vertical accuracies of 3-10 cm) achieved in the six epochs of kinematic GPS surveys
provided reliable GPS data that were used to construct three-dimensional
topographic models of the dune system on 5 m x 5 m grids using kriging. The
topographic models displayed the general patterns of displacement and accretion of
sediment that maintain dune form. Using cross-sectional profiles, at representative
locations across the dune, the pattern of process-response between wind speed I wind
direction on the direction of sand movement and on morphodynamics was clearly
evident. A series of morphological parameters were extracted from the kinematic
GPS data to quantify dune migration rates, dune volumes, and dune reconstitution
time.
The measured migration rate of the parabolic dune head was 21.5 m/yr (mean value)
measured over 4 years, and 27.3 m/yr measured from a fifty-year sequence of orthorectified,
georeferenced, digitised aerial photography. The head of the dune
reconstitutes at the rate of 8.9 years, with a volume of 100,800 m3.
Volumetric change for the study site over an interval of thirty months was in the range of
656,400 m3. The majority of sand transport is generated by moderate velocity wind
flows which have a higher frequency of occurrence. Forty one percent of wind events
occur in the moderate velocity category (4 to< 12 m/s), twenty seven percent occur
in the high velocity category of> 12 to> 20 m/s. Measurement of flow close to the
ground on windward slopes indicated that shear stress does not progressively
increase from toe to crest of slope due to interaction between flow and bed form.
Some seventy percent of wind events are topographically aligned; across dune flow
from the SW sector results in lateral migration of the trailing arms, with the smaller
south trailing arm migrating ENE at more than twice the rate of the north trailing
arm. This rate of lateral displacement maintains the 3: 1 length to width ratio of the
asymmetric parabolic dune by maintaining the dimensions of the deflation plain
which in turn maintains the dynamic equilibrium of the aerodynamic envelope of the
dune form.
This integrated approach has provided quantitative evidence that demonstrates the
dynamic feedback between the prevailing wind regime and seasonal and discrete
wind flow events on the dune bed, and the influence of atmospheric conditions on
dune mobility.