Ralph Bunche is remembered most for three major achievements in the international field. His mediation of the end of the first Israel-Arab war, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize; his work in the tumultuous period of independence in the Congo; and his "invention " of United Nations peacekeeping, which itself won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. This article looks at the legacy of each of these achievements. While Bunche's contemporary achievements were outstanding, in each of these areas the long-term legacy is marked by disappointment and indeed retrogression from the time of his contributions. THE MIDDLE EAST This article does not propose to analyze in depth the diplomacy in the Middle East. Instead it looks at the legacy of United Nations (UN) involvement in this region in the aftermath of the negotiations of 1948-49 and again in 1957. In short, Bunche's leadership, especially in the first of these periods, represents the highpoint of UN responsibility and direction of Middle East diplomacy. Since then there has been a steady decline in the UN's role to the point that until very recently it was virtually a non-actor in one of the most turbulent parts of the world. How did this happen? Bunche learned quickly that diplomacy in this region was fraught with charges of bias, with duplicity by external players, and heavy handedness. In this first period of his Middle East diplomacy, Bunche was accused by Israelis of a pro-Arab bias, a criticism picked up by a broad array of American commentators, even including W.E.B. DuBois (Rivlin, 1990; Urquhart, 1993). The interests of major powers, particularly Britain, would confound his mediating efforts. The position of the United States, still ambivalent on many of the points in question, was not yet as profound as later, but it required special attention. Bunche also faced the continuing efforts of the parties to make progress on the ground, through military or other means. Yet Bunche was able to maintain his position as the central mediating party. Through dogged, six week-long discussions at Rhodes in early 1949, Bunche hammered out the armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt. Agreements with Syria and Jordan would follow. For the moment, earlier accusations were forgotten and Bunche returned home a hero, praised by all sides. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1956-57, the UN was once again heavily engaged in the wake of the British, French, and Israeli invasion of the Sinai. But in this situation, the overriding influence of the United States was becoming evident. The decision of the United States to oppose the invasion, insist upon withdrawal of all three forces, and to back the UN in policing the agreement was critical to what UN Secretary General Dag Hammerskjold, Bunche, and their UN colleagues were able to achieve. What was significant in this regard was the strong support of the United States for a substantial UN role. It was in this situation that UN peacekeeping was born, with the creation of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), the first armed UN military force. Once again, Bunche found himself in the crosshairs of those accusing the UN of bias; in this case, of being "slaves" to the Egyptians in the deployment of UNEF. Meanwhile, the Egyptians made life for the UN almost equally difficult (Urquhart, 1993). Nevertheless, UNEF came to be considered a success, as the warring sides settled down to yet another, albeit short period of peace. Ominously, however, as perhaps signs of problems to come, Israel refused to allow UNEF to be posted on its side of the border.4 Ten years later, Egyptian President Nasser would demand UNEF's withdrawal from Egyptian soil as a prelude to the 1967 Six Day War. The Six Day War marked the beginning of the end of a major UN role in the Middle East. In the run-up to the war, this time it was Egypt that accused Bunche of bias, to the point that secretary General U Thant was told that Bunche would not be welcome in accompanying U Thant on a visit to Cairo. …


Adherence to treatment in psychiatric populations is notoriously low. In this randomized, controlled, proof-of-concept study, we sought to examine whether motivational interviewing (MI) could be used to enhance motivation for, adherence to, and benefit obtained from cognitive rehabilitation. Dual diagnosis MI, developed specifically for individuals with psychotic symptoms and disorganization, was further adapted to focus on cognitive impairments and their impact. Sixty-four outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders completed baseline assessments and were randomized to receive either the 2-session MI focused on cognitive functioning or a 2-session sham control interview focused on assessment and feedback about preferred learning styles. Next, all participants were given 4 weeks during which they could attend up to 10 sessions of a computer-based math training program, which served as a brief analog for a full course of cognitive rehabilitation. As hypothesized, MI condition was associated with greater increases in task-specific motivation along with greater training program session attendance. Moreover, postinterview motivation level predicted session attendance. There were no significant differences in improvement on a measure of cognitive training content, which may have been due to the abbreviated nature of the training. While the literature on the efficacy of MI for individuals with psychosis has been mixed, we speculate that our positive findings may have been influenced by the adaptations made to MI as well as the focus on a nonpharmacological intervention.


Stockouts of HIV commodities increase the risk of treatment interruption, antiretroviral resistance, treatment failure, morbidity and mortality. The study objective was to assess the magnitude and duration of stockouts of HIV medicines and diagnostic tests in public facilities in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. This was a cross-sectional survey involving visits to facilities and warehouses in April and May 2015. All zonal warehouses, all public facilities with more than 200 patients on antiretroviral treatment (ART) (high-burden facilities) and a purposive sample of facilities with 200 or fewer patients (low-burden facilities) in Kinshasa were selected. We focused on three adult ART formulations, cotrimoxazole tablets, and HIV diagnostic tests. Availability of items was determined by physical check, while stockout duration until the day of the survey visit was verified with stock cards. In case of ART stockouts, we asked the pharmacist in charge what the facility coping strategy was for patients needing those medicines. The study included 28 high-burden facilities and 64 low-burden facilities, together serving around 22000 ART patients. During the study period, a national shortage of the newly introduced first-line regimen Tenofovir-Lamivudine-Efavirenz resulted in stockouts of this regimen in 56% of high-burden and 43% of low-burden facilities, lasting a median of 36 (interquartile range 29–90) and 44 days (interquartile range 24–90) until the day of the survey visit, respectively. Each of the other investigated commodities were found out of stock in at least two low-burden and two high-burden facilities. In 30/41 (73%) of stockout cases, the commodity was absent at the facility but present at the upstream warehouse. In 30/57 (54%) of ART stockout cases, patients did not receive any medicines. In some cases, patients were switched to different ART formulations or regimens. Stockouts of HIV commodities were common in the visited facilities. Introduction of new ART regimens needs additional planning.


One of the main challenges of formal verification is the ability to handle systems of realistic size, which is especially exacerbated in the context of software verification. In this dissertation, we suggest two related approaches that, while both relying on formal method techniques, can still be applied to larger practical systems. The scalability is mainly achieved by restricting the types of properties we are considering and guarantees that are given.
Our first approach is a novel run-time monitoring framework. Unlike previous work on this topic, we expect the properties to be specified using Property Specication Language (PSL). PSL is a newly adopted IEEE P1850 standard and is an extension of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). The new features include regular expressions and finite trace semantics, which make the new logic very attractive for run-time monitoring of both software and hardware designs. To facilitate the new logic we have extended the existing algorithm for LTL tester construction to cover the PSL-specific operators. Another novelty of our approach is the ability to use partial information about the program that is being monitored while the existing tools only use the information about the observed trace and the property under consideration. This allows going beyond the focus of traditional run-time monitoring tools - error detection in the execution trace, towards the focus of static analysis - bug detection in programs.
In our second approach, we employ static analysis to compute SAT-based function summaries to detect invalid pointer accesses. To compute function summaries, we propose new techniques for improving the precision and performance in order to reduce the false error rates. In particular, we use BDDs to represent a symbolic simulation of functions. BDDs allow an efficient representation of path-sensitive information and high level simplification. In addition, we use a light-weight range analysis technique for determining lower and upper bounds for program variables, which can further offoad the work from the SAT solver. Note that while in our current implementation the analysis happens at compile time, we can also use the function summaries as a basis for run-time monitoring.


Knowledge of "popular proteins" has been a focus of multiple Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) initiatives and can guide the development of proteomics assays targeting important disease pathways. We report here an updated method to identify prioritized protein lists from the research literature, and apply it to catalog lists of important proteins across multiple cell types, sub-anatomical regions, and disease phenotypes of interest. We provide a systematic collection of popular proteins across 10,129 human diseases as defined by the Disease Ontology, 10,642 disease phenotypes defined by Human Phenotype Ontology, and 2,370 cellular pathways defined by Pathway Ontology. This strategy allows instant retrieval of popular proteins across the human "diseasome", and further allows reverse queries from protein to disease, enabling functional analysis of experimental protein lists using bibliometric annotations.


In the Brazilian savanna, there is a risk that soil fertility of pastures declines to a level below that of the native savanna because of low fertilizer application. To evaluate biophysical pasture sustainability we compared regularly fertilized productive pasture (PP), degraded pasture fertilized 13 yr previously (DP), and native savanna (Cerrado, CE) in an on-farm experiment. We determined (i) biomass productivity of the pastures and (ii) nutrient concentrations in Anionic Acrustoxes from three plots under each of CE, DP, and PP. From the 0- to 2-m soil layer, we sampled solid phase in January 1998 and soil solution during two rainy seasons (1997-1998 and 1998-1999). The mean aboveground biomass production (dry weight) was 2.1 Mg ha -1 yr -4 for DP and 4.1 Mg ha -1 yr -1 for PP. In the solid phase of the 0- to 0.15-m layer, mean total N and S and exchangeable Ca and Mg concentrations increased in the order CE < DP < PP, while NaHCO 3 -extractable P was not significantly different among CE, DP, and PP. In the soil solution at 0.15-m depth, pH and concentrations of Ca and Mg also increased in the order CE < DP < PP. At the 2-m depth, only K, Mn, and NO 3 -N concentrations in soil solution were slightly higher under the pastures than under CE indicating an increased risk of leaching losses to below the rooting zone. Thus, topsoil fertility in both pastures is increased compared with CE, and little leaching occurs. Some fertility indicators in DP are still improved compared with CE 13 yr after a single fertilization.


John Grogan is a well-known and respected author on labour law and has extensive practical experience. His latest work, Collective Labour Law, first appeared in 1993 as a companion to Riekert's Basic Employment Law. In 1996, both were merged into Workplace Law. The author has once more decided to separate the two labour-law components (individual and collective labour law) in order to produce a comprehensive work on each of them. Collective Labour Law, which is in its first edition, therefore serves as a second volume to Dismissal, Discrimination and Unfair Labour Practices, published in 2005.


In this research a comparison was made of reading speed in mother tongue (Dutch) and foreign language (French). Subjects were two groups of Dutch university students in the 3rd or 4th year of their study: students of French language and literature (advanced group), and students of history and Dutch literature (intermediate group) respectively. There was no beginners groupsince all the the students involved had passed through a six year high school French curriculum. Texts of about 150 words (adapted from introductory handbooks, an encyclopedia and a political magazine) were presented in segments of about 1 sentence on a microcomputer screen. Self paced reading rate was registered segment by segment. After each text subjects were asked to give a short summary of the text they had read. The summary was recor-ded on tape. All the texts contained two interwoven topics. Texts were presented to the two groups of students with different reading tasks:1. Read the text and give a summary (neutral condition)2. Read the text and give a summary of what it says about topic χ3. Read the text and give a summary of what it says about topic yAs expected, no significant difference was found between the two groups in Dutch. In the neutral condition the intermediate readers read twice as fast in Dutch as in French. The difference for the advanced readers was a factor 1,3. In the topic oriented Dutch and French reading tasks subjects generally had a faster reading speed in the irrelevant segments.An additional analysis of the results revealed that in the topic oriented French reading tasks only the faster readers (=faster mother tongue readers) had a faster reading speed in the irrelevant segments. The slower readers made no or little difference between relevant and irrelevant segments in the French texts. It was concluded that for slower readers the use of efficient strategies in topic oriented reading tasks is only possible beyond a fairly high level of language proficiency.


This study was conducted to analyze the performance differences between alternative education campuses in Texas that used teacher-directed strategies and those that used self-directed strategies. The study was also conducted to inform educators of the results these two strategies had achieved with at-risk students during the three years of 2006-2008. The study used the results from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test as reported in the AEIS annual reports from the Texas Education Agency. Alternative education schools were grouped according to the strategy used to educate at-risk students. The results of the statistical tests showed the two strategies had similar performance results and there was no statistical difference between the two. The results offered several implications concerning the ability of at-risk students to achieve in alternative education schools including possible reasons why students who were previously unsuccessful became successful in alternative settings. The report also addressed the number of students who continued to be unsuccessful even when placed on an alternative education campus. Possible reasons for this continued inability to succeed are discussed. Recommendations for further research were listed at the conclusion of the study.


Recent theories of the Long Divergence between Middle Eastern and Western European economies focus on Middle Eastern (over-)reliance on religious legitimacy, use of slave soldiers, and persistence of restrictive proscriptions of religious (Islamic) law. These theories take as exogenous the cultural values that complement the prevailing institutions. As a result, they miss the role of cultural values in either supporting the persistence of or inducing change in the economic and institutional environment. In this paper, we address these issues by modeling the joint evolution of institutions and culture. In doing so, we place the various hypotheses of economic divergence into one, unifying framework. We highlight the role that cultural transmission plays in reinforcing institutional evolution toward either theocratic or secular states. We extend the model to shed light on political decentralization and technological change in the two regions.


Two sets of experimental measurement were carried out on an axisymmetric swirling jet flow and a natural convection boundary layer. In the first experiment, the far field of an incompressible swirling jet, discharged into a quiescent ambient has been studied using laser Doppler anemometry. The effect of low to moderate swirl (below vortex breakdown) was studied by measuring velocity profiles of the mean and fluctuating streamwise, radial and azimuthal velocity components at different streamwise locations
up to 50 jet exit diameters. The scaled velocity and turbulence intensity profiles, centerline decay and growth rates for two swirling jets with the strength of
(S=0.15 and 0.25) have been compared to those obtained in the same facility without swirl (S=0). Like the previous observations for the near jet, there was no observable effect on the properly scaled far jet for the S=0.15
case. For the S=0.25 case, the only statistically significant effect was a shift in the virtual origin. The results were in excellent agreement with the equilibrium similarity theory of Ewing[1999] in which the mean azimuthal
component of velocity falls off as the inverse square of the downstream distance.
By contrast, the mean streamwise velocity and turbulence intensities fall off with the inverse of the downstream distance. As a consequence, the mean azimuthal equation uncouples from the rest, so the asymptotic swirling jet behaves like the non-swirling jet. The swirl is also shown to have a negligible effect on the overall Reynolds normal and shear stress balances.

Measurements are also presented for the boundary layer flow of air along a heated vertical cylinder. The flow was entirely driven by natural convection: there was no co-flow. The cylinder was 4.5 m in height, had a diameter of 0.15 m, and was maintained at a temperature of 70 C (approximately 40 C above ambient). The cylinder was heated by water flowing through it, and mounted inside a 1.2 m in diameter cylindrical tunnel through which the ambient flow
could be controlled. Detailed measurements of temperature and velocity statistics were taken at heights of 1.5 m, 3m , 4 m height, the latter corresponding to a Rayleigh number based on length, Ra = g \beta \Delta T x^4 / \alpha \nu = 1.7 \times 10^{11}. Two-component burst-mode LDA was used for measuring the instantaneous velocity, while the fluctuating temperature was measured simultaneously using 1-micron platinum wire. Arrays of thermocouples were used to monitor the ambient and wall conditions, as well as the mean profile. Particular attention was given to the buoyancy and momentum differential and integral equations in order to evaluate the residual effects of stratification and co-flow. The strong temperature gradients and end conduction effects on the temperature probes adversely
affected unsteady temperature results, as did the development with increasing height of the flow between the concentric cylinders.


Tea is a popular, socially accepted, drink that is enjoyed by millions of people. A growing body of evidence suggests that moderate consumption of tea may protect against several forms of cancer. It is also known that bioactivation of precarcinogens and detoxification of ultimate carcinogens is carried out mainly by drug metabolizing enzymes such as cytochrome P450 (CYP). The present study investigates the effect of tea consumption on modulating CYP and phase II conjugating enzymes, and their association in the chemopreventive effect against esophageal tumorigenesis using both in vitro and in vivo techniques. Female Wistar rats were given aqueous solutions (2% w/v) of six different teas, standard green tea extract (GTE) (0.5% w/v), and dandelion tea (2% w/v) as the sole source of fluid for two weeks prior to and during the entire period of tumour induction (12 weeks). Animals were gavaged with 0.5 mg/kg N-nitrosomethylbenzylamine (NMBA) twice weekly for 12 weeks for esophageal tumor induction and the activities of different CYP isoforms and phase II enzymes were determined in the liver microsomes or cytosols. GTE, green tea and Dandelion tea caused decrease in tumour multiplication, tumour size and tumour volume; however, none of these tea preparations altered tumour incidence. No appreciable changes in drug metabolizing enzyme activity were observed in the treatment groups. Thus, the modulations in the activities of CYP 1A1/ 1A2 and CYP2E enzymes, by pre-treatment with green and dandelion teas, observed in our earlier experiments, seem to be compensated by the tumor inducing agent, NMBA. The balance between phase I carcinogen-activating enzymes and phase II detoxifying enzymes could be important in determining the risk of developing chemically-induced cancer and the present study in conjunction with the previous observations suggest a possible role of drug metabolizing enzymes in the anticancer effect of tea.


Never before in history has data been generated at such high volumes as it is today. Exploring and analyzing the vast volumes of data is becoming increasingly difficult. Information visualization and visual data mining can help to deal with the flood of information. The advantage of visual data exploration is that the user is directly involved in the data mining process. There are a large number of information visualization techniques which have been developed over the last decade to support the exploration of large data sets. In this paper, we propose a classification of information visualization and visual data mining techniques which is based on the data type to be visualized, the visualization technique, and the interaction and distortion technique. We exemplify the classification using a few examples, most of them referring to techniques and systems presented in this special section.


Path planning, the problem of efficiently discovering high-reward trajectories, often requires optimizing a high-dimensional and multimodal reward function. Popular approaches like CEM and CMA-ES greedily focus on promising regions of the search space and may get trapped in local maxima. DOO and VOOT balance exploration and exploitation, but use space partitioning strategies independent of the reward function to be optimized. Recently, LaMCTS empirically learns to partition the search space in a reward-sensitive manner for black-box optimization. In this paper, we develop a novel formal regret analysis for when and why such an adaptive region partitioning scheme works. We also propose a new path planning method LaP3 which improves the function value estimation within each sub-region, and uses a latent representation of the search space. Empirically, LaP3 outperforms existing path planning methods in 2D navigation tasks, especially in the presence of difficult-to-escape local optima, and shows benefits when plugged into the planning components of model-based RL such as PETS. These gains transfer to highly multimodal real-world tasks, where we outperform strong baselines in compiler phase ordering by up to 39% on average across 9 tasks, and in molecular design by up to 0.4 on properties on a 0-1 scale. Code is available at https://github.com/yangkevin2/neurips2021-lap3.


The objective of this thesis have been the development and the analysis of microscopic mathematical models to investigate the dependence of triglycerides conformations from environmental conditions. Triglycerides are important constituents of food products that show polymorphic solid transitions. Such behaviors influence greatly processes management involving fats mixtures. To investigate the relationship between macroscopic conditions and conformational induced properties, we dealt with microscopic mathematical models.
The first part of the thesis regards the building of a united-atoms model from which physical properties and structural distribution functions of a liquid phase were derived.
The second part regards the development of a coarse-grained model. The force field of such model was developed, by means of statistical tools, using
suitable distribution functions derived from the atomistic one.
The coarse-grained model was used to perform numerical experiments to highlight the dependence of molecules conformations from experimental conditions.
The results of our simulations show a clear relationship between the conformational state of molecules and temperature annealing condition. Moreover, the improvement of order features through radial distribution functions was
pointed out during several heating-cooling processes. The formation of small clusters of few planar molecules can be easily observed by means of visual inspection.
The effect of simple flow conditions imposed on the system was also investigated. Imposed flows increase molecules mobility causing a raise of planar molecules and a greater uniform distribution of inter-molecular orientational
order vector.


Dealing with the most translated work of German literature, the Tales of the brothers Grimm (1812-1815), this book discusses their history, notably in relation to Denmark and subsequently other nations from 1816 to 1986. The Danish intelligentsia responded enthusiastically to the tales and some were immediately translated into Danish by a nobleman and by the foremost Romantic poet. Their renditions remained in print for a century and embued the tales with high prestige. This book discusses translators, approaches, and other parameters such as copyright, and changes in target audiences. The tales' social acceptability inspired Hans Christian Andersen to write his celebrated fairytales. Combined, the Grimm and Andersen tales came to constitute the 'international fairytale'.This genre was born in processes of translation and, today, it is rooted more firmly in the world of translation than in national literatures. This book thus addresses issues of interest to literary, cross-cultural studies and translation.


The location and distribution of wetlands and riparian zones influences the ecological functions present on a landscape. Accurate and easily reproducible landcover maps enable monitoring of land management decisions and ultimately a greater understanding of landscape ecology. Multi-season Landsat ETM+ imagery from 2001 combined with ancillary topographic and soils data was used to map wetland and riparian systems in the Gallatin Valley of Southwest Montana. Classification Tree Analysis (CTA) and Stochastic Gradient Boosting (SGB) decision-tree based classification algorithms were used to distinguish wetlands and riparian areas from the rest of the landscape. CTA creates a single classification tree using a one-step-look-ahead procedure to reduce variance. SGB utilized classification errors to refine tree development and incorporated the results of multiple trees into a single best classification. The SGB classification (86.0% overall accuracy) was more effective than CTA (61.7% overall accuracy) at detecting a variety of wetlands and riparian zones present on this landscape. A change detection analysis was performed for the years 1988 and 2001. The change detection used Landsat-based Tasseled Cap (TC) components and change vector analysis (CVA) to identify locations of wetland/riparian gain or loss in the 13-year period. CVA of TC brightness, greenness, and wetness components reduces the compound errors of multi-date classifications by using a threshold value to separate land cover change from spectral variability between 1988 and 2001 imagery. Only the highly changed pixels were classified using 1988 Landsat imagery and ancillary data. These change pixels were then merged with the 2001 classified image to develop a wetland/riparian map for 1988. The high overall accuracy of the 1988 classification (81%) developed with this procedure showed the benefits of this technique for mapping historical landcover features. Comparison of the 1988 and 2001 classifications identified locations where wetlands/riparian areas increased, decreased, or remained stable between these years. TC based CVA had an overall change detection accuracy of 75.8% and was able to identify areas of isolated and contiguous wetland/riparian change.


The Working Group on aggression has tackled both main issues referred to in article 5 of the Rome Statute and Resolution F, namely the definition of the crime and the conditions of exercise of jurisdiction by the Court. For some participants these two issues are closely interrelated to the point that one cannot be considered without the other. Without prejudice to the substance of this view, in practice, a separate debate has taken place to allow an orderly discussion of each aspect of the problem. Discussions during and after Rome demonstrate that there is no easy solution to any of the problems raised. In light of the difficulties to be faced, some continue to argue that aggression should have never been included in the Statute in the first place. Whether they are right or wrong is irrelevant today. The Statute has been adopted and will soon enter into force. The international community needs now to act upon decisions that were made at the Rome Conference both to include the crime and to mandate the PrepCom to draft proposals with the view of implementing this inclusion at a review conference. All those who promote the establishment of a universal Court, regardless of their position with regard to the crime of aggression, are required to negotiate in good faith in order to seek an adequate answer to the problem. Failure to do so could undermine the credibility of the process and weaken support for the Court. THE WORKING GROUP ON AGGRESSION AT THE PREPARATORY COMMISSION FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT Silvia A. Femdndez de Gurmendi*


The UK Biobank project is a large prospective cohort study of ~500,000 individuals from across the United Kingdom, aged between 40-69 at recruitment. A rich variety of phenotypic and health-related information is available on each participant, making the resource unprecedented in its size and scope. Here we describe the genome-wide genotype data (~805,000 markers) collected on all individuals in the cohort and its quality control procedures. Genotype data on this scale offers novel opportunities for assessing quality issues, although the wide range of ancestries of the individuals in the cohort also creates particular challenges. We also conducted a set of analyses that reveal properties of the genetic data – such as population structure and relatedness – that can be important for downstream analyses. In addition, we phased and imputed genotypes into the dataset, using computationally efficient methods combined with the Haplotype Reference Consortium (HRC) and UK10K haplotype resource. This increases the number of testable variants by over 100-fold to ~96 million variants. We also imputed classical allelic variation at 11 human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes, and as a quality control check of this imputation, we replicate signals of known associations between HLA alleles and many common diseases. We describe tools that allow efficient genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of multiple traits and fast phenome-wide association studies (PheWAS), which work together with a new compressed file format that has been used to distribute the dataset. As a further check of the genotyped and imputed datasets, we performed a test-case genome-wide association scan on a well-studied human trait, standing height.


A Gothic Tale From The X-Ray Conference Room. When I left Poland in 1968, I first settled in Nakskov, on Denmark's southernmost island. I was appointed deputy head of Nakskov Hospital's department of internal medicine. This was a large department of more than seventy beds. The working day used to start at 8:30 with an X-ray conference at which the radiologist commented on our patients' roentgenograms. Sometimes the X-rays revealed a cancer--mostly of the stomach, or the lung, or the colon. Every time this happened, which was once a week or once a fortnight, all the doctors present, the head of internal medicine Dr. S, the four residents, and the radiologist burst into Homeric laughter. My sitting there, stone-faced, never spoiled the general hilarity. If the cancer had not been suspected by the internists, the uproar would not abate for a whole minute, at least. I felt I had to find answers to nagging questions. How could adult men, doctors, behave in such a bizarre, obscene way? Who were these people? And who were we, men and women of my own circle? What made us what we were? Thus began the quest which I have pursued for more than thirty years. What's Happening To Doctors' Manners And Morals? More strange observations followed. In 1971, a public debate was going on in Denmark whether to close or maintain the "unplanned" kidney dialysis center at a hospital in the town of Fredericia, on the country's central island of Fyn. The "abolitionist" party was led by the chairman of the Ministry of Health's committee on kidney disease, Dr. T-H, professor of internal medicine at Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet. Trying to discredit the leader of a Citizens' Action Group, this doctor called a press conference, announced that he was that man's attending physician, and divulged information from the patient's hospital file. The good doctor also mailed excerpts from the medical file to the editors of major Danish newspapers. In Nakskov, I once told Dr. S, the head of the department that I applied for a position at the department of cardiology in Aalborg, a larger city in the North, and would go for an interview. This was unpleasant news to S, who was known as a difficult man and wouldn't easily find another deputy. On the day of my trip, S, quoting a formal, but never followed, point in my contract, kept me in the hospital past the hour of my train. I had to drive in heavy snowstorm, on slippery roads. I sighed, lamenting the professional circle I had left in my native Poland, the proud men who would never debase themselves by such petty bullying. I became uncomfortably aware that I had now fallen into bad company. In Holland I was struck dumb seeing for the first time in my life doctors who intentionally caused deaths of their patients. Some of these acts involved low cheating. I discuss the subject elsewhere in this work; but let's turn again to lighter subjects. In Den Bosch, a cardiologist, let's call him Dr. X, was asked to give out a patient's coronary angiography film for a second opinion. He refused. His pronouncement that the patient was inoperable was final, and as the owner of the angiography film Dr. X decided not to give it out. But the patient, a Mr. T, a half-Javanese former regular in the Dutch Army, was not a man who would easily give up. He called the press. An article in the province's major newspaper told the whole story and depicted Dr. X as a stupid bully. Only then did he agree to release the film. A second opinion was obtained: Mr. T's coronary arteries were slender and, indeed, a bypass could not be done by just any heart surgeon--but it could be done by one particularly skilled in operating on thin vessels. Mr. T had his coronary bypass done with good results by Dr. Cooley at St. Luke's Hospital in Houston, Texas. The group of five cardiologists, of which Dr. X was a member, was also involved in another scandal. For reasons of economy, the Dutch Ministry of Health had authorized for the city of Den Bosch only one laboratory of cardiac catheterization. …


Parallels have been drawn between the evolution of nonrecombining regions in fungal mating‐type chromosomes and animal and plant sex chromosomes, particularly regarding the stages of recombination cessation forming evolutionary strata of allelic divergence. Currently, evidence and explanations for recombination cessation in fungi are sparse, and the presence of evolutionary strata has been examined in a minimal number of fungal taxa. Here, the basidiomycete genus Microbotryum was used to determine the history of recombination cessation for loci on the mating‐type chromosomes. Ancestry of linkage with mating type for 13 loci was assessed across 20 species by a phylogenetic method. No locus was found to exhibit trans‐specific polymorphism for alternate alleles as old as the mating pheromone receptor, indicating that ages of linkage to mating type varied among the loci. The ordering of loci in the ancestry of linkage to mating type does not agree with their previously proposed assignments to evolutionary strata. This study suggests that processes capable of influencing divergence between alternate alleles may act at loci in the nonrecombining regions (e.g., gene conversion) and encourages further work to dissect the evolutionary processes acting upon genomic regions that determine mating compatibility.


The wide deployment of general purpose and embedded microprocessors has emphasized the need for defenses against cyber-attacks. Due to the globalized supply chain, however, there are several stages where a processor can be maliciously modified. The most promising stage, and the hardest during which to inject the hardware trojan, is the fabrication stage. As modern microprocessor chips are characterized by very dense, billion-transistor designs, such attacks must be very carefully crafted. In this paper, we demonstrate zero overhead malicious modifications on both high-performance and embedded microprocessors. These hardware trojans enable privilege escalation through execution of an instruction stream that excites the necessary conditions to make the modification appear. The minimal footprint, however, comes at the cost of a small window of attack opportunities. Experimental results show that malicious users can gain escalated privileges within a few million clock cycles. In addition, no system crashes were reported during normal operation, rendering the modifications transparent to the end user.


The possibility of using a hyperbolic metamaterial to form conventional and epsilon-near-zero Tamm plasmon polaritons in the near-infrared and visible spectral ranges is demonstrated. The spectral properties of the hyperbolic metamaterial are investigated in the framework of the effective medium theory and confirmed by the transfer matrix method. It is found that at the oblique incidence of light onto a structure, the I-type hyperbolic metamaterial can be implemented, while II-type cannot. The sensitivity of the epsilon-near-zero wavelength to the variation in the angle of light incidence for TE and TM waves is demonstrated. It is shown that both the high-quality and broadband Tamm plasmon polaritons are excited in the investigated structures.


Anaerobic digestion (AD) is used increasingly worldwide to convert organic waste materials into the renewable energy of methane gas. However, the produced biogas consists of a mixture of typically 50% methane CO2, respectively. The presence of CO2 in biogas affects engine performance; therefore, removing CO2 content will significantly improve the usability of biogas. Recently, integrating bioelectrochemical systems (BESs) with AD processes have been considered as a way to increase methane content.

The principle of the BES in enriching biogas in methane content is thought to be in the transfer of electrons from an active cathode either directly to methanogens or via reduction of protons to H2 and subsequent H2 transfer to hydrogenotrophic methanogens that reduce CO2 to CH4. Two different types of BES have been described in this thesis: one is membrane-free single-chamber reactor which contains both anode and cathode; the other reactor consists of two-chambers separated by an ion-exchange membrane in order to avoid interference of the anodic reaction with the cathode.

This study combined BES with AD (thermophilic anaerobic sludge used as an inoculum) and investigated the capability of upgrading biogas to methane under thermophilic conditions. For the first time, we showed a direct comparison between single and two-chamber systems. Based on the results, the following observations were made:

1. The application of the BES to a glucose fed AD resulted in an immediate increase in biogas production (approximately from 1 L/L/d to 1.5 L/L/d) and methane content (approximately from 50% to about 65%). This applied for both reactor configurations (single- and two-chamber for the first 4 days. However, after one week the methane content of the single chamber decreased to that of the control AD without BES, while the two-chamber reactor increased its methane level to > 90%. The reason for the diminished longer term performance of the single chamber reactor is presumably the production of oxygen by the anode as indicated by increased redox potential.

2. pH adjustment was needed during the operation of the two-chamber reactor as its cathodic chamber tended to be alkaline (>9); while the pH of the single-chamber reactor was in the range of 6-7.

3. After 3 weeks experiment, both single- and two-chamber reactor showed signs of failure by an accumulation of VFA and diminished methane production. The build-up of VFA was attributed to the H2 produced by the BES inside the AD which was known to result in VFA accumulation.

To avoid the volatile fatty acids (VFAs) accumulation, the BES was removed from the AD and placed in-line with the AD, receiving the biogas by functioning as a biogas-filter. This novel concept of using a BES as a biogas-filter was evaluated as an alternative way of upgrading biogas to methane. And the microbial community of a mixed-culture methane producing biocathode was investigated to illuminate the possible role of microbial in methane production. Results revealed that:

1. When applying a WE potential at -1.1 V vs. Ag/AgCl the biofilter increased the methane content of inflowing biogas from 50% to 85%.

2. The microbial community at the start of the experiment was dominated by two phylotypes of Archea- Methanosarcina and Methanobacteria. However, at the end of experiment hydrogenotrophic Methanothermobacter was the majority population of Archea (95.4%).

3. Based on the analysis of energy efficiency, it was showed that final energy output as extra methane was 57.1 kJ and the overall energy efficiency was 56%.

4. The use of BES as an inline biofilter to remove CO2 from biogas represents an alternative, not yet published approach that is not likely to cause digester failure as observed by BES imbedded in the AD but showing similar performance.

Overall, this thesis showed the capacity of BES on biogas upgrading and the selection of electromethanogens on the biocathode during the BES operation in the two-chamber reactor. Thus, further studies on the optimisation of BES process and the mechanisms of catalysis of biocathode will provide essential knowledge for improving BES performance for the practical application.


Abstract Background:   Imposter syndrome (IS) first described in 1978 is recently gaining more importance due to its long lasting, strong and detrimental implications on the Medical students as well as the institutions and society. The sufferers are competent objectively but they have a secret fear in them, that they are inadequate in the skills and knowledge and this secret will be open to others anytime. It is strongly associated with burnout phenomenon, anxiety, depression, many other psychological effects and many significant implications on medical education and training. Suffering students develop different styles of learning and find it difficult to learn through conventional or usual teaching strategies. Objectives:   This study objective was to find out the frequency of IS among Pakistani medical students. Methodology:   This was a cross sectional, descriptive study, conducted in a private medical college of Lahore, Pakistan in November 2016. Sampling technique was convenient non-probability type and study instrument was 08 items questionnaire. The students who answered "Yes" for five or more out of eight questions were considered positive for Imposter Syndrome. Results:   Out of 143 final year MBBS students 58.7% were females & 41.3% males. Sixty eight (68) students (47.5%) were found having Imposter Syndrome according to the Young Imposter scale (YIS) used as questionnaire. Out of these 45 (53.5%) were females and 23 (38.9%) males. Conclusion:   Imposter syndrome or phenomenon may be present in significant frequencies and number among medical students. This may have detrimental effects on body, mind, personalities and academic as well as professional developments. Efforts should be made to find out IS/IP among students and to train both students and teachers.


The set covers the full breadth of American immigration history in 525 alphabetically arranged and easy-to-understand articles. Designed for and written to be understood by high school students and college undergraduates, ""Encyclopedia of American Immigration"" offers a clear and innovative approach to immigration history that can also be used by advanced students and scholars. The goal of the set is to address all questions about immigration that students might reasonably be expected to ask: Where immigrants have come from and why; how they have adapted to their new homeland; how they have contributed to American culture and society; how government policies toward them have changed; practical issues of legal and social integration; and how American immigration history has fit into worldwide migration patterns. One-third of the essays are overviews covering broad issues ranging from accent discrimination to AIDS, world migration patterns, and xenophobia. The next large category of essays might be considered the set's core: 70 articles on specific ethnic and national immigrant groups. Each of these essays outlines its group's immigration history, emphasizing what has made each group unique. Other important essays cover events, laws and treaties, organizations and institutions, and Supreme Court rulings on immigration. In addition, every state in the union has its own essay, averaging nearly 1,000 words in length, along with a table summarizing demographic data. Ten cities with particularly large immigrant populations are also subjects of essays. Lastly, the set has articles on 45 individual persons, most of whom were post-independence-era immigrants who had a significant impact on the United States. These range from U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who came from Czechoslovakia, and the Dominican-born writer Julia Alvarez to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian bodybuilder and actor who became governor of California. All these essays focus on the experiences of their subjects as immigrants. ""Encyclopedia of American Immigration"" is organized and formatted to be student friendly. Essays are arranged alphabetically under the headwords students are most likely to seek, and finding aids are offered in the form of textual cross-references (e.g., ""McCarran-Walter Act. See Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952""), ""See also"" cross-references at the end of each essay, a category list in volume 3, and a complete list of contents in every volume.


Background: Mutations in the glucocerebrosidase (GBA) gene have recently been identified as contributing to the development of Parkinson disease (PD) in Ashkenazi Jews. Methods: To investigate whether this finding can be confirmed in a Taiwanese population, we conducted a case control study in a cohort of 518 PD patients and 339 controls for the three common GBA mutations in Taiwan, L444P, RecNciI and R120W, using PCR restriction enzyme assay and DNA sequencing. Results: Heterozygous GBA mutations were detected in 16 PD patients (3.1%) and four controls (1.2%). Although this difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.0703), the average age at disease onset of the 16 PD patients (50.6 (12.3) years) was significantly younger than that of the total patient group (63.8 (10.5) years; p = 0.0007) and the non-carrier patient group (64.2 (10.2) years; p = 0.0005). After stratification by age, the frequency of mutation carriers was significantly higher for the early onset PD (EOPD, age at onset ⩽50 years) group than for age matched controls (12.9% vs 1.8%; p = 0.0335) and there was a trend towards an increased risk of the mutation carrier with EOPD (odds ratio 8.30; 95% CI 1.45 to 156.53). Clinically, all 16 patients carrying a GBA mutation presented with a typical parkinsonian phenotype and experienced a good or excellent response to levodopa. Conclusions: Mutations of the GBA gene may be associated with the development of EOPD in Taiwan.


Modern States face the task of compensating individuals in many ways, some of which do not fall within the domain of liability, in the sense of responsibility for an event that caused harm. Thus, it must be stressed the different nature of the right to compensation that arises either from the fault of the governmental bodies or from the risky activities that they undertake ?that is, public liability- and the right to compensation in which underlies motives of solidarity, compassion and efficiency. This article explores such a topic with special reference to British Law, French Law and EU Law. This article also addresses the question whether public liability for fault is actually different from fault as it is used in the domain of Private Law. Furthermore, it aims to ascertain the particular features of the liability regime stated in the European Convention and EU Law, its interpretation by the courts, and its impact on the development of public liability in the States Members, which basically consists on fixing a minimum standard. In fact, there are certain criteria that serve as a common basis for the liability of public administration, but there are significant differences in the conceptions of liability and duties to compensate as well.


Before surface mount components can be placed on a circuit board, it is necessary to print solder paste onto pads. The paste is then melted to make an electrical connection (reflow). A screen printing process is used to print the solder paste onto the board. This is a complicated process with a large number of input parameters. Some of these parameters can be controlled and it is the purpose of this work to investigate control of the process based on measurement of the output shape of the printed paste. The shape is measured using a laser range scanner Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is proposed as a tool for describing solder paste shape with a small number of parameters. This paper discusses the use of PCA for shape analysis in range images as well as explaining how such a description can be incorporated into a process control loop.


The resurgence in local content reforms in most oil-rich Africa countries is broadly understood within the elite-political projects of creating opportunities for domestic capitalists to accumulate rents. New insights from an extended political settlements framework (incorporating ideas) help offer a more explicit understanding of this drive and go further to situate the current local content commitments in Ghana within deeper forms of politics and power relations. The paper asserts the critical role of not only the rents accumulation interests of politicians and domestic capitalists in driving the surge in local content, but also key political settlement tendencies (partisan policy making, coalition building and clientelist politics), underpinned by a linked array of elite interests and ideas. This paper offers deeper political economy insights into the drivers of elite commitment to governing oil in the national interest and argues that current debates concerning the factors driving local content reform in oil-rich African countries could be stronger with a focus on the entwining of interests and ideas generated by the configuration of power within political settlements.


With the support of the Simons Foundation, SFU students were invited by the Institute for the Humanities to submit written research proposals that focused on issues related to citizenship. Cameron Clark presented the following selected paper on November 14, 2007, at SFU Harbour Centre.


The shapes of binary trees can be encoded as permutations having a very special property. These permutations are tree permutations, or equivalently they avoid subwords of the type 231. The generation of binary trees in natural order corresponds to the generation of these special permutations in the lexicographic order. In this paper we use a stringologic approach to the generation of these special permutations: decompositions of essential parts into the subwords having staircase shapes. A given permutation differs from the next one with respect to its tail called here the working suffix. Some new properties of such working suffixes are discovered in the paper and used to design effective algorithms transforming one tree permutation into its successor or predecessor in the lexicographic order. The algorithms use a constant amount of additional memory and they look only at those elements of the permutation which belong to the working suffix. The best-case, average-case and worst-case time complexities of th...


Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to fill a significant research gap in academic literature pertaining to open innovation (OI). To do so, this paper empirically tests the impact of organizational culture, employees' knowledge, attitudes and rewards as antecedents and mediators of OI adoption in organizations, facilitating a more thorough understanding by using an empirical multi-level approach.

Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyzes the results of the "Identification of Industrial Needs for Open Innovation Education in Europe" survey through a quantitative analysis using logistic regression models. This survey includes 528 employees working in 28 different industrial sectors in 37 countries, most of which are in Europe.

Findings
The results suggest a positive impact of organizational characteristics on the adoption of OI (i.e. including the adoption of outside-in and inside-out OI activities in participating organizations), showing that the openness of an organization's culture increases its likelihood of adopting an OI paradigm. More importantly, the results highlight the positive mediating effect of employees' knowledge and rewards on this relationship.

Research limitations/implications
The data set that was the basis of this paper was generated in European countries, the results of the analysis are limited and appropriate for this region and may vary when applied to other regions of the world.

Practical implications
The proposed multi-level approach offers new insight into organizational knowledge. It enables the improvement of OI and knowledge management practices in organizations by assisting practitioners and academics in recognizing the relationship between organizational culture; employees' knowledge, attitudes and rewards; and the adoption of the OI paradigm.

Social implications
This paper offers a possible explanation on why open-border cultures are more likely to have a successful OI adoption, by relating it to factors that advance in the presence of an open-border culture, such as active participation of OI relative departments in knowledge sourcing and knowledge exchange, and rewarding employees for OI activities.

Originality/value
This paper presents a new framework which links organizational culture to OI, moving on from merely examining culture in terms of its positive or negative impact on OI adoption. It contributes to research on the OI paradigm and knowledge management by highlighting the significance of antecedents and mediators from a multi-level perspective using multiple units of analysis. Most previous studies focus on a single unit of analysis.


An exact algorithm is proposed for minimum sum-of-squares nonhierarchical clustering, i.e., for partitioning a given set of points from a Euclidean m-space into a given number of clusters in order to minimize the sum of squared distances from all points to the centroid of the cluster to which they belong. This problem is expressed as a constrained hyperbolic program in 0-1 variables. The resolution method combines an interior point algorithm, i.e., a weighted analytic center column generation method, with branch-and-bound. The auxiliary problem of determining the entering column (i.e., the oracle) is an unconstrained hyperbolic program in 0-1 variables with a quadratic numerator and linear denominator. It is solved through a sequence of unconstrained quadratic programs in 0-1 variables. To accelerate resolution, variable neighborhood search heuristics are used both to get a good initial solution and to solve quickly the auxiliary problem as long as global optimality is not reached. Estimated bounds for the dual variables are deduced from the heuristic solution and used in the resolution process as a trust region. Proved minimum sum-of-squares partitions are determined for the first time for several fairly large data sets from the literature, including Fisher's 150 iris.


BACKGROUND
Pain in Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is common, yet it is often under recognised and poorly managed. In recent years, a variety of pharmacological treatment options have been investigated in clinical trials for people with GBS-associated pain.

OBJECTIVES
To assess the efficacy and safety of pharmacological treatments for various pain symptoms associated with GBS, during both the acute and convalescent (three months or more after onset) phases of GBS.

SEARCH METHODS
On 27 August 2012, we searched the Cochrane Neuromuscular Disease Group Specialized Register, CENTRAL (2012, Issue 8) in The Cochrane Library, MEDLINE (January 1966 to August 2012) and EMBASE (January 1980 to August 2012). In addition, we searched ClinicalTrials.gov and the World Health Organization (WHO) International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.

SELECTION CRITERIA
We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-RCTs in participants with confirmed GBS, with pain assessment as either the primary or secondary outcome. For cross-over trials, an adequate washout period between phases was required for inclusion.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Two review authors independently screened the titles and abstracts of identified records, selected studies for inclusion, extracted eligible data, cross-checked the data for accuracy and assessed the risk of bias of each study.

MAIN RESULTS
Three short-term RCTs, which enrolled 277 randomised participants with acute phase GBS, were included. Risk of bias in the included studies was generally unclear due to insufficient information. None of the included studies reported the primary outcome selected for this review, which was number of patients with self reported pain relief of 50% or greater. One small study investigated seven-day regimens of gabapentin versus placebo. Pain was rated on a scale from 0 (no pain) to 10 (maximum pain). Amongst the 18 participants, significantly lower mean pain scores were found at the endpoint (day 7) in the gabapentin phase compared to the endpoint of the placebo phase (mean difference -3.61, 95% CI -4.12 to -3.10) (very low quality evidence). For adverse events, no significant differences were found in the incidence of nausea (risk ratio (RR) 0.50, 95% CI 0.05 to 5.04) or constipation (RR 0.14, 95% CI 0.01 to 2.54). A second study enrolling 36 participants compared gabapentin, carbamazepine and placebo, all administered over seven days. Participants in the gabapentin group had significantly lower median pain scores on all treatment days in comparison to the placebo and carbamazepine groups (P < 0.05). There were no statistically significant differences in the median pain scores between the carbamazepine and placebo groups from day 1 to day 3, but from day 4 until the end of the study significantly lower median pain scores were noted in the carbamazepine group (P < 0.05) (very low quality evidence). There were no adverse effects of gabapentin or carbamazepine reported other than sedation. One large RCT (223 participants, all also treated with intravenous immunoglobulin), compared a five-day course of methylprednisolone with placebo and found no statistically significant differences in number of participants developing pain (RR 0.89, 95% CI 0.68 to 1.16), number of participants with decreased pain (RR 0.95, 95% CI 0.63 to 1.42) or number of participants with increased pain (RR 0.85, 95% CI 0.52 to 1.41) (low quality evidence). The study did not report whether there were any adverse events.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
While management of pain in GBS is essential and pharmacotherapy is widely accepted as being an important component of treatment, this review does not provide sufficient evidence to support the use of any pharmacological intervention in people with pain in GBS. Although reductions in pain severity were found when comparing gabapentin and carbamazepine with placebo, the evidence was limited and its quality very low. Larger, well-designed RCTs are required to further investigate the efficacy and safety of potential interventions for patients with pain in GBS. Additionally, interventions for pain in the convalescent phase of GBS should be investigated.


Quartz pseudomorphs after possible retrogression of coesite were recognized petrographically within garnets of mafic eclogites from the Lanterman Range (Antarctica). In one of the quartz pseudomorphs the presence of a pristine coesite is indicated by in situ Raman microprobe spectroscopy. The results of the Raman analyses show that the quartz inclusion in addition to the typical quartz vibrations has a weak band at 521 cm-1, which corresponds to the most intense fundamental vibration in coesite. This finding represents a first piece of evidence for ultrahigh-pressure metamorphism in Antarctica which was part of the Gondwana supercontinent affected by the Cambro-Ordovician orogenic cycle.


Ecological perturbations during the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary interval along the eastern margin of the Canadian Western Interior Seaway (WIS) were investigated in a subsurface core from eastern Saskatchewan (distal) and outcrop at the Manitoba Escarpment (proximal). Paleoecological controls on biota included transgressive/regressive cyclicity, the Oceanic Anoxic Event 2, frequent ashfalls, and a stratified water column. Changes in foraminiferal assemblage composition, species richness, and abundance can be correlated between the core and outcrop. The lower Turonian biofacies at both sites is made up exclusively of planktic species, reflecting the persistent bottom water anoxia in the Canadian WIS. The low-diversity assemblage is nearly entirely composed of opportunistic, surface-dwelling species of the genera Muricohedbergella and Heterohelix , responding to water turbidity, reduced salinity, and shallow water depth. Abundances of planktic species are significantly higher in the distal core section. During the early Turonian, diversity slightly increased, with the presence of Whiteinella aprica reflecting periodic improvement of the water column conditions at both sites. The appearance of the clavate species, Clavihedbergella simplex , reflects an expanded oxygen minimum zone, also confirmed by biomarkers, particularly in outcrop. Dwarfing of foraminiferal tests is interpreted as a response to frequent ashfalls that affected the water column. Lowering of sea level during the middle Turonian allowed for seafloor winnowing and caused a brief disappearance of planktic foraminifera. The north-south temperature gradient in the WIS resulted in a lower planktic foraminiferal diversity in what is now Canada compared to the waters that covered what is now the United States and the absence of benthic and deeper-dwelling, keeled planktic species can be attributed to an increasingly well-developed oxygen minimum zone or increasingly stratified water column. The appearance datum of planktic foraminifera is distinctly diachronous along a south to north transect.


This study was conducted to assess the pesticide-related safety risks that Benguet farmers face on a regular basis. Pesticide residue in soil and crops, as well as farmers' knowledge and practices on pesticide were assessed. Methods consisted of survey questionnaire among 38 farmers, and the use of gas chromatography for the analysis of soil and crop samples. All farmers used more than one type of pesticide, most of whom used three types (73.7%). The most common was organophosphate (45.2%). Twelve of the identified pesticide brands were insecticides while the remaining two were fungicides. Twenty-three practiced cocktailing of pesticides (60.5%), mostly to save time. The most common PPE used while spraying pesticides were gas masks, gloves and boots. For the soil and crop samples, 3 soil samples were positive for Chlorpyrifos, two of which exceeded the maximum residue level (MRL). Of the 3 that were positive for Cypermethrin, all exceeded the MRL. Caution must be exercised when handling these potentially harmful pesticides. Proper equipment maintenance, cleaning and storage must be observed to prevent unnecessary pesticide exposure. Pesticide companies and the agricultural branches of the government must work towards adequate user education, focusing on safe handling of pesticides.


Structural features of plasma membranes have been derived from chemical and structural data on nerve myelin, a multilayered membrane system which is highly favorable for direct study. Molecular constituents of such membranes have been related to electron-density distribution curves derived from x-ray diffraction patterns of myelin in fresh nerve tissue. These curves relate to the variations of electron density through the thickness of the membrane layer, and they indicate significant structural differences between Schwann-cell and glial-cell membranes. Experience with the myelin system has also facilitated discussion of the distribution of molecular constituents within the plane of the membrane and the possibility of variations in this distribution in relation to function.


The adverse health effects from hot weather and heat waves represent significant public health risks in vulnerable areas worldwide. Rising temperatures due to climate change are aggravating these risks in a context of fast urbanization, population growth and societal ageing. However, environmental heat-related health effects are largely preventable through adequate preparedness and responses. Public health adaptation to climate change will often require the implementation of heat wave warning systems and targeted preventive activities at different levels. While several national governments have established such systems at the country level, municipalities do not generally play a major role in the prevention of heat disorders. This paper analyzes selected examples of locally operated heat-health prevention plans in Japan. The analysis of these plans highlights their strengths, but also the need of local institutions for assistance to make the transition towards an effective public health management of high temperatures and heat waves. It can also provide useful elements for municipal governments in vulnerable areas, both in planning their climate change and health adaptation activities or to better protect their communities against current health effects from heat.


With literally millions of images moving on the Internet each year it is safe to
say that hiding data in digital image is of real concern to many in the security field.
Therefore how to protect secret messages during transmission becomes an important
issue. Hiding data provides a good layer of protection on the secret message, so the
purpose of this thesis is to study the data hiding techniques in digital images as a new
and powerful technology capable of solving important practical problems.
Depending on what information in which form is hidden in the digital images,
one can distinguish two types of data hiding techniques, spatial domain techniques, and
frequency domain techniques.
In the spatial domain techniques, a digital image serves as a carrier for a secret
message. For instance, by replacing the least significant bit of each pixel in the carrier
image with the secret message after changing it to stream of bits, the changes to the
carrier image will be imperceptible and the secret message will be masked by carrier image. In this side, two programs had been implemented using MATLAB program to
illustrate the main idea involved in least significant technique (low bit encoding), and
the other to illustrate the masking technique inside the carrier image.
In the frequency domain techniques, a short message is embedded in the carrier
image in a robust algorithm. Robustness means the ability to survive common image
processing operations, such as lossy compression, filtering, noise adding, geometrical
transformations, etc. So in this technique two programs had been implemented to
illustrate the main idea involved in frequency domain, one with the Fast Fourier
Transform (FFT), and the other with the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT).
After all these studies, one of the algorithms in the masking technique is
developed and implemented using JAVA program to embed message into true color
image with a good quality and higher capacity. Beside that the carrier images in different
techniques were examined by exposing them to common signal processing operations
such as image resizing, rotation, histogram equalization, lossy Compression, and
Gaussian noise addition to illustrate the characteristic of the data hiding techniques, such
as hiding capacity, robustness, undetectability, and perceptual transparency
Finally, it has been shown that the frequency transformation techniques are more
robust, and hence suitable for water marking and data hiding purpose. The spatial
domain techniques exhibit loss robustness but due to its higher capacity and good quality
are perfect for data hiding purposes.


In the United States, states are federally mandated to develop watershed management plans to mitigate pollution from increased impervious surfaces due to land development such as buildings, roadways, and parking lots. These plans require a major investment in water retention infrastructure, known as structural Best Management Practices (BMPs). However, the discovery of BMP configurations that simultaneously minimize implementation cost and pollutant load is a complex problem. While not required by law, an additional challenge is to find plans that not only meet current pollutant load targets, but also take into consideration anticipated changes in future precipitation patterns due to climate change. In this dissertation, a multi-scale, multiobjective optimization method is presented to tackle these three objectives. The method is demonstrated on the Bartlett Brook mixed-used impaired watershed in South Burlington, VT. New contributions of this work include: (A) A method for encouraging uniformity of spacing along the non-dominated front in multiobjective evolutionary optimization. This method is implemented in multiobjective differential evolution, is validated on standard benchmark biobjective problems, and is shown to outperform existing methods. (B) A procedure to use GIS data to estimate maximum feasible BMP locations and sizes in subwatersheds. (C) A multi-scale decomposition of the watershed management problem that precalculates the optimal cost BMP configuration across the entire range of possible treatment levels within each subwatershed. This one-time pre-computation greatly reduces computation during the evolutionary optimization and enables formulation of the problem as real-valued biobjective global optimization, thus permitting use of multiobjective differential evolution. (D) Discovery of a computationally efficient surrogate for sediment load. This surrogate is validated on nine real watersheds with different characteristics and is used in the initial stages of the evolutionary optimization to further reduce the computational burden. (E) A lexicographic approach for incorporating the third objective of finding non-dominated solutions that are also robust to climate change. (F) New visualization methods for discovering design principles from dominated solutions. These visualization methods are first demonstrated on simple truss and beam design problems and then used to provide insights into the design of complex watershed management plans. It is shown how applying these visualization methods to sensitivity data can help one discover solutions that are robust to uncertain forcing conditions. In particular, the visualization method is applied to discover new design principles that may make watershed management plans more robust to climate change.


Abstract : In this paper we present Preventive Spatio-Temporal Aggregation (PRESTA), a reputation model that combines spatial and temporal features to produce values that are behavior predictive and useful in partial-knowledge situations. To evaluate its effectiveness, we applied PRESTA in the domain of spam detection. Studying the temporal properties of IP blacklists, we found that 25% of IP addresses once listed on a blacklist were re-listed within 10 days. Further, during our evaluation period over 45% of IPs de-listed were re-listed. By using the IP address assignment hierarchy to define spatial groupings and leveraging these temporal statistics, PRESTA produces reputation values that correctly classify up to 50% of spam email not identified by blacklists alone, while maintaining low false-positive rates. When used in conjunction with blacklists, an average of 93% of spam emails are identified, and we find the system is consistent in maintaining this blockage rate even during periods of decreased blacklist performance. PRESTA spam filtering can be employed as an intermediate filter (perhaps in-network) prior to context-based analysis. Further, our spam detection system is scalable; computation can occur in near real-time and over 500,000 emails can be scored an hour.


The aim of this book is to show the way forward to a coherent view of language in which the achievement of the formalist paradigm is strengthened to the extent that its claims are weakened. A formal theory such as generative grammar is a special theory which is to be subsumed in a general theory of linguistic communication that also includes pragmatics. The tension between the psycho-formalist and the socio-functional views could be resolved in a synthesis whereby both the psychological and social natures of language are fully acknowledged. Semantics and pragmatics, representing these two natures in the study of meaning, have distinct goals, which can be defined more clearly and pursued more effectively to the extent that both their distinctness and their interdependence are recognized.


Global wheat production is threatened by the change in climate thus leading lead to the increase in the biotic and abiotic stresses. We need to increase wheat productivity at a faster pace and manage these challenges to meet the growing demand. Development of cultivars with durable disease resistance and enhancing the rate of genetic gain in wheat are the major goals in wheat breeding programs. Bacterial Leaf Streak (BLS) is one of the most threatening bacterial diseases to wheat in the US Northern Great Plains. Unlike fungal diseases, bacterial diseases cannot be effectively managed using chemicals and thus developing disease resistant cultivars would be the most economical control for BLS. Identification and characterization of genomic regions in wheat that confer resistance to BLS can be an effective way to mobilize resistance genes in wheat breeding. Here we performed Genome – wide association mapping on a Hard Winter Wheat Association Panel (HWWMP) to identify genomic regions that confer resistance to BLS. The genotyped data for this panel of 300 winter wheat lines from the major breeding programs across the Midwestern region of the US was obtained from T3 Triticale Toolbox (under the GPL license). The responses of all these lines against Xanthomonas campestris pv. translucens in the greenhouse and field conditions were evaluated. Association Mapping (AM) was used to detect marker – trait associations using ECMLM, and we identified five QTL regions (Q.bls.sdsu.1AL, Q.bls.sdsu.1BS, Q.bls.sdsu.3AL, Q.bls.sdsu.4AL and Q.bls.sdsu.7AS) conferring BLS resistance. In total, these five QTLs explained 42% of the variation. Eleven genotypes were identified, which could be used as a source of resistance against BLS. Comparative analysis of three of the identified QTLs (Q.bls.sdsu.1AL, Q.bls.sdsu.3AL and Q.bls.sdsu.4AL) with rice showed BLS resistance genes in rice (qBLSr5d, qBLSr1, and qBLSr3d) located on syntenic regions in rice chromosomes 5R, 1R and 3R respectively. The 11 BLS resistant genotypes and SNP markers linked to QTLs identified in our study could facilitate breeding BLS resistance in wheat. For grain yield improvement, we assessed the robustness for genomic selection (GS) in the South Dakota State Winter Wheat Breeding program (SDSWWBP). We performed GS with a set of 434 advanced breeding lines (AYT and PYT nurseries) between the years 2014 – 2017. These lines were genotyped by sequencing GBS and the yield data from 34 years × location combinations were used as a phenotype. We developed training and validation datasets for testing the genomic prediction accuracies. Single and multiyear analysis were done using several GS models (rrBLUP, PLSR, ELNET and Random Forest). The average predictions accuracies within a single year across locations were 0.62. However, with the multi-year-location analysis, the average genomic prediction accuracies were 0.26 for two-year combination, 0.32 for three-year combination and 0.36 for the four-year combination. Our results suggested several years of data is…


The Black Bream Acanthopagrus butcheri, which is the subject of this thesis, completes its life cycle within estuaries and has particularly plastic biological characteristics. The overarching aims of the thesis were 1) to determine the ways in which A. butcheri has responded to marked environmental changes in the Swan River Estuary and 2) to track the biological performance of restocked A. butcheri in the Blackwood River Estuary in which the stock of this species had become depleted.

Between the early 1990s and mid-2000s, the deeper waters of the upper Swan River Estuary became increasingly hypoxic, due to a reduction in the flushing of nutrients and organic material from the estuary as a result of declining rainfall and thus freshwater discharge. Over that same time period, the condition, growth and length at maturity of female and male A. butcheri declined and the age at maturity increased. Furthermore, catch data implied that, during that period, the larger A. butcheri showed a marked tendency to move from the deeper hypoxic waters into the shallows, occupied by smaller A. butcheri. This habitat compression led to greatly increased densities in the shallows. It is therefore proposed that the detrimental effects of hypoxia and high densities led to the above retrograde changes in the biological characteristics of A. butcheri.

The development of a year-effect growth model demonstrated that the growth of A. butcheri in the Swan River Estuary also differed substantially among years between 2007/08 and 2013/14. Annual growth of one year old A. butcheri in those seven years were positively correlated with temperature during the main growing period, but not with freshwater discharges in the preceding wet 'winter' months. That positive correlation with temperature, which is consistent with the metabolic theory of ecology, contrasts with the decline in growth between the early 1990s and mid-2000s, when temperatures were increasing. This implies that the influence of temperature on growth between those two 2 periods was overridden by other factors, i.e. hypoxia and increased densities, but then, in 2007-14, became the most important factor, when fish became concentrated in relatively similar densities in nearshore waters. Although there was no evidence that the overall abundance of A. butcheri in the Swan River Estuary had changed markedly between the early 1990s and early 2010s, there is circumstantial evidence that the stock of this species declined during the 1980s and 1990s in the Blackwood River Estuary, due to fishing pressure and/or environmental changes.

Concern for the status of the stock of A. butcheri in the Blackwood River Estuary led to a study aimed at determining the efficacy of using restocking to replenish the population of this species in this system. The growth and maturity schedules of the 2001 and 2002 year classes of A. butcheri, which had been cultured and introduced into the Blackwood River in south-western Australia at seven and four months old, respectively, were determined from samples collected regularly between 2002 and 2014. Restocked A. butcheri could always be distinguished from its wild stock because their otoliths retained the pink coloration of the alizarin complexone with which they had been stained prior to release. The growth and maturity schedules of restocked fish were only slightly inferior to those of its wild stock and the mean gonad weights of these two groups did not differ significantly in any month. As increasing numbers of restocked A. butcheri attained the minimum legal length (MLL) of 250 mm for retention, their contribution to the commercial fishery increased from 6% in 2005 to 74% in 2010. That contribution subsequently declined to 39% in 2012 and 10% in 2014, due predominantly to the introduction of the very strong 2008 year class in the commercial catches, the first substantial recruitment into the population since 1999. As restocked fish were estimated as contributing ~55% to the eggs produced in 2008, substantial numbers of the 2008 year class were derived from spawning by restocked fish. The results of this and a previous genetic study imply that restocking is an effective and appropriate way for replenishing stocks of an estuarine species such as A. butcheri, especially as its recruitment is highly episodic.

Protection of riverine discharge into the estuaries of south-western Australia is likely to be the most effective management strategy to maintain the 'health' of estuaries and their fisheries. It follows that a thorough understanding of the hydrology of estuaries will become increasingly important to managing these systems as they become subjected further to the effects of climate change and increases in the demand for water resources by human populations. As A. butcheri completes its life cycle within its natal estuary and has plastic biological characteristics, it is an ideal candidate for use as an indicator of the health of an estuary and hypothesising on the effects of climate change.


A number of studies have indicated that adverse events from anticoagulants are
significant contributors to health care system expenditure. Adverse events
comprise three groups: under-use, over-use and misuse. In Australia, it was
estimated in 1992 that adverse events from warfarin cost $100 million in direct
hospital costs alone.
Part one of this thesis gives an overview of atrial fibrillation (AF) and the
use of antithrombotics. This part provides comprehensive background on the
significance of AF and its contribution to stroke and details the extensive
evidence of antithrombotic drug efficacy in the prevention of stroke in AF. Despite overwhelming evidence that antithrombotics are effective in
reducing the risk of stroke in AF, they remain under-utilised. Studies conducted
internationally and nationally have shown that, in general, less than half of
eligible patients receive anticoagulants. Described in part two of this thesis is two
studies aimed at improving the use of antithrombotics for stroke prevention in AF.
A nationwide survey of a random sample of general practitioners (GPs),
cardiologists and other specialists was undertaken assessing barriers to the use of
anticoagulants for stroke prevention in AF. This survey identified a number of
key barriers to the use of anticoagulants and identified a number of key
interventions to improve the prescribing of anticoagulants. Targeting the
identified barriers to the use of anticoagulants, an educational intervention
directed at GPs was initiated, aimed at improving the prescribing of
antithrombotics in AF. The educational intervention utilised mailed guidelines
and the process of academic detailing. The effect of the intervention was analysed
using a controlled before and after study design. The educational intervention significantly improved the use of anticoagulants, but recognised that there is still
significant room for more improvement.
Findings of the nationwide survey of doctors identified portable
International Normalised Ratio (INR) monitors as a key intervention to improve
the prescribing of anticoagulants in AF, and improve the management of existing
patients on anticoagulants. Part three of this thesis evaluated the use of portable
INR monitors in three practice settings: an outpatient hospital anticoagulant
clinic, rural general practices and rural community pharmacies. The portable INR
monitors performed well in these three settings. They were found to give accurate
and reproducible results when compared to pathology testing and the use of the
monitors was well received by GPs, community pharmacists and patients.
Findings from these three studies show that the use of portable INR monitors has
the potential to significantly reduce health care expenditure associated with
anticoagulant therapy, and provides a number of alternative models for
anticoagulant management in the community setting. The final part of the thesis was an intervention aimed at reducing the
incidence of bleeding complications amongst patients commenced on warfarin in
hospital and discharged to GP care. Patients were randomised to a control or
intervention group, where the control group received standard care from their GP
and the intervention group received education after discharge and alternate day
INR monitoring using a portable INR monitor for four visits after discharge. The
intervention significantly reduced the incidence of bleeding complications
assessed 90 days after initial discharge, and provided a reproducible model of care
for patients commenced on warfarin in hospital and discharged to the community. The body of work conducted in this thesis provides a number of system
solutions aimed at reducing the incidence of anticoagulant-related misadventure
and under-use. It is clear that while this thesis provides preliminary evidence that
adverse events associated with warfarin can be reduced, more work targeting the
use of portable INR monitors in the initiation of warfarin therapy and transfer to
the community setting, and education for stroke prevention in AF should
continue.


The problem of when to control for continuous or high-dimensional discrete covariate vectors arises in both experimental and observational studies. Large-cell asymptotic arguments suggest that full control for covariates or stratification variables is always efficient, even if treatment is assigned independently of covariates or strata. Here, we approximate the behavior of different estimators using a panel-data-type asymptotic sequence with fixed cell sizes and the number of cells increasing to infinity. Exact calculations in simple examples and Monte Carlo evidence suggest this generates a substantially improved approximation to actual finite-sample distributions. Under this sequence, full control for covariates is dominated by propensity-score matching when cell sizes are small, the explanatory power of the covariates conditional on the propensity score is low, and/or the probability of treatment is close to 0 or 1. Our panel-asymptotic framework also provides an explanation for why propensity-score matching can dominate covariate matching even when there are no empty cells. Finally, we introduce a random-effects estimator that provides finite-sample efficiency gains over both covariate matching and propensity-score matching.


Abstract. IceBern2D is a vertically integrated ice sheet model to investigate the ice distribution on long timescales under different climatic conditions. It is forced by simulated fields of surface temperature and precipitation of the Last Glacial Maximum and present-day climate from a comprehensive climate model. This constant forcing is adjusted to changes in ice elevation. Due to its reduced complexity and computational efficiency, the model is well suited for extensive sensitivity studies and ensemble simulations on extensive temporal and spatial scales. It shows good quantitative agreement with standardized benchmarks on an artificial domain (EISMINT). Present-day and Last Glacial Maximum ice distributions in the Northern Hemisphere are also simulated with good agreement. Glacial ice volume in Eurasia is underestimated due to the lack of ice shelves in our model. The efficiency of the model is utilized by running an ensemble of 400 simulations with perturbed model parameters and two different estimates of the climate at the Last Glacial Maximum. The sensitivity to the imposed climate boundary conditions and the positive degree-day factor β, i.e., the surface mass balance, outweighs the influence of parameters that disturb the flow of ice. This justifies the use of simplified dynamics as a means to achieve computational efficiency for simulations that cover several glacial cycles. Hysteresis simulations over 5 million years illustrate the stability of the simulated ice sheets to variations in surface air temperature.


The Cloud infrastructure service providers currently provision basic virtualized computing resources as on demand and dynamic services but there is no common framework in existence that allows the seamless provisioning of even these basic services across multiple cloud service providers, although this is not due to any inherent incompatibility or proprietary nature of the foundation technologies on which these cloud platforms are built. We present a solution idea which aims to provide a dynamic and service oriented provisioning of secure virtual private networks on top of multiple cloud infrastructure service providers. This solution leverages the benefits of peer to peer overlay networks, i.e., the flexibility and scalability to handle the churn of nodes joining and leaving the VPNs and can adapt the topology of the VPN as per the requirements of the applications utilizing its intercloud secure communication framework.


We develop a four-sector (labor-intensive agriculture, capital-intensive agriculture, service & construction, and manufacturing) general-equilibrium model of North American countries to analyze the effects of tighter U.S. immigration policies. Results show that these policies erode the comparative advantage of U.S. labor-intensive agriculture, causing U.S. production and exports to fall and other countries to expand their exports to the United States. In Mexico, low-skilled labor demand in labor-intensive agriculture increases as production rises. The effectiveness of U.S. tighter immigration policies depends on the substitutability between U.S. domestic and undocumented workers. Immigration policies exacerbate the wedge between Mexican low-skilled wage rate and the undocumented wage rate, intensifying the underlying cause for unauthorized entry.


A cardinal dimension of adult development and the learning most uniquely adult pertains to becoming aware that one is caught in one's own history and is reliving it. This leads to a process of perspective transforma tion involving a structural change in the way we see ourselves and our rela tionships. If the culture permits, we move toward perspectives which are more inclusive, discriminating and integrative of experience. We move away from uncritical, organic relationships toward contractual relation ships with others, institutions and society. Perspective transformation refor mulates the criteria for valuing and for taking action. Behavior change is often a function of such transformation. In this emerging transformation theory, adult education finds its own inherent goals and functions.


Several studies confirm a positive inverted U-shaped relationship between age and entrepreneurship. This paper analyses if this statement is true also for Sweden. By focusing on those above the age of 50, this paper adds knowledge about how individuals close to their retirement act in terms of self-employment and to what extent they contribute as entrepreneurs to the overall society. First, it analyses at the regional level the propensity of older people to start firms with a focus on the relationship between different age cohorts and the rate of new firm formation. At the second stage, an individual perspective is taken where the probability to become self-employed is expected to increase as individuals be¬come older but at a decreasing rate. By decomposing the population in different age cohorts, it is possible to find differences in the probability of becoming self-employed. To increase and deepen the knowledge about the relationship between age and entrepreneurship this paper further adds to existing literature by separating regions into different categories along the urban-rural hierarchy. The results in this paper confirm that the rate of entrepreneurship first increases and then decreases with age. Individuals above both 55 and 64 have a positive influence on the rate of entrepreneurship at both the regional as well as the individual level. The impact is stronger in locations that are more rural.


As exemplified in the 2010 Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, cyber attackers have capabilities to embed disruptive infections into equipment that is employed within physical systems. This paper presents a cyber security design approach that addresses cyber attacks that include modification of operator displays used for support in managing software controlled automated systems. This class of problems is especially important because our nation's critical infrastructures include such systems. In addition, many other systems, such as surveillance systems, navigation systems, and communications systems, are candidates for such solutions as they continue to become more and more automated. The suggested design approach builds upon fault–tolerant and automatic control system techniques that, with important and necessary modifications, are the basis for providing improved cyber security. In particular, the appropriate combination of diversely redundant security designs coupled with system dynamics models and state estimation techniques provide a potential means for detecting purposeful adjustments to operator displays. This paper provides a theoretical approach for designing such solutions and a corresponding set of examples with simulation–based results. In addition, the paper includes a discussion of important implementation requirements for greater assurance of such physical system security solutions. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16