Phylogenetic relatedness is a key diversity measure for the analysis and understanding of how species and communities evolve across time and space. Understanding the nonrandom loss of species with respect to phylogeny is also essential for better-informed conservation decisions. However, several factors are known to influence phylogenetic reconstruction and, ultimately, phylogenetic diversity metrics. In this study, we empirically tested how some of these factors (topological constraint, taxon sampling, genetic markers and calibration) affect phylogenetic resolution and uncertainty. We built a densely sampled, species-level phylogenetic tree for spiders, combining Sanger sequencing of species from local communities of two biogeographical regions (Iberian Peninsula and Macaronesia) with a taxon-rich backbone matrix of Genbank sequences and a topological constraint derived from recent phylogenomic studies. The resulting tree constitutes the most complete spider phylogeny to date, both in terms of terminals and background information, and may serve as a standard reference for the analysis of phylogenetic diversity patterns at the community level. We then used this tree to investigate how partial data affect phylogenetic reconstruction, phylogenetic diversity estimates and their rankings, and, ultimately, the ecological processes inferred for each community. We found that the incorporation of a single slowly evolving marker (28S) to the DNA barcode sequences from local communities, had the highest impact on tree topology, closely followed by the use of a backbone matrix. The increase in missing data resulting from combining partial sequences from local communities only had a moderate impact on the resulting trees, similar to the difference observed when using topological constraints. Our study further revealed substantial differences in both the phylogenetic structure and diversity rankings of the analyzed communities estimated from the different phylogenetic treatments, especially when using non-ultrametric trees (phylograms) instead of time-stamped trees (chronograms). Finally, we provide some recommendations on reconstructing phylogenetic trees to infer phylogenetic diversity within ecological studies.


Criminal justice responses to rape and sexual assault in the UK have long been criticised for treating victims with suspicion and subjecting them to aggressive questioning (Stern, 2010). Research has shown that stereotypes about rape, for example, that those who delay reporting an incident to the police are more likely to be lying, have affected court responses (Temkin and Krahe, 2008). Victims have stated feeling as if they were the one on trial, because of the focus placed on evaluating their character and actions rather than the defendant's (Sanders and Jones, 2007).In response to these criticisms, legal professionals now receive training to counter stereotypes, new guidelines highlight the importance of considering victims' vulnerability during trial and 'special measures' have been introduced in an attempt to make giving evidence less traumatic. Nevertheless, research conducted by Dr Olivia Smith (while at the University of Bath) has found that these measures are not having their intended effect. This brief outlines the research findings and makes recommendations for change.


This paper describes frequency-doubled operation of a high-energy chirped-pulse-amplification beamline. Efficient type-I second-harmonic generation was achieved using a 3 mm thick 320 mm aperture KDP crystal. Shots were fired at a range of energies achieving more than 100 J in a subpicosecond, 527 nm laser pulse with a power contrast of 10(14).


Abstract Eye disorders are relatively common. Often the initial presentation is to a general practitioner. With a few basic tools for eye examination, a general practitioner would be able to conduct an adequate ophthalmic examination and appropriately refer cases requiring specialist care. Assessment of visual acuity using a snellen chart and a pinhole can exclude refractive errors. A penlight is an inexpensive yet indispensable tool in the assessment of pupillary response, external structures as well as the anterior segment of the eye. Superficial ocular foreign bodies are relatively common. With a good technique for eyelid eversion, these foreign bodies can be easily removed. Using fluorescein stain and cobalt blue light one can appreciate corneal epithelial defects. Glaucoma is a sight threatening condition that can be effectively screened for, by using a schiotz tonometer and appropriate referrals made if the intraocular pressure is > 21 mmHg or if the optic disc is cupped. Direct ophthalmoscopy may be difficult but with a systematic approach and a few simple guidelines one would be able to adequately evaluate the posterior segment.


Although many aspects of English as a second language (ESL) academic writing instruction have been well researched, Leki, Cumming, and Silva (2008) note that, "There have been surprisingly few research-based descriptions of L2 writing classroom instruction" (p. 80). Although research related to the use of critical and feminist pedagogy in ESL is increasing, Kumaradivelu (2006) notices that it is still not clear how the critical awakening "...has actually changed the practice of everyday teaching and teacher preparation" (p. 76). The purpose of this study was to provide an individual response to the gaps identified by both sets of authors by investigating how critical and feminist theories could be utilized to develop an orientation to interactions in the everyday practices of an ESL academic writing classroom. In order to achieve this purpose, an autoethnographic study of an eight-week ESL academic writing course in an Intensive English Program (IEP) was conducted. The participants in this study included the teacherresearcher and seven learners. The data collected included the following: lesson plans, instructional materials, teacher field notes, teacher reflexive journal, transcripts of everyday class interactions, transcripts of multiple interviews with learners, learner written reflections, and learners' written assignments for the course. Analysis of findings revealed that the critical and feminist theories selected for the course were realized even though there were some internal and external obstacles. Learners experienced positive shifts in their feelings about the topic of academic writing and their own abilities as academic writers. Learners' written texts also reflected positive shifts with respect to the teacher's goals for learners. These findings suggest that critical and feminist theories can be enacted in everyday classrooms and can be helpful with regard to improving teachers' and learners' experiences of everyday ESL academic writing classrooms. INDEX WORDS: English as a second language (ESL) writing instruction, Academic writing instruction, Critical pedagogy, Feminist pedagogy, Auto-ethnography THEORY TO PRACTICE, PRACTICE TO THEORY: DEVELOPING A CRITICAL AND FEMINIST PEDAGOGY FOR AN ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE ACADEMIC WRITING CLASSROOM


"High food prices are not only causing a humanitarian crisis, but also putting at risk the development potential of millions of people. Global agriculture markets are undergoing structural changes, and the next three to four years will pose great challenges for achieving an affordable and accessible food supply for the world's most vulnerable. Soaring food and fuel prices are creating a "perfect storm" for the world's most vulnerable. The consequence is that the bottom billion could become the bottom 2 billion overnight, as those living on US$1 a day see their purchasing power cut in half." from Text


Who's Who in Lesbian and Gay Writing is a lively and accessible biographical guide to lesbian and gay literary culture, from Sappho to modern pulp fiction. Featuring authors of works with lesbian or gay content as well as known lesbian and gay writers, this volume opens the boundaries of this field to include the writers of popular cultural fiction. It places these alongside the canon of poets, dramatists and novelists, to acknowledge the importance of pop culture to gay and lesbian communities. It includes fascinating entries on authors from W.H. Auden to Alice Walker, James Baldwin to Virginia Woolf. Also included are those such as Judith Butler who have theorised lesbian and gay culture and writing, or have contributed to the uncovering and charting of this vibrant literary history. Fully cross referenced, and with suggestions for further reading, this book offers an invaluable guide to a rich and varied literary culture and is indispensable for anyone with an interest in lesbian and gay writing.


This cost-benefit analysis studies several significant costs and benefits of the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project. The two major costs of construction and operating expenses and the two major benefits of passenger benefits and car miles saved have been used to analyze the project over a 30-year period starting in 2009, to include four years of construction followed by 26 years of Metro operation. The project was determined to have a net cost of $1.78 billion. With the exception of the first four years, in which construction costs would be incurred but the other three costs and benefits would not yet be realized, the project creates annual benefits of $32 million or greater. Additionally, a break-even analysis was performed within the sensitivity analysis to determine the year in which net benefits would begin accruing on the project. This year was found to be 2063, or 54 years into the project (including four years of construction and 50 years of service). Any following years in which the Metrorail was still operating would create increasing net benefits.


Abstract In order to address the disparity of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) doctorates in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), culturally congruent mentorship program development is needed. Because traditional Western academic paradigms are typically constrained to a non-Indigenous perspective, the authors question how American Indian graduate students in STEM can successfully navigate graduate education with their cultural identity intact. Our review and synthesis of the literature addresses this question by considering 60 data sources that include peer-reviewed articles, personal communication with professionals working in the field of AI/AN academic success, and professional training literature. Our synthesis demonstrates that there is a dearth of Indigenous participation in the STEM fields that needs to be addressed by instituting a bicultural paradigm. This paradigm includes incorporating traditional academic mentoring into Indigenous values and kinship structures. A conceptual model is offered that delineates information necessary to conceptualize and develop an Indigenous mentoring program.


Mobility occurs naturally in many distributed system applications such as telecommunications and electronic commerce. Mobility may reduce bandwidth consumption and coupling and increase flexibility. However, it seems that relatively little work has been done to support quality assurance techniques such as testing and verification of mobile systems.
This thesis describes an approach for checking the conformance of a mobile, distributed application with respect to an executable model at runtime. The approach is based on kiltera — a novel, high-level language supporting the description and execution of models of concurrent, mobile, distributed, and timed computation. The approach allows distributed, rather than centralized, monitoring. However, it makes very few assumptions about the platform that the mobile agent system is implemented in.
We have implemented our approach and validated it using four case studies. Two of them are examples of mobile agent systems, the two others are implementations of distributed algorithms. Our approach was able to detect seeded faults in the implementations. To check the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach more comprehensively a mutation-based evaluation framework has been implemented. In this framework a set of a new mutation operators for mobile agent systems has been identified in order to automatically generate and run a number of mutants programs and then evaluate the ability of our approach to detect these mutants. We found that our approach is very effective and efficient in killing the non-equivalent mutants.


The rapid adoption of Internet has turned the Millennial Teens' life like a lightning speed. Empirical evidence has illustrated that Pathological Internet Use (PIU) among them ensure long-term success to the market players in the children industry. However, it creates concerns among their care takers as it generates mental disorder among some of them. The purpose of this thesis is to study the determinants of pathological Internet use (PIU) among Millennial Teens in urban Klang Valley in Malaysia and the outcomes of this disorder on their cognitive and behavioral skills, as well as the influence by their personality. A modified Media System Dependency (MSD) model comprising social system, media system, personality system, online
consumer self-efficacy and Internet maven are proposed. To the best knowledge of the researcher, there has been no study conducted to date on MSD which integrates personality system in its micro-level relationship. The sample of this thesis consisted of 656 school students between the ages of 16 - 17 year-old sampled in a multi-stage cluster in Malaysia. Exploratory factor analysis was used to extract determinants of PIU. It was found that personality system which consisted of neuroticism trait formed the highest contribution of PIU among Millennial Teens in urban Klang Valley and social system which was made of parents and peers had negative relationship with
PIU. Structural Equation Modeling was used to test the study hypotheses. According to the findings, Millennial Teens long time online increased their online consumer self-efficacy and Internet maven skills. Implications for families, research, theory, policy, and education are discussed.


In order to overcome problems associated with the use of porphyrins under photooxidative conditions, the 1 : 2 molecular complex of meso-tetraphenylporphyrin (H2TPP) with 2,3-dichloro-5,6-dicyano-1,4-benzoquinone (DDQ) has been used as a photosensitizer for the aerobic photooxidation of olefins. Under the optimized conditions, H2TPP(DDQ)2 showed a significantly increased catalytic activity and oxidative stability compared to that of the free base porphyrin. Interestingly, 1H NMR and UV-vis studies showed that the DDQ molecules efficiently prevent protonation of H2TPP under acidic condition formed by exposure of chlorinated solvents to the UV-vis light. The photosensitizing ability of the adduct was found to be mainly dependent on the light absorption in the Soret band region and to a much lesser extent on the absorption in the Q(0,0) band region. Furthermore, substantially increased solubility of H2TPP(DDQ)2 in acetonitrile facilitated the use of acetonitrile as a safer solvent than the common chlorinated solvents in photooxidation reactions. Also, the influence of different parameters including the type and power of light source, type of solvent and the molar ratio of H2TPP(DDQ)2 to olefin on the efficiency of the catalyst and the quantum yield of the photochemical reaction (Φ) was investigated. The use of 1,3-diphenylisobenzofuran as the quencher of singlet oxygen and 1,4-benzoquinone as the scavenger of superoxide anion radical revealed the involvement of singlet oxygen as the major reactive oxygen species.


When medical researchers test a new treatment procedure, they recruit patients with appropriate medical histories. An experiment with a new procedure is called a clinical trial. The selection of patients for clinical trials has traditionally been a labor-intensive task, which involves the matching of medical records with a list of eligibility criteria, and studies have shown that clinicians can miss up to 60% of the eligible patients. A recent project at the University of South Florida has been aimed at the automation of this task. We have developed an intelligent agent that selects trials for eligible patients. We report the work on the representation and entry of the related knowledge about clinical trials. We describe the structure of the agent's knowledge base and the interface for adding new trials. Keywords— Knowledge representation, medical expert systems, user interfaces.


This thesis aims to consider the role played by science in policy making. Firstly, two decision models are considered, synoptic rationality which depends heavily on formal information and comprehensive planning, and disjointed incrementalism, under which decisions are made in a fragmented and remedial manner via the interaction of interested partisans and with little necessity for formal information. Secondly, different descriptions of scientific activity are discussed and a broadly Kuhnian view of science is supported, with what is regarded as a `fact' being heavily influenced by social factors. It is suggested that scientific controversies are more likely to occur in policy related science but for reasons that are intrinsic to science rather than due to some correctable aberration. A number of case studies, including two `in-depth' studies into maternal deprivation and the relationship between hyperactivity and food additives, support this contention and also show that whilst scientific findings can raise issues they cannot aid in the resolution of these as the synoptic model suggests that they should. Instead information supports and legitimates value based policy views, with actual policy decisions arrived at via negotiation and aiming at a balancing of partisan pressures, as suggested by the incremental model. Not only does information not aid the resolution of policy disputes, it cannot do so. When policy is disputed, scientific findings are also likely to be disputed and further research merely attracts more highly destructive criticism. This is termed the over critical model. When policy is decided then there is reduced impetus to critically test scientific ideas; this is termed the under critical model. Both of these situations act to the detriment of science. The main conclusion drawn is that the belief that science is essential to decision making is misleading and may serve to mask rather than illuminate areas of dispute.


The structuralist perspective envisages poverty, especially in rural India, as a long duration phenomenon. Over time, most of the structural features of poverty have remained more or less intact. As a result, a large proportion of the poor in India are also chronically poor in terms of duration as well as severity (Mehta and Shah, 2002). Economic growth achieved through the processes of planned development since the early fifties, have made a significant dent in the incidence of poverty measured in terms of average expenditure of the households. Thus, incidence of poverty in India declined from 52 per cent in 1977-78 to 39 per cent in 1987-88 and further to 36 percent in 1993-94 and 27 per cent in 1999-2000 (Hirway and Dev, 2000). This suggests a substantial impact in terms of poverty reduction at an aggregate level. The impact, however has been fairly varied across regions and households. Three different trajectories can be visualized for those who were poor in the initial period. These are: (i) crossing over the poverty barrier on a sustained basis, (ii) moving above and below the poverty line, and (iii) always remaining below the poverty line. The households experiencing different trajectories represent non-poor, transient poor, and chronically poor (in duration sense). A fourth category consists of households that have never been poor. URL:[http://www.chronicpoverty.org/uploads/publication_files/CPRC-IIPA_5.pdf].


As opposed to Web search, social tagging can be considered an alternative technique tapping into the wisdom of the crowd for organizing and discovering information on the Web. Effective tag-based recommendation of information items is critical to the success of this social information discovery mechanism. Over the past few years, there have been a growing number of studies aiming at improving the item recommendation quality of collaborative filtering (CF) methods by leveraging tagging information. However, a critical problem that often severely undermines the performance of tag-based CF methods, i.e., sparsity of user-item and user-tag interactions, is still yet to be adequately addressed. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework, which deals with this data sparsity problem by making effective use of unlabeled items and propagating users' preference information between the item space and the tag space. Empirical evaluation using real-world tagging data demonstrates the utility of the proposed framework.


Environmental Fate and Safety Management of Agrochemicals discusses residue analysis, environmental fate and safety management, environmental risk assessment, metabolism, resistance and management, and advances in formulation and application technology from the academic, government, and industry perspective. Meaningful ecological and environmental risk assessment of pest control agents is possible only when accurate and credible metabolic and environmental fate data is available. The advent of affordable and sensitive liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) has greatly increased our ability to detect environmentally relevant metabolites and degradation products following the application of these materials. Furthermore, ecological risk assessment and monitoring of pesticide resistance in field populations has become more feasible and cost effective by employing hig-hroughout molecular diagnostic techniques on the genetic leve3l and LC/MS techniques on the proteomic and meabolomic levels. Efficient formulations and application technologies have greatly reduced the amount of materials that are required to achieve effective pest control and hence reduce their ecological and environmental impacts. Controlled release, stabilization and dispersion technologies have provided the pest manager with new tools that allow them to use necessary pest control options in "best management strategies."


Abstract Double-differential cross sections (spectra) for light charged particle (proton, deuteron, triton, and alpha) emission in fast neutron-induced reactions on aluminum are reported for eight incident neutron energies between 25 and 55 MeV, augmenting previous results at 63 MeV. Angular distributions were measured at 15 laboratory angles between 20 and 160 deg. Procedures for data taking and data reduction are presented. Deduced energy-differential and total production cross sections are also reported. Experimental cross sections are compared to existing experimental proton-induced data and to nuclear model calculations that include preequilibrium and compound nucleus decay mechanisms. These calculations formed the basis of a recent set of higher-energy ENDF/B-VI data evaluations (the LA150 Library), and therefore, the present measurements facilitate a testing of the accuracy of these evaluated cross sections. This is important for accelerator-driven-systems design, where radiation transport simulation codes require accurate nuclear data to guide engineering design. Comparisons between the experimental data and the calculated values indicate that while proton, triton, and alpha-particle emission are modeled fairly accurately, deuteron emission is only poorly described, and further improvements to the nuclear reaction models for preequilibrium cluster emission are needed.


Many interpretation methods for neural models in natural language processing investigate how information is encoded inside hidden representations. However, these methods can only measure whether the information exists, not whether it is actually used by the model. We propose a methodology grounded in the theory of causal mediation analysis for interpreting which parts of a model are causally implicated in its behavior. The approach enables us to analyze the mechanisms that facilitate the flow of information from input to output through various model components, known as mediators. As a case study, we apply this methodology to analyzing gender bias in pre-trained Transformer language models. We study the role of individual neurons and attention heads in mediating gender bias across three datasets designed to gauge a model's sensitivity to gender bias. Our mediation analysis reveals that gender bias effects are concentrated in specific components of the model that may exhibit highly specialized behavior.


The eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada (USA) forms one of the most prominent topographic and geologic features in the Cordillera, yet the timing and nature of fault displacements along it remain relatively poorly known. The central Sierra Nevada range front is an ideal place to determine the structural evolution of the range front because it has abundant dateable Cenozoic volcanic rocks. The Sonora Pass area of the central Sierra Nevada is particularly good for reconstructing the slip history of range-front faults, because it includes unusually widespread and distinctive high-K volcanic rocks (the ca. 11.5–9 Ma Stanislaus Group) that serve as outstanding strain markers. These include the following, from base to top. (1) The Table Mountain Latite (TML) consists of voluminous trachyandesite, trachybasaltic andesite, and basalt lava flows, erupted from fault-controlled fissures in the Sierra Crest graben-vent system. (2) The Eureka Valley Tuff consists of three trachydacite ignimbrite members erupted from the Little Walker caldera. These ignimbrites are interstratified with lava flows that continued to erupt from the Sierra Crest graben-vent system, and include silicic high-K as well as intermediate to mafic high-K lavas. The graben-vent system consists of a single ∼27-km-long, ∼8–10-km-wide approximately north-south graben that is along the modern Sierran crest between Sonora Pass and Ebbetts Pass, with a series of approximately north-south half-grabens on its western margin, and an ∼24-km-wide northeast transfer zone emanating from the northeast boundary of the graben on the modern range front south of Ebbetts Pass. In this paper we focus on the structural evolution of the Sonora Pass segment of the Sierra Nevada range front, which we do not include in the Sierra Crest graben-vent complex because we have found no vents for high-K lava flows here. However, we show that these faults localized the high-K Little Walker caldera. We demonstrate that the range-front faults at Sonora Pass were active before and during the ca. 11.5–9 Ma high-K volcanism. We show that these faults are dominantly approximately north-south down to the east normal faults, passing northward into a system of approximately northeast-southwest sinistral oblique normal faults that are on the southern end of the ∼24-km-wide northeast transfer zone in the Sierra Crest graben-vent complex. At least half the slip on the north-south normal faults on the Sonora Pass range front occurred before and during eruption of the TML, prior to development of the Little Walker caldera. It has previously been suggested that the range-front faults formed a right-stepping transtensional stepover that controlled the siting of the Little Walker caldera; we support that interpretation by showing that synvolcanic throw on the faults increases southward toward the caldera. The Sonora Pass–Little Walker caldera area is shown here to be very similar in structural style and scale to the transtensional stepover at the Quaternary Long Valley field. Furthermore, the broader structural setting of both volcanic fields is similar, because both are associated with a major approximately northeast-southwest sinistral oblique normal fault zone. This structural style is typical of central Walker Lane belt transtension. Previous models have called for westward encroachment of Basin and Range extension into the Sierra Nevada range front after arc volcanism ceased (ca. 6–3.5 Ma); we show instead that Walker Lane transtension is responsible for the formation of the range front, and that it began by ca. 12 Ma. We conclude that Sierra Nevada range-front faulting at Sonora Pass initiated during high-K arc volcanism, under a Walker Lane transtensional strain regime, and that this controlled the siting of the Little Walker caldera.


This essay was solicited for a symposium on new directions in scholarship about the Thirteenth Amendment. It analyzes controversies over abortion, surrogacy, and race selection through the lens of reproductive slavery.

I argue that abortion bans are vulnerable to Thirteenth Amendment challenge: namely, that criminalizing abortion access subjects women to "involuntary servitude." Pregnancy and childbirth aren't as coercive when a woman agrees in advance to carry a child for someone else. Surrogacy may not be voluntary in the meaningful sense that gives its performance moral force—but it's usually willed freely enough to carry constitutional force for Thirteenth Amendment purposes. Finally are reproductive mix-ups in which fertility patients end up with a baby of a different racial background. Negligence suits in these cases evoke the racial division and hierarchy that animate what the U.S. Supreme Court has called the "badges and incidents" of slavery.

I analyze the Thirteenth Amendment implications for each of these three contexts in detail. I conclude with the following reflections: Appeals to reproductive slavery promise to break new ground across these unyielding landscapes. But that analogy can do more bad than good when it's enlisted to resolve hard moral questions by comparison to one of the few practices that almost everyone—even people who rarely see eye-to-eye—can agree is unequivocally evil. The enormity of slavery's injustice was so plain, so profound, that modern comparisons struggle to escape its absolute wrongs. Imperfect metaphors risk insulting the memory of enslaved person and crowding out prospects for good-faith conversation and practical compromise.


Very simply, electromagnetic interference (EMI) costs money, reduces profits, and generally wreaks havoc for circuit designers in all industries. This book shows how the analytic tools of circuit theory can be used to simulate the coupling of interference into, and out of, any signal link in the system being reviewed. The technique is simple, systematic and accurate. It enables the design of any equipment to be tailored to meet EMC requirements. Every electronic system consists of a number of functional modules interconnected by signal links and power supply lines. Electromagnetic interference can be coupled into and out of every conductor. A review of the construction of the wiring assemblies and the functions of the signals they carry will allow critical links to be identified. Circuit modeling can be used to simulate the electromagnetic coupling mechanism of each critical link, allowing its performance to be analyzed and compared with the formal requirements. Bench testing during the development of any product will allow any interference problem to be identified and corrected, long before the manufactured unit is subjected to formal testing. Key Features: A fully outlined, systematic and dramatically simplified process of designing equipment to meet EMC requirements; Focuses on simplifications which enable electrical engineers to singularly handle EMC problems; Helps minimize time-to-market of new products and reduces the need for costly and time-consuming modifications; Outlines how general purpose test equipment (oscilloscopes and signal generators) can be used to validate and refine any model; Discusses how to use Mathcad or MATLAB® to perform analysis and assessment.


Contemporary social and cultural life is increasingly organised around a logic of self-transformation, where changing the body is seen as key. Transforming Images examines how the future functions within this transformative logic to indicate the potential of a materially better time. The book explores the crucial role that images have in organising an imperative for transformation and in making possible, or not, the materialisation of a better future. Coleman asks the questions: which futures are appealing and to whom? How do images tap into and reproduce wider social and cultural processes of inequality?

Drawing on the recent 'turns' to affect and emotion and to understanding life in terms of vitality, intensity and 'liveness' in social and cultural theory, the book develops a framework for understanding images as felt and lived out. Analysing different screens across popular culture – the screens of shopping, makeover television programmes, online dieting plans and government health campaigns – it traces how images of self-transformation bring the future into the present and affectively 'draw in' some bodies more than others.

Transforming Images will be of interest to students and scholars working in sociology, media studies, cultural studies and gender studies.


Microcores and microliths have been identified in archaeological sites in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota. While clearly the product of patterned reduction yielding flakes with roughly parallel sides, the cores seldom produced regular flake removals, suggesting a high degree of variability in the resulting microliths. This irregular pattern of reduction contrasts with classic microblade cores from higher latitudes, where uniformity of microblades was desired. When noted by field archaeologists, microcores are variously described as conical or circular scrapers as well as microcores or microblade cores. They occur in low frequencies in several time periods and are seldom identified with associated production debitage let alone microliths. This article examines microlith manufacture and microcore discard in the Northwestern Plains and adjacent regions and proposes that the technology fulfilled a specialized role in the organization of lithic technology linked to the infrequent manufacture of specialty items.


Oxidative phosphorylation within the inner mitochondrial membrane generates the majority of cellular adenosine triphosphate (ATP) required for normal physiological functions (including regulation of cell volume and solute concentration, maintenance of cellular architecture, and synthesis of essential macromolecules). Its efficient functioning depends on the maintenance of an electrochemical gradient and is tightly coupled to the energetic demands of the cell and/or tissue. Commitment to and completion of the cell division cycle are sensitive to changes in the availability of mitochondrially derived ATP, although the relationship between cell cycle and mitochondrial physiology is poorly understood. Using vital, mitochondrial‐specific fluorochromes to differentiate between mitochondrial mass (10‐N‐nonyl acridine orange) and mitochondrial membrane potential (Rhodamine123), together with a quantification of total cellular ATP levels, it was possible to generate profiles of these mitochondrial characteristics in HL‐60 cells at different stages of their cell cycle. The data suggest that the availability of ATP changes in a cell cycle‐specific manner and cannot be predicted by changes in mitochondrial mass or membrane potential. Furthermore, transition points in the cell cycle where ATP availability is low with respect to the amount of functional inner mitochondrial membrane have been observed. We suggest that these cell cycle phase transitions are sensitive to inhibition of mitochondrial activity because the basal levels of available ATP at these points are nearer to a theoretical "minimal threshold" below which cell cycle progression is inhibited. J. Cell. Physiol. 180:91–96, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Although pneumococcal vaccine has been recommended for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), its efficacy in this population has not been shown. A double-blind randomized controlled trial of 14-valent pneumococcal vaccine was carried out in 189 men and women aged 40 to 89 years with a clinical diagnosis of COPD and a forced expiratory volume in 1 second of less than 1.5 L. Of the 189, 92 received the vaccine and 97 received saline placebo. In a randomly chosen subsample of those who received the vaccine the mean titres of specific IgG antibody to selected pneumococcal polysaccharide serotypes increased two- to threefold by 4 weeks after vaccination. Over a 2-year period the rates of death, hospital admissions and emergency visits and the mean length of hospital stay were not significantly different in the two groups. Although a protective effect of 14-valent pneumococcal vaccine could not be shown, the small size of the sample and the relatively low follow-up rates preclude firm conclusions about efficacy from these data alone. The elevated antibody levels before vaccination in some of the patients, suggesting prior infection with Diplococcus pneumoniae, may partly explain the findings.


This article looks at the case law governing discovery of social media, and finds several problems. First, many courts are improperly requiring a threshold showing that relevant information exists in public portions of the user's social media account before allowing such discovery. Second, they allow overbroad discovery, often requiring a litigant to turn over its username and password to the other party. At the same time, parties are seeking such information directly from social media sites, attempting an end-run around the relevancy requirement and increasing motion practice. The article argues that, instead, social media discovery should be treated like other party-driven discovery where litigants are entitled to request relevant information that exists on social media accounts and are in turn responsible for providing that information just as they would other discovery in their possession, custody or control. There is a promising new line of case law following that path. The article then looks more broadly at the emerging issue of privacy in e-discovery, and sets forth the existing methods of restricting undue attempts to invade that privacy. Finally, the article argues that the scope of e-discovery dictates a new look at the way our discovery rules protect privacy, and finds encouragement in the latest proposed amendments to Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(1) to limit the scope of discovery based on proportionality and relevance to existing claims and defenses.


We investigate the use of the dot notation in the context of abstract types. The dot notation -- that is, a.f referring to the operation f provided by the abstraction a -- is used by programming languages such as Modula-2 and CLU. We compare this notation with the Mitchell-Plotkin approach, which draws a parallel between type abstraction and (weak) existential quantification in constructive logic. The basic operations on existentials coming from logic give new insights about the meaning of type abstraction, but differ completely from the more familiar dot notation. In this paper, we formalize simple calculi equipped with the dot notation, and relate them to a more classical calculus a la Mitchell and Plotkin. This work provides some theoretical foundations for the dot notation, and suggests some useful extensions.


Humans did not discover fire--they designed it. Design is not defined by software programs, blueprints, or font choice. When we create new things--technologies, organizations, processes, systems, environments, ways of thinking--we engage in design. With this expansive view of design as their premise, in The Design Way, Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman make the case for design as its own culture of inquiry and action. They offer not a recipe for design practice or theorizing but a formulation of design culture's fundamental core of ideas. These ideas--which form "the design way"--are applicable to an infinite variety of design domains, from such traditional fields as architecture and graphic design to such nontraditional design areas as organizational, educational, interaction, and health care design. Nelson and Stolterman present design culture in terms of foundations (first principles), fundamentals (core concepts), and metaphysics, and then discuss these issues from both learner's and practitioner's perspectives. The text of this second edition is accompanied by new detailed images, "schemas" that visualize, conceptualize, and structure the authors' understanding of design inquiry. This text itself has been revised and expanded throughout, in part in response to reader feedback.


The transition from a fossil fuel-dependent society to a cleaner, more sustainable society will not be possible without renewable energy sources. Hydrogen holds great potential as an energy carrier as an alternative to fossil fuels in such society. However, the compact and safe storage of hydrogen are still major challenges. Solid state hydrogen storage offers the possibility to store hydrogen in solids offering high volumetric and high gravimetric energy densities, while reducing the risks associated when handling hydrogen gas. Nevertheless, no single system has fully achieved the required properties for on-board mobile applications.
Various approaches can be adopted with the aims of improving the kinetics and thermodynamics of hydrogen sorption. The nanostructuring of materials is one of the more promising strategies to achieve these aims. Reduction of the particle size of hydrides by nanoconfinement in forms of porous matrix leads to an increased surface area of the active material, and shorter diffusion distances for hydrogen atoms or ions to travel in the solid state. Kinetic barriers can be overcome and thermodynamics manipulated. An enhanced dehydrogenation rate and a reduced dehydrogenation temperature can be achieved by impregnating metal hydrides into porous scaffolds.
Two complex hydrides are selected for study in this work; LiAlH4 and LiNH2. LiAlH4, is the lightest of the alanates, with a theoretical hydrogen storage capacity of 10.5 wt.%, and 7.9 wt. % H2 evolved below 220 °C. LiNH2 mixed with LiH, as part of the Li-N-H system, can reversibly desorb/uptake 6.5 wt. % H2 at 300 °C. When LiNH2 is heated alone, it releases ammonia (which is decomposed to N2 and H2 at higher temperatures > 400 °C).
In this work, LiAlH4 has been impregnated in different types of commercial and synthesised porous carbon scaffolds for the first time. Nanoconfinement of the active material was achieved using solution impregnation with diethyl ether as a solvent. Analogously, the confinement of LiNH2 in porous carbon was achieved "in-situ" using lithium-ammonia solutions. Both confined composites showed lower dehydrogenation temperatures in comparison with the respective bulk materials.
The influence of the design of the carbon scaffold (as manifested for example, by the surface area and the pore volume and pore size distribution) on the dehydrogenation behaviour of the impregnated complex hydrides is demonstrated. By judicious selection of an appropriate porous host, we show how it is possible to induce faster H2 desorption and substantially reduce the desorption temperature.
The onset of hydrogen release for confined LiAlH4 decreased significantly in temperature, being reduced by 51 °C (in both porous hosts used, AX-21 and FDU-15) in comparison with as-received LiAlH4. The temperature at which the hydrogen release was maximised was also lowered (by 16 °C in FDU-15 and by 26 °C in AX-21) in comparison with as-received LiAlH4.
The confined LiNH2 showed a much earlier release of hydrogen in comparison with as-received LiNH2. Normally LiNH2 would thermally decompose to Li2NH with ammonia evolution, but ammonia release was eliminated for the confined sample. Reaction with carbon led to irreversible Li2CN2 formation and hydrogen evolution. A set of experiments to establish the formation of Li2CN2 with physically mixed samples were performed. The physically mixed samples showed hydrogen release between 400 - 450 °C, producing a mixture of Li2NH and Li2CN2, suggesting two decomposition pathways were followed. In contrast, confined LiNH2 released hydrogen ca. 220 °C lower than the physically mixed sample, with no detectable trace of ammonia release.


A rapid avifaunal diversity assessment was carried out at three different locations of north Bengal viz. Gorumara National Park (GNP), Buxa Tiger Reserve (BTR) (Jayanti/Jainty range) and Rasik Beel Wetland Complex (RBWC) during 2 November and 14 November 2008. A total of 117 bird species belonging to 42 families were recorded during the present short span study. The highest bird diversity was recorded in GNP with 87 bird species, followed by RBWC (75) and BTR (68). The transition zones between GNP and BTR, BTR and RBWC and GNP and RBWC were represented by 51, 41 and 57 common bird species, respectively. A total of 36 bird species were recorded in all three study sites. This diverse distribution of bird species was reflected in the study of diversity indices where the highest Shannon–Wiener diversity index score of 3.86 was recorded from GNP followed by RBWC (3.64) and BTR (2.84). The similar trend was also observed for Simpson's Dominance Index, Pielou's Evenness Index and Margalef's Richness Index. Consequently in the dendrogram analysis, we found that GNP and RBWC were much closer to each other while BTR remained distantly located form this cluster. The present study recorded two birds viz. Black-naped oriole (Oriolus chinensis) and Marshall's iora (Aegithina nigrolutea) previously not reported from the present study location. Like other protected areas of the country the present study location is also facing conservation challenges and more intensive studies will certainly reveal the impact of anthropogenic alteration of the habitats in and around the present study location along with the enrichment of knowledge for the avifaunal diversity.


Summary The geotechnical implications of the inherent complexity of glacial sedimentary sequences have been recently emphasized and it has been suggested that more extensive use be made of engineering geological and geomorphological mapping, especially in the preliminary stages of site investigations. The incidence of certain geomorphic processes beyond the ice margins, notably periglacial solifluction, obscures the relationship between glacial depositional landforms and glacial deposits, especially when periglacial activity has prevailed throughout a glacial period. In such a case, the level of discrimination and sophistication required of these techniques is higher than that demanded using a'land system' approach in ice-moulded terrain such as that of the last (Devensian) glaciation. This paper describes examples from the east Midlands of England, where recent engineering operations have encountered serious difficulties due to complex glacial assemblages or unstable bedrock being found beneath apparently simple morphostratigraphic surfaces. Surfaces mapped, for example, as late Tertiary'erosional platforms' and late Pleistocene river terraces can be shown to be the product of periglacial processes. Examples are described from recent engineering projects and suggestions are presented as to how similar problems may be avoided in the future.


This paper develops a systematic assessment of the sustainability of ecosystem services provided by rivers impacted by water storage projects. Given the conflicting preferences amongst stakeholders and the incomplete, uncertain and contradictory understanding about river ecology it is recognized that managing water resources sustainably is a wicked problem. In order to address this wicked problem, the methods of multi-criteria analysis and graph analysis are applied, in accordance with integrated water resource management, to assess the potential of investing in water storage projects and explore for sustainable solutions through the construction of an ecosystem services index.


ABSTRACT To achieve Millennium Development Goal 5 on maternal health, many countries have focused on marginalized women who lack access to care. Promoting facility-based deliveries to ensure skilled birth attendance and emergency obstetric care has become a main measure for preventing maternal deaths, so women who opt for home births are often considered 'marginal' and in need of targeted intervention. Drawing upon ethnographic data from Nicaragua, this paper critically examines the concept of marginality in the context of official efforts to increase institutional delivery amongst the rural poor, and discusses lack of access to health services among women living in peripheral areas as a process of marginalization. The promotion of facility birth as the new norm, in turn, generates a process of 're-marginalization', whereby public health officials morally disapprove of women who give birth at home, viewing them as non-compliers and a problem to the system. In rural Nicaragua, there is a discrepancy between the public health norm and women's own preferences and desires for home birth. These women live at the margins also in spatial and societal terms, and must relate to a health system they find incapable of providing good, appropriate care. Strong public pressure for institutional delivery makes them feel distressed and pressured. Paradoxically then, the aim of including marginal groups in maternal health programmes engenders resistance to facility birth.


Two new dyes, E1 and E2, equipped with triphenylamine as the electron donor, oligothiophene as the linker and different electron acceptor groups, have been designed and synthesized as photosensitizers for p-type dye-sensitized solar cells (p-DSCs). A systematic study of the effect of molecular structures on the observed photophysical properties, the electron/hole recombination process, the overall performance and the interfacial charge separation was carried out. Transient absorption spectroscopy (TAS) shows that the E1 dye with a napthoilene-1,2-benzimidazole (NBI) unit as the acceptor has a longer lifetime in the reduced state than the E2 dye with a malononitrile subunit on the NiO surface.


Intermontane basins are often the result of regionally variable uplift in tectonic settings. Wedge‐top basins, a type of intermontane basin, form along thrust faults within a fold and thrust belt, and provide an ideal environment to study the regional fluvial and surface response to local variations in rock uplift. This study simulates the formation and evolution of an intermontane basin using a landscape evolution model. The modelling results demonstrate that large trunk streams maintain connectivity during basin formation for two reasons: (1) their stream power is enhanced by the capture of smaller streams, enabling them to incise through the uplifting downstream region, and (2) they acquire increased sediment yield to completely infill the upstream accommodation space rather than forming an endorhic basin. During active deformation of the fold‐and‐thrust belt, both channel slope and erosion rates are reduced upstream of the intermontane basin and these changes propagate as a wave of low erosion into the uplands. For a uniform background uplift rate in a landscape previously at steady state, this reduced rate of erosion results in a net surface uplift upstream of the basin. Following the eventual breach of the basin's bounding structural barrier, a wave of high erosion propagates through the basin and increases the channel slope. This onset of increased erosion can be delayed by up to several million years relative to the onset of downstream uplift. Observed paleoerosion rates in paired wedge‐top and foreland basin sequences, and present‐day stream profiles in the Argentine Precordillera support our modelling results. Our results may be extrapolated to other foreland systems, and are potentially identifed using low‐temperature thermochronometers in addition to paleoerosion rates.


Ketone bodies compete with chloride ions for binding to vesicular glutamate transporters, thus inhibiting glutamate release. For those epileptic patients for whom conventional drugs poorly control their seizures, adoption of a high-fat, low-protein and -carbohydrate ("ketogenic") diet offers some relief. Such a diet results in a high serum concentration of ketone bodies, such as acetoacetate, that can cross the blood-brain barrier; however, how these metabolic products might modulate the effects of excitatory or inhibitory neurotransmission to alleviate epileptic symptoms is unclear. Juge et al. used a reconstituted proteoliposome system to investigate the regulation of vesicular glutamate transporters (VGLUTs), which mediate the loading of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate into presynaptic vesicles. Uptake of glutamate into the proteoliposomes by VGLUT2 (in response to the ionophore valinomycin) required the presence of chloride ions (Cl–) in the buffer, as previously reported, but Cl– was not cotransported with glutamate. Hypothesizing that Cl– was allosterically regulating the activity of VGLUT2, the authors examined other compounds for their effects on glutamate transport and found a number of metabolic products, including acetoacetate, that inhibited the activity of VGLUT2 and increased its dependency on Cl–. Other members of the family of vesicular neurotransmitter transporters were also inhibitable by acetoacetate. Acetoacetate reversibly inhibited the release of glutamate from cultured rat hippocampal neurons but not astrocytes. The ketone body also reduced the quantal size of glutamate released from CA1 pyramidal cells in mouse hippocampal slices. Finally, in rats treated with the convulsant 4AP, acetoacetate reduced the intensity of seizures and the amount of secreted glutamate in the brain. Together, these data suggest that metabolic state might influence excitatory neurotransmission by regulating the activity of VGLUT proteins. N. Juge, J. A. Gray, H. Omote, T. Miyaji, T. Inoue, C. Hara, H. Uneyama, R. H. Edwards, R. A. Nicoll, Y. Moriyama, Metabolic control of vesicular glutamate transport and release. Neuron 68, 99–112 (2010). [PubMed]


Climate change threatens to put back the fight to eradicate hunger by decades – and our global food system is unprepared to cope with the challenge. New evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is likely to  show that the impact of climate change on global hunger will hit harder and sooner than previously thought. In this briefing, Oxfam analyses ten key factors that influence a country's ability to feed its people in a warming world, including the quality of weather monitoring systems, social safety nets, agricultural research and adaptation finance.  Across all ten areas Oxfam has found a serious gap between what is happening and what is needed to protect our food systems. And that it is the world's poorest and most food insecure countries that are generally the least prepared for and most susceptible to harmful climate change.


Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical and empirical possibility of measuring trust and commitment in collective actions.

Design/methodology/approach

The study employs choice experiments to estimate trust implicitly as opposed to the common practice of measuring trust explicitly. Several experiments were conducted to assess members' level of trust and commitment to marketing cooperatives in rural Ethiopia.

Findings

The results of the study indicate that significant number of farmers do not yet have trust in their organization and fellow members in both absolute and relative terms. The probability of trust increases when members actively participate in cooperative governance, are less diverse, stay longer in the cooperative, and when cooperatives are older. The authors also learnt that both trust and commitment have indeed improved the performance of farmers' market organizations. Trust in cooperative is asymmetrically sensitive to incentives and disincentives.

Research limitations/implications

The study implied that research efforts attempting to estimate trust in collective action shall use an implicit measurement and consider the sensitivity of trust to relativeness, incentives and types of transactions.

Practical implications

The findings of this study showed that rural organizations that are established with external help, such as agricultural cooperatives in Africa, seem to struggle to earn the trust of their current and potential members. This implies that given the effectiveness and persistence of informal rural organizations emerged through mutual trust, cooperatives must be organized either through informal ways as trust-based organizations or based on cooperative business principles of voluntarism and independence.

Originality/value

This paper employs the behaviorally appealing choice experiment approach to capture the different aspects of trust such as relativism, sensitivity of trust to incentive and types of transactions in smallholder producers' organizations.


Increasing economy's resistance against the menace of sanctions, various risks, shocks, and internal and external threats are one of the main national policies which can be implemented through bank investments. Investment project selection is a complex and multi-criteria decision-making process that is influenced by multiple and often some conflicting objectives. This paper studies portfolio investment decisions in Iranian Banks. The main contribution of this paper is the creation of a project portfolio selection model that facilitates how Iranian banks would make investment decisions on proposed projects to satisfy bank profit maximization and risk minimization, while focus on national policies such as Resistance Economy Policies. The considered problem is formulated as a multi-objective integer programming model. A framework called Multi-Objective Electromagnetism-like (MOEM) algorithm, is developed to solve this NP-hard problem. To further enhance MOEM, a local search heuristic based on simulated annealing is incorporated in the algorithm. In order to demonstrate the efficiency and reliability of the proposed algorithm, a number of test are performed. The MOEM results are compared with two well-known multi-objective genetic algorithms in the literature, i.e. Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) and Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA-II) based on some comparison metrics. Also, these algorithms are compared with an integer linear programming formulation for small instances. Computational experiments indicate the superiority of the MOEM over existing algorithms.


Formal organization is often seen as opposed or resistant to change, in theory as well as in practice. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze we argue that the reverse is true — that organization is itself a dynamic quality and that change and organization are imbricated in each other. We expand several key concepts of this philosophy in relation to organization (the multiplicity of order and the multiplicity of organization, strata and meshworks, virtuality and multitude) all of which draw attention to the unstable but ever-present forces that subvert and disrupt, escape, exceed and change organization. This enables an understanding of organization as creatively autosubversive — not fixed, but in motion, never resting and constantly trembling.


Mendelian randomization (MR) is a powerful approach that evaluates the causal association between a risk factor and an outcome. It makes use of the random allocation of genetic variants to mimic randomizers in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), providing quality evidence that is less susceptible to unmeasured confounding and reverse causality, when compared to conventional observational studies. Currently, MR has been applied in osteoporosis-related research to begin to unravel the causal risk factors that predispose to low bone mineral density (BMD) and increased susceptibility of fracture. Some MR studies made use of serum level measurement as a surrogate to mimic the role of supplementation, such as vitamin D and calcium, and evaluate the effects of the supplements in bone metabolism. From clinical perspective, MR studies enable identification of diagnostic markers and therapeutic targets. They provide evidence on the efficacy and adverse effects of drugs, contributing to discovery and repurposing of drugs.


Parkinson Disease (PD) is brain disorder that affects the central nervous system that results in damage of nerve cells causing dopamine to drop. PD has a severe effect on vocal features termed as Dysarthria symptoms including varied pitch, extended pauses, monotonous and speaking slowly or with a slur. In this paper, a dataset containing various vocal features are taken as input to analyze the performance of various Machine Learning algorithms including Naive Bayes, Random Forest Classifier, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Linear Regression, K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Neural Networks such as ANN and LSTM. The best classification accuracy was obtained by ANN around 90.00%.


The implementation of a Bus Rapid Transit system (BRT) is a reality in many Brazilian cities. In Belem, where the public transportation system is mainly operated by buses with no integration, BRT is expected to serve: bus users on a larger scale; users of other modes of transportation, such as alternative collective transport system and microbuses; and users of individual modes of transportation, such as cars, taxis and motorcycle taxis. Therefore, it is expected that users change their travel strategies, especially those who are located in the area surrounding the project. This study intends to explore the effects of BRT on townspeople and on public and private transport users regarding their travel strategies. The study is composed of an initial discussion about BRT projects in Brazilian cities and the development of a case concerning the routes, which are part of BRT system in Belem, Para, Brazil. The investigation involved focus groups in a one-mile radius around the route. A questionnaire was applied using the stated preference technique, with questions about socioeconomic profile, travel standards, inputs related to the current transport system and strategies for current and future travels after the implementation of BRT system. Among the results achieved, BRT was found to cause tremendous impacts on travel strategies of townspeople and public transport users in the surveyed area. Cyclists expect the system to be integrated with the implementation of bicycle racks. In general, the survey has shown that users tend to change their travel strategies and that BRT is positively regarded by public transport users, as something that would improve their urban mobility.


Many people view animal welfare standards in the agricultural industry as critical and some consumers would prefer to buy high welfare meat. In order to successfully introduce high welfare meat products onto the market, some important marketing decisions must be made. Due to limited shelf space in retail outlets, niche products like high welfare meat cannot be placed both at the self-service counter and at the service counter. In order to analyze where to place it best an online survey of 642 German consumers was conducted. By means of factor and cluster analyses, consumers' animal welfare attitudes and their preference for a point of purchase were combined. The different target groups were joint using cross tabulation analysis. The results reveal that consumers in the target group show a more positive attitude to the service counter.


It's hard to imagine how the touch industry could be any more exciting than it is right now. Consider the following, especially in light of the current worldwide economic crisis: • Consumer-device manufacturers are adopting touch at a very rapid rate. • New touch technologies are being created. • Touch is growing 3X (units) to 10X (revenue) faster than the display industry. • Existing touch technologies are being refined and enhanced. • Projected-capacitive-touch revenue has rocketed from $20 million to $600 million in 3 years. • The pace and scope of university research on touch has accelerated. • Display Week has dedicated one of the four half-day Sunday Short Courses to touch. • SID has designated touch as a special area of focus and created symposium sessions exclusively for touch. • Touch startups are being funded or acquired when they rarely would have been in the past (FlatFrog, Touchco, Sensitive Objects ...). • New conferences and shows devoted to touch are being created worldwide.


Aims Uveal melanoma is the commonest primary intraocular malignancy in adults, and leads to death in approximately half of patients. The aim was to report on trends over time and geographical variation in rates of uveal melanoma in England. Methods Analysis of admissions for uveal melanoma, using linked English national hospital episode statistics, available from 1999 to 2010, and the Oxford record linkage study (ORLS), before that, from 1979 to 1998. Results The annual rate of people admitted in England with a new record of uveal melanoma remained stable at approximately 1.0 people per 100 000 population from 1999 to 2010. Annual ORLS incidence rates were also stable from 1979 to 1998. Proportions of new uveal malignancies in adults for 2006–10 were 88% (382 people/year) choroidal and 12% (52) ciliary body/iris. Incidence rates increased with increasing age and were higher in men than women. Geographical analysis showed variation across local authorities (LA) in incidence rates, from 0.1 to 1.9 people per 100 000 population per year. Incidence rates at the LA level were inversely correlated with the proportion of black (r=−0.18) or Indian individuals (r=−0.13) in each LA, were weakly correlated with LA levels of social deprivation (r=0.08) and were not correlated with southerly latitude. Conclusions The annual incidence of uveal melanoma in England has remained stable over the past decade. This contrasts with the rising incidence of cutaneous melanoma. Our data do not support the possibility that ultraviolet light exposure contributes to the pathogenesis of uveal melanoma.


Most students of the joint degree in English Philology and Tourism, taught at the University of Jaen (Spain), usually complain about the fact that the teaching of literature is sometimes reduced to the theoretical study of literary periods and bio-bibliographical data about authors. This approach overlooks one of the main functions of literary texts: their contribution to the definition of our students' ideological positioning in the world. Raising critical awareness through literature is, without any doubt, one of the principles that should guide the design of every literary syllabus. The teaching programme of the compulsory subject Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (Literary Texts in English) revolves around this belief. This subject has been structured around the analysis of several literary texts by authors from different periods which examine key cross-curricular issues such as ideological independence, alienation, authenticity or multicultural awareness. The traditional stylistic analysis of literary texts has been complemented with the inclusion of strategies to foster the students' capability to express their critical opinion and establish meaningful connections between the message of a text and their own lives. The aim of this paper is to discuss the methodological anatomy of these strategies.


The essence of the legal nature of relations between the non-entrepreneurial company and its participants is revealed. Analyzed the views of scholars on the definition and content of corporate rights in non-entrepreneurial societies. It is concluded that in a non-commercial partnership there are two types of legal relationships regulated by different methods of civil law: internal corporate relations or organizational, regulated by a method in which the decision of the majority is mandatory for minority, and property relations, which are regulated by the legal equality of parties, with all legal consequences. Formulation of the problem. Today many non-entrepreneurial companies have shown themselves to be active in such a way that real social issues are solved, which for a number of reasons the state does not manage. Among them, supporting and protection of the rights of socially vulnerable groups of the population (children, youth, women, military personnel, veterans, refugees, settlers, invalids, etc.); defending the rights of citizens to a favorable environment; complex of issues related to local self-government; leisure organization, education, retraining, social rehabilitation, etc. The variety of forms of non-entrepreneurial company directly depends on the specific purpose for which it is created and its functions. Some of them are created and operate for the sake of providing economic benefits to an indefinite number of people who are not participants of the non-entrepreneurial company itself (charities, institutions, foundations), others in order to meet the needs of all, the participants themselves of non-entrepreneurial company (public organizations, associations of co-owners of multi-apartment buildings residential buildings, credit unions). Analysis of the recent research materials and publications. The searching of certain issues of the legal status of NT was given attention in the works of V.I. Borisova, I.V. Spasibo-Fateyeva, I.M. Kucherenko, V.I. Zhukov, I.P. Zhigalkin, V.F. Poddubnaya, OO Belyaeva, VV Cochin, N.Y. Filatova and many other scientists, emphasizing the relevance of the research topic. Despite the considerable interest of scientists in the issues of non-entrepreneurial company activities, many outstanding issues remain, including the legal nature of the relationship between non-entrepreneurial company and its participants. Purpose of the article – to identify the legal nature of the relationship between non-entrepreneurial company and its participants, depending on the type of non-entrepreneurial company and the purpose of its creation. Presenting the main material. The legal nature of the relationship between the non-entrepreneurial company and its participants is based on the "right of participation" in the society enshrined in the law. For its researching it is necessary to determine the legal nature of the "right to participate" in non-entrepreneurial company as a legal entity. Along with the "participation", the term "membership" is also used by law, which in some cases is generally identified. It follows from the conclusion that for non-entrepreneurial company it is not fundamental, but it is more expedient to use the term "right of participation" to unify the use of the definition. Definition of the"right of participation" Civil Code is not provided. Therefore, in clarifying the essence of this right should proceed, first of all, from the general understanding of the concept of "participation" and to analyze the rights enshrined by law to the members of the companies. The legal nature of the right to participate in a company as a legal entity is the right of a companion to act on his own, which causes another person - the companion of the state of affiliation. It can be argued that the right to participate implies involvement in something that the person is involved in, that is, the fact that the person is in a certain connection with other persons is confirmed. This association is not an obligation. However, this is a right that is not opposed to any obligation. The peculiarity of the right of participation of a society is the actions of a companion in a company, which at the same time is both a power and a duty. The right to participate in the "union of persons" is simultaneously a duty in the "union of deposits". The "Union of Persons" adopted the method of legal regulation of intra corporate law, which consists in the decision of the body of the company, adopted by the majority, mandatory for the minority of companions. The method of democratic centralism. Does not have the right to veto, but there is a certain, intracorporate, subordination. In its legal nature, this is an organizational relationship (the right to participate), the subject of civil law. The "Union of deposits" inherent method of legal regulation is a method of civil law. This is a method of legal equality, that is, not subordination of subjects of civil legal relations to each other. This is a property relationship, in which its members, being companions, are related to each other as equal. Conclusions. Based on the foregoing can conclude that in the company, including non-entrepreneurial, two types of legal relations governed by various methods of civil law: internal corporate relations or organizational, regulated by the method in which the majority decision is mandatory for the minority, and property legal relations, which are regulated by the method of legal equality of the parties, with all legal consequences. In the non-entrepreneurial company, in which property contributions are significant and perform functions similar to functions of property contributions in entrepreneurial associations, there is a need for additional protection of the rights and legitimate interests of participants (members), which can be ensured, in particular, by improving the system of reporting on the activities of non-entrepreneurial company and the cost of material resources; mandatory creation in the non-entrepreneurial company of the bodies that control the activities of the organization; the extension of the list of questions submitted to the exclusive competence of the supreme management body of non-entrepreneurial company, etc. If the non-entrepreneurial company simply gives its participants (members) goods, works, and services typical of the external market for a fee, then they act in a role equivalent to the role of creditors. At the same time, the participants (members) are subject to general rules on the protection of creditors' rights.


Location-based services (l-services for short) comprise an emerging application involving spatiotemporal databases. In this paper, we discuss this type of application in terms of database requirements and provide a set of ten benchmark database queries (plus two operations for loading and updating data). The list includes selection queries on stationary and moving reference objects, join queries and unary operations on trajectories of moving objects. We also survey recent work in query processing for those query types, with an emphasis on indexing moving objects, and suggest candidates for efficiently supporting databases for l-services.


An illumination-dependent analysis of silicon nanocrystal p-i-n solar cells is presented within the framework of the constant field approximation. Silicon nanocrystals in silicon carbide were prepared by solid-phase crystallization and contacted with doped a-SixC1−x:H. This paper aims at determining the fundamental transport and recombination properties, i.e., the effective mobility lifetime product, of the nanocrystal layer at device level. Illumination-dependent current-voltage curves are modelled with a voltage-dependent collection function with only two free parameters, and excellent agreement is found between theory and experiment. An effective mobility lifetime product of 10−10 cm2/V is derived and confirmed independently from an alternative method.


This report attempts to assist policymakers by indicating the status and trend of minority business and providing information on characteristics of minority business owners. Tremendous progress has been made, the disparity between minorities and the American mainstream is still lingering. At the same time, we have found successful stories that can shed lights to improve the economic wellbeing of those left behind. In 1982, minorities merely owned 7 percent of U.S. firms. Twenty years later, minorities owned 18 percent in 2002. In five years between 1997 and 2002, Black-owned firms grew 45 percent and Hispanic-owned firms grew 31 percent. Yet, for every dollar of receipts that a White-owned firm made on average, minorities made much less. While minority population has been growing rapidly, the growth of business numbers, especially the increase in business receipts has not been synchronized. Terms such as poverty, food stamps, or social welfare, remain minority significant. Can American minorities catch up with the mainstream? Asian Americans have offered a very positive and promising tendency. The abundant human capital through education and possible strong social network associated with high rate of marriage and with family business financing created a special comparative advantage for Asian business. This resulted in a high business density that is likely to be positively correlated to people's economic wellbeing.


We studied 68 small lowland streams in Denmark of which the majority were affected by physical and chemical stress or a combination of both. Using DCA analyses, we analysed macrophyte and macroinvertebrate communities along a combined disturbance gradient. Both macrophytes and macroinvertebrate communities responded to the combined pressure gradient. We used a rigorous classification of the 68 sites, into 5 disturbance groups, with respect to physical and chemical disturbance and studied the effects of disturbance on physical habitat structure and density and diversity of macrophytes, macroinvertebrates and fish. Physical habitat structure in the disturbed streams was similar, except for variations in width which was lowest, and coverage of mud, which was highest in heavily disturbed streams. Macrophyte communities were impacted by disturbance. Average species richness and diversity were significantly lower in disturbed streams (8.6 and 2.8) than in relatively undisturbed streams (15.3 and 5.6). The total number of Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera and Trichoptera taxa (EPT) was significantly lower in disturbed streams (4.1) compared to streams experiencing intermediate disturbance (6.0-7.6) and undisturbed streams (7.0). Taxa associated with stable substrata, such as Leuctra sp. and Baetis sp., were reduced in abundance by approximately 50% on disturbed sites. Density of trout (Salmo trutta L.) was markedly lower in disturbed streams (14 per 100 m 2 ) than in undisturbed streams (55-204 per 100 m 2 ). The results indicate that disturbance cascades through the stream ecosystem, primarily meditated by changes in macrophyte communities that are essential providers of habitat in unshaded lowland streams in which other structural elements, as coarse inorganic substrates and woody debris, are scarce. The analyses also show that the community variable responses to the combined stressors are not linear, which is an important issue implementing the ecological classification in the Water Framework Directive.


Self-regulation is a complex, multifaceted concept that can be described as a higher mental process oriented toward children's (and adults') metacognitive, motivational, and behaviorally active participation in their own learning. It includes cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional development. It is related to several other higher mental processes, notably executive function, and the two are sometimes confused and even conflated. They are, however, not interchangeable, and it is vital to clarify both what self-regulation is and what it is not. Failure to do so may lead to confusion at practice and policy levels, and ineffective or inappropriate practice, potentially disadvantageous to young children.
 Self-regulation may be significant in all aspects of development, particularly in early childhood, and efforts to enhance children's self-regulation may be among the most effective educational interventions. Interest is reflected in developments in the field of assessment, including by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and in government policy in, inter alia, England. Play, particularly pretense, problem-solving, and talk (both private speech and dialogue) are advocated as rich, naturalistic contexts for the development, support, and meaningful assessment of young children's self-regulation. Some specific approaches to assessment are identified, notably observation and stimulated recall, in the form of reflective dialogues, including the use of video. Decontextualized assessment is suggested as a potentially less effective approach in capturing the full depth and range of young children's self-regulatory competence.


Thurston parameterized quadratic invariant laminations with a non-invariant lamination, the quotient of which yields a combinatorial model for the Mandelbrot set. As a step toward generalizing this construction to cubic polynomials, we consider slices of the family of cubic invariant laminations defined by a fixed critical leaf with non-periodic endpoints. We parameterize each slice by a lamination just as in the quadratic case, relying on the techniques of smart criticality previously developed by the authors.


When men participate as students in Women's and Gender Studies (WGS) classrooms, they undergo feminist change. They adopt more progressive understandings of gender, show greater support for feminism, and increase their involvement in anti-sexist activism. Male students in WGS classrooms benefit to the same degree as female students, showing similar levels of change, although they start with poorer attitudes and thus the gap between them and their female peers persists. At the same time, male students' presence highlights critical challenges to feminist pedagogy: gendered patterns of interaction, resistance to feminist teaching, and limitations on women's critical reflections on personal experience. When men teach WGS, typically they are ''graded up''—evaluated by students as less biased and more competent than female professors. Male professors face distinct dilemmas in teaching about gender inequality from a position of privilege. Yet, like male students, they can adopt traitorous and antipatriarchal social locations and standpoints, developing pedagogies for and by the privileged.


During mild graded ischemia in perfused rat hearts, we (V.M. Figueredo, R. Brandes, M. W. Weiner, B. M. Massie, and S. A. Camacho. J. Clin. Invest 90: 1794-1802, 1992) previously found a relationship between decreased left ventricular developed pressure (LVDP) and increased Pi, in which intracellular pH, cytosolic Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i), ATP, and free-energy change of ATP hydrolysis were not altered enough to affect contractility. However, the contribution of decreased coronary perfusion pressure (CPP) to decreased LVDP could not be determined. Thus, in the present study, graded hypoxia in perfused rat hearts (95-37.5% O2) was used to increase Pi to similar levels produced during mild ischemia without altering CPP and minimizing changes of other potential mediators of contractile dysfunction. 31P-magnetic resonance spectroscopy and indo 1 fluorescence were used to assess energy metabolites and [Ca2+]i, respectively. The relationship between LVDP and Pi during graded hypoxia was fit to a monoexponential (LVDP = 105 x e-0.04Pi). These data were compared with the relationship of LVDP and Pi during mild ischemia (LVDP = 106 x e-0.08Pi) (V. M. Figueredo, R. Brandes, M. W. Weiner, B. M. Massie, and S. A. Camacho. J. Clin. Invest 90: 1794-1802, 1992). The exponential constant, which describes the effect of Pi on LVDP, was 50% lower during graded hypoxia relative to mild ischemia. This suggests that another mediator, which accounted for approximately 50% of the decrease of LVDP during mild ischemia, was not present during hypoxia. Because CPP decreased during ischemia but not hypoxia, these data suggest that CPP and Pi contribute similarly in mediating contractile dysfunction during mild ischemia.


T cell responses are initiated by antigen and promoted by a range of costimulatory signals. Understanding how T cells integrate alternative signal combinations and make decisions affecting immune response strength or tolerance poses a considerable theoretical challenge. Here, we report that T cell receptor (TCR) and costimulatory signals imprint an early, cell-intrinsic, division fate, whereby cells effectively count through generations before returning automatically to a quiescent state. This autonomous program can be extended by cytokines. Signals from the TCR, costimulatory receptors, and cytokines add together using a linear division calculus, allowing the strength of a T cell response to be predicted from the sum of the underlying signal components. These data resolve a long-standing costimulation paradox and provide a quantitative paradigm for therapeutically manipulating immune response strength. T cells follow a linear calculation when integrating costimulatory and cytokine signals. Stimulatory signals add up for T cells T cell activation is a dynamic process. T cells encounter multiple input signals such as antigens, costimulatory molecules, and cytokines at different times and anatomical locations during an infection. But how do T cells integrate this information to determine the extent to which they divide? To find out, Marchingo et al. stimulated mouse T cells in culture with different combinations of inputs and also tracked antigen-specific T cell responses in mice infected with influenza virus. They found that T cells linearly sum the various stimulatory inputs they receive to determine their "division destiny." Science, this issue p. 1123


Many screen and stage adaptations of the classics are informed by a philosophical investment in literature's reparative merit, a preconceived notion that performing the canon can make one a better person. Inspirational narratives, in particular, have instrumentalized the canon to serve socially reparative purposes. Social recuperation of disabled figures loom large in adaptation, and many reparative adaptations tap into a curative quality of Shakespearean texts. When Shakespeare's phrases or texts are quoted, even in fragments, they serve as an index of intelligence of the speaker. Governing the disability narrative is the trope about Shakespeare's therapeutic value. There are two strands of recuperative adaptations. The first is informed by the assumption that the dramatic situations exemplify moral universals. The second strand consists of adaptations that problematize heteronormativity and psychological universals in liberal humanist visions of the canon. This approach is self-conscious of deeply contextual meanings of the canon. As a result, it lends itself to the genres of parody, metatheatre, and metacinema. Through case studies of Tom Hooper's King's Speech, Cheah Chee Kong's Chicken Rice War, and other adaptations that thematize vocal disorders, this article identifies a common trope in reparative performances of disability in order to highlight some questions the trope raises.


Let $V$ and $W$ be $n$-dimensional vector spaces over $GF(2)$. A mapping $Q:V\rightarrow W$ is called crooked if it satisfies the following three properties: $Q(0)=0$; $Q(x)+Q(y)+Q(z)+Q(x+y+z)\neq 0$ for any three distinct $x,y,z$; $Q(x)+Q(y)+Q(z)+Q(x+a)+Q(y+a)+Q(z+a)\neq 0$ if $a\neq 0$ ($x,y,z$ arbitrary). We show that every crooked function gives rise to a distance regular graph of diameter 3 having $\lambda=0$ and $\mu=2$ which is a cover of the complete graph. Our approach is a generalization of a recent construction found by de Caen, Mathon, and Moorhouse. We study graph-theoretical properties of the resulting graphs, including their automorphisms. Also we demonstrate a connection between crooked functions and bent functions.


We consider a commonly studied supervised classification of a synthetic dataset whose labels are generated by feeding a one-layer neural network with random iid inputs. We study the generalization performances of standard classifiers in the high-dimensional regime where $\alpha=n/d$ is kept finite in the limit of a high dimension $d$ and number of samples $n$. Our contribution is three-fold: First, we prove a formula for the generalization error achieved by $\ell_2$ regularized classifiers that minimize a convex loss. This formula was first obtained by the heuristic replica method of statistical physics. Secondly, focussing on commonly used loss functions and optimizing the $\ell_2$ regularization strength, we observe that while ridge regression performance is poor, logistic and hinge regression are surprisingly able to approach the Bayes-optimal generalization error extremely closely. As $\alpha \to \infty$ they lead to Bayes-optimal rates, a fact that does not follow from predictions of margin-based generalization error bounds. Third, we design an optimal loss and regularizer that provably leads to Bayes-optimal generalization error.


The purpose of this paper is to explore recent trends in the Croatian agriculture and forestry business sector and compare it with the Croatian economy as a whole. This topic is considered interesting because recent business years have been heavily influenced by the global financial crisis. Many authors would say that agriculture, as a specific branch of the economy, does not follow general trends, but is affected rather by other factors, especially such as environmental ones. The global financial crisis had the most negative impact on the Croatian economy in the 2008/2009 period, when the GDP growth rate tumbled from 2.4% to -5.8%. Although some positive movements have been recorded since 2009, a recession is still going on. Based on information from the National Financial Agency (FINA) database we found that during the period 2007-2011, agricultural firms experienced the same trends as the whole economy, except in terms of average monthly salaries and employment. However, due to the impact of / on? agricultural products prices and yields, in two year period from 2008 to 2010, agricultural firms recorded an almost linear fall in revenues, while the national business sector on the whole experienced a sharp fall in revenues in 2009 and then only a modest fall in 2010.


The recent results of using a new type of chosen-plaintext attack, which is called differential cryptanalysis, makes most published conventional secret-key block cipher systems vulnerable. The need for a new conventional cipher which resists all known attacks was the main inspiration of this work.

The design of a secret-key block cipher algorithm called DCU-Cipher, that resists all known cryptanalysis methods is proposed in this dissertation. The proposed method is workable for either 64-bit plaintext/64-bit ciphertext blocks, or 128-bit plaintext/128-bit ciphertext blocks. The secret key in both styles is 128-bit long. This method has only four rounds and the main transformation function in this cipher algorithm is based on four mixed operations. The proposed method is suitable for both hardware and software implementation. It is also suitable for cryptographic hash function implementations.

Two techniques for file and/or data communication encryption are also proposed here. These modes are modified versions of the Cipher-Block Chaining mode, by which the threat of the known-plaintext differential cyptanalytical attack is averted.

An intensive investigation of the best known Identity-based key exchange schemes is also presented. The idea behind using such protocols, is providing an authenticated secret-key by using the users identification tockens. These kind of protocols appeared recently and are not standardized as yet. None of these protocols have been compared with previous proposals. Therefore one can not realize the efficiency and the advantages of a new proposed protocol without comparing it with other existing schemes of the same type. The aim of this investigation is to clarify the advantages and the disadvantages of each of the best known schemes and compare these schemes from the complixity and the speed viewpoint.


The largest cities in the wealthy nations all face an unprecedented challenge: how to meet the needs of a population that lives longer, has a declining birth rate, is generally healthier, but also increasingly beset by the rise of chronic illness. The World Cities Project (WCP) has produced two books and numerous articles based on comparisons among, and within five of the world's most dynamic cities: New York, Paris, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong. These cities are centres of economic growth and finance, culture and media, sophisticated transportation systems and innovations of all kinds. They are renowned for their centres of excellence in medical care, top-ranking medical schools, institutes of bio-medical research, and public health infrastructure. Likewise, they attract some of the wealthiest, as well as the poorest populations of their nations, which forces their health care systems to confront the challenge of confronting glaring inequalities and redesigning their health care systems.


The rate at which HIV-1 infected individuals progress to AIDS is highly variable and impacted by T cell immunity. CD8 T cell inhibitory molecules are up-regulated in HIV-1 infection and associate with immune dysfunction. We evaluated participants (n = 122) recruited to the SPARTAC randomised clinical trial to determine whether CD8 T cell exhaustion markers PD-1, Lag-3 and Tim-3 were associated with immune activation and disease progression. Expression of PD-1, Tim-3, Lag-3 and CD38 on CD8 T cells from the closest pre-therapy time-point to seroconversion was measured by flow cytometry, and correlated with surrogate markers of HIV-1 disease (HIV-1 plasma viral load (pVL) and CD4 T cell count) and the trial endpoint (time to CD4 count <350 cells/μl or initiation of antiretroviral therapy). To explore the functional significance of these markers, co-expression of Eomes, T-bet and CD39 was assessed. Expression of PD-1 on CD8 and CD38 CD8 T cells correlated with pVL and CD4 count at baseline, and predicted time to the trial endpoint. Lag-3 expression was associated with pVL but not CD4 count. For all exhaustion markers, expression of CD38 on CD8 T cells increased the strength of associations. In Cox models, progression to the trial endpoint was most marked for PD-1/CD38 co-expressing cells, with evidence for a stronger effect within 12 weeks from confirmed diagnosis of PHI. The effect of PD-1 and Lag-3 expression on CD8 T cells retained statistical significance in Cox proportional hazards models including antiretroviral therapy and CD4 count, but not pVL as co-variants. Expression of 'exhaustion' or 'immune checkpoint' markers in early HIV-1 infection is associated with clinical progression and is impacted by immune activation and the duration of infection. New markers to identify exhausted T cells and novel interventions to reverse exhaustion may inform the development of novel immunotherapeutic approaches.


There are only two ways to implement reform in an education system, namely through inservice education of existing teachers and preservice teacher education. Implementing the Australian Curriculum will require targeting both teachers and preservice teachers. Classroom teachers in their roles as mentors have a significant role to play for developing preservice teachers. What mentors do in their mentoring practices and what mentors think about mentoring will impact on the mentoring processes and ultimately reform outcomes. What are mentors' reports on their mentoring of preservice teachers in science and mathematics? This mixed-method study presents mentors' reports on their mentoring of primary preservice teachers (mentees) in mathematics (n=43) and science (n=29). Drawing upon a previously validated instrument (Hudson, 2007), this instrument was amended to allow mentors to report on their perceptions of their mentoring. A questionnaire elicited extended written responses that focused on: (1) the mentors' rapport with their mentees, (2) successful mentoring strategies, (3) aspects that may lead the mentee to feel unsuccessful, and (4) ways to enhance their mentoring skills. Mentors claimed they mentored teaching mathematics more than science. However, 20% or more indicated they did not provide mentoring practices for 25 out of 34 survey items in the science and 9 out of 34 items in the mathematics. Educational reform will necessity mentors to be educated on effective mentoring practices so the mentoring process can be more purposeful. Indeed, mentors who have knowledge of such practices may address the potential issues of more than 20% of mentees not receiving these practices. These mentors also claimed that professional development on effective mentoring can enhance their skills. To ensure the greatest success for an Australian Curriculum will require targeting mentors for professional development in order to assist mentees' development into the profession.


The process of peer-review of papers submitted for publication and of grant proposals is widely accepted in modern science as a crucial guarantee of high-quality work. Foremost in restricted research areas, anonymous reviewers and editors may use their power to slow down or even reject competitive yet worthwhile work that does not fit or is questioning their own dogmas. This potential peers conflict of interest of may be particularly expressed in areas where empirical proofs of findings are de facto impossible, e.g. in physical anthropology. An example, two-way anonymous (double-blind) peer-review process improves the overall quality of evaluation but it is hard to implement in a highly specialized research field. Yet, the introduction of a completely open peer-review policy would most likely be supported by the overwhelming majority of reviewers. Furthermore, it may increase the overall quality of peer-review with reviewers to have their name acknowledged. Science should be about the possibility of advertising fresh concepts on evidence-based results in a non-biased, egalitarian, and open way with transparency the prime goal of editing such scientific discourse. By raising our foremost concerns and, hopefully, by the implementation of the proposed policy, we believe that these stated goals can be achieved, thus enhancing the true purpose of peer review particularly in the complex situation of scientific niches.