1. The relative rates of hydrolysis of a series of glycine homopeptides by guinea-pig small intestinal mucosa and by isolated brush borders have been studied. Oligopeptides up to and including hexaglycine were hydrolysed. No activity was detected against a series of homopolypeptides of molecular weight 10000–100000. 2. Except for activity against diglycine, the peptidase activity was greater in the brush-border fraction than in the original homogenate. The relative activity of the peptidase in the brush borders compared to the homogenate increased with increasing length oligopeptide substrate. 3. Analysis of the enzyme reaction products indicated that the brush border contained an exopeptidase. Studies with peptide derivatives containing N- and C-terminal blocking groups and with tetraglycine synthesized with either the N- or C-terminal residues labelled, demonstrated that the brush borders contained an amino-oligopeptidase. 4. Studies with inhibitors and with purified gastric and pancreatic enzymes indicated that this glycine oligopeptidase activity was not due to enzymes from the intestinal lumen which had been adsorbed to the brush borders.


Endogenous glucocorticoids and serotonin have been implicated in the pathophysiology of depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. This thesis investigates the potential of downregulating expression of central Type II glucocorticoid receptors (GR) both in vitro and in vivo, with empirically-designed antisense oligodeoxynucleotides (ODN), to characterise GR modulation of 5-HT2A receptor expression using quantitative RT-PCR, Western blot analysis and radioligand binding. The functional consequence of GR downregulation is also determined by measuring 1-(2,5-dimethoxy 4-iodophenyl)-2-amino propane hydrochloride (DOI) mediated 5-HT2A receptor specific headshakes. Using a library of random antisense ODN probes, RNAse H accessibility mapping of T7-primed, in vitro transcribed GR mRNA revealed several potential cleavage sites and identified an optimally effect GR antisense ODN sequence of 21-mer length (GRAS5). In vitro efficacy studies using rat C6 glioma cells showed a 56% downregulation in GR mRNA levels and 80% downregulation in GR protein levels. In the same cells a 29% upregulation in 5-HT2A mRNA levels and 32% upregulation in 5-HT2A protein levels was revealed. This confirmed the optimal nature of the GRAS5 sequence to produce marked inhibition of GR gene expression, and also revealed GR modulation of the 50-HT2A receptor subtype in C6 glioma cells to be a tonic repression of receptor expression. The distribution of a fluorescently-labelled GRAS5 ODN was detected in diverse areas of the rat brain after single ICV administration, although this fluorescence signal was not sustained over a period of 5 days. However, fluorescently-labelled GRAS5 ODN, when formulated in polymer microspheres, showed diverse distribution in the brain which was maintained for 5 days following a single ICV administration. This produced no apparent neurotoxic effects on rat behaviour and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis homeostasis. Furthermore, a single polymer microsphere injection ICV proved to be an effective means of delivering antisense ODNs and this was adopted for the in vivo efficacy studies. In vivo characterisation of GRAS5 revealed marked downregulation of GR mRNA in rat brain regions such as the frontal cortex (26%), hippocampus (35%), and hypothalamus (39%). Downregulation of GR protein was also revealed in frontal cortex (67%), hippocampus (76%), and hypothalamus (80%). In the same animals upregulation of 5-HT2A mRNA levels was shown in frontal cortex (13%), hippocampus (7%), and hypothalamus (5%) while upregulation in 5-HT2A protein levels was shown in frontal cortex (21 %). This upregulation in 5-HT2A receptor density as a result of antisense-mediated inhibition of GR was further confirmed by a 55% increase in DOl-mediated 5-HT2A receptor specific headshakes. These results demonstrate that GR is involved in tonic inhibitory regulation of 5-HT2A receptor expression and function in vivo, thus providing the potential to control 5-HT2A-linked disorders through corticosteroid manipulation. These experiments have therefore established an antisense approach which can be used to investigate pharmacological characteristics of receptors.


This study aims to help address concerns about the growing demand of wider bandwidth Internet connection in the Philippines. Using articles and research of international organizations and content from official websites of the Philippine government, this paper has carefully examined the slow Internet connectivity and the high cost that the end-users pay for it. This paper suggests that this inefficiency hampers the motivation of users to innovate in a way that could contribute to inclusive growth and the development of an inclusive information society. Through a comparison of the current global ICT situation with the current situation in the Philippines, this paper shows that the country's Internet infrastructure lags behind among those of contemporary developing countries in Asia, particularly in terms of Internet connectivity. In 2015, Thailand had an average Internet speed of 7.4 Mbps, Sri Lanka 7.4, and Malaysia 4.3. Meanwhile, the Philippines had a meager average Internet speed of 2.8 Mbps, placing the country at 104 among 160 countries, with developed countries in Asia such as South Korea (23.6 Mbps) and Singapore (12.9 Mbps) ranking 1 and 12, respectively. Findings show that the lack of competition in the Internet connectivity market, among other reasons, is at the root of the dilemma of slow and costly Internet connection. Assessing the accomplishments of the Republic of Korea and other broadband-leading countries has provided practical insights and recommendations that can promote competitiveness. Furthermore, related literature argues how ISP practices may affect Internet speed and cost. This study offers an approach in improving Internet connectivity in the Philippines by bridging the gap between the Internet infrastructure market and government policies.


We investigated whether stimulating the cerebellum and primary motor cortex (M1) using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) could affect postural control in young and older adults. tDCS was employed using a double-blind, sham-controlled design, in which young (aged 18–35) and older adults (aged 65+) were assessed over three sessions, one for each stimulatory condition–M1, cerebellar and sham. The effect of tDCS on postural control was assessed using a sway-referencing paradigm, which induced platform rotations in proportion to the participant's body sway, thus assessing sensory reweighting processes. Task difficulty was manipulated so that young adults experienced a support surface that was twice as compliant as that of older adults, in order to minimise baseline age differences in postural sway. Effects of tDCS on postural control were assessed during, immediately after and 30 minutes after tDCS. Additionally, the effect of tDCS on corticospinal excitability was measured by evaluating motor evoked potentials using transcranial magnetic stimulation immediately after and 30 minutes after tDCS. Minimal effects of tDCS on postural control were found in the eyes open condition only, and this was dependent on the measure assessed and age group. For young adults, stimulation had only offline effects, as cerebellar stimulation showed higher mean power frequency (MPF) of sway 30 minutes after stimulation. For older adults, both stimulation conditions delayed the increase in sway amplitude witnessed between blocks one and two until stimulation was no longer active. In conclusion, despite tDCS' growing popularity, we would caution researchers to consider carefully the type of measures assessed and the groups targeted in tDCS studies of postural control.


While empowerment has been encouraged in the hotel industry, a basic understanding on the possible relationship between empowerment and positive and negative emotions has yet to emerge. Evidence on the effects of empowerment and positive and negative emotions on job satisfaction is also limited. Therefore, the objectives of the study are threefold: to empirically investigate the relationship of empowerment on both positive and negative emotions and job satisfaction, to test whether the positive and negative emotions impose effect on employee's job satisfaction and to examine the effect of individual empowerment components (task meaningfulness and freedom to perform) on job satisfaction. The approach of the study is based on questionnaires distributed to the frontline hotel employees in Malaysia. It was found that empowerment has a significant positive relationship with positive emotions and a negative relationship with negative emotions. The results also indicate that both empowerment and positive emotions have a significant influence on employee's job satisfaction. Moreover, as hypothesized, the results support the negative relationship between negative emotions and job satisfaction. Another noteworthy finding was that, the effect of task meaningfulness on job satisfaction was significantly higher than freedom to perform. It is significant that managers should consider employing different forms of empowerment in order to maximize employee's potential. The management must play an important role in monitoring employee's emotions at work.


David Beard presents the first definitive survey of Harrison Birtwistle's music for the opera house and theatre, from his smaller-scale works, such as Down by the Greenwood Side and Bow Down, to the full-length operas, such as Punch and Judy, The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain. Blending source study with both music analysis and cultural criticism, the book focuses on the sometimes tense but always revealing relationship between abstract musical processes and the practical demands of narrative drama, while touching on theories of parody, narrative, pastoral, film, the body and community. Each stage work is considered in terms of its own specific musico-dramatic themes, revealing how compositional scheme and dramatic conception are intertwined from the earliest stages of a project's genesis. The study draws on a substantial body of previously undocumented primary sources and goes beyond previous studies of the composer's output to include works unveiled from 2000 onwards.


, Abstract. Presence based notification systems play a pivotal role in any collaborative working environment by providing near real time information about the status, locality and presence of the collaborators. Instant Messaging (IM) tools provide a simple low cost solution to support communication and collaboration in the working environment. With the wide adoption of smart phones, there is an increasing trend of using IM clients on mobile devices for exchanging and managing presence information. However, in modern organisations the use of collaborative tools is not limited only to IMs, but various other tools are also used, such as project management tools, meeting agenda, calendar and alike. In this paper we design, develop and implement an agile platform for ubiquitous presence management that relies on semantically interlinked vocabularies, existing information extraction tools for semantic enhancement of heterogeneous enterprise collaborative tools, continuous query processing for semantic integration and event detection in dynamic environment, and semantic transformation via query language for event-triggered notification actions based on the users context. We showcase our proposed solution by demonstrating a real world scenario for Cisco's Unified Presence System and we evaluate our solution in terms of requirements for Ubiquitous Presence Management System (UPMS) compared to related solutions, and overhead of each additional processing step, namely semantic transformation, continuous query processing and notification.


Of all the American Indian tribes of the Plains, the Pawnee and the closely related Arikara developed their religious philosophy and ceremonialism to its fullest; in fact, they may have developed it more highly than any other group north of Mexico. "Ceremonies of the Pawnee" is the first and only systematic, comprehensive description of that rich and complex religious life. Written under the direction of the anthropologist Clark Wissler between 1914 and 1920, it is the culmination of the ethnographic studies of James R. Murie, himself a Pawnee, who witnessed and participated in revivals of the ceremonialism just before it finally died out.Part I presents the annual ritualistic cycle of the Skiri band, giving detailed accounts of the major ceremonies and describing the role of priests, doctors, and bundles in Pawnee religion. Part II is devoted to three major doctors' ceremonies--the White Beaver Ceremony, the Bear Dance, and the Buffalo Dance--one of the three groups known collectively as the South Bands. The descriptions include, in both the original Pawnee and an English translation, several hundred songs as well as a number of ceremonial chants and speeches that are virtually unique in the literature on American Indian religion and provide invaluable material for linguistic study. Equally valuable is the collection of vision stories that underlie the songs. As a body they provide a new perspective on the vision and its cultural patterning, and allow for a deeper understanding of the cultural and psychological bases of Pawnee religion.Dr. Douglas R. Parks of the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University has provided an overview of Pawnee social organization and religion, along with explanatory notes and a biography of Murie.


Though over one hundred private schools for Jewish girls thrived in the areas of Jewish settlement in the Russian empire between 1831 and 1881, their story has been largely overlooked in the scholarship of Jewish educational history. In Her Hands: The Education of Girls in Tsarist Russia restores these schools to their rightful place of prominence in training thousands of Jewish girls in secular and Judaic subjects and also paving the way for the modern schools that followed them. Through extensive archival research, author Eliyana R. Adler examines the schools' curriculum, teachers, financing, students, and educational innovation and demonstrates how each of these aspects evolved over time. The first section of this volume follows the emergence and development of the new private schools for Jewish girls in the mid-1800s, beginning with the historical circumstances that enabled their creation, and detailing the staffing, financing, and academics in the schools. Adler dispels the myth that all education in Russia was reserved for boys by showing that a dedicated group of educators and administrators worked to provide new opportunities for a diverse group of Jewish girls. In the second section, Adler looks at the interactions between these new educational institutions and their communities, including how the schools responded to changes taking place around them and how they in turn influenced their environment. Adler consults several major archives, including those of the former Russian Ministry of Education, along with contemporary periodicals, educational materials, and personal memoirs to provide a remarkably complete picture of education for Jewish girls in Russia in the mid- to late nineteenth century. In telling the story of Russia's private schools for Jewish girls, Adler argues that these schools were crucibles of educational experimentation that merit serious examination. Scholars of Jewish history, educational history, and womens' studies will enjoy this pathbreaking study.


The biotech arena emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when molecular biology, one of the fastest-moving areas of basic science in the twentieth century, met the business world. Gene Jockeys is a detailed study of the biotech projects that led to five of the first ten recombinant DNA drugs to be approved for medical use in the United States: human insulin, human growth hormone, alpha interferon, erythropoietin, and tissue plasminogen activator. Drawing on corporate documents obtained from patent litigation, as well as interviews with the ambitious biologists who called themselves gene jockeys, historian Nicolas Rasmussen chronicles the remarkable, and often secretive, work of the scientists who built a new domain between academia and the drug industry in the pursuit of intellectual rewards and big payouts. In contrast to some who critique the rise of biotechnology, Rasmussen contends that biotech was not a swindle, even if the public did pay a very high price for the development of what began as public scientific resources. Within the biotech enterprise, the work of corporate scientists went well beyond what biologists had already accomplished within universities, and it accelerated the medical use of the new drugs by several years. In his technically detailed and readable narrative, Rasmussen focuses on the visible and often heavy hands that construct and maintain the markets in public goods like science. He looks closely at how science follows money, and vice versa, as researchers respond to the pressures and potential rewards of commercially viable innovations. In biotechnology, many of those engaged in crafting markets for genetically engineered drugs were biologists themselves who were in fact trying to do science. This book captures that heady, fleeting moment when a biologist could expect to do great science through the private sector and be rewarded with both wealth and scientific acclaim.


Natural Areas Journal 20:325–335 ABSTRACT: We assessed the relative contributions of in situ survival and recolonization to overall recovery of arthropod populations following prescribed fire by monitoring arthropod morphospecies richness and abundance in enclosed and open plots in adjacent burned and unburned units within two remnant Illinois prairies. Vacuum sampling of arthropods at semimonthly intervals following spring burns at each site indicated that fire strongly depressed arthropod abundance initially, but that abundance and species richness tended to recover toward the end of the summer, mostly due to recolonization from adjacent unburned refuges. Nevertheless, arthropod groups (taxa or guilds) were affected differently by fire, and differences in arthropod species composition among burned and unburned plots persisted. Sampled arthropod groups significantly reduced by fire at one or both study sites included springtails (Collembola), deltocephaline leafhoppers (Homoptera: Cicadellidae: Deltocephalinae), aphids (Homoptera: Aphididae), delphacid planthoppers (Homoptera: Delphacidae), parasitoid wasps (Hymenoptera), and spiders (Araneae). Only one group, typhlocybine leafhoppers (Homoptera: Cicadellidae : Typhlocybinae), exhibited a significant positive response to fire. These results indicate that in situ populations of many arthropod species are substantially reduced by prescribed fire. Thus, to preserve native arthropod faunas, land managers should ensure that unburned refuges are maintained and that the intervals between burns are sufficient to allow recolonization of burned areas to occur.


Pesticides are used to control diseases, undesired vegetation and insects in forestry, gardening and agriculture. In the environment, pesticides are generally believed to originate from a diffuse source, such as spray drift of pesticides during application, or a point source, such as spills during refill and cleaning of spraying equipment. Point sources are easier to eliminate than diffuse sources and one method to reduce the leaching from point sources is to use biobeds as bioprophylaxis.

The Swedish biobed was developed by Torstensson and Castillo in 199X (KB) and is constructed with locally available constituents, such as peat, wheat straw and soil. The main advantages of the biobed is that it is very simple and cheap, but still very effective. On sites where vegetable oil have been spilled on the biobed, e.g on farms producing rapeseed oil, both increased activity of lignin degrading microorganisms and increased pesticide degradation have been observed.

The lignin degrading microorganisms produce unspecific extracellular enzymes, which also are able to degrade recalcitrant molecules such as organic pollutants. The most important ligninolytic enzymes, currently known, are lignin peroxidase (LiP), manganese peroxidase (MnP) and laccase. Pure MnP have been found to be able to initiate lipid peroxidation. Due to recent findings that vegetable oil, which has high levels of unsaturated fatty acids, is increasing the effect of lignin degrading microorganisms, addition of oil is proposed to further increase the biobed efficiency.

Since the crop is determining which pesticide to be used, pesticides are often encountered in mixtures in the environment. For this purpose five selected pesticides will represent the mixture of pesticides. The selected pesticides are bentazone (BZ), metabenzthiazuron (MBTZ), isoproturon (IP), terbutylazine (TBA) and chlorpyrifos (CLP).

The main objectives of this study were:
I. To investigate whether the addition of rapeseed oil to the biomix (mixture of peat, soil and straw used in a biobed) enhanced the degradation rate of pesticides (BZ, MBTZ, IP, TBA and CLP).
II. To investigate whether a potential increase in degradation, of the same pesticide mixture, was explained by a MnP-mediated lipid peroxidation process.

The experiment was set up to study whether the addition of oil can have a positive effect on degradation of a mixture of pesticides in a biomix and in soil. Enzymatic activity and microbial respiration were followed during the incubation period.

The degradation of the pesticides by pure MnP in the presence of oil was tested in vitro. The experiment was prepared for each pesticide separate and a control without any pesticide added, in total six experimental setups.

The main results from these studies are summarized below:

• The effect from the addition of oil varies from promoting degradation to inhibiting degradation depending on pesticide. The lack of correlation with phenoloxidase activity could indicate that degradation mechanisms other than ligninolytic enzymes were prevailing or even dominant in this study.

• The microbial respiration was higher in biomix than in soils. The addition of oil had an inhibitory effect in the biomix.

• The phenoloxidase activity was higher in the biomix compared to the soil. The addition of oil did not increase the enzymatic activity.

• In the in vitro experiments the addition of oil enhanced the degradation of IP by MnP, but no positive effect was observed for CLP, TBA, BZ and MBTZ. However, no enhancement of IP degradation was obtained in the biomix in the presence of rapeseed oil.

• The initial method for the HPLC analysis was developed so all five pesticides could be detected within a reasonable time frame. However, with the oil-fractions peaking around MTBZ and BZ, and the fact that CLP had to be analysed separately, a new method also for the other four pesticides need to be developed for further studies. The new method for the four pesticides should separate the peaks around BZ and MBTZ further and not take CLP into account.

• The interference peak in the chromatograms which
increased over the incubation time could a product from vegetable oil being degraded in presence of of MnP could possibly indicate lipid.


Developments in neurobiology are providing new insights into the biological and physical features of human thinking, and brain-activation imaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging have become the most dominant research techniques to approach the biological part of thinking. With the aid of neurobiology, there also have been several studies on the biological processes of human moral thinking in moral psychology. For instance, some researchers have tried to discover patterns of brain activation when a person copes with moral dilemmas. In this paper, the authors suggest the level-structure of moral thinking from the most abstract level to the most biological-physical level and reductionism in the philosophy of science is introduced as a framework for analysis. Moreover, with the level-based structural approach and framework of reductionism, this paper tries to discover the practical value of our model for moral development and education.


We find that option listings are associated with a decrease in the variance of the pricing error, a decrease in the adverse selection component of the spread, and an increase in the relative weight placed by the specialist on public information in revising prices for the underlying stocks. We also find that there is a decrease in the spread and increases in quoted depth, trading volume, trading frequency, and transaction size after option listings. Overall, our results suggest that option listings improve the market quality of the underlying stocks. Copyright The American Finance Association 1998.


We consider a structural truss problem where all of the physical model parameters are uncertain: not just the material values and applied loads, but also the positions of the nodes are assumed to be inexact but bounded and are represented by intervals. Such uncertainty may typically arise from imprecision during the process of manufacturing or construction, or round-off errors. In this case the application of the finite element method results in a system of linear equations with numerous interval parameters which cannot be solved conventionally. Applying a suitable variable substitution, an iteration method for the solution of a parametric system of linear equations is firstly employed to obtain initial bounds on the node displacements. Thereafter, an interval tightening (pruning) technique is applied, firstly on the element forces and secondly on the node displacements, in order to obtain tight guaranteed enclosures for the interval solutions for the forces and displacements.


Home-based businesses and their founders represent an important, but under-researched facet of entrepreneurship. Far from being small, hobby-businesses with little economic impact, home-based business make significant contribution to national economies in terms of both turnover and employment. Online home-based businesses have been recognised as an important and distinct sector of the home-based business domain, offering unique opportunity for innovation and business diversity. The paper presents a systematic literature review of extant research on online home-based entrepreneurs and their businesses. The findings of the review are structured and discussed using the theoretical lens of entrepreneur-venture fit. Use of this lens allows the study to bring coherence to previously fragmented extant studies, providing a basis for future research in this domain. The study also develops a novel model of entrepreneur-venture fit in the specific case of online home-based businesses. This allows us to suggest five positive interactions between entrepreneurial and venture characteristics. It also allows us to suggest a number of previously unidentified negative interactions, which may result in entrepreneurs becoming 'locked-in' and suffering multiple sources of stress.


Political Campaigns Social Media Collective Behavior The growing role of the Internet social networking sites (SNS) has served as a flash point for debate about the democratization of information, particularly in light of their perceived roles in the 2008 presidential election. This horizontal sharing of information undoubtedly facilitated the revival of the youth vote and volunteerism in many ways mimicking traditional grassroots approaches. While the role of the Internet SNS in mobilization efforts and information-sharing cannot be overstated, its effectiveness in creating a new ―public sphere,‖ or transforming traditional electoral campaign strategies and communicative practices must be closely examined before generalizations about the democratization of media can be confirmed. In the aftermath of the election, theorists were quick to simplistically identify the use of social networking sites as key to this electoral shift. In this paper we attempt to advance contemporary theorizing of new media and institutional politics by examining specifically how and if ICTs (information communication technologies) and new media platforms are shifting the balance of power in terms of organization and mobilization away from the professional model and toward more democratic and bottom-up efforts. Reconceptualizing some of the basic theories of social movements and collective behavior this paper seeks to address questions such as: how are digitally enabled forms of mobilization affecting who becomes a participant; how do they affect organizational structure and leadership; how do they impact the dynamics of collective action; how do we address the powerful yet ephemeral effect of e-tactics established for short-term gains; can mobilizations succeed without collective identity and/or do we need new categorizations for collective identity; and whether e-tactics serve as a gateway for future participation.


In this paper two invariant sets are derived for a second order nonlinear affine system using a sliding mode controller. If the state started in these sets, it will not leave it for all future time. The invariant set is found function to the initial condition only, from which the state bound is estimated and used when determining the gain of the sliding mode controller. This step overcomes an arithmetic difficulty that consists of calculating suitable controller gain value that ensures the attractiveness of the switching manifold. Also, by using a differentiable form for the approximate signum function in sliding mode controller formula, the state will converge to a positively invariant set rather than the origin. The size of this set is found function to the parameters that can be chosen by the designer, thus, it enables us to control the size of the steady state error. The sliding mode controller is designed to the servo actuator system with friction where the derived invariant sets are used in the calculation of the sliding mode controller gain. The friction model is represented by the major friction components; Coulomb friction, the Stiction friction, and the viscous friction. The simulation results demonstrate the rightness of the derived sets and the ability of the differentiable sliding mode controller to attenuate the friction effect and regulate the state to the positively invariant set with a prescribed steady state error.


Exhibition 22 July until 12th August 2017 Workshop Saturday 22nd July 2017Drawing is a form of looking and a means of thinking. Drawing from observation is not restricted to the eyes alone, as the act of looking is combined with other sensory impressions. So when we draw from a pebble, a shell, or a living organism, like a flower, animal or human, and when we draw the landscapes surrounding us, many sensory impressions work together in helping us translate into a drawing or a painting. The sounds of birds, the rustling of the wind, mechanical noises like cars, tractors, the atmospheric changes in the air, pressure, wind, moisture, rain, sun and light, the texture of a surface when handling an object, all these combine to varying degrees when working from life or still life. This makes drawing a very different exercise from drawing from photos, or other viewfinders like the Claude glass or Camera obscura used in the past to compress space into a two dimensional composition.No one knew this better than John Ruskin. He was also aware that drawing is not something reserved to artists, but is a fundamental educational tool to help us see more profoundly, to understand and appreciate the world of nature and culture, clouds, trees, plants, flowers, rocks and mineral as much as architecture, painting, sculpture and the human form. Ruskin proposes drawing as a perceptive tool, holistically combining the science of accurate observation with imagination, moreover with awe and respect for creation. This dialogue with what we see, or rather perceive, is deepened through the meditative act of drawing. In an age of rapid transition, of multi-media images and dissonance of time and place through mobile and digital devices, moments to slow down and to fully and meditatively immerse ourselves with doing one thing at a time have become precious and increasingly rare. The popularity of colouring in books (mindfulness) attests to this. Yet Ruskin knew that we can do better than filling in other people's outlines – we all have the ability to look and to translate this looking into our own visual language of drawing. We can be mindful and skilful and creative, drawing our own vision and versions of the world.The workshop accompanies above exhibition and is an integral part of the exhibition concept, providing shared additional exhibition space for participant involvement. It aims to combine Ruskin's approach to drawing from observation with experimental and multi-sensory playful activities exploring sound, touch and sight.Bookings are taken by Florence Mine


The history of Indian economic thought provides rich insights into both economic issues and the workings of the Indian mind. A History of Indian Economic Thought provides the first overview of economic thought in the sub-continent. Arguing that it would be inappropriate to rely on formal economic analyses it draws on a wide range of sources; epics, religious and moral texts for the early period and public speeches, addresses, and newspaper articles for controversies from the nineteenth century onwards. What emerges is a rich mosaic reflecting India's different cultures and civilizations. Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam all address economic issues and British colonial rule had a deep impact, both in propagating Western economic ideas and in provoking Indian theories of colonialism and underdevelopment. The author concludes with chapters on Ghandian economics and on Indian economic thought since Independence.


The problem of designing a plasma current and shape control system for a tokamak is dealt with, and a complete framework based on a validated linearized plasma model is developed. Starting from the equilibrium configurations to control and given the required performance, a procedure for choosing the parameters to control is outlined. Then, a method is proposed to evaluate the best performance one could ever expect from a control system, given the actual limitations due to the power supply. A procedure for designing a linear controller is described. The use of a modern multivariable technique, such as the H∞ theory, allows one to take into account the many existing constraints and to find a trade-off among performance, robustness, and control effort. The methodology proposed is general and can be applied in principle to any tokamak plant. The simulation results refer to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) tokamak, A controller designed following almost the same steps has been successfully tested on an existing tokamak.


In this second Focus Issue in an ongoing series of articles on the regulation and function of ion channels, Science's STKE presents four articles that highlight various aspects of ion channel function. A Review by Faundez and Hartzell concerns the functions of intracellular chloride channels in endosomes and related organelles, concluding with an intriguing scenario whereby chloride channels in the membranes of synaptic vesicles could help determine their neurotransmitter content. A Perspective by DeCoursey on the functions of ion channels in phagocytes critically evaluates the possible contributions of proton channels and large-conductance calcium- and voltage-activated potassium channels to phagosomal destruction of microbes. Trauner and Kramer discuss various examples of metabolic regulation of potassium channels, speculating that other classes of potassium channels may be similarly subject to regulation by various small metabolites. Wolf discusses recent research implicating the TRPM7 "chanzyme" in magnesium homeostasis, research that has turned our previous concepts of the regulation of magneisum homeostasis upside down.


Originally published in 1937 as "The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760 - 1850" and re-issued in its present form in 1956, Donald Creighton's study of the St. Lawrence became an essential text in Canadian history courses. This, his first book, helped establish Creighton as the foremost English Canadian historian of his generation. In it, he examines the trading system that developed along the St. Lawrence River and he argues that the exploitation of key staple products by colonial merchants along the St. Lawrence River system was key to Canada's economic and national development. Creighton tells the story of the St. Lawrence empire largely from the perspective of these Canadian merchants, who, above all others, struggled to win the territorial empire of the St. Lawrence and to establish the Canadian commercial state. Christopher H. Moore, historian and Governor General Award winner, has written a new introduction to this classic text.


Balanced Viscosity solutions to rate-independent systems arise as limits of regularized rate-independent flows by adding a superlinear vanishing-viscosity dissipation.
We address the main issue of proving the existence of such limits for infinite-dimensional systems and of characterizing them by a couple of variational properties that combine a local stability condition and a balanced energy-dissipation identity.
A careful description of the jump behavior of the solutions, of their differentiability properties, and of their equivalent representation by time rescaling is also presented.
Our techniques rely on a suitable chain-rule inequality for functions of bounded variation in Banach spaces, on refined lower semicontinuity-compactness arguments, and on new BV-estimates that are of independent interest.


Fifteen bacterium strains were isolated from soil samples and the one that had the highest proteolytic activity, from Susano.lu village at Silifke-Mersin, was selected. The strain was identified and determined as Bacillus cereus. The bacterium, that had R type colony morphology, subterminal spores, motile and facultative anaerobe microorganism, was a gram positive with 10 ƒE length and 1 ƒE width. It could ferment glucose, fructose and maltose which formed acid but not gas. Catalase and urease were positive. The bacterium could grow on common medium easily and form b-haemolyze on blood agar. It was determined that the  microorganismfs growth continued up to the 12th hour and when it gets to the 18th hour, it was in a stationary phase. As a result, after the 18th hour, it was in a lytic phase. The optimum growth temperature range was 20 - 40‹C and the optimum pH range was 6.0 . 10.0, respectively.  Maximum growth was obtained at 30‹C and at pH 7.0. The highest protease activity was determined at 30‹C temperature and 6.4 pH conditions and after the 18th hour, it decreased evidently. Key words : Protease, production, optimization, Bacillus sp.


A very short and disagreeable audible and tactile response from a vehicle driveline may be excited
when the throttle is abruptly applied or released, or when the clutch is rapidly engaged. The
condition is most noticeable in low gear and in slow moving traffic, when other background engine
and road noise levels are low. This phenomenon is known as clonk and is often associated with the
first cycle of shuffle response, which is a low frequency longitudinal vehicle movement excited by
throttle demand. It is often reported that clonk may coincide with each cycle of the shuffle response,
and multiple clonks may then occur. The problem is aggravated by backlash and wear in the
drivetrain, and it conveys a perception of low quality to the customer.
Hitherto, reported investigations do not reveal or discuss the mechanism and causal factors of clonk
in a quantitative manner, which would relate the engine impulsive torque to the elastic response of
the driveline components, and in particular to the noise radiating surfaces. Crucially, neither have
the issues of sensitivity, variability and non-linearity been addressed and published. It is also of
fundamental importance that clonk is seen as a total system response to impulsive torque, in the
presence of distributed lash at the vibro-elastic impact sites.
In this thesis, the drivetrain is defined as the torque path from the engine flywheel to the road
wheels. The drivetrain is a lightly damped and highly non-linear dynamic system. There are many
impact and noise emitting locations in the driveline that contribute to clonk, when the system is
subjected to shock torque loading.
This thesis examines the clonk energy paths, from the initial impact to many driveline lash
locations, and to the various noise radiating surfaces. Both experimental and theoretical methods are applied to this complex system. Structural and acoustic dynamics are considered, as well as the very important frequency couplings between elastic structures and acoustic volumes.
Preliminary road tests had indicated that the clonk phenomenon was a, very short transient impact
event between lubricated contacts and having a high frequency characteristic. This indicated that a
multi-body dynamics simulation of the driveline, in conjunction with a high frequency elasto-acoustic coupling analysis, would be required. In addition, advanced methods of signal analysis
would be required to handle the frequency content of the very short clonk time histories. These are
the main novelties of this thesis.
There were many successful outcomes from the investigation, including quantitative agreement
between the numerical and experimental investigations. From the experimental work, it was
established that vehicle clonk could be accurately reproduced on a driveline rig and also on a
vehicle chassis dynamometer, under controlled test conditions. It then enabled Design of
Experiments to be conducted and the principal causal factors to be identified. The experimental
input and output data was also used to verify the mathematical simulation. The high frequency FE
analysis of the structures and acoustic cavities were used to predict the dynamic modal response to a
shock input. The excellent correlation between model and empirical data that was achieved, clearly
established the clonk mechanism in mathematical physics terms. Localised impact of meshing gears
under impulsive loads were found to be responsible for high frequency structural wave propagation,
some of which coupled with the acoustics modes of cavities, when the speed of wave propagation
reached supersonic levels. This finding, although previously surmised, has been shown in the thesis
and constitutes a major contribution to knowledge.


Background : Aspiration pneumonia is ranked as a considerable etiology in community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and healthcare-associated pneumonia (HCAP). However, its frequency and role have not been fully evaluated due to difficulties in the diagnosis.

Objective : To determine the frequency of aspiration pneumonia in CAP and HCAP, and to evaluate its impact on the outcome among these patients with acute pneumonias.

Methods : We defined aspiration pneumonia as the following conditions: having risk factors for aspiration pneumonia, including dysphagia due to neurological disorder, mechanical obstruction of the airways and disturbance of consciousness, and also showing lung gravitational opacities in chest CT. Clinical features, microbiology, and outcomes in total 637 patients with CAP (n=417) and HCAP (n=220) were retrospectively analyzed.

Results : Forty-six (11%) patients with CAP and 102 (46%) patients with HCAP met the definition of aspiration pneumonia (p<0.001). The severity score (CURB-65) was higher in HCAP patients (median 3.0, interquartile range; IQR 1.0) than in CAP patients (median 2.0, IQR 1.0; p<0.001). The treatment failure due to resistant pathogens was more frequently seen in HCAP (9.5%) than in CAP (3.4%, p=0.001). In the entire patients with pneumonias, a multivariate analysis indicated that aspiration pneumonia was associated with 30-day mortality (adjusted hazard ratio 4.263, p=0.001) after adjusting for other variables.

Conclusion : Aspiration pneumonia may be a significant predictor of mortality in both patients with CAP and HCAP. Therefore, it would be better for the treatment guidelines for CAP and HCAP to adopt a concept of objectively-defined aspiration pneumonia.


The real-world guide to JMS messaging with IBM WebSphere technologiesThis book offers start-to-finish guidance for building reliable, high-performance JMS-based messaging infrastructure with IBM WebSphere technologies.IBM expert Kareem Yusuf systematically introduces the latest versions of JMS-both 1.1 and 1.02b. Once you've thoroughly mastered JMS development on any platform, Yusuf turns to the exceptional JMS support found in IBM's WebSphere products. Using extensive code examples, he walks you step-by-step through WebSphere JMS development, configuration, deployment, and administration in several real-world scenarios. Coverage includes: Roles and goals of messaging infrastructure in the enterprise Key JMS concepts: messaging domains, messages, and Application Server Facilities Defining/structuring content, choosing message types, and manipulating messages The JMS API, explained through detailed code examples Using JMS with EJB, message-driven beans, servlets, and portlets Working with IBM WebSphere JMS providers, administered objects, and tools Hands-on tutorials: EJB message exchange, integration with non-JMS applications, and SSL security Resource location and physical topologies for maximizing availability and efficiencyWhether you're developing enterprise messaging infrastructure, architecting it, or managing it, this book delivers indispensable guidance-straight from the frontlines.On the WebDownload an extensive library of code samples for JMS 1.1 and 1.02b, including complete functional prototypes built for JMS 1.02b.


Corporate reputation is increasingly identified as the most important strategic asset in value creation for a company. Scholarly interest in the concept of corporate reputation has led to a five-fold increase in the number of peer-reviewed articles and studies over the past decade (Barnett et al., 2006). Yet, there is no commonly accepted definition. We propose a definition of corporate reputation based on a number of academic sources as well as work by practitioners. Corporate reputation is an intangible asset that is built up over time and represents the value and trust that stakeholders have for the company. It is a key asset, which favours the achievement of strategic objectives such as value creation, profitable growth, and sustainable competitive advantage. Companies' reputations are more vulnerable than ever today because of globalization, increasing business complexity, economic and financial turbulence, the exponential growth of social media, and the speed of the news cycle. These factors can provoke difficult to predict crises which can destroy even the most carefully built reputations. Recently, both corporate board members and risk management professionals identified risk to reputation as the number one risk facing companies (EisnerAmper, 2011; Economist Intelligence Unit, 2005). We are all aware of crises that have severely damaged well established corporate reputations, causing at the same time a dramatic loss of stock market value. One example is Canada's largest, most prestigious tech company, Research In Motion. RIM began 2011 as Canada's fifth most admired company in ratings established by Canadian Business magazine and the Reputation Institute (Canadian Business, May 19, 2011). Then, a failed product launch and a disastrous loss of service to millions of Blackberry users set the company on a steep slide in value. The loss of trust in RIM intensified when company executives waited three days before offering a public explanation and apology for the loss of service. RIM shares dropped 75 percent in value between March and December of 2011 (Canadian Business, January 19, 2012). A more recent case, in February 2012, is that of Canada's most respected engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, which has seen its shares drop by over 20 percent due to issues of questionable expenses. This report combines the authors' exploratory study of Quebec's top companies with the review of most of the current studies and research on corporate reputation published over the last 12 years. Our Quebec survey shows that only half the companies surveyed recognize the importance of reputation. None appear to be managing reputation in a proactive way. CIRANO and Preventa will introduce a framework and processes to improve the way organizations manage their most valuable asset. This report provides a road map for companies to make the transition from reactive management to proactive management of reputation.


Secure spectrum auctions can revolutionize the spectrum utilization of cellular networks and satisfy the ever increasing demand for resources. In this paper, a multitier dynamic spectrum sharing system is studied for efficient sharing of spectrum with commercial wireless system providers (WSPs), with an emphasis on federal spectrum sharing. The proposed spectrum sharing system provides an efficient usage of spectrum resources, manages intra-WSP and inter-WSP interference, and provides essential level of security, privacy, and obfuscation to enable the most efficient and reliable usage of the shared spectrum. It features an intermediate spectrum auctioneer responsible for allocating resources to commercial WSPs by running secure spectrum auctions. The proposed secure spectrum auction, MTSSA, leverages Paillier cryptosystem to avoid possible fraud and bid-rigging. Numerical simulations are provided to compare the performance of MTSSA and its computational and communication complexity, in the considered spectrum sharing system, with other spectrum auction mechanisms for realistic cellular systems.


Background Quantifying sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevalence and incidence is important for planning interventions and advocating for resources. The World Health Organization (WHO) periodically estimates global and regional prevalence and incidence of four curable STIs: chlamydia, gonorrhoea, trichomoniasis and syphilis. Methods and Findings WHO's 2012 estimates were based upon literature reviews of prevalence data from 2005 through 2012 among general populations for genitourinary infection with chlamydia, gonorrhoea, and trichomoniasis, and nationally reported data on syphilis seroprevalence among antenatal care attendees. Data were standardized for laboratory test type, geography, age, and high risk subpopulations, and combined using a Bayesian meta-analytic approach. Regional incidence estimates were generated from prevalence estimates by adjusting for average duration of infection. In 2012, among women aged 15–49 years, the estimated global prevalence of chlamydia was 4.2% (95% uncertainty interval (UI): 3.7–4.7%), gonorrhoea 0.8% (0.6–1.0%), trichomoniasis 5.0% (4.0–6.4%), and syphilis 0.5% (0.4–0.6%); among men, estimated chlamydia prevalence was 2.7% (2.0–3.6%), gonorrhoea 0.6% (0.4–0.9%), trichomoniasis 0.6% (0.4–0.8%), and syphilis 0.48% (0.3–0.7%). These figures correspond to an estimated 131 million new cases of chlamydia (100–166 million), 78 million of gonorrhoea (53–110 million), 143 million of trichomoniasis (98–202 million), and 6 million of syphilis (4–8 million). Prevalence and incidence estimates varied by region and sex. Conclusions Estimates of the global prevalence and incidence of chlamydia, gonorrhoea, trichomoniasis, and syphilis in adult women and men remain high, with nearly one million new infections with curable STI each day. The estimates highlight the urgent need for the public health community to ensure that well-recognized effective interventions for STI prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment are made more widely available. Improved estimation methods are needed to allow use of more varied data and generation of estimates at the national level.


Using representative German employee data, we analyse the role of works councils for the incidence of severance payments subsequent to dismissals. While there is a positive relation with severance payments after those dismissals which stem from plant closings, the incidence of a works council is negatively associated with severance pay subsequent to individual layoffs. In both cases, we find a negative moderating effect of individuals' higher reemployment chances. We also explore gender differences and differences between the types of previously held jobs.


The Localism Act 2011 is a wide-ranging piece of legislation which is part of the current government's drive towards creating 'the Big Society'. Part 6 of that Act concerns changes to the planning system and represents a radical departure from the system that has developed over the last 60 years. Amongst other changes, it abolishes Regional Spatial Strategies and introduces Neighbourhood Planning. These changes will affect the way that decisions about the distribution of desirable and undesirable land-uses in England are made and they therefore raise questions about environmental justice. This paper uses the concept of environmental justice to analyse the provisions and underpinning ideology of the Localism Act. In concluding I find that both these changes have the potential to have a negative effect on environmental justice. Both are liable to increase the disparity between rich and poor communities. Read more


As germ cells progress through spermatogenesis, they undergo a dramatic transformation, wherein a single, diploid spermatogonial stem cell ultimately produces thousands of highly specialised, haploid spermatozoa. The cytoskeleton is an integral aspect of all eukaryotic cells. It concomitantly provides both structural support and functional pliability, performing key roles in many fundamental processes including, motility, intracellular trafficking, differentiation and cell division. Accordingly, cytoskeletal dynamics underlie many key spermatogenic processes. This review summarises the organisational and functional aspects of the four major cytoskeletal components (actin, microtubules, intermediate filaments and septins) during the various spermatogenic phases in mammals. We focus on the cytoskeletal machinery of both germ cells and Sertoli cells, and thus highlight the critical importance of a dynamic and precisely regulated cytoskeleton for male fertility.


Rapid and simultaneous changes in temperature, precipitation and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 are predicted to occur over the next century. Simple, well-validated models of ecosystem function are required to predict the effects of these changes. This paper describes an improved version of a forest carbon and water balance model (PnET-II) and the application of the model to predict stand- and regional-level effects of changes in temperature, precipitation and atmospheric CO2 concentration. PnET-II is a simple, generalized, monthly time-step model of water and carbon balances (gross and net) driven by nitrogen availability as expressed through foliar N concentration. Improvements from the original model include a complete carbon balance and improvements in the prediction of canopy phenology, as well as in the computation of canopy structure and photosynthesis. The model was parameterized and run for 4 forest/site combinations and validated against available data for water yield, gross and net carbon exchange and biomass production. The validation exercise suggests that the determination of actual water availability to stands and the occurrence or non-occurrence of soil-based water stress are critical to accurate modeling of forest net primary production (NPP) and net ecosystem production (NEP). The model was then run for the entire NewEngland/New York (USA) region using a 1 km resolution geographic information system. Predicted long-term NEP ranged from -85 to +275 g C m-2 yr-1 for the 4 forest/site combinations, and from -150 to 350 g C m-2 yr-1 for the region, with a regional average of 76 g C m-2 yr-1. A combination of increased temperature (+6*C), decreased precipitation (-15%) and increased water use efficiency (2x, due to doubling of CO2) resulted generally in increases in NPP and decreases in water yield over the region.


The study collected medical histories and reviewed medical records, and discovered that among those with dementia at ages 100 or older, the subjects still markedly delayed the onset of dementia relative to the average age of onset- particularly of late onset Alzheimer's Disease. During the first year of my geriatrics fellowship, in 1991, I was assigned numerous patients-among them were two individuals who would change my life forever. Though I gradually became acquainted with the other residents who lived in the "independently functioning" residential section of Boston's Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged, I had yet to meet this section's two centenarian patients who would so influence my life and work. They were, quite simply, never around for me to meet. I was surprised that there were centenarians residing on the Center's most independent floor because the notion of "the older you get, the sicker you get" was so ingrained in me from years of caring for older patients in the hospital. This maxim definitely did not apply to Celia Bloom, age 100, and Ed Fisher, age 101. I finally discovered why they were never available to meet me: Celia was always busy beautifully playing Mozart and Chopin on the piano for other residents. Ed was devotedly volunteering in Occupational Therapy, teaching tailoring and clothes-mending-his trade for over eighty years. When he was not teaching, Ed was off "robbing the cradle," dating his 85-yearold girlfriend (Perls, Lauerman, and Silver, 1999). At the time, the East Boston Study, a population- based prevalence study of Alzheimer's Disease, had recently indicated that about 50 percent of people over age 85 had Alzheimer's Disease (Evans et al., 1989). Given what appeared to be an increasing incidence of the disease with age, it seemed that all people living to age 100 should have Alzheimer's. But the two centenarians I was caring for did not have the disease and, from what I could tell, they were entirely cognitively intact. This surprised me, piqued my curiosity, and led me toward a life-changing endeavor. Centenarians: Models of Resistance to Alzheimer's Disease Forming this clinical observation about Celia and Ed (which appeared to counter the conventional wisdom of the time), I embarked on a new research project: to determine the prevalence of Alzheimer's Disease in a population-based sample of centenarians. I hypothesized that because Alzheimer's is associated with premature mortality, it would be unlikely that a person could live to age 100 while having developed the disease. Later, I found out that such a supposition was the basis of the idea of demographic selection. In demographic selection, as a population ages, at some point those with age-related diseases associated with increased mortality risk die off, leaving behind a cohort of healthier select survivors (Perls, 1995; Vaupel and Yashin, 1985; Vaupel et al., 1998). Using voter registries and local newspaper articles about centenarian birthdays, I tried to find and enroll all the centenarians living in eight communities around Boston. At a prevalence rate of one centenarian per 10,000, and given a population base of 460,000, at any one time I should have been studying about forty-six centenarians: I ended up with a sample of forty-three subjects (Perls et al., 1999). Together with Dr. Margery Silver, a neuropsychologist with expertise in aging, we determined the prevalence of dementia in this sample using Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) criteria. Twenty percent had no dementia, 15 percent were assigned a diagnosis of "uncertain," and the remaining 65 percent had at least some degree of dementia (Silver, Jilinskaia, and Perls, 2001). Though a dementia frequency of 65 percent was quite high, it still seemed remarkable, given their age, that about one-fifth of the centenarians were clinically cognitively intact. Other centenarian studies noted their own prevalence of dementia ranging from 100 percent to just 20 percent. …


Modern appliances are complex machines with processors, operating systems, and application software. While there are books that will tell you how to run Linux on embedded hardware, and books on how to build a Linux application, Linux Appliance Design is the first book to demonstrate how to merge the two and create a Linux appliance. You'll see for yourself why Linux is the embedded operating system of choice for low-cost development and a fast time to market. Linux Appliance Design shows how to build better appliances-appliances with more types of interfaces, more dynamic interfaces, and better debugged interfaces. You'll learn how to build backend daemons, handle asynchronous events, and connect various user interfaces (including web, framebuffers, infrared control, SNMP, and front panels) to these processes for remote configuration and control. Linux Appliance Design also introduces the Run-Time Access library, which provides a uniform mechanism for user interfaces to communicate with daemons. Learn to: Separate your user interfaces from your daemons Give user interfaces run time access to configuration, status, and statistics Add professional network management capabilities to your application Use SNMP and build a MIB Build a web-based appliance interface Build a command line interface (CLI) Build a framebuffer interface with an infrared control as input Manage logs and alarms on an appliance Companion CD includes a prototype appliance-a home alarm system-that supports the book's lessons.


Even leaving aside concerns of cognitive plausibility, incremental parsing is appealing for applications such as speech recognition and machine translation because it could allow for incorporating syntactic features into the decoding process without blowing up the search space. Yet, incremental parsing is often associated with greedy parsing decisions and intolerable loss of accuracy. Would the use of lexicalized grammars provide a new perspective on incremental parsing? In this paper we explore incremental left-to-right dependency parsing using a lexicalized grammatical formalism that works with lexical categories (supertags) and a small set of combinatory operators. A strictly incremental parser would conduct only a single pass over the input, use no lookahead and make only local decisions at every word. We show that such a parser suffers heavy loss of accuracy. Instead, we explore the utility of a two-pass approach that incrementally builds a dependency structure by first assigning a supertag to every input word and then selecting an incremental operator that allows assembling every supertag with the dependency structure built so-far to its left. We instantiate this idea in different models that allow a trade-off between aspects of full incrementality and performance, and explore the differences between these models empirically. Our exploration shows that a semi-incremental (two-pass), linear-time parser that employs fixed and limited look-ahead exhibits an appealing balance between the efficiency advantages of incrementality and the achieved accuracy. Surprisingly, taking local or global decisions matters very little for the accuracy of this linear-time parser. Such a parser fits seemlessly with the currently dominant finite-state decoders for machine translation.


In this study, the authors investigate the error rate performance of amplify-and-forward relaying over N*Nakagami fading channels. This is a recently introduced channel model that involves the product of N Nakagami-m-distributed random variables. Employing the moment generating function approach, the authors derive symbol error rate expressions for a single-relay system under instantaneous power scaling (IPS) and average power scaling (APS) factors at the relay node, that is, variable and fixed gains. The results achieved by the authors demonstrate that the achievable diversity order is a function of Nakagami fading parameter (m) and degree of cascading (N). An identical diversity order is obtained under both scaling factors when the relay is close to the destination. When the relay is close to the source, IPS becomes advantageous over APS. Monte–Carlo simulations are further provided to confirm the analytical results.


With the enormous popularity of smartphones, millions of mobile apps are developed to provide rich functionalities for users by accessing certain personal data, leading to great privacy concerns. To address this problem, many approaches have been proposed to detect privacy disclosures in mobile apps, but they largely fail to automatically determine whether the privacy disclosures are necessary for the functionality of apps. As a result, security analysts may easily face with a large number of false positives when directly adopting such approaches for app analysis. In this paper, we propose LeakDoctor, an analysis system seeking to automatically diagnose privacy leaks by judging if a privacy disclosure from an app is necessary for some functionality of the app. Functionality-irrelevant privacy disclosures are not justifiable, so considered as potential privacy leak cases. To achieve this goal, LeakDoctor integrates dynamic response differential analysis with static response taint analysis. In addition, it employs a novel technique to locate the program statements of each privacy disclosure. We implement a prototype of LeakDoctor and evaluate it against 1060 apps, which contain 2,095 known disclosure cases. Our experimental results show that LeakDoctor can automatically determine that 71.9% of the privacy disclosure cases indeed serve apps' functionalities and are justifiable. Hence, with the diagnosis results of LeakDoctor, analysts may avoid analyzing many justifiable privacy disclosures and only focus on the those unjustifiable cases.


The rivers of western Oregon have diverse forms and characteristics, with channel substrates ranging from continuous alluvial gravel to bare bedrock. Analysis of several measurable morphologic attributes of 24 valley reaches on 17 rivers provides a basis for comparing nonalluvial and alluvial channels. Key differences are that alluvial reaches have greater bar area, greater migration rates, and show systematic correlation among variables relating grain size to bed-material transport capacity. We relate these differences between channel types to bed-material transport rates as derived from a coupled regional analysis of empirical sediment yield measurements and physical experiments of clast attrition during transport. This sediment supply analysis shows that overall bed-material transport rates for western Oregon are chiefly controlled by (1) lithology and basin slope, which are the key factors for bed-material supply into the stream network, and (2) lithologic control of bed-material attrition from in-transport abrasion and disintegration. This bed-material comminution strongly affects bed-material transport in the study area, reducing transport rates by 50%–90% along the length of the larger rivers in the study area. A comparison of the bed-material transport estimates with the morphologic analyses shows that alluvial gravel-bed channels have systematic and bounding relations between bed-material transport rate and attributes such as bar area and local transport capacity. By contrast, few such relations are evident for nonalluvial rivers with bedrock or mixed-bed substrates, which are apparently more influenced by local controls on channel geometry and sediment supply. At the scale of western Oregon, the physiographic and lithologic controls on the balance between bed-material supply and transport capacity exert far-reaching influence on the distribution of alluvial and nonalluvial channels and their consequently distinctive morphologies and behaviors—differences germane for understanding river response to tectonics and environmental perturbations, as well as for implementing effective restoration and monitoring strategies.


Tennessee has a long history of strongly held and diverse religious beliefs and practices. Equally firmly established is its "at-will" employment rule that allows businesses to create and control their workforces to maximize operations and profits to the benefit of employers and employees. When an employee's religious beliefs conflict with his obligations to his employer, state and federal laws resolve the tension. Employees who experience this tension and feel they have been discriminated against based on their religion generally have the choice to bring their claims of discrimination under federal law, state law, or both. Because claims under federal law may be removed to federal court, and because state courts are generally perceived to be more favorable to employees, some employees strategically elect to pursue only selected state law claims. An employee might also be forced to bring a claim only under state law if she works for a small employer, since the federal law's reach is limited to employers with at least fifteen employees. This Article examines whether a Tennessee employee who brings claims only under Tennessee's statutory protection against religious discrimination in employment has the same protections as he would if he proceeded under federal law. Part I discusses employers' obligations under the Tennessee Human Rights Act ("THRA"), the primary Tennessee religious anti-discrimination statute, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ("Title VII"), the primary federal religious anti-discrimination law. Part II discusses the background of both the THRA and Title VII and how it informs the analysis. Part III proposes that the THRA not be interpreted to import the reasonable accommodation requirement from Title VII. This interpretation is consistent with the textual language of the statute, courts' interpretation of the Tennessee Disability Act, existing case law, and Tennessee's history of limiting exceptions to the at-will employment doctrine. The Article proposes that this different interpretation is more consistent with the THRA as it is currently written and invites discussion of whether this interpretation is ultimately better for employees and employers.


HPC applications are large software packages with high computation and storage requirements. To meet these requirements, the architectures of supercomputers are continuously evolving and their capabilities are continuously increasing. Present-day supercomputers have achieved petaflops of computational power by utilizing thousands to millions of compute cores, connected through specialized communication networks, and are equipped with petabytes of storage using a centralized I/O subsystem. While fulfilling the high resource demands of HPC applications, such a design also entails its own challenges. Applications running on these systems own the computation resources exclusively, but share the communication interconnect and the I/O subsystem with other concurrently running applications. Simultaneous access to these shared resources causes contention and inter-application interference, leading to degraded application performance.

Inter-application interference is one of the sources of run-to-run variation. While other sources of variation, such as operating system jitter, have been investigated before, this doctoral thesis specifically focuses on inter-application interference and studies it from the perspective of an application. Variation in execution time not only causes uncertainty and affects user expectations (especially during performance analysis), but also causes suboptimal usage of HPC resources. Therefore, this thesis aims to evaluate inter-application interference, establish trends among applications under contention, and approximate the impact of external influences on the runtime of an application.

To this end, this thesis first presents a method to correlate the performance of applications running side-by-side. The method divides the runtime of a system into globally synchronized, fine-grained time slices for which application performance data is recorded separately. The evaluation of the method demonstrates that correlating application performance data can identify inter-application interference. The thesis further uses the method to study I/O interference and shows that file access patterns are a significant factor in determining the interference potential of an application.

This thesis also presents a technique to estimate the impact of external influences on an application run. The technique introduces the concept of intrinsic performance characteristics to cluster similar application execution segments. Anomalies in the cluster are the result of external interference. An evaluation with several benchmarks shows high accuracy in estimating the impact of interference from a single application run.

The contributions of this thesis will help establish interference trends and devise interference mitigation techniques. Similarly, estimating the impact of external interference will restore user expectations and help performance analysts separate application performance from external influence.


In Presenting to Win: Persuading Your Audience Every Time, the world's #1 presentation consultant shows how to connect with even the toughest, most high-level audiences--and move them to action. Jerry Weissman shows presenters of all kinds how to dump those PowerPoint templates once and for all--and learn to tell compelling stories that focus on what's in it for their listeners. Drawing on dozens of practical examples and real case studies, Weissman shows presenters how to identify their real goals and messages before they even open PowerPoint; how to stay focused on what their listeners really care about; and how to capture their audiences in the first crucial 90 seconds. From bullets and graphics to the effective, sparing use of special effects, Weissman covers all the practical mechanics of effective presentation--and walks readers through every step of building a Power Presentation, from brainstorming through delivery. Unlike the techniques in other presentation books, this book's easy, step-by-step approach has been proven with billions of dollars on the line, in hundreds of IPO road shows before the world's most jaded investors.


The WorldFish Center and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) are currently implementing a Regional Programme entitled Fisheries and HIV/AIDS in Africa: Investing in Sustainable Solutions, to strengthen the capacity in the region to develop sustainable solutions to enhance the contributions of fish and fisheries to economic and human development. In particular, the programme is building a strategic response to HIV/AIDS in the fisheries sector that will generate benefits for vulnerable groups in wider society. With financial support from the Swedish-Norwegian Regional Programme on HIV/AIDS in Africa, this programme is conducting research-for-development activities and implementing pilot interventions in selected fishing communities in eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa, namely Benin, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cameroon, Nigeria, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia. In all eight countries, three technical focus areas have been identified through national consultations 1) Options for reducing vulnerability along the fish marketing chain; 2) Enhancing nutrition benefits from small scale aquaculture and fisheries; 3) Institutional change to increase investment in viable support options


Sharp upper and lower bounds of the Chebyshev type are established for the probability of error due to intersymbol interference and additive Gaussian noise in a digital communication system. The results are in relatively closed form, and the only statistical knowledge assumed about the interference is the peak eye opening and the variance. The bounds apply to correlated and uncorrelated signals and for any signal to noise ratio.


The reasons why people may periodically resort to binge eating behavior have long been a focus of study, and the reasons are elusive and varied. For people troubled by poor sleep and living with chronic stress, binge eating may be an attempt by the brain's glucose-depleted executive processing center to both regulate (i.e., increase) glucose levels and induce restorative sleep. Recovery resulting from restorative sleep may lead to a reduction in perceived stress, improved mood, and increased willpower, reducing the likelihood of another binge episode in close temporal proximity to the sleepinduced recovery. A repetitive cycle may ensue when stress inevitably again disturbs sleep, lowering mood, reducing willpower, and heightening sensitivity to stigma and stress. The purpose of the research described here is to synthesize recent findings from three diverse fields of scientific inquiry to predict factors that influence episodes of binge eating. Combining studies of sleep and sleep disorders, stress and stigma research, and recent work on self-regulatory capacity, I attempt to show how poor sleep ultimately leads to binge eating. A seven-day study consisted of three parts: an initial set of baseline questionnaire and physiological measures; collection of objective sleep quality data using an electronic motion logger; and an online daily diary in which participants completed measures of self-regulatory capacity and reported details about their sleep, stress levels, experiences with stigma, mood, and eating events. The data partially supported a path model where sleep quality, stress, mood, and self-regulation affected binge eating behavior.


Introduction Limited data exist on epidemiology, clinical presentation and management of acute hyperkinetic movement disorders (AHMD) in paediatric emergency departments (pED). Methods We retrospectively analysed a case series of 256 children (aged 2 months to 17 years) presenting with AHMD to the pEDs of six Italian tertiary care hospitals over a 2-year period (January 2012 to December 2013). Results The most common type of AHMD was tics (44.5%), followed by tremors (21.1%), chorea (13.7%), dystonia (10.2%), myoclonus (6.3%) and stereotypies (4.3%). Neuropsychiatric disorders (including tic disorders, psychogenic movement disorders and idiopathic stereotypies) were the most represented cause (51.2%). Inflammatory conditions (infectious and immune-mediated neurological disorders) accounted for 17.6% of the cases whereas non-inflammatory disorders (including drug-induced AHMDs, genetic/metabolic diseases, paroxysmal non-epileptic movements and idiopathic AHMDs) accounted for 31.2%. Neuropsychiatric disorders prevailed among preschoolers and schoolers (51.9% and 25.2%, respectively), non-inflammatory disorders were more frequent in infants and toddlers (63.8%), whereas inflammatory conditions were more often encountered among schoolers (73.3%). In 5 out of 36 Sydenham's chorea (SC) cases, tics were the presentation symptom on admission to emergency department (ED), highlighting the difficulties in early diagnosis of SC. Inflammatory disorders were associated with a longer hospital stay and a greater need of neuroimaging test compared with other disorders. Conclusions This study provides the first large sample of paediatric patients presenting to the ED for AHMDs, helping to elucidate the epidemiology, aetiology and clinical presentation of these disorders.


Prostitution remains a controversial issue in the United Kingdom. The period of 2000 to 2009 saw a range of disparate solutions, from legalization to abolition, debated by policy makers and feminists and covered extensively in the news media. The debates raised questions about the public's rights, the treatment of prostitution as a legitimate form of work in the liberal economy, the limits on women's choice to enter sex work, and the extent of violence and harm experienced by sex workers. Definitions of prostitution are enacted via a complex relationship between legal and cultural discourses. The media uses certain tropes that create discursive boundaries in the debates. The first principal research question is, "How are competing discourses of prostitution conveyed in contemporary British news media?" The project provides an empirical analysis of the competing constructions of prostitution in British news media over the last decade, focusing on the depiction of sex workers, clients and the phenomenon of prostitution generally. Previous operationalizations of Habermas' theory of communication suggest that it is an effective approach for revealing distortions in media discourses. The study operationalized the validity claims of Truth, Sincerity and Legitimacy and systematically applied them to a sample of 342 articles from The Daily Mail and The Guardian, theoretically representing both the popular political right- and left-leaning framings of issues. Key findings of this project were that many media discourses are distorted compared to empirical realities, and that they are often expressed in dualisms and dichotomies. Media constructions of prostitution also reflect long-standing cultural themes. Nineteenth-century discourses of prostitutes as "fallen" -- simultaneously doomed victims and immoral seducers -- also appeared in many of the media characterizations of sex workers today. Finally, the dissertation argues that the neo-Victorian novels of Michel Faber and Sarah Waters consider prostitution with particular attention of the persistent historical cultural tropes. A second key finding of the project is that literature provides alternative ways of conceptualizing questions of "choice" and "harm." By including an examination of literature, the dissertation explores alternative, more nuanced perspectives that may allow superior understandings of the phenomenon than many of the "factual" media accounts.


For the best performance of hybrid structures, it is inevitable to combine members made of different materials. Japanese design codes of steel and concrete hybrid structures require mechanical shear connectors to combine the members so that cross sectional forces are transmitted through the connectors. Therefore, it is important to predict accurately the mechanical characteristics of shear connectors. In this context, introducing interface and material nonlinearities, we develop a finite element model which can evaluate the performance of shear connectors.


Global competition is rapidly becoming the norm in which nearly all business organizations must compete in one fashion or another. The complexity and value of strategic global human resource management (SGHRM) will continue to compound in significance as globalization becomes the predominate form of business. Both practitioners and researchers maintain the grapple with understanding the global phenomena and the resulting impact on the entire human resource management system. Previously, researchers' maintained research programmes utilizing Western-style theories and methods, which were predominantly quantitative, to explore phenomena that may now be inappropriate. These methods and theories frequently do not capture the 'fabric' of global phenomena that include complex interactions of culture, institutions, societal norms and government regulations, among a few concerns. The mixed methods approach is proposed to add the 'fabric' required, illustrating the depth and flexibility needed to explore the SGHRM issues. Mixed methods are a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches that maintain methodological rigour as well as measures for reliability and validity. This paper explores the current methods, the reasons for their lack of success in portraying the depth of the phenomena and why the mixed methods approach appears to be a superior method for research for the SGHRM field.


In a number of remote-sensing applications, it is critical to decrease the dimensionality of the input in order to reduce the complexity and, hence, the processing time and possibly improve classification accuracy. In this letter, the application of genetic algorithms as a means of feature selection is explored. A genetic algorithm is used to select a near-optimal subset of input dimensions using a feed-forward multilayer perceptron trained by backpropagation as the classifier. Feature and topology evolution are performed simultaneously based on actual classification results (wrapper approach).


This paper presents initial findings from research investigating an important but largely neglected facet of the history of Further Education (FE) – the Liberal Studies and General Studies (LS/GS) movement. Drawing on historical documents and interview data from a group of former LS/GS lecturers, the paper provides important insights into some of the key events and initiatives between the 1950s-1980s, which led to the rise and eventual fall of the LS/GS movement, and seeks to capture the voices of those who were involved at the 'chalk face'. Whilst it is acknowledged that the quality and nature of LS/GS was often variable and that the experiences of both teachers and learners were often uneven, the central argument of the paper is that many of the principles of the LS/GS movement were not only ahead of their time, but are perhaps more relevant to FE today than ever before.


Big Data is a data whose scale, diversity, and complexity require new architecture, techniques, algorithms, and analytics to manage it and extract value and hidden knowledge from it. Hadoop is the core platform for structuring Big Data, and solves the problem of making it useful for analytics purposes. Hadoop is an open source software project that enables the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of commodity servers. It is designed to scale up from a single server to thousands of machines, with a very high degree of fault tolerance. Hadoop MapReduce is an implementation of the algorithm developed and maintained by the Apache Hadoop project. Map Reduce is a programming model for processing large data sets with parallel distributed algorithm on cluster. This paper presents the survey of bigdata processing in perspective of hadoop and mapreduce.


Playability can be defined as the adaptation of a system to a playful use. On the computer, playability takes shape through many aspects. One of these factors is the relationship which is formed between the player and his representation in the fictional universe, since the latter represents his modalities of action within the game world. This text proposes to understand the role of the avatar in the playful involvement of the user. First, we define the notion of playability. Then we question the framework that can be used to analyze the links between the avatars and playability in video games. The text ends with the definition of several characteristics of the avatar of video games.


Background Evidence suggests that in‐person management by nighttime intensivists does not change patients' mortality rates in high‐intensity intensive care units. Objective To better understand domains affected by nighttime intensivist staffing not previously measured. Methods Semistructured interviews of 13 night‐shift nurses in an academic medical intensive care unit to elicit perceptions of nighttime staffing with attending intensivists versus residents with attending intensivists on call remotely. Interviews were done during the final months of a randomized trial comparing the same staffing models. Qualitative analysis was done by using a grounded theory approach. Three investigators independently reviewed interview transcripts to identify key domains. Results In addition to 5 themes probed during interviews (efficiency, communication, job place comfort, quality of patient care, and procedures), participants identified 3 other themes (supervision, systems issues, and experience). Most participants thought that nighttime intensivists improved clinical care, procedures, efficiency, communication, and job place comfort. Two thought that the quality of patient care, efficiency, or communication was the same with both arrangements. Three reported no effect on their job place comfort. Twelve mentioned improved supervision of trainees, and all thought systems issues improved. Conclusions Nurses perceive improvements with nighttime intensivists in several domains. Future work is needed to determine whether such perceptions translate into improved outcomes for staff or patients.


The exoplanet detection rate from gravitational microlensing has grown significantly in recent years thanks to a great enhancement of resources and improved observational strategy. Current observatories include ground-based wide-field and/or robotic world-wide networks of telescopes, as well as space-based observatories such as satellites Spitzer or Kepler/K2. This results in a large quantity of data to be processed and analyzed, which is a challenge for modeling codes because of the complexity of the parameter space to be explored, and the intensive computations required to evaluate the models. In this work, I present a method that allows to compute the quadrupole and hexadecapole approximation of the finite-source magnification with more efficiency that previously available codes, with routines about x6 and x4 faster respectively. The quadrupole takes just about twice the time of a point-source evaluation, which advocates for generalizing its use to large portion of the light curves. The corresponding routines are available as open-source python codes.


Automating the exercise of statutory powers through algorithmic decision-making carries high levels of legal risk. Fundamental public law doctrines assume that legal powers will be exercised by a particular kind of decision-making agent: one with sufficient cognitive capacities to understand the interpretative complexity of legal instruments and respond to highly dynamic environments. Public law doctrines also assume that clear reasons can be given for the exercise of public power and, by default, attribute legal responsibility for the exercise of statutory powers to a human being bearing political and social responsibility. Those doctrines provide the standards against which the legality of algorithmic decision-making in the public sector must be tested and, until they are met, lawyers should be sceptical of suggestions that statutory powers can be automated.


This essay will show how important collective memory is to the contemporary politics of historic injustices, to state-building, and to the production of nationhood, all of which involve placing politics in and out of time. To this end, the first section of the essay challenges the popular notion that the failure to address prevailing injustices is a result of collective amnesia, of a forgetting of the past. Instead, I argue that the persistence of colonialist and racial injustices is a consequence of collective disavowal and as such a particular production and presence of memory, rather than a lack of memory. To explore the politics of collective memory at greater length, the rest of the essay focuses on the calendar. I see calendars as forms of evidence for understanding politics because they are products of the mutually constitutive relationship between collective memory and the production of political temporality. Calendars thus have epistemological value as public documents of state-building, of nationhood, and of resistances to both. The second section of the essay looks at the politics of calendars in theoretical and historical terms, setting out their importance for state-building, nationhood, resistance, and revolution. The final section of the essay then considers the contemporary U.S. context, looking at examples of political resistance and elite consolidation that take as their target the mnemonics of the calendar. I turn first to address what I call the mis-diagnosis of collective amnesia.


We developed a simple seminumerical method to model, get design parameters, and estimate performance of side-polished microstructured optical fiber (SPMOF)-based devices. As an example, we analyze a SPMOF directional coupler and show good agreement between the available experimental results and our theoretically estimated characteristics of such a coupler. To further demonstrate the utility of our design approach, we also propose a new wavelength filter design based on the use of a SPMOF half-coupler, which is loaded with an overlay planar waveguide and should find applications as a gain-flattening filter for erbium-doped fiber amplifiers or as a bandstop filter, in general. To show the applicability of our approach even to surface plasmonic components, we also propose a SPMOF polarizer design, which could be formed by coating the top polished surface of a SPMOF half-coupler with a metal layer.


Efficient surface reconstruction and reverse engineering techniques are usually based on a polygonal mesh representation of the geometry: the resulting models emerge from piecewise linear interpolation of a set of sample points. The quality of the reconstruction not only depends on the number and density of the sample points but also on their alignment to sharp and rounded features of the original geometry. Bad alignment can lead to severe alias artifacts. In this paper we present a sampling pattern for feature and blend regions which minimizes these alias errors. We show how to improve the quality of a given polygonal mesh model by resampling its feature and blend regions within an interactive framework. We further demonstrate sophisticated modeling operations that can be implemented based on this resampling technique.


ABSTRACT The serine/threonine kinase 5′ adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK), a heterotrimeric protein known as a metabolic switch, is involved in oocyte nuclear maturation in mice, cattle, and swine. The present study analyzed AMPK activation in cumulus cell expansion during in vitro maturation (IVM) of porcine cumulus-oocyte complexes (COC). 5-Aminoimidazole-4-carboxamide-1-beta-d-ribofuranoside (AICAR) is a well-known activator of AMPK. It inhibited oocyte meiotic resumption in COC. Moreover, cumulus cell expansion did not occur in the presence of AICAR, demonstrating its marked impact on cumulus cells. Activation of AMPK was supported by AICAR-mediated phosphorylation of alpha AMPK subunits. Furthermore, the presence of AICAR increased glucose uptake, a classical response to activation of this metabolic switch in response to depleted cellular energy levels. Neither nuclear maturation nor cumulus expansion was reversed by glucosamine, an alternative substrate in hyaluronic acid synthesis, through the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway, which ruled out possible depletion of substrates. Both increased gap junction communication and phosphodiesterase activity in COC are dependent on protein synthesis during the initial hours of IVM; however, both were inhibited in the presence of AICAR, which supports the finding that activation of AMPK by AICAR mediated inhibition of protein synthesis. Moreover, this protein synthesis inhibition was equivalent to that of the well-known protein synthesis inhibitor cycloheximide, as observed on cumulus expansion and protein concentration. Finally, the phosphorylation level of selected kinases was investigated. The pattern of raptor phosphorylation is supportive of activation of AMPK-mediated inhibition of protein synthesis. In conclusion, AICAR-mediated AMPK activation in porcine COC inhibited cumulus cell expansion and protein synthesis. These results bring new considerations to the importance of this kinase in ovarian physiology and to the development of new oocyte culture medium.


Dielectrophoresis (DEP) refers to the motion of particles that results from the interaction between a non-uniform external field and the induced dipole moment. Under an extremely high field-gradient created in microfabricated electrode systems, objects with molecular dimensions, such as DNA, can be attracted and trapped. Since the DEP force is stronger for large objects, biomolecules can be separated by the difference in their molecular size. In this paper, the electric field-flow separator, which we call DEP chromatography, is developed and tested. The device consists of a microelectrode array for dielectrophoretic trapping of biomolecules, which is covered by a lid having a microfabricated fluid passage. Water solutions of λ-DNA (48.5kbp) and an oligonucleotide (22 nucleotides) are fed to the device, separately or as a mixture. Under the field strength of 1MV/m at IMHz, λ-DNA is collected onto the electrode array, while the oligonucleotide is not, thus enabling the separation between λ-DNA and the oligonucleotide. During the experiment, dependence of the DEP collection on the molecular concentration is observed. The interpretation for this phenomenon is the aggregate formation at high molecular concentrations due to the attractive force between induced dipole moments on the molecules.