The work presented in this thesis focuses on the synthesis and characterisation of inorganic dyes which may be used as potential catalysts for CO2 reduction. Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter concerned with introducing the area of CO2 reduction and the complexes developed to date. It begins with a brief overview of the area of CO2 reduction before introducing the significant photocatalysts developed to date for this purpose. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the photocatalysts developed within this research.

Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis describe the synthesis and characterisation of mononuclear and dinuclear ruthenium (II) and rhenium (I) complexes using various synthetic routes and ligands. The experimental methodology (i.e. the materials, methods and instrumentation) used while conducting this research, is described in Chapter 2.

The investigation into the preparation of photocatalysts begins in chapter 3 with the development of homonuclear and heteronuclear supramolecular complexes containing ruthenium and rhenium metal centers using the "complexes as metals / complexes as ligands" approach. A range of 'azole' type bridging ligands 3,5-bis(pyridin-2-yl)-1,2,4-triazole (Hbpt), 3,5-bis(pyridin-2-yl)-1,2,4-triazole (Hbpzt), 2,5-Bis(2-pyridyl)-1,3,4-thiadiazole (dptd) were prepared to connect these two centres with an aim to study the effect of bridging ligands on catalytic activity. Characterisation was carried out by 1 HNMR, and CHN with a discussion of their electronic properities included.

Chapter 4 continues with a description of a synthetic study to prepare [Ru(bpy)2(tpphz)Re(CO)3Cl](PF6)2. Synthesis of the bridging ligand, tetrapyrido[3,2-a:2',3':3'',2''-h:2''',3'''-j]phenazine (tpphz) is described with subsequent novel synthetic routes leading to the development of ruthenium and rhenium precursor complexes. Further investigation in the preparation of [Ru(bpy)2(tpphz)Re(CO)3Cl](PF6)2 is detailed and characterisation is carried out by 1 HNMR and IR.

Chapter 5 details the analysis of [Ru(bpy)2(bpt)Re(CO)3Cl]PF6 conducted by ion chromatography using a Dionex ICS-1500 system for oxalate and formate. System installation, calibration and validation are described with respect to the detection of oxalate and formate. Irradiation studies of the heteronuclear complex using blue light over a twenty four hour period are described.

Chapter 6 concludes this thesis with a summary of the work completed during this research. Possible future work is also described before concluding remarks.


Fossil fuel is being consumed rapidly and large-scale development of energy plants is very promising to solve future energy crisis. However, it is impossible to grow energy plants in arable farmland extensively in order to ensure the national food security in China. This necessitates exploiting non-cultivated coastal saline lands to produce biomass that may be converted into biofuel. Halophytes which produce plenty of biomass using saline resources may be an important source for bio-energy. This study shows the natural distribution of halophytic energy plants in coastal zone in China. Also the assessment of the potential developing halophytic energy plants in China coastal zone is carried out. Finally, several practical suggestions are offered for the future exploitation of coastal energy plants in China.


We model the increase in temperature in compost piles or landfill sites due to micro-organisms undergoing exothermic reactions. The model incorporates the heat release due to biological activity within the pile and the heat release due to the oxidation of cellulosic materials. The heat release rate due to biological activity is modelled by a function which is a monotonic increasing function of temperature over a particular range and followed by a monotone decreasing function of temperature. This functionality represents the fact that micro-organisms die or become dormant at high temperatures. The heat release due to the oxidation reaction is modelled by the usual manner using Arrhenius kinetics. The bifurcation behaviour is investigated for two-dimensional slab geometries to determine the critical sizes of the compost piles.


Optical mapping of the internal signal is a unique method of studying the brain and makes it possible to investigate the functional anatomy of the cerebral cortex with high spatial resolution. Modern modifications of this method make it possible to shorten the time to obtain individual functional maps, and this opens up new prospects of using the given approach in neurophysiological experiments. It is shown to be possible in principle to use optical mapping of the internal signal to objectively test the visual function: As the contrast of the visual stimulus changes, changes have been observed in both the amplitude of the metabolic response in the cortex and in the structure of the functional maps.


Pseudopleonexes sheardi n.sp. is reported from South Australia. This is the second named species in the genus known previously only from New Zealand. Conlan's (1982) original diagnosis of the genus (type species Pleonexes lessoniae Hurley, 1954) and the diagnosis in Barnard & Karaman (1991) differ in several respects. Thirty-six characters from those diagnoses and from Pseudopleonexes sheardi are compared in a table, and a number of those characters are discussed. Pseudopleonexes sheardi differs from Conlan's diagnosis in the palm of gnathopod 1 being slightly oblique rather than transverse, and in the reduced palp of maxilla 1 having a single article rather than 2. In view of several synapomorphies identified, those differences do not warrant separate generic recognition of P. sheardi. A new diagnosis of Pseudopleonexes is given. Specimens from New Zealand referred to P. lessoniae by Barnard (1972, as Ampithoe (Pleonexes) lessoniae) are discussed. The specimens probably represent two separate species, neither belonging to P. lessoniae. Further material is required to confirm or reject their inclusion in Pseudopleonexes.


This article determines the weakest failure detectors to implement shared atomic objects in a distributed system with crash-prone processes. We first determine the weakest failure detector for the basic register object. We then use that to determine the weakest failure detector for all popular atomic objects including test-and-set, fetch-and-add, queue, consensus and compare-and-swap, which we show is the same.


The goal of this project is to make a system able of executing drop and recovery of sensor nodes at sea by the use of UAVs. The sensor node will be a lightweight packet that can contain different sensors depending on the mission. These sensor nodes will be dropped into the sea where they will float on the surface. Examples of use for the sensor nodes can be to log temperature, currents, salinity or water quality. Hence they can be very useful in for instance climate research or for detectingoil spills. This project is a continuation of a project executed by the author [Voldsund, 2013] where a drop and recovery mechanism to be mounted on a multicopter UAV was developed. The mechanism has been further developed in this project and integrated to an UAV. A control structure for the UAV has been developed and tested using simulator, software-in-the-loop tests and tests in the lab. Simulations and software-in-the-loop tests showed that the control structure was able to execute drop and recovery. But the needed accuracy for recovery of sensor nodes using the mentioned mechanism was not achieved in the lab tests. Measures that could be taken to enhance accuracy to make the system able to conduct drop and recovery of sensor nodes are discussed in this thesis


Local work groups in the nine counties comprising the Ichawaynochaway watershed in southwestern Georgia have identified natural resource concerns and implemented projects to address these concerns. Resource concerns are primarily related to water quality, water quantity and soil erosion. The groups prepared and submitted a proposal to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) for designation as an Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) Priority Area. 366 applications for EQIP assistance have been received from landowners, and contracts for over $900,000 in financial assistance for BMP implementation have been developed. Annual attendance at conservation field days exceeds 100 agricultural producers and other interested landowners. The Local Work Group has also identified obstacles to BMP implementation that may limit the success of a locally led conservation program.


The world is an integral (holistic) "system of systems" (SoS), a set of self-sufficient, but interconnected (energy-materially, information-genetically and mental-conceptually), structural-functional formations (SFF), which are in a permanent state of stable development. Separate subsystems of the world system are the space and terrestrial oecumene, geotories (closed socio-natural systems) and civilizations, biosphere and technosphere, the world of reason (noosphere) and the cognitive world of a man. Metasystem as a whole (SoS) — is fractal (with SFF similar in space and time) dynamic system, in which "what's above, the same is below", "what happened is what will happen." Global studies is a complex of scientific knowledge, established generally accepted information and individual speculative assumptions, views and intuitive sensations about the world system as a whole and its individual parts, laws of their dynamic functioning and development, as well as a targeted vision system (foresight) of the present, the past and the future of SoS on the whole. Fractality of the world system allows us to use, for its general management, conseptions inherent in one of its constituent parts ("want to know the Universe — cognize a human himself", and vice versa). Cosmology, natural history, social science and human studies are determined by the same structural and functional concepts, in particular, the cyclical nature of both separate SFF and SoS as a whole. Therefore, the present article examines basic principles of a new metasystem-based world studies on the example of eco-studies (ecological, economic and energy conceptions on development of the planetary house-ecos in which we live: from the Greek oikos - house, place of residence, oikumen). At the same time, based on ideas about cyclical nature of the development of terrestrial oecumene and Eurasian civilization, an attempt is made to present the structure of a new project "Targeted vision of the new world" for the second half of the 21st century and for the coming 36-year period, "Christmas Eve" is the culmination of the 144-year "imperial" cycle.


political and foreign-relation orientation to a purely commercial endeavor. This change of focus engendered unanticipated management challenges for travel service operations at various administrative levels in the country. This article identifies and analyzes the changes and problems concerning the management of international travel services in China and discusses efforts by the Chinese tourism administrative authority to develop a systematic travel service management. Also included are suggestions for improving travel service management in China.


Everyday mobility—the ability to move around freely in one's  neighborhood—is discussed as an essential foundation of social participation in current mobility research. Numerous studies indicate that mobility decreases as age increases. The decrease is associated with a loss of social integration and declining quality of life. Nevertheless, research is lacking about how individuals cope with decreased mobility, and how changes are initiated in the light of individual perceptions and beliefs. The goal of the research reported in this article was to explore, using qualitative methods, how changes in mobility can be conceptualized on the basis of subjective constructions and actions in a theory emerging from the data—as defined by grounded theory methodology—which can describe and explain the process. In a second step I developed prospective assumptions about the way in which the use of a mobility assistant, which was developed within the framework of a project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research—could influence the perceptions and beliefs of older people and could promote in this way their mobility. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1401113


Information systems success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems (IS) research, but research on free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) often fails to appropriately conceptualize this important concept. In this article, we reconsider what success means within a FLOSS context. We first review existing models of IS success and success variables used in FLOSS research and assess them for their usefulness, practicality and fit to the FLOSS context. Then, drawing on a theoretical model of group effectiveness in the FLOSS development process, as well as an on-line discussion with developers, we present additional concepts that are central to an appropriate understanding of success for FLOSS.

In order to examine the practicality and validity of this conceptual scheme, the second half of our article presents an empirical study that demonstrates operationalizations of the chosen measures and assesses their internal validity. We use data from SourceForge to measure the project's effectiveness in team building, the speed of the project at responding to bug reports and the project's popularity. We conclude by discussing the implications of this study for our proposed extension of IS success in the context of FLOSS development and highlight future directions for research. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The use of visual cues by insect herbivores is likely to be an important component of plant-herbivore interactions in the wild, yet has until recently received little attention from researchers. In the last decade, however, interest in this topic has intensified following Hamilton & Brown's (2001) autumn colouration hypothesis, which proposes that the intensity of colouration of trees at autumn time is a signal of their defensive commitment to potential herbivores. This idea remains controversial and to date robust empirical data linking colouration with chemical defence and herbivory have been lacking.

This thesis begins with a meta-analysis, in which I synthesize and analyse previously published data to determine the evidence for the use of host plant colouration by herbivores. I then move to explore the relationship between chemical defences and colouration in a classic plant-herbivore system: the wild cabbage (Brassica oleracea) and its herbivores the cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) and the cabbage aphid (Brevicoryne brassicae). Both species have colour vision, and I use spectral sensitivity data to model the colour of the host 'through the eyes' of the herbivores. First, I present data from a field study of wild cabbage populations showing significant relationships between herbivory, plant colouration and levels of glucosinolates defensive compounds. These results suggest that plant colouration could be used by herbivores to gain information about plant chemical defence. I then show colouration has a fixed genetic component in a common garden experiment; a necessary requirement for evolution of a colour signal. I explore the use of colouration in host choice by herbivores in more detail in a series of behavioural experiments. I show that cabbage aphids do not use leaf brightness as a cue when selecting among plants, but they do respond to different leaf colours. I also show that cabbage white butterflies do not choose hosts based on particular colour cues, even though this colouration potentially provides important information about host defence levels, which are shown to impact upon offspring fitness.

Together, these results provide a clear demonstration of a link between plant chemistry and colouration in the wild cabbage system. However, the data presented in this thesis indicate that the use of colouration as a guide to host defence is limited, and I conclude by discussing possible reasons why this might be the case.


This paper introduces average treatment effects conditional on the outcomes variable in an endogenous setup where outcome Y, treatment X and instrument Z are continuous. These objects allow to refine well studied treatment effects like ATE and ATT in the case of continuous treatment (see Florens et al (2009)), by breaking them up according to the rank of the outcome distribution. For instance, in the returns to schooling case, the outcome conditioned average treatment effect on the treated (ATTO), gives the average effect of a small increase in schooling on the subpopulation characterised by a certain treatment intensity, say 16 years of schooling, and a certain rank in the wage distribution. We show that IV type approaches are better suited to identify overall averages across the population like the average partial effect, or outcome conditioned versions thereof, while selection type methods are better suited to identify ATT or ATTO. Importantly, none of the identification relies on rectangular support of the errors in the identification equation. Finally, we apply all concepts to analyse the nonlinear heterogeneous effects of smoking during pregnancy on infant birth weight.


Literature that features Asian Americans in the Midwest simultaneously functions as an archive that documents the existence and experiences of people of Asian descent in the heartland and as a provocation to reimagine the relationship between race, place, and (trans)national belonging. Although Asian people have been immigrating to the middle of the country since the late 19th century, the Midwest continues to figure as a hinterland where Asian people do not reside and have no desire to visit. Thus, fictional, semi-fictional, and autobiographical accounts of the region from the perspective of Asian Americans, spanning at least eight decades, help debunk the impression that Asian Americans are practically nonexistent in the Midwest, or that Midwestern Asian Americans do not have an authentic sense of racial-ethnic identity. These novels, short stories, memoirs, and plays not only engage the strangeness of being of Asian descent in America's heartland, but also they explore imaginative ideas of affinity and place: what it means to dream of elsewheres or to rework the realities of "here" from the lens of so-called nowheres. Some of these texts depict the history of Asian migration to and refugee resettlement in the US interior, gesturing toward alternative genealogies of movement and displacement. Others create new worlds that fuse food (e.g., pop and tea, hotdish and chicken afritada), language, and other transcultural practices. Midwestern Asian American literature encompasses stories by and about East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian peoples whose lives intersect with gender, sexuality, class, and ableness. Literature about Asian Americans in the Midwest often communicates a sense of racial isolation: the loneliness and abjection Asian Americans feel in being the only Asian person or one of a handful of persons treading in a sea of whiteness. However, it also can provoke readers to reimagine the Midwest as Asian, female empowering, and queer. Whereas dominant cultural attitudes often associate the region as devoid of people, opportunities, and racial, gender, and sexual diversity, Midwestern Asian American literature represents the heartland as abundant, with counter-narratives that encompass emotional attachments to place, social interactions different from those on the coasts, and Asian American characters who inhabit areas that are often seen as incompatible with, if not hostile to, cultural difference. The range of stories indicates more broadly that there is no unified Asian Midwest or Asian American experience. Rather, the literature of Asian Americans in the Midwest calls attention to the significance of space and place in conceptualizing racial formations as diverse and dynamic.


Computing devices that use non-traditional methods to interact with data are becoming more popular than those that use keyboard-based interaction. Applications and query interfaces for such devices pose a fundamentally different set of workloads on the underlying databases. We characterize these differences and show how today's query representation and evaluation techniques are not well-suited to these new non-keyboard interaction modalities. We propose a new database architecture to address these issues, and demonstrate that it can be built using already existing components.


Lucilia sericata Meigen (Diptera: Calliphoridae) larvae are manufactured worldwide for the treatment of chronic wounds. Published research has confirmed that the primary clinical effect of the product, debridement (the degradation of non-viable wound tissue), is accomplished by a range of enzymes released by the larvae during feeding. The quality assessment of larval activity is currently achieved during production using meat-based assays, which monitor insect growth and/or the reduction in substrate mass. To support this, we have developed a complementary radial-diffusion enzymatic assay (RDEA) to produce a visual and measureable indication of the activity of larval alimentary products (LAP) collected under standardised conditions, against a gelatin substrate. Using basic laboratory equipment and reagents, the assay is rapid and suited to high-throughput. Assay reproducibility is high (SD 0.06 0.27, CV 0.75 4.31%) and the LAP collection procedure does not adversely affect larval survival (mortality < 2%). As a costand time-effective method, it is suited to academic or industrial use, supporting good manufacturing (or laboratory) practice (GMP and GLP) as a quality control (QC) assay.


Diamond-Dybvig [1983] provide a model of intermediation in which bank runs are driven by pessimistic depositor expectations. Models which address these issues are important in the ongoing discussion which weighs the costs (incentive problems) and the benefits (preventing runs) of deposit insurance. In the present paper we extend the Diamond-Dybvig analysis to consider several important questions for evaluating deposit insurance that could not be addressed within their framework. First, we provide conditions for runs when banks can invest in both illiquid and liquid projects. This results in a weakening of the conditions necessary for bank runs relative to the Diamond-Dybvig model in which no liquid investments occur in equilibrium. Second, we characterize how banks respond to the possibility of runs in their design of deposit contracts and investment decisions, particularly through the holding of excess reserves. Finally, we use this framework to evaluate the costs and benefits of deposit insurance and other forms of intervention. To do so, we introduce moral hazard and monitoring into the model to explore the incentive effects of deposit insurance. The implementation of a capital requirement can, along with deposit insurance, support the optimal allocation.


ABSTRACT Bats of the genus Myotis cannot be identified reliably using conventional acoustic analyses. Here we use morphology of echolocation calls to discriminate between Myotis spp. This method may be used to identify unknown roosts to species level. Echolocation calls of M. daubentonii, M. mystacinus and M. nattereri, were recorded in emergence flights from roosts. Images of echolocation calls were extracted for morphological analysis performed in SHAPE, a program that transforms two-dimensional outline data into Elliptic Fourier Descriptors. Species typical call shapes were described with Mahalanobis models. Discriminant Function Analyses (DFA) were applied with Mahalanobis scores of typical shape alone and with a spectral call parameter, maximum frequency. DFA achieved an overall correct classification rate of 88.9% using typical outline shapes alone. Correct classification of 100% of both M. daubentonii and M. mystacinus was achieved by both typical call outlines. For M. nattereri, 79.6% of calls were correctly classified by call morphology, but the addition of maximum frequency improved this to 96.3%. Shape analyses provide a quick and easy method of distinguishing Myotis species under field conditions and could be extended to include other species of bats that share conventional acoustic parameters.


Purpose
Having paid work, relationships and a choice of where to live are common policy priorities for adults with intellectual disabilities. The purpose of this paper is to compare outcomes with respect to these three priorities between adults with intellectual disability and the general population in Jersey.

Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 217 adults with intellectual disability known to services, and 2,350 adults without intellectual disability using a stratified random sample. Data on employment, marital status and accommodation profiles were compared.

Findings
In sum, 87 per cent of adults with intellectual disability were currently single vs 16 per cent of adults without intellectual disability; 23 per cent of working-age adults with intellectual disability were in paid employment vs 92 per cent of working-age adults without intellectual disability; and 57 per cent of adults with intellectual disability lived-in sheltered housing vs 2 per cent of adults without intellectual disability.

Social implications
Very few adults with intellectual disability are in paid employment or intimate relationships, and the majority live in sheltered, supported housing, with very few owning their own home. There is a significant disconnect between policy and reality. Considerable work is required to make an ordinary life the reality for adults with intellectual disability.

Originality/value
This study adds to the body of evidence that suggests people with intellectual disabilities are less likely to experience an ordinary life. Furthermore, it illustrates that despite Jersey being an affluent society, the same difficulties and barriers exist there for persons with an intellectual disability as in other jurisdictions.


A fantastic children's crime story from the world's best-loved children's author, Enid Blyton. Fatty has discovered an amazing talent for disguise. He fools everyone with his French student act - even Mr Goon! But when Pip discovers a secret room in Milton House, the children decide to investigate...What will they discover in The Mystery of the Secret Room? The Mystery series follows the adventures of 'The Five Find Outers' - Pip, Bets, Larry, Daisy and Fatty, as they solve the most unusual crime cases with the help of their dog Buster. Enid Blyton is arguably the most famous children's author of all time. Thanks to series such as The Wishing-Chair, The Faraway Tree-, The Mysteries, The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, she has sold over 400 million books in more than 40 languages worldwide. Her Mysteries stories have charmed generations of children - and they are as popular today as they have ever been.


Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) is an ambitious tax reform project under EU law, to harmonize corporate income tax base on a group basis at the EU level, and use a pre-determined formulary apportionment mechanism (i.e. a formula consisting the sales factor, the asset factor and the labour factor) to allocate taxing rights between EU Member States. The standard formula is based on the business model of the manufacturing industry and is not completely suitable for the financial industry. The current CCCTB Proposal has a special formula apportioning pan-EU taxable income a multinational taxpayer in the financial industry but there are some problems in it. This paper compares the financial industry formula in the USA state taxation and argues that, the role of the monetary capital is the key criterion to design the financial industry formula under the CCCTB. Based on this rationale, the financial industry formula should include a special rule for the asset factor to include the financial assets and a special rule for the sales factor. Such formula would be suitable not only to multinational groups consisting of pure financial institutions but also to multinational groups consisting of both financial and non-financial institutions.


BACKGROUND
Anger and depressive ruminations have recently received empirical attention as processes related to borderline personality disorder (BPD). The Emotional Cascade Model (Selby, Anestis, & Joiner, 2008) suggests that negative affect (such as anger and sadness) may trigger rumination, which in turn may increase the duration and extent of negative affect, leading to dysregulated behaviours aimed at reducing such intense and unpleasant emotions.

AIM
The aim of this study is to explore the relationships between emotional dysregulation, anger and depressive ruminations, and their role in predicting dysregulated behaviours (such as aggression and self-harm) in a clinical sample of patients with BPD.

METHODS
Ninety-one patients with a diagnosis of BPD were recruited from three outpatient community mental health centres and asked to complete a comprehensive assessment for personality disorder symptoms, emotion dysregulation, anger and depressive ruminations, aggression, and self-harm.

RESULTS
Anger and depressive ruminations were found to be significantly associated to, respectively, self-harm and aggression, beyond the variance accounted by emotional dysregulation.

CONCLUSIONS
Rumination may act as a mediator between emotional dysregulation and dysregulated behaviours in BPD. Future research should examine whether clinical techniques aimed at reducing rumination may be helpful in reducing dysregulated behaviours in patients with BPD.


The Nursing Resources guide is designed for nurses interested in research, updating best practices, and increasing professional knowledge. This guide contains many nursing specific resources, including databases, e-books, and e-journals


We present a new type of large-scale computational screening approach for identifying promising candidate materials for solid state electrolytes for lithium ion batteries that is capable of screening all known lithium containing solids. To be useful for batteries, high performance solid state electrolyte materials must satisfy many requirements at once, an optimization that is difficult to perform experimentally or with computationally expensive ab initio techniques. We first screen 12 831 lithium containing crystalline solids for those with high structural and chemical stability, low electronic conductivity, and low cost. We then develop a data-driven ionic conductivity classification model using logistic regression for identifying which candidate structures are likely to exhibit fast lithium conduction based on experimental measurements reported in the literature. The screening reduces the list of candidate materials from 12 831 down to 21 structures that show promise as electrolytes, few of which have been examined experimentally. We discover that none of our simple atomistic descriptor functions alone provide predictive power for ionic conductivity, but a multi-descriptor model can exhibit a useful degree of predictive power. We also find that screening for structural stability, chemical stability and low electronic conductivity eliminates 92.2% of all Li-containing materials and screening for high ionic conductivity eliminates a further 93.3% of the remainder. Our screening utilizes structures and electronic information contained in the Materials Project database.


Data analysis projects typically use different programming languages (from Python for prototyping to C++ for support of runtime constraints) at their different stages by different experts. This creates a need for a data processing framework that is re-usable across multiple programming languages and supports collaboration of experts. In this work, we discuss implementation of a framework which uses a Domain Specific Language (DSL), called WorkflowDSL, that enables domain experts to collaborate on fine-tuning workflows. The framework includes support for parallel execution without any specialized code. It also provides a provenance capturing framework that enables users to analyse past executions and retrieve complete lineage of any data item generated. Graph database is used for storing provenance data. Advantages of usage of a graph database compare to relational databases are demonstrated. Experiments which were performed using a real-world scientific workflow from the bioinformatics domain and industrial data analysis models show that users were able to execute workflows efficiently when using WorkflowDSL for workflow composition and Python for task implementations. Moreover, we show that capturing provenance data can be useful for analysing past workflow executions.


The ICAST 2017: 19th International Conference on Arts, Science and Technology aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of Arts, Science and Technology. It also provides a premier interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns as well as practical challenges encountered and solutions adopted in the fields of Arts, Science and Technology.


We design a laser diode (LD) end-pumped passively mode-locked solid-state laser with a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror. Mode-matching efficiency in the active medium including the thermal effect is analyzed, and the optimum mode-matching coefficient is obtained by optimizing the pump mode. In the experiment, a total power of 4.2 W stable pulse sequences without multipulse at 1064 nm is obtained with a pulse repetition rate of 86 MHz and a pulse width of 13 ps, corresponding to a high optical to optical efficiency of 44%.


The presence of HIV or AIDS in domestic violence can change how someone experiences abuse. HIV/AIDS may influence the nature of violent acts and the type of power and control exerted, and it can transform the effect of violence by elevating the level of danger and the consequences of violent acts. Based on public health studies and my clients' experiences, I have identified eight categories of ways HIV/AIDS is used in domestic violence, including threats to publicize a survivor's HIV-positive status to others as a way of exerting control; an abusive partner's interference with an HIV-positive partner's medical care; escalated violence following partner notification; and HIV infection resulting from sexual assault, the inability to negotiate condom use, or intentional infection by an abusive partner. The primary legal tool for addressing domestic violence is the civil protection order. The remedy of the civil protection order, however, was created without an understanding of HIV, and HIV/AIDS creates new circumstances for the laws of domestic violence. Furthermore, the role of HIV/AIDS in domestic violence is not revealed in civil protection order cases because of the public nature of the proceedings and clients' concerns about discrimination. With the absence of these stories from the courtroom, litigants lose the therapeutic benefits of storytelling and receive less effective relief than appropriate because judges do not understand the events and are not able to award remedies tailored to the actual experiences of violence.The previously unrecognized voices of those who suffer at the intersection of HIV/AIDS and domestic violence can serve to inspire procedural and substantive legal changes as well as specific response mechanisms. Procedural changes would make courtrooms safer places for revealing highly sensitive, socially stigmatizing, and otherwise confidential information. Substantive changes in domestic violence protection order laws would address complex situations of intimate partner violence, and judicial remedies could target HIV-related domestic violence. Through greater understanding of HIV/AIDS-related domestic violence, lawyers would serve as better advocates for their clients and would address their multiple needs. Finally, domestic violence response mechanisms need to employ coordinated interventions to provide lifesaving medical and legal care to survivors with HIV/AIDS and to those whose abusive partners have HIV/AIDS.


This Article examines the major Supreme Court rulings since the late 1960s that have directly addressed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), commonly known as welfare. The Supreme Court decided cases, such as King v. Smith, Shapiro v. Thompson, and Goldberg v. Kelly, in favor of welfare recipients. The outcomes of these cases suggest that while the Supreme Court viewed welfare policy as a negotiation between federal and state governments, it reserved a special role for the judicial branch in protecting equal rights. The judicial understanding of the relationship between federal and state government power within welfare policy ranged from "cooperative federalism," (expanding powers of the national government in areas traditionally left to the states) to fiscal conservatism (privileging state power and proffering a hands-off approach). These conceptual rubrics do not follow a linear narrative nor offer a story of change over time; instead they are competing approaches that can be implemented by the Supreme Court simultaneously. While the historical arch from the Civil Rights Era to the present normally presents a story of expanded liberties and freedoms to the socially disenfranchised, the lens of the Supreme Court welfare decisions narrates a much different story. Instead, we see the devolution of racial liberalism, the intensification and expansion of poverty, and the rise of social conservatism so familiar by the mid-1980s. Here, black women became both the symbolic scapegoat and the site of social policy surveillance. At the apex of this symbolic/social policy convergence were national attacks on the stereotyped "welfare queen" in particular, and any redistribution of national resources to the poor, in general. Part I of this paper examines Supreme Court case law on welfare policy through the lens of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Part II surveys the Supreme Court case law on welfare policy through the lens of federalism. Finally, Part III reviews much of the same case law contrasted through the lens of fiscal conservatism. Through these lenses, it is clear that the seemingly value-neutral Supreme Court as not at all immune to the changing political landscape of the nation over the last forty years.


The corporations using the varied workforce can supply a greater variety of solutions to problems in service, sourcing, and allocation of their resources. The current labor market mentions four generations that are living and working today: the Baby boomers generation, the Generation X, the Generation Y and the Generation Z. The differences between generations can affect the way corporations recruit and develop teams, deal with change, motivate, stimulate and manage employees, and boost productivity, competitiveness and service effectiveness. A corporation's success and competitiveness depend on its ability to embrace diversity and realize the competitive advantages and benefits. The aim of this paper is to present the current generation of employees (the employees of Baby Boomers Generation, Generation X, Generation Y and Generation Z) in the labor market by secondary research and then to introduce the results of primary research that was implemented in selected corporations in the Czech Republic. The contribution presents a view of some of the results of quantitative and qualitative research conducted in selected corporations in the Czech Republic. These researches were conducted in 2015 on a sample of 3,364 respondents, and the results were analyzed. Two research hypotheses and one research question have been formulated. The verification or rejection of null research hypothesis was done through the statistical method of the Pearson's Chi-square test. It was found that perception of the choice of superior from a particular generation does depend on the age of employees in selected corporations. It was also determined that there are statistically significant dependences between the preference for heterogeneous or homogeneous cooperation and the age of employees in selected corporations.


The Beagle 2 X-ray Spectrometer (B2 XRS) instrument was part of the Beagle 2 Mars lander payload and intended to perform in situ geochemical analyses of geological materials on Mars. The analytical performance of a spare version of the B2 XRS was compared with (1) a portable X-ray fluorescence (PXRF) spectrometer designed to perform terrestrial fieldwork and (2) a laboratory-based wavelength-dispersive (WD-XRF) system used to produce high quality geochemical data. The criteria used to assess the performance were based on fitting precision, accuracy and detection limit, determined from the analysis of international geochemical reference materials. The fitting precision of the B2 XRS and PXRF was found to be in agreement with the Horwitz function (a benchmark relating the analysed concentration of an analyte to its uncertainty) over 4 orders of magnitude of concentration range from 10-1 to 10-5 g/g. The PXRF generally had a better fitting precision than the B2 XRS because of its better resolution. In order of improving accuracy, the spectrometers generally are ranked B2 XRS, PXRF and WD-XRF for various major and trace elements. A limiting factor in the accuracy of the B2 XRS was the application of the algorithm used for its quantitative analysis. The detection limits for the spectrometers ranked in the same order as the accuracy as a result of improving signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of elemental peaks, which is a direct consequence of improving resolution between these spectrometers. Overall, the B2 XRS was found to have a favourable analytical performance compared to the benchmark spectrometers, despite having met considerable design constraints and qualification tests as a planetary instrument.


The split-Hopkinson pressure bar (SHPB) technique has been adapted to measure the dynamic response of soil to impulse loads. The experimental technique is relatively simple and can investigate soil response in regimes beyond the capabilities of current equipment used for dynamic soil laboratory investigations. Soils have several characteristics that must be considered in designing a SHPB experiment and evaluating the data (for example, low wave speeds, nonlinear hysteretic behavior, and low unconfined compressive strength compared to the applied loads). Insight has been gained as to how these factors affect experimental accuracy and data reliability. It has been shown that the experimental assumptions can be satisfied and that the experimental results can be replicated.


General view where the bank of windows meets the service wall at right, including the roof, depicting different treatment given to each realm; [Le Corbusier's third project for the French Salvation Army in Paris]. Even as built, the hostel (1929-1933), called the Cite de Refuge, constitutes a complete urban fragment, incorporating overnight accommodation for 680 people and a long-stay hostel for unmarried mothers, with a creche, refectory, clubs and reading rooms. Le Corbusier's innovative but flawed system of environmental control by means of murs neutralisants (hermetically sealed, double-glazed walls with a shallow cavity into which hot or cold air could be pumped) was ultimately abandoned, but despite technical inadequacies the Cite de Refuge is a fascinating and rich building, full of fantasy and vision and yet surprisingly practical. The difficult site is exploited to the full with a circulation route through a monumental reception porch into a circular drum, which acts as a 'social condenser'. With its philosophy of strict discipline within an enclosed and protected working environment, the building expresses the bracing morality of William Booth and his French disciple Albin Peyron. Source: Grove Art Online; http://www.groveart.com/ (accessed 1/4/2008)


With the growing importance of machine learning (ML) algorithms for practical applications, reducing data quality problems in ML pipelines has become a major focus of research. In many cases missing values can break data pipelines which makes completeness one of the most impactful data quality challenges. Current missing value imputation methods are focusing on numerical or categorical data and can be difficult to scale to datasets with millions of rows. We release DataWig, a robust and scalable approach for missing value imputation that can be applied to tables with heterogeneous data types, including unstructured text. DataWig combines deep learning feature extractors with automatic hyperparameter tuning. This enables users without a machine learning background, such as data engineers, to impute missing values with minimal effort in tables with more heterogeneous data types than supported in existing libraries, while requiring less glue code for feature engineering and offering more flexible modelling options. We demonstrate that DataWig compares favourably to existing imputation packages. Source code, documentation, and unit tests for this package are available at: github.com/awslabs/datawig


Politics in the Council is Janus-faced. There is bargaining with identifiable winners and losers, yet the voting records show high levels of agreement. These two sides have almost exclusively been studied in isolation even though standard theoretical models of voting typically assume that actors' behaviour is guided by their positions relative to the proposal and the status quo. By combining positional data and voting data, we evaluate to what extent voting is driven by salience-weighted issue-specific positions. Our results show that governments' voting behaviour are guided by their issue-specific positions. The relationship between preferencebased positions and votes is stronger when we impute values for the missing positions in the positional data. This illustrates the importance of cautious treatment of missing data in EU decision-making.


In this article, I describe the ways that Islamic presses associated with the piety movement attempt to help Kazakhs develop virtues such as patience and faith by publishing a book of supplications called The Fortress of the Muslim .  Members of the piety movement attempt to follow these presses' instructions and often report that they have become more patient or mindful of God.  Members of Ata Zholy, another Islamic movement in Kazakhstan, learn a different ideology of supplication on pilgrimages where they seek God's help in conjunction with the blessings of saints.  Members of Ata Zholy use The Fortress of the Muslim in heterogeneous ways, many of which contradict the ideology of the piety movement.  The various tactics that members of Ata Zholy use while reading The Fortress illustrate the ways that readers unassociated with the piety movement in Kazakhstan use the products of a dominant Islamic movement for their own purposes.


The search for target genes involved in unbalanced acquired chromosomal abnormalities has been largely unsuccessful, because the breakpoints of these rearrangements are too variable. Here, we use the example of dicentric chromosomes in B cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia to show that, despite this heterogeneity, single genes are targeted through a variety of mechanisms. FISH showed that, although they were heterogeneous, breakpoints on 9p resulted in the partial or complete deletion of PAX5. Molecular copy number counting further delineated the breakpoints and facilitated cloning with long-distance inverse PCR. This approach identified 5 fusion gene partners with PAX5: LOC392027 (7p12.1), SLCO1B3 (12p12), ASXL1 (20q11.1), KIF3B (20q11.21), and C20orf112 (20q11.1). In each predicted fusion protein, the DNA-binding paired domain of PAX5 was present. Using quantitative PCR, we demonstrated that both the deletion and gene fusion events resulted in the same underexpression of PAX5, which extended to the differential expression of the PAX5 target genes, EBF1, ALDH1A1, ATP9A, and FLT3. Further molecular analysis showed deletion and mutation of the homologous PAX5 allele, providing further support for the key role of PAX5. Here, we show that specific gene loci may be the target of heterogeneous translocation breakpoints in human cancer, acting through a variety of mechanisms. This approach indicates an application for the identification of cancer genes in solid tumours, where unbalanced chromosomal rearrangements are particularly prevalent and few genes have been identified. It can be extrapolated that this strategy will reveal that the same mechanisms operate in cancer pathogenesis in general.


Atmospheric aerosols constitute one of the largest sources of uncertainty in the estimation of radiative forcing for climate. From April 2003 to January 2005, in situ mea- surements of aerosol optical properties were conducted at a rural site in Northern China, Shangdianzi Global Atmo- sphere Watch (GAW) regional station (SDZ), about 150 km from Beijing. Mean values (standard deviation, S.D.) of scat- tering and absorption coefficients for the entire period are 174.6 Mm 1 (189.1 Mm 1 ) and 17.5 Mm 1 (13.4 Mm 1 ), respectively. These values are approximately one third of the reported values for scattering coefficients and one fifth of those for absorption coefficients obtained in the Beijing ur- ban area. The mean single scattering albedo (SSA) for the entire period was estimated as 0.88 (0.05), which is about 0.07 higher than the values reported for the Beijing urban area, and also higher than the values (0.85) used in a re- ported climate simulation for China and India. Both the ab- sorption and scattering coefficients showed a seasonal cycle with the lowest values in winter, while the highest values occurred in summer for absorption coefficients and in fall for scattering coefficients. The mean SSA values were low- est in spring and highest in winter. The daily variations of aerosol absorption and scattering coefficients were strongly influenced by synoptic changes throughout the observation period. A trajectory cluster analysis was applied to dis- cern the source characteristics of aerosol optical properties for different air masses. The cluster-mean aerosol scattering coefficients, absorption coefficients and SSA were all high when the air masses moved from SW and SE-E directions to the site and aerosols were influenced with heavy pollution from the dense population centers and industrial areas. The cluster-mean SSA for air masses coming from the polluted areas was not only higher than those with trajectories from the "clean" directions, but also higher than the reported val- ues for the regions with high pollution emissions (such as the Beijing urban area). This fact might reflect the substantial secondary aerosol production during transport. The charac- teristics of aerosol optical properties measured at this rural site suggest significant impacts of human activities on the re- gional aerosol.


Since, other things equal, older children do better in school, the extent and pattern of delayed entry affects observed patterns in academic performance. This paper provides three new sets of relevant findings, utilizing comprehensive data on birth cohorts of children who enrolled in first grade in North Carolina public schools.: (1) Delayed entry (redshirting) reduces the male-female achievement gap by 11%; (2) For each of 6 groups defined by sex and race/ethnicity, the likelihood of redshirting is strongly inversely related to academic ability; and (3) A recent shift in the cut date to earlier in the calendar year reduced redshirting, and provided clear evidence that parental decisions are tied to the absolute age of the child rather than age relative to classmates. The adaptation of redshirting to changes in the cut date is an important mechanism by which such changes affect patterns in academic outcomes.


The migration towards a 20 Gb/s quaternary TDM-PAM passive optical network with chirped and non-linear optical transmitters is experimentally studied. We show that a loss budget of 27.3 dB is compatible together with a packet power ratio of 10 dB between loud and soft ONU.


A simple multiscale analysis framework for heterogeneous solids based on a computational homogenization technique is presented. The macroscopic strain is linked kinematically to the boundary displacement of a circular or spherical representative volume which contains the microscopic information of the material. The macroscopic stress is obtained from the energy principle between the macroscopic scale and the microscopic scale. This new method is applied to several standard examples to show its accuracy and consistency of the method proposed.


OBJECTIVE: To identify in the literature the complications related to physiological changes of the patient, the multidisciplinary team and the use of equipment during the intrahospital transport of critically ill patients. METHODS: Integrative review of literature, through a search in the databases of PubMED, MEDLINE, and LILACS. RESULTS: We encountered 20 articles, all written in the English language. Studies have shown that changes in arterial pressure and heart rate are most common during transport. Of the adverse events related to problems with the team, the lack of knowledge of the professional and failure of communication stood out, apart from those derived from equipment used. CONCLUSION: Transporting the critically ill patient safely requires improving communication between teams, standardizing the actions and equipment used by means of protocols, and identifying opportunities to obtain excellence in service during transport.


The concept of sustainable development forms the basis for a wide variety of international and national policy making. World population continues to expand at about 80 M people per year, while the demand for natural resources continues to escalate. Important policies, treaties and goals underpin the notion of sustainable development. In this paper, we discuss and evaluate a range of scientific literature pertaining to the use of transgenic crops in meeting sustainable development goals. It is concluded that a considerable body of evidence has accrued since the first commercial growing of transgenic crops, which suggests that they can contribute in all three traditional pillars of sustainability, i.e. economically, environmentally and socially. Management of herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant transgenic crops to minimize the risk of weeds and pests developing resistance is discussed, together with the associated concern about the risk of loss of biodiversity. As the world population continues to rise, the evidence reviewed here suggests it would be unwise to ignore transgenic crops as one of the tools that can help meet aspirations for increasingly sustainable global development.


Complex nonlinear aspects of aeroelastic phenomena include unsteady nonlinear aerodynamic loads, structural nonlinearities, as well as nonlinear couplings between the flow and the structural response. Nonlinearities in aerodynamic loads originate from unsteady shocks and/or flow separation. Structural nonlinearities are geometric, or a result of free play. Nonlinear fluid structure couplings result from nonlinear resonance between the aerodynamic load and structural modes. Under different conditions, one or a combination of these aspects could yield flutter or Limit Cycle Oscillations (LCO). The overall goal of this work is to develop the capabilities to quantify the role that these different nonlinear mechanisms could play in observed flutter and LCO. The realization of such a goal would help in providing a benchmark for the detection of nonlinear aeroelastic instabilities and possibly effective means for obtaining improved performance and reduced uncertainties through operation beyond conventional boundaries that are based on linear analysis. Additionally, this effort will provide a benchmark for the validation of computational methodologies. In this thesis, wavelet-based higher order spectra are applied to identify different nonlinear aeroelastic phenomena as encountered in two experiments. First, the analysis is applied to a set of experiments involving a flexible semispan model (FSM) of a High Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) wing configuration conducted by Silva et al. (Experimental Steady and Unsteady Aerodynamic and Flutter Results for HSCT Semispan Models AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ASC 41st Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Conference, 2000). The interest is in the identification of nonlinear aeroelastic phenomena associated with a high dynamic response region which was measured over a large range of dynamic pressures around Mach number 0.98. At the top of this region is a "hard" flutter point that resulted in the loss of the model. The results show that "hard" flutter is related to intermittent nonlinear coupling between the shock motion and large amplitude structural motions. Second, the analysis is applied to identify nonlinear aspects of LCO encountered during test flights of an F-16 aircraft. The results show quadratic and cubic couplings in the acceleration signals of the under-wing launchers and high quadratic coupling levels between flaperon motions and wing oscillations. The implications of applying these techniques in the capacity of a "flutterometer" are also discussed.


Abstract Over the past decade, organic food sales and farmland have grown rapidly worldwide. As the US market for organic food has expanded, anecdotal evidence indicates that imports of organic food have increased. US organic handlers may be importing to meet consumer demand for out-of-season products, as well as products not grown domestically. Handlers may also be importing organic products that are in short supply or to reduce input costs. This paper provides the first examination of imports of organic products into the USA. Data from a national survey of certified organic handlers in 2007 are used to examine the extent, types and origins of imported organic commodities. A Heckman model is employed to investigate the factors that influence an organic handler's decision to import organic products, and the level at which organic handlers import a product. Summary results show that while many of the products being imported into the USA are those that cannot be produced domestically, such as coffee and tropical fruits, some oft-imported commodities are those that can be produced in the USA, such as soybeans, wheat, barley and berries. The summary results also show that organic handlers are procuring almost a half of their imported products from a few countries, including Canada, China, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia. In the econometric analysis, we found those handlers prioritizing local suppliers negatively affected the facility's decision to import products. The use of a social label, such as Fair Trade, positively affected a handler's decision to import. The size of organic sales was important to both the decision to import and the share imported, with larger firms more likely to import and smaller firms less likely to import. However, once a smaller firm had decided to import, they imported a larger share. Finally, our analysis found that experiencing limited supplies or prioritizing price with suppliers did not influence a handler's decision to import products. Based on the findings, we suggest future research avenues, including studies that address consumer preferences and the impact of increased imports on domestic organic farms.


This study presents a new approach to the control problem of single-phase switch-mode rectifiers. The proposed approach is based on a particular model predictive control scheme, incorporated with soft constraints for the errors of the key control targets. This control system is free of PI controllers, which are responsible for poor dynamic performance. Control objectives of sinusoidal input current, approximately unity input power factor, and output voltage regulation are successfully met under both steady state and load or setpoint changes. Considering the significant advantages of multilevel operation, the reflected AC side voltage exhibits an appropriate three-level modulation. The developed control strategy involves improved performance compared with a model-based sliding mode one. The theoretical analysis is validated by measurements on a laboratory prototype, illustrating the feasibility and suitability of the proposed controller for this type of rectifiers.


A suite of different geophysical techniques was applied in the course of multidisciplinary research conducted within the framework of the Sikyon survey project, whose goal is the study of the landscape and human activity on the plateau of ancient Sikyon (NE Peloponnese). During the first 3 years of the geophysical campaign, more than 60,000 m2 of the city centre were covered using magnetic measurements,electrical resistivity mapping and tomography techniques, and ground penetrating radar. Controlled experiments covering large sections of the site using different methods and instrumentation allowed the evaluation of these methods' effectiveness in detecting and mapping the subsurface targets and improved representation of the lateral and stratigraphic extent of the architectural remnants. Already a number of architectural features and even whole structures have been identified and mapped, starting to reveal the urban network of the ancient city and its diachronic phases.


The depth and duration of the credit crisis has highlighted a number of problems in modern finance. Banks have been accused of excessive risk taking, rating agencies of severe conflicts of interest, central banks of neglecting the inflation of asset price bubbles and national supervisors of lax regulatory controls. Credit and market losses have been considerable. Operational losses have also surged as surviving corporates merge or acquire less fortunate ones without the requisite controls. Furthermore, as more jobs get made redundant it is believed that people are getting forced to play their hand to get involved in internal fraud as their sources of income has dried up drastically and stealing from the institution seems to be their last resort.. The main objective of this paper is to establish if there has been a changed in the nature of operational risk with regards to the number of operational losses as well as their impact pre and during the crisis. The way in which operational losses have been affected will be presented and a comparison will be made between operational loss characteristics pre and during the crisis. Some of the main findings of this paper were that operational losses shown little change in frequency, but shown a significant increase in severity, meaning that their financial impact has been more severe during the crisis. Therefore it is quite safe to say that the financial crisis most defiantly had an impact on operational risk as the impact of operational losses became much more severe


This paper uses a unique data set of Mexican researchers to explore the determinants of research productivity. Our findings confirm a quadratic relationship between age and productivity. However, productivity peaks when researchers are approximately 53 years old, 5 or 10 years later than what prior studies have shown. These results suggest that age is not very important in terms of research productivity. We also find that reputation matters for the number of citations but not publications. Results also show great heterogeneity across areas of knowledge. Interpretations of other aspects, such as gender, country of PhD, cohort effect, among others,


In the wake of the events of September 11th, the task of reconciling issues of security with a respect for fundamental human rights has emerged as one of the key challenges facing governments throughout the world. Although the issues raised by the rise of security have been the subject of considerable academic interest, to date much of the debate surrounding the impact of security on human rights has taken place within particular disciplinary confines. In contrast, this collection of essays from leading academics and practitioners in the fields of criminal justice, public law, international law, international relations and legal philosophy offers a genuinely multidisciplinary perspective on the relationship between security and human rights. In addition to exploring how the demands of security might be reconciled with the desire to protect established rights, Security and Human Rights offers a fresh perspective on the broader legal and political challenges that lie ahead as states attempt to control crime, prevent terrorism and protect their citizens.The Introduction to this collection of essays ('Security and Human Rights: The Search for a Language of Reconciliation') is available for download.


The thesis investigates a number of auction formats both theoretically and empirically. The effect of different auction rules on the final price and on bidder valuations is analyzed. Results from an experimental sale of real goods, testing revenue equivalence of the open and sealed-bid second-price auction do not conform to theoretical predictions: the open auction leading to significantly lower prices than the sealed-bid auction. It turns out that the open auction format allows bidders to satisfy a tendency to "stick together" with their valuations. The empirical results motivate a dynamic bidding model of interdependent valuations, bidders being uncertain about their valuations and learning from the exit-prices of their rivals. Furthermore, bidding behavior on the Internet is investigated in the hard close and the automatically extended auction. Late bidding is shown to be a rational strategy in the hard close auction, but not in the automatically extended auction. Theoretical results show that the expected final price and seller revenue is lower in the hard close auction than in the automatically extended auction, where prestige-concerns can lead to an explosive final price. Moreover, Yahoo auction data confirms the strong presence of late bidding in the hard-close auction and the seller's preference for the automatically extended auction. (author´s abstract)


As anxiety about environmental change and its effects grows, we need to understand both the scientific processes and the ethical and aesthetic judgments involved in deciding which changes we should welcome and promote and which we should try to avoid. In Environmental Philosophy Christopher Belshaw examines the current debates on the environment, focusing on questions of value while also taking into account relevant issues in epistemology and metaphysics.
Beginning with an overview of current concerns, Belshaw locates our attitudes toward the environment within their cultural and historical milieu. He then examines the various positions in detail, ranging from the moderate view that we ought to consider not only ourselves but also other animals, to the seemingly more extravagant contention that non-sentient life, rocks, deserts B indeed all of the processes of nature B should be considered intrinsically valuable. In later chapters Belshaw explores the importance of an aesthetic response to the environment, opening the way for a human-centred position that is both more generous and more flexible than those often advanced elsewhere.
In contrast to many of its competitors, Environmental Philosophy challenges accepted dichotomies - man/nature, instrumental/intrinsic, green/non-green - and advocates conciliation rather than confrontation. Although the arguments are rigorous, the writing is clear and non-technical, making Environmental Philosophy an excellent survey for those engaging with these issues for the first time, as well as offering much to challenge the more advanced student.


This letter presents hyperspectral image segmentation based on the phase-correlation measure of subsampled hyperspectral data, which is referred to as modified phase correlation. The hyperspectral spectrum of each pixel is initially subsampled to gain robustness against noise and spatial variability, and phase correlation is applied to determine spectral similarity. Similar and dissimilar pixels are decided according to the peak value of the phase correlation result to determine pixels that fall into the same segments. The approach can be regarded as a region-growing technique. The total number of segments is determined automatically according to the similarity threshold


Zones, cells, and parcels have long been regarded as the main units of analysis in urban modeling. However, only limited attention has been paid to street-level urban modeling. The emergence of fine-scale open and new data available from various sources has created substantial opportunities for research on urban modeling at the street level, particularly for modeling the spatiotemporal process of urban phenomena. In this paper, the street is adopted as the spatial unit of an urban model, and a conceptual framework for such modeling based on cellular automata is proposed. The validity of the proposed framework is verified by an empirical application to the urban space within the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing from 2014 to 2018. The results show that the density of points of interest simulated by the cellular automata model for 2018 is basically consistent with the actual distribution according to direct observation, and there is no significant difference in the proportion of high, medium, and low points of interest density streets between different ring roads. In addition, the deviation rate and Kappa index are 0.1171 and 0.97, respectively, indicating the proposed model can replicate historical patterns well and predict the transition of points of interest density at the street level. Subsequently, we considered three scenarios, adopting 2018 as the base year and using the proposed model to simulate the distribution of points of interest density in 2022 and the changes in points of interest density from 2018 to 2022. The conceptual framework and empirical application also provide support for urban planning and design based on the integration of linear public space and big data.


Objective : To determine the association between oral health and socioeconomic status with subjective psychological well-being.
Methods : An interviewer-administered questionnaire was conducted during 2011 on a nationally representative sample of South African adults ≤16 years (n=2,971) who reported on socio-demographic data, past dental visit patterns, number of remaining teeth and oral and general health status. Subjective well-being was computed as the sum of scores obtained from participants' estimates of level of happiness (scale 0-6) and rating of level of satisfaction with life (scale 0-4). Analyses included t-tests and multivariable-adjusted Poisson regression.
Results : The average score on a scale of 0-10 for subjective well-being was 6.31 (95%CI=6.17-6.44), which decreased with age, but increased with level of education and frequency of dental visits. Even after controlling for socioeconomic status, those who rated their oral health as good were more likely to report a higher subjective well-being (Prevalence Rate ratio (PRR) =1.14; 95% CI=1.03-1.27). Those who reported visiting a dentist at least every 6 months reported higher subjective well-being (PRR=1.10; 1.04-1.16).
Conclusions : Good oral health is independently associated with greater subjective well-being. This highlights the need to prioritise oral health promotion as an integral part of promoting general health and improving the quality of life of South Africans.


The purpose of this paper was to explore the unique qualities/characteristics/components of the Co-Active coaching model compared to Motivational Interviewing and Egan's Skilled Helper Model. Six questions pertaining to the creation, purpose, and process of the therapeutic alliance; and the relationship between practitioner and client were used to guide comparisons. Given the similarities among all three methods, it cannot be said that any of them are necessarily distinctive in their core principles or tenets. Instead, their uniqueness lies in the way that they are packaged and delivered. A model of Motivational Coaching, informed by this study's comparative analysis of the three models/method analyzed in this paper, is presented. Our intent is to distil into one framework the key components of three important and overlapping methods used in working toward behavioural changes.


and Implications Stochastic budget analysis compares diversified hog and grain operations to a specialized cash grain operation based on fixed labor resource. Benefits to diversified farms include decreased fertilizer costs due to manure application, shared machinery costs, and more stable grain price/cost assurances. As modeled manure application covers nearly all fertilizer requirements of the grain operation, greatly reducing fertilizer costs. The diversified operation is able to have dual-purpose tractors, enabling them to spread the tractor costs over more hours. Lastly, combining a grain and hog operation allows both enterprises to improve price assurance by treating the grain operation as a cost center. Grain is priced to the hogs at cost of production, thereby protecting the hog operation from volatility in the corn market. The risk reduction benefit of diversification is overshadowed when the 2002 Farm Bill is included in the analysis.


The relationship between an Approved
Clinical Instructor (ACI) and athletic training
students creates a unique instructional
interaction, A low instructor-to-student ratio
allows an ACI to regularly provide feedback
to students about the status of their clinical
skills. This feedback of student performance, whether it is
confirming. correcting.
or providing suggestions
for change, can
be given in many ways,
such as written notes,
verbal comments, or
nonverbal communication
(e.g., a nod of the
head). 1,2 An additional
way to provide feedback
is with the use of Clinical Encounter Cards
(CECs), CECs are small (i.e., the size of an
index card), user-friendly feedback cards that
provide a way for instructors to give valuable
and efficient information to students about
their clinical performances. 3 Part 1 of this two-part report addresses effective feedback, types of feedback. and how feedback is used in clinical education. Part 2 will provide
examples of CECs and discuss ways in which
they can be used in athletic training clinical
education.


The study was carried out in Kamberg Nature Reserve (Natal Drakensberg) from June 1994 to August 1995. Seven spotted-necked otters were fitted with an intraperitoneal radio-implant; radio-tracking was performed by both temporally independent locations and 24h continuous tracking sessions. When active, otters were always found in aquatic habitats, mainly dams, the river or oxbow lakes. Dense vegetation cover, as trees, reeds, and tall grass were preferred while resting. Otters were active both during the day and during the night, with peaks of activity at twilight. The amount of time spent in consecutive activity varied seasonally together with the main prey items exploited. Average home range area was 11.3km², including a stretch of river with an average length of 14.8 km. No intersexual nor intrasexual territoriality was detected. Intraspecific relationships varied with the dispersion and availability of food resources.


Much scholarship devoted to the study of the text of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has focused on the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, attempting to reconcile their many differences in the content and presentation of the poem. In concentrating on these two manuscripts, and a small group of other witnesses dated to the first quarter of the fifteenth century, scholars have largely ignored over forty complete manuscripts copied throughout the remainder of the century. Study of the manuscripts has relied on features external to the text of the poem itself in order to chart the development of the tradition, such as the order of tales, while details of text, language and metre have remained relatively unconsidered. The subject of this study is a manuscript that has been neglected by scholars due to its date of copying, c. 1430-50, and certain idiosyncracies in the tale-order. Despite these factors this manuscript contains a text closely related to that of Hg, the earliest extant copy of the poem. In addition to preserving an accurate copy of an early exemplar, Ad3 also shows close links with El, particularly in its ordering of the tales and the inclusion of marginalia. This is therefore an important copy of the poem, highlighting the restrictions and limitations of current attitudes to the textual tradition, and with much to offer as an independent witness to an early exemplar, with unique access to materials used in the production of both Hg and El. This study draws on recent technological developments, such as the availability of electronic versions of Middle English texts and collation software, in order to provide a detailed and comprehensive analysis of Ad3. In addition to this an electronic version of the text is included to enable further research of this kind.


During the mid 1980s official accounts stated that the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) was experiencing an unprecedented 'crisis' which primarily concerned: overcrowding, poor conditions, serious disorder and prisoner unrest, low staff morale and consequently loss of public confidence in the ability of the SPS to manage prisons effectively. Added pressure was placed on the SPS by a substantial increase in sentenced short term offenders together with an increase in long termers and a commitment in the courts to longer sentences. Although the 'crisis' in Scottish prisons emerged on a range of levels, producing one of the most bitter penal controversies in Europe, the SPS identified long term adult male imprisonment as fundamental to its problems and central to its programme of reform.

Once it became evident that the SPS had 'lost control' of its main male prisons, a period of evaluation and self appraisal was initiated. This research examines the manifestations of the 'crisis' and considers the response of the SPS, outlining and evaluating the subsequent policy changes and new initiatives adopted to alleviate the 'crisis'.

The theoretical framework of this study is derived specifically in critical analysis within criminology, which prioritises the significance of the structural relations of production and distribution, reproduction and patriarchy, and neo colonialism, as primary determining contexts, within which the inter-relationships and mutual dependencies of structural forms of oppression can be considered. In examining the relationship between the law, crime, punishment and the state, the politics of marginalisation and the processes of criminalisation are prioritised. Within this context, the means through which imprisonment is conceived and legitimated and the implications of a growing authoritarianism are discussed.

This study focuses on the dynamics of long term male imprisonment in Scottish prisons. The views and experiences of long term male prisoners are contrasted with those of senior management, Governors and prison staff in order to understand the 'crisis', and ascertain the impact of policy changes and new initiatives on both the Prison Service and the experiences of men serving long sentences in Scotland's prisons. The research places official discourse, which incorporates the 'view from above', alongside the views of those individuals whose experiences provide essential testimony concerning the daily reality of operational policy on regimes.


BACKGROUND We recently described a lateral-to-medial approach for transversus abdominis plane (LM-TAP) block, which may permit preoperative initiation of the block. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to evaluate the feasibility of continuous LM-TAP blocks in clinical practice in comparison with thoracic epidural analgesia (TEA). DESIGN A randomised, open-label study. SETTING University Hospital, London Health Sciences Centre, London, Ontario, Canada from July 2008 to August 2012. PATIENTS Fifty adult patients undergoing open abdominal surgery via laparotomy were allocated randomly to receive preoperative catheter-congruent TEA or ultrasound-guided continuous bilateral LM-TAP block for 72 h postoperatively. Reasons for noninclusion were American Society of Anesthesiologists' physical status more than 4, known allergy to study drugs, chronic pain/opioid dependence, spinal abnormalities or psychiatric illness. INTERVENTIONS In the TEA group (n = 24), patient-controlled epidural analgesia was maintained using bupivacaine 0.1% with hydromorphone 10 &mgr;g ml−1 after establishment of the initial block. In the LM-TAP group (n = 26), ultrasound-guided LM-TAP catheters were inserted on each side preoperatively after a bolus of 30 ml of ropivacaine 0.5% (20 ml subcostal and 10 ml subumbilical injections on both sides). Analgesia was maintained with an infusion of ropivacaine 0.35% at a rate of 2 to 2.5 ml h−1 through each catheter, along with rescue intravenous patient-controlled analgesia. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The primary outcome was pain score on coughing 24 h after the end of surgery. Secondary outcomes were pain scores from 24 to 72 h, intraoperative and postoperative opioid consumption, time to onset of bowel movement and side effect profiles. RESULTS Mean [95% confidence interval (95% CI)] pain scores at rest ranged from 1. 7 (0.9 to 2.5) to 2.3 (1.1 to 3.4) in TEA vs. 1.5 (0.7 to 2.2) to 2.2 (1.3 to 3.0) in LM-TAP (P = 0.829). The dynamic pain scores ranged from 2.9 (1.5 to 4.4) to 3.8 (2.8 to 4.8) in TEA vs. 3.3 (2.4 to 4.3) to 3.8 (2.7 to 4.9) in LM-TAP (P = 0.551). The variability in pain scores was lower in the LM-TAP group than in the TEA group in the first 24 h postoperatively. Patient satisfaction and other secondary outcomes were similar. CONCLUSION Continuous bilateral LM-TAP block can be initiated preoperatively and may provide comparable analgesia to TEA in patients undergoing laparotomy. CLINICAL TRIALS REGISTRY not registered because registration was not mandatory at the time of starting the trial.


Within economic policies tax incentive policies have always had a serious significance in establishing stability and encouraging investments. After 1980 in Turkey, together with the globalisation process experienced in the World, fundamental changes have been made in economic policy applications. From import substituting, inward oriented and somewhat intervening practices before 1980, an economic policy strategy has been transitioned to which makes an export-oriented industrialisation and growth model as well as free market relations dominant. In this study the objective is to discuss the question of "to what extent incentive policies applied after 1980 have realised targeted economic policies†and to make an assessment of it. In addition, by touching upon the role and function of incentive policies in economic policies, the situation after 1980 in Turkey will be determined insofar as statistical data permit. Another subject matter within the scope of this study is to assess a new draft incentive law which has not been put into effect yet but has been prepared by the Ministry of Finance, and to determine the effects of developments experienced in the World on incentive policies. As a conclusion, changes in the tax incentive understanding taking place after 1980 in Turkey is explored and suggestions are made for possible changes in the future.


As an initial effort to identify universal and language-specific factors that influence the behavior of distributional models, we have formulated a distributionally determined word similarity network model, implemented it for eleven different languages, and compared the resulting networks. In the model, vertices constitute words and two words are linked if they occur in similar contexts. The model is found to capture clear isomorphisms across languages in terms of syntactic and semantic classes, as well as functional categories of abstract discourse markers. Language specific morphology is found to be a dominating factor for the accuracy of the model.


This thesis concerns the atmospheric monitoring instrumentation for the H.E.S.S. (High Energy Stereoscopic System) gamma-ray telescope site and the adaptation of such instruments for commercial use. The effect of the atmosphere on the H.E.S.S. telescopes' response has been demonstrated and the technicalities associated with the atmospheric monitoring instruments have been studied in depth. The responses of a LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) and a transmissometer have been checked by customised MODTRAN (MODerate resolution atmospheric TRANsmission) routines. This process revealed a malfunction of the LIDAR, whose raw data was independently treated to yield meaningful results. More importantly, the `Durham-designed' transmissometer, manufactured to operate during the night in parallel with the H.E.S.S. telescopes, was successfully adapted for day-light operation. As a result Durham prototype gained strong interest from Aeronautical & General Instruments Limited (AGI) in Dorset, who are particularly interested in the airport applications, and see the Durham instrument as a potential replacement for the transmissometer which they manufacture currently and is coming to the end of its useful design life. Durham University and AGI drew up a license agreement to pursue further development of the instrument. The resulting Durham aviation transmissometer meets the accuracy requirements for the Runway Visual Range (RVR) assessment imposed by both the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). Moreover, the Durham instrument is easy to align, uses very little power, and is lightweight and portable, enabling its use not only in civil airports, at altitudes exceeding all prior-art aviation transmissometers, but also in tactical military applications, such as remote landing strips.


The proton-pump inhibitor (PPI) is an effective and widely used treatment but may cause side effects, especially for the elderly. Materials and methods: this is a cross-sectional study including 45 patients older than 65 years, followed at our outpatient and treated with PPIs for at least a year. The indication for PPI, the results of any endoscopy, and the quality of the tolerance of these molecules is specified by the data folder. During the consultation, we conducted an interrogation to an update of the history and medications to our patients and a type checking of the molecule, the dose, and the quality of the observance. Results: patients were divided into 32 women and 13 men with a mean age of 75 ± 7 years (65–92). The average length of PPI use was 6 ± 4 years (1–16) with a consumption of a double dose for at least 1 year in 28.8% of cases. The prescribed dose was higher than the recommended dose in at least 15.5% of cases. PPIs were well tolerated. One patient had presented a micro - scopic colitis, revealed by diarrhea regressed after discontinuation of PPIs. Conclusion: PPIs were prescribed in elderly subjects by gastroenterologists, in a university center, with a high dose and long. In our series, this treatment is well tolerated in the elderly.


Recent media reports signal growing fears that crimes against children with access to new forms of technologies are on the increase. South African children continue to experience a multiplicity of violations through transmission of illegal or harmful content on new forms of technology. The numbers of reported cases involving children abused or disappearing, linked allegedly with people they meet on the so-called social networks, have risen. This is often ignored as law makers endeavour to promote technological developments and/or other civil rights.


The Universities of Ulster and Durham are engaged on a Wellcome Trust funded project exploring material metaphors for knowledge and understanding of anatomy. This presentation will use imagery, garments and live models to illustrate various aspects of the project. These will include the popular and well travelled Incisions Gown http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/health/7213757.stm and jeans representing various dermatome maps of the lower limbs. (Dermatomes are areas of skin supplied by a nerve). These jeans illustrate unexpected variation between such maps, and unanticipated problems which arise in moving from two-dimensional illustrations to three-dimensional representations as required in clinical practice. Mapping from the texts exposed anomalies in the diagrams and implied that the body had a mismatched side seam. We will show how such approaches can be implemented in teaching, but also how they evoke complex, profound and sometimes moving narratives from members of the public, which in turn can be used to enhance learning. We will also discuss and illustrate other hidden maps of the body such as Langer and Blaschko lines, as we move back and forward between medical, aesthetic and personal identity discourses of the body. (For non anatomists, S2 is the dermatome which covers the derriere…)


With web development now being considered a commodity, projects are getting larger every day. If you are dealing with large projects on a daily basis, you know that the most difficult task is to deliver products on time and within a budget. However, many factors can influence those variables, including the programming language development methods you choose. This Short Cut shows you what a good choice it is to use PHP and Smarty for large-scale web projects. If you follow the principles and methodologies described here, you'll achieve greater productivity in your development tasks.


This study was designed to monitor the Revised 9-Year Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) with the aim of establishing the level of implementation in terms of the level of awareness, the accessibility to and the training on the use of the 9-Year BEC and the Teachers' Guide (TG). The study is of descriptive survey. One Official each from the State Ministry of Education, (SMOE), and the State Universal Basic Education Board, (SUBEB); and HeadTeachers of 8 Basic Education Schools in one Local Government Area each of the three Senatorial Districts/Zones in Benue State were sampled for the study. From the findings of this study, it was recommended among others that on-the-job trainings should be organized for the teachers of in the schools to update their knowledge on the implementation of the Revised 9-Year BEC and there is need for adequate provisions of the Curricula, TG and relevant textbooks. Keywords: Implementation, Revised 9-Year BEC, Curricula, Teachers' Guides.


SETTING
Previous studies in many countries have shown that mortality due to tuberculosis (TB) is higher among people of lower socio-economic status.

OBJECTIVE
To assess the magnitude and direction of trends in educational inequalities in TB mortality in 11 European countries.

DESIGN
Data on TB mortality between 1980 and 2011 were collected among persons aged 35-79 years. Age-standardised mortality rates by educational level were calculated. Inequalities were estimated using the relative and slope indices of inequality.

RESULTS
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, educational inequalities in TB mortality occurred in all countries in this study. The largest absolute inequalities were observed in Lithuania, and the smallest in Denmark. In most countries, relative inequalities have remained stable since the 1980s or 1990s, while absolute inequalities remained stable or went down. In Lithuania and Estonia, however, absolute inequalities increased substantially.

CONCLUSION
The reduction in absolute inequalities in TB mortality, as seen in many European countries, is a major achievement; however, inequalities persist and are still a major cause for concern in the twenty-first century. Interventions aimed at preventing TB disease and reducing TB case fatality in lower socio-economic groups should be intensified, especially in the Baltic countries.


Many scientific computing tasks are too large to be processed quickly on one computer. Instead, the grid has become popular for a wide range of disciplines. Efficiently using the all the resources of the grid is a challenging, NP problem though. The authors introduced a new method for scheduling that accounted for data dependencies, a topic often ignored in job scheduling algorithms. They also analyzed the method extensively, in terms of tasks that were compute bound, data bound and tasks where job completion was estimated incorrectly.


The chances of optical computing are probably best if a large number of processing elements act in parallel. The efficiency of parallel processors depends, among other things, on the time it takes to communicate signals from one processor to any other processor. In an optical parallel processor one hopes to be able to transmit a signal from one processor to any other processor within only one cycle period, no matter how far apart the processors are. Such a global communications network is desirable especially for algorithms with global interactions. The fast Fourier algorithm is an example. We define a degree of globality and we show how speed and globality are related. Our result applies to a specific architecture based on spatial filtering.


BACKGROUND: Television and insufficient sleep are associated with poor mental and physical health. This study assessed associations of TV viewing and bedroom TV with sleep duration from infancy to midchildhood. METHOD: We studied 1864 children in Project Viva. Parents reported children's average daily TV viewing and sleep (at 6 months and annually from 1–7 years) and the presence of a bedroom TV (annually 4–7 years). We used mixed effects models to assess associations of TV exposures with contemporaneous sleep, adjusting for child age, gender, race/ethnicity, maternal education, and income. RESULTS: Six hundred forty-three children (35%) were racial/ethnic minorities; 37% of households had incomes ≤$70 000. From 6 months to 7 years, mean (SD) sleep duration decreased from 12.2 (2.0) hours to 9.8 (0.9) hours per day; TV viewing increased from 0.9 (1.2) hours to 1.6 (1.0) hours per day. At 4 years, 17% had a bedroom TV, rising to 23% at 7 years. Each 1 hour per day increase in lifetime TV viewing was associated with 7 minutes per day (95% confidence interval [CI]: 4 to 10) shorter sleep. The association of bedroom TV varied by race/ethnicity; bedroom TV was associated with 31 minutes per day shorter sleep (95% CI: 16 to 45) among racial/ethnic minority children, but not among white, non-Hispanic children (8 fewer minutes per day [95% CI: −19 to 2]). CONCLUSIONS: More TV viewing, and, among racial/ethnic minority children, the presence of a bedroom TV, were associated with shorter sleep from infancy to midchildhood.


BACKGROUND: The management of malignant malodorous wounds within the oral cavity can be challenging due to limited availability of dressings that are safe, efficacious, and ingestible. CASE DESCRIPTION: An 80-year-old woman with squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity was admitted to home care with complaints and distress related to extreme malodor. CONCLUSION: Manuka honey proved a safe, effective, palliative treatment to reduce odor and inflammation in wounds secondary to squamous cell carcinoma of the oral cavity in this patient.


Integrating Electric vehicles into distribution systems introduce new challenges both in operation and planning of electric distribution systems. In the planning process, these vehicles mainly affect load uncertainty in the grid. A new method for Active Distribution Network (ADN) expansion planning is proposed considering the uncertainty of bus loadings because of electric vehicles (EVs) integration. The approach taken in this paper includes the initial cost of investment and operation. A probabilistic model is proposed for extracting the effect of electric vehicles integration on future loading of network buses. Different scenarios are defined based on electric vehicle entrance time, charging delays and their overall penetration level. Particles colony algorithm is used for handling the proposed mixed integer and nonlinear optimization model. Also, a graph theory based method for detecting radial structures is implemented for faster convergence. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is examined by implementing it on the modified IEEE 33 bus standard distribution network.


The billboard market near its end for the development of electric commerce, especially with the maturing of online advertising systems. Traditional billboards demand innovative ways to attract and categorize users; and to direct them to desired advertisements. Location information is the prerequisite to pinpoint the users or customers. Location information collection, GPS and cellular networks are better for outdoor navigation than indoor positioning. The emergence of Bluetooth Low Energy technology provides an efficient approach for indoor positioning services. In this thesis, we propose an iBeacon based location aware advertising system to make users acquire the desired advertisement. The system includes the server side, user side and billboard side. We will go into details about its concept, implementation and related background in the thesis. Finally, we analyzed the performance of the system and showed that the system is suitable for indoor environments.