Newly developed treatment technologies are capable of separating livestock manure into a liquid fraction and a solid fraction using sedimentation, mechanical, and/or chemical methods. These technologies offer a potential means of distributing nutrients to agricultural lands without the unwanted environmental risks associated with the release of steroid hormones to adjacent waterways. To assess the potential benefit of these technologies in reducing the level of release of steroid hormones to adjacent waterways, distribution profiles of nine steroid hormones (pregnenolone, progesterone, dehydroepiandrosterone, androstenedione, testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, estrone, 17α-estradiol, and 17β-estradiol) were determined in raw swine manure, and in solid and liquid fractions separated from ten full-scale manure separation systems. Steroid hormone concentrations, normalized for nitrogen content, were significantly higher in separated solids than in liquids. If separated liquids are applied instead of raw manu...


This article develops a model of the interactions between borrowers, originators, and a securitizer in primary and secondary mortgage markets. In the secondary market, the securitizer adds liquidity and plays a strategic game with mortgage originators. The securitizer sets the price at which it will purchase mortgages and the credit-score standard that qualifies a mortgage for purchase. We investigate two potential links between securitization and mortgage rates. First, we analyze whether a portion of the liquidity premium gets passed on to borrowers in the form of a lower mortgage rate. Somewhat surprisingly, we find very plausible conditions under which securitization fails to lower the mortgage rate. Second, and consistent with recent empirical results, we derive an inverse correlation between the volume of securitization and mortgage rates. However, the causation is reversed from the standard rendering. In our model, a decline in the mortgage rate causes increased securitization rather than the other way around.


The theory of uniform distribution of sequences of algebraic integers in a fixed algebraic number field K, as initiated by Kuipers, Niederreiter, and Shiue, is developed from a measuretheoretic viewpoint. After establishing some general facts in § 2, in particular, the analogy between uniform distribution of sequences of algebraic integers in K and of sequences of lattice points, a method of enumerating all algebraic integers in K into a uniformly distributed sequence is discussed in § 3. This enumeration method is useful for the construction of other uniformly distributed sequences as well and plays a role in the density theory. In § 4, a so-called Banach-Buck measure is defined on the ring of all algebraic integers in K. Various relations between this measure and the property of uniform distribution are exhibited. Based on Buck's general concept of density, the notions of relative density and of density of sets of algebraic integers in K are introduced in the final section. Connections among the concepts of uniform distribution, measurability, and relative density of sequences of algebraic integers in K are established.


Much of the world today views America as an imperialist nation bent on global military, economic, and cultural domination. At home few share this negative view, largely because of a widespread belief in the irreproachable purity of our goals. Bob Pepperman Taylor, however, argues that our moral self-righteousness may potentially imperil our democratic ideals and threaten democracy itself by plunging us into illiberalism. Taylor looks closely at six key thinkers in the Progressive tradition whose work helps illuminate the essential flaws in our current thinking about democracy. Their writings, he contends, offer insights that can reinforce and strengthen a vigorous democratic faith, warn us of the dangers inherent in various forms of democratic arrogance, and counsel a kind of doubt or humility that would make us much better democratic citizens. All six thinkers - Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Carl Becker, and Aldo Leopold - were active in the first half of the twentieth century and grew out of and reflect the temper of American Progressivism. Their writings, in Taylor's view, illuminate harmful beliefs that constrain and even delude the popular democratic imagination in America. Taylor argues that Croly, Lippmann, and Dewey overestimate the normative value of science and underestimate the utopianism of their democratic visions. By contrast, Addams, Becker, and Leopold resisted these scientific and utopian temptations and offered reform-minded Americans a stronger understanding of what it meant to practice democratic citizenship. Addams counsels us to ""walk humbly before God""; Becker embraces the Progressive faith in equality and justice but discards its dogma of certain progress; and Leopold employs moral authority rather than his scientific training to defend our natural inheritance in what he recognizes is an ambiguous political debate. These three, Taylor argues, by aiming less at the grand transformation of the human condition than at practical solutions, show greater respect for democratic possibilities than did their more messianic counterparts. They promote a much more modest understanding of the possibilities both for democracy and the role of science in informing democratic practice. They also point to a clearer understanding of the virtues that citizens should cultivate if democracy is to prosper.


Antibody fragments have great potential as crystallization chaperones for structural biology due to their ability to either stabilise targets, trap certain conformations and/or promote crystal packing. Here we present an example of using a single-chain variable fragment (scFv) to determine the previously unsolved structure of the multidomain protein SP140. This nuclear leukocyte-specific protein contains domains related to chromatin-mediated gene expression and has been implicated in various disease states. The structure of two of the domains (PHD-bromodomain) was solved by crystallizing them as a complex with a scFv generated by phage display technology. SP140 maintains a similar overall fold to previous PHD-bromodomains and the scFv CDR loops predominately interact with the PHD, while the framework regions of the scFv makes numerous interactions with the bromodomain. Analysis of our and other complex structures suggest various protein engineering strategies that might be employed to improve the usefulness of scFvs as crystallization chaperones.


Arthur Lewis' seminal 1954 paper and its emphasis on dualism appeared at a time when neither the work of Keynes or Harrod-Domar nor the later neoclassical production function of Solow seemed relevant for developing countries. As a consequence, his model, rooted in the classical tradition, plus its many extensions, generated an extensive literature at the center of development theory. The approach also encountered increasingly strong criticism, some of the red herring variety, but some, spearheaded by neoclassical microeconomists like Rosenzweig, also raised serious challenges, focused especially on its labor market assumptions. This paper reviews this landscape and asks what theoretical or policy relevance the Lewis model retains for today's developing countries.


Abstract : Dynamics of a system of many bodies in space is formulated in a Hamiltonian setting. Typically there are symmetry groups associated to such problems, and one can reduce the phase space by these symmetry groups. Dynamics in the reduced phase space is determined by appropriate Poisson structure. Equilibria for specific cases are obtained and their stability examined using energy-Casimir method. Nonlinear control techniques including exact linearization are applied successfully. A global controllability theorem is proved and feedback stabilization is studied. Applications to robotics and multibody systems in space are discussed. Symbolic computational tools were used extensively in the research. OOPSS - an Object Oriented Planar System Simulator package has been developed to automatically generate, analyze, simulate and graphically display the dynamics of planar multibody systems.


This paper employs a recent statistical algorithm (CRAGGING) in order to build an early warning model for banking crises in emerging markets. We perturb our data set many times and create "artificial" samples from which we estimated our model, so that, by construction, it is flexible enough to be applied to new data for out-of-sample prediction. We find that, out of a large number (540) of candidate explanatory variables, from macroeconomic to balance sheet indicators of the countries' financial sector, we can accurately predict banking crises by just a handful of variables. Using data over the period from 1980 to 2010, the model identifies two basic types of banking crises in emerging markets: a "Latin American type", resulting from the combination of a (past) credit boom, a flight from domestic assets, and high levels of interest rates on deposits; and an "Asian type", which is characterized by an investment boom financed by banks' foreign debt. We compare our model to other models obtained using more traditional techniques, a Stepwise Logit, a Classification Tree, and an "Average" model, and we find that our model strongly dominates the others in terms of out-of-sample predictive power.


CLINICAL SCENARIO
The gluteus medius (GM) is thought to play an important role in stabilizing the pelvis and controlling femoral adduction and internal rotation during functional activity. GM weakness, resulting in decreased stabilization and control, has been suggested to be related to lower extremity dysfunction and injury. Many clinicians focus on strengthening the GM to improve lower extremity kinematics for the prevention and rehabilitation of injury. An indirect way to measure GM strength is through electromyography. It is generally assumed that exercises producing higher levels of activation will result in greater strengthening effects.3 Understanding what exercises result in the greatest level of GM activation will assist clinicians in their injury prevention and rehabilitation efforts.

FOCUSED CLINICAL QUESTION
In a healthy adult population, what lower extremity exercises produce the greatest mean GM activation, expressed as a percentage of maximum voluntary isometric contraction?


Feature Selection plays an important role in machine learning and data mining, and it is often applied as a data pre-processing step. This task can speed up learning algorithms and sometimes improve their performance. In multi-label learning, label dependence is considered another aspect that can contribute to improve learning performance. A replicable and wide systematic review performed by us corroborates this idea. Based on this information, it is believed that considering label dependence during feature selection can lead to better learning performance. The hypothesis of this work is that multi-label feature selection algorithms that consider label dependence will perform better than the ones that disregard it. To this end, we propose multi-label feature selection algorithms that take into account label relations. These algorithms were experimentally compared to the standard approach for feature selection, showing good performance in terms of feature reduction and predictability of the classifiers built using the selected features.


How does a highly polarized media system respond to a catastrophic event? The July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey provides fertile ground to examine how a catastrophic event has shaped the editorial policies of news media outlets in a highly polarized media system. This article hypothesizes that, mainly due to the peculiarities of the Turkish media system, even at the time of a catastrophic event, the framing strategies of media outlets converge only to a limited degree on a sphere of consensus. Adopting a content analysis methodology, we analyze the framing strategies of four national newspapers affiliated with specific sociopolitical camps (the pro-government Sabah , the moderate Hurriyet , and the oppositional Sozcu and Cumhuriyet ). We reach the counterintuitive conclusion that these news outlets used different framing strategies in the immediate aftermath of the coup attempt and that the gap between them widened over the period of analysis.


This study documents some perceptions of Cambodian farmers towards organic rice farming, as well as the determinants of farmers' views. Three target organic cooperatives were selected from three districts located in Takeo and Kampot province. 170 out of 247 farmers that were randomly selected for interviews from March to April 2014 were used in the analysis. Results indicate that most farmers were only aware that organic rice production would yield higher market prices for their produce, along with an improved standard of health and environment. They infrequently remarked about other benefits, such as soil improvement and cost reduction. Farmers perceive that labor-intensive production and lack of organic fertilizers are the main challenges in organic farming. Moreover, farmers distinguished the opportunities and challenges differently according to their characteristics. Hence, securing better yields and a market for organic rice production through long term contracting and improved farming techniques are key factors for promoting organic farming.


Scripts represent knowledge of event sequences that can help text understanding. Script event prediction requires to measure the relation between an existing chain and the subsequent event. The dominant approaches either focus on the effects of individual events, or the influence of the chain sequence. However, only considering individual events will lose much semantic relations within the event chain, and only considering the sequence of the chain will introduce much noise. With our observations, both the individual events and the event segments within the chain can facilitate the prediction of the subsequent event. This paper develops self attention mechanism to focus on diverse event segments within the chain and the event chain is represented as a set of event segments. We utilize the event-level attention to model the relations between subsequent events and individual events. Then, we propose the chain-level attention to model the relations between subsequent events and event segments within the chain. Finally, we integrate event-level and chain-level attentions to interact with the chain to predict what happens next. Comprehensive experiment results on the widely used New York Times corpus demonstrate that our model achieves better results than other state-of-the-art baselines by adopting the evaluation of Multi-Choice Narrative Cloze task.


Robustness and accuracy are major issues in real-time tracking. This paper describes a reliable tracking for markerless planar objects based on the fusion of visual cues and on the estimation of a 2D transformation. Its parameters are estimated by a non-linear minimization of an unique criterion that integrates information on both texture and edges. The efficiency and the robustness of the proposed method are tested on image sequences as well as during a robotic application.


Depending on one's perspective, democracy promotion has been a part of US foreign policy for a century, (since the occupation of the Philippines), half a century (since the Marshall Plan), or a quarter century (since Ronald Reagan�s creation of the National Endowment for Democracy). Whichever history you accept, democracy promotion came into its own in Eastern Europe and Russia in the early 1990s, where political pluralism, rule of law, and civil society were championed as vital for consolidating the defeat of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Under the management of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), democracy has also become a multi-million dollar business involving planners and managers in US government agencies, Beltway contractors, progressive non-governmental organizations, and an aspiring professional class of advocates, lobbyists, service providers and organizers in countries across the former Eastern bloc. Like any business, this one also has its gurus, efficiency experts, management consultants, evaluators, and critics who have combined to generate an extensive body of literature on the successes and failures of the enterprise. The utility of number-crunching as guide for future programming, or as indicator of what has actually happened, diminishes as one moves either from Washington D.C. out to where programs and projects get implemented, or from the abstract to the concrete. One might perhaps expect Western social scientists-especially in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political science or public policy-to have recognized this deficit in field data, and filled it. Yet for a variety of reasons, including in particular the relative value placed on "pure scholarship" as opposed to "applied" work, and a generally critical stance toward working in proximity to the U.S. government, they have not produced a significant body of empirically-grounded case-studies to supplement the statistically-based big picture. This paper argues that the next step in understanding how theory gets turned into practice will depend on harnessing, more effectively than to date, the reflections and insights of this group of participants, by enlisting them as collaborators in description, analysis and diagnosis.


The 85% of cases of primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT) are due to parathyroid adenomas (PA) and less than 1% to parathyroid carcinomas (PC). The PA usually measure <2 cm, weigh <1 g and generate a mild PHPT, whereas the PC usually exceeds these dimensions and are associated with a severe PHPT. However, giant PA (GPA), which is defined as those larger than 3 g, has been documented. Those may be associated with very high levels of PTH and calcium. In these cases, their differentiation before and after surgery with PC is very difficult. We present a case of severe PHPT associated with a large parathyroid lesion, and we discuss the differential aspects between the GPA and PC. Learning points: In parathyroid lesions larger than 2 cm, the differential diagnosis between GPA and PC should be considered. Pre and postsurgical differentiation between GPA and PC is difficult; however, there are clinical, analytical and radiographic characteristics that may be useful. The depth/width ratio larger or smaller than 1 seems to be the most discriminatory ultrasound parameter for the differential diagnosis. Loss of staining for parafibromin has a specificity of 99% for the diagnosis of PC. The simultaneous presence of several histological characteristics, according to the classification of Schantz and Castleman, is frequent in PC and rare in GPA.


The estimation of test metrics such as defect level, test yield or yield loss is important in order to quantify the quality and cost of a test approach. In the analogue domain, previous works have considered the estimation of these metrics for the case of single faults, either catastrophic or parametric. The consideration of single parametric faults is sensible for a production test technique if the design is robust. However, in the case that production test limits are tight, test escapes resulting from multiple parametric deviations become important. In addition, aging mechanisms result in field failures that are often caused by multiple parametric deviations. In this paper, we present a statistical technique for estimating test metrics for the case of multiple analogue parametric deviations, requiring a Monte Carlo simulation of the circuit under test. This technique assumes Gaussian probability density functions (PDFs) for the parameter and performance deviations but the technique can be adapted to other types of PDFs. We will illustrate the technique for the case of testing a fully differential operational amplifier, proving the validity in the case of this circuit of the Gaussian PDF


NleG homologues constitute the largest family of type 3 effectors delivered by pathogenic E. coli, with fourteen members in the enterohaemorrhagic (EHEC) O157:H7 strain alone. Identified recently as part of the non-LEE-encoded (Nle) effector set, this family remained uncharacterised and shared no sequence homology to other proteins including those of known function. The C-terminal domain of NleG2-3 (residues 90 to 191) is the most conserved region in NleG proteins and was solved by NMR. Structural analysis of this structure revealed the presence of a RING finger/U-box motif. Functional assays demonstrated that NleG2-3 as well as NleG5-1, NleG6-2 and NleG9′ family members exhibited a strong autoubiquitination activity in vitro; a characteristic usually expressed by eukaryotic ubiquitin E3 ligases. When screened for activity against a panel of 30 human E2 enzymes, the NleG2-3 and NleG5-1 homologues showed an identical profile with only UBE2E2, UBE2E3 and UBE2D2 enzymes supporting NleG activity. Fluorescence polarization analysis yielded a binding affinity constant of 56±2 µM for the UBE2D2/NleG5-1 interaction, a value comparable with previous studies on E2/E3 affinities. The UBE2D2 interaction interface on NleG2-3 defined by NMR chemical shift perturbation and mutagenesis was shown to be generally similar to that characterised for human RING finger ubiquitin ligases. The alanine substitutions of UBE2D2 residues Arg5 and Lys63, critical for activation of eukaryotic E3 ligases, also significantly decreased both NleG binding and autoubiquitination activity. These results demonstrate that bacteria-encoded NleG effectors are E3 ubiquitin ligases analogous to RING finger and U-box enzymes in eukaryotes.


Zumba® is a group exercise format that incorporates aerobic dance components and claims to be an appropriate physical activity to be included in an exercise prescription for improving cardiorespiratory fitness. The purpose of this study was to determine the energy expenditure and physiological effects of a 58.6 min Zumba® class and compare the average METs of the Zumba® class to the ACSM's definition of vigorous activity of 6 METs. All participants (n=30) were volunteers from Zumba® classes at Texas Woman's University. Participants attended three Zumba® classes to become familiar with the choreography. The Zumba® session where data was collected was performed in a standard class setting identical to the three familiarization classes. The Zumba® class was composed of 16 songs corresponding to a specific set of choreography. The Zumba® class was divided into a warm up phase, aerobic phase, and cool down phase. Oxygen consumption (VO2) was measured using a K4b2 Cosmed unit that the participant wore during the Zumba® class. A one sample t test was used to determine if there was a significant difference between the METs of the Zumba® class and 6 METs. A repeated measures ANOVA, with a Bonferroni post-hoc test, was used to determine if there was a significant difference between variables in the three phases of the Zumba® class. Significance level was set at p ≤ .05. Mean METs for the full Zumba® class (5.7 ± 1.8 METs) was not significantly different (p < 0.05) from 6 METs. The HR during the aerobic phase (164 ± 12 bpm) was significantly higher (p < 0.05) than the warm up (148 ± 25 bpm) and cool down phase (139 ± 20 bpm). Similarly, %HRmax was highest in the aerobic phase relative to warm up and cool down (83.7 ± 6.1% vs 75.2 ± 12.6% and 71.0 ± 10.4%, p < 0.05, respectively). The cool down phase had a significantly lower (p < 0.05) VO2 and energy expenditure (14.7 ± 4.9 ml/kg/min and 5.0 ± 1.3 kcal/min, respectively) than the warm up (20.2 ± 7.0 ml/kg/min and 6.8 ± 2.1 kcal/min) and aerobic phases (21.0 ± 6.8 ml/kg/min and 7.2 ± 1.9 kcal/min). Based on these results, Zumba® meets the ACSM Guidelines for the minimum recommendation for aerobic exercise intensity as a moderate intensity (3-6 METs) exercise.


Rich combustion of n-heptane, diesel oil, jet A-1 kerosene, and bio-diesel (rapeseed-oil methyl ester) were studied to produce hydrogen enriched gas, ready for the cleanup stages for fuel cell applications. n-heptane was successfully reformed up to an equivalence ratio of 3:1, reaching a conversion efficiency up to 83% for a packed bed of alumina bead burner. Diesel, kerosene and bio-diesel were reformed to synthesis gas with conversion efficiency up to 65%. At equivalence ratio of 2:1 and P=7 kw, stability, low HC formation, high conversion efficiency, and low soot emission were achieved. A common synthesis gas composition around this condition was 15 and 13% H2, 15 and 17% CO, and 4 and 4.5% CO2for n-heptane and diesel, jet A-1 and bio-diesel, respectively, for burner A. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 2010 Spring National Meeting (San Antonio, TX 3/21-25/2010).


Succeed in your course and prepare for effective practice with Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing: 6th Edition. Focused throughout on helping you develop the skills and knowledge you ll need on the job, this practical book explores the full psychiatric nursing curriculum and gives you opportunities to practice specific nursing interventions, build therapeutic communication skills, and apply content within the framework of the nursing process. A study guide built into every chapter helps you master key concepts and build critical reasoning skills. Identify major disorders through "clinical vignettes" that paint a picture of the disorder in action. Prepare for effective practice with "Best Practice "boxes. Increase your clinical decision-making skills with "the Psych Nursing Online Video Series" that shows realistic patient scenarios, and then asks you to make decisions and answer questions. Learn what to look for in your clients through non-judgmental, cartoon-like illustrations that depict disorders. Master key concepts and skills through "Critical Thinking questions, Chapter Reviews," and a "built-in chapter Study Guide" that provides workbook-style fill-in, short-answer, and NCLEX-style questions that test knowledge and understanding. Answers appear at the back of the book. Enhance your personal and professional development through chapter-ending "Self-Awareness" features that encourage you to reflect on yourself, your emotions, and your attitudes. Build skills in culturally sensitive practice through "Cultural Considerations" sections. Enhance your therapeutic communication skills through "Therapeutic Communication Dialogues," which are set off with an icon and give specific examples of nurse-client interactions. Strengthen your role as an educator through "Client/Family Education boxes.""


Modern hands-free telecommunication devices jointly apply several subsystems, e.g. for noise reduction (NR), acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) and listening-room compensation (LRC). In this contribution the combination of an equalizer for listening room compensation and an acoustic echo canceller is analyzed. Inverse filtering of room impulse responses (RIRs) is a challenging task since they are, in general, mixed phase systems having hundreds of zeros inside and outside near the unit circle in the z-domain. Furthermore, a reliable estimate of the RIR which shall be inverted is important. Since RIRs are time-variant due to possible changes of the acoustic environment, they have to be identified adaptively. If an AEC (or any other adaptive method) is used to identify the time variant room impulse responses the estimate's distance to the real RIRs may be too high for a satisfying equalization, especially in periods of initial convergence of the AEC or after RIR changes. Therefore, we propose to estimate the convergence state of the AEC and to incorporate this knowledge into the equalizer design.


Bio-based building blocks and sustainable synthesis pathways were used to synthesise star-shaped polymers composed of a D-sorbitol core and polycaprolactone arms by ring opening polymerisation (ROP). The use of volatile organic solvents was avoided and less energy intense reaction conditions were achieved by performing the ROP in the bulk or in a green solvent, supercritical CO2 (scCO2). Two catalysts were tested: conventional tin(II) 2-ethylhexanoate (Sn(Oct)2) which is a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved metal catalyst and an enzyme, Novozym 435 (Lipase B from Candida Antarctica immobilised on a solid support). The influence of the reaction medium and of the nature of the catalyst on the molecular weight, the dispersity and the architecture of the PCL stars was investigated. The star polymers were characterised by 1H and 31P nuclear magnetic resonance (1H and 31P NMR) spectroscopy, size exclusion chromatography – multi-angle light scattering (SEC-MALS) and matrix-assisted laser desorption and ionisation-time of flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry. The use of scCO2 enabled the reduction of the reaction temperature of Sn(Oct)2 catalysed star D-sorbitol-polycaprolactone polymerisations from 140 to 95 °C. In addition, star polymers were successfully synthesised by enzyme catalysis in the bulk or in scCO2 at 60 °C; lower temperatures that could provide significant energy savings on a commercial scale. The catalyst was shown to have a pronounced influence on the architecture of the PCL stars. Regular star polymers were obtained in the presence of Sn(Oct)2 whereas Novozym 435 gave access to miktoarm-type star PCL. Finally, the influence of the number and length of the arms on the thermal properties of the star polymers was investigated by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).


E-health one of the important applications of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the field of public health services and treatment that projects its launch, within the framework of a comprehensive e-government program and runs the Information Society. Thus, e-health, including health services and health information via the Internet. Therefore, the availability of and prospects for the future information society in preparation for implementation of e-health, information society is essential. The aim of this study was to investigate the introduction of e-health in the information society and its associated aspects as well as the development of e-health and future prospects. Continue to assess the impact of each of these aspects will be addressed in the development of the health sector, aspiration and vision development. Paper Type: letter to editor.


We have investigated whether Plx1, a kinase recently shown to phosphorylate cdc25c in vitro, is required for activation of cdc25c at the G2/M-phase transition of the cell cycle in Xenopus. Using immunodepletion or the mere addition of an antibody against the C terminus of Plx1, which suppressed its activation (not its activity) at G2/M, we show that Plx1 activity is required for activation of cyclin B-cdc2 kinase in both interphase egg extracts receiving recombinant cyclin B, and cycling extracts that spontaneously oscillate between interphase and mitosis. Furthermore, a positive feedback loop allows cyclin B-cdc2 kinase to activate Plx1 at the G2/M-phase transition. In contrast, activation of cyclin A-cdc2 kinase does not require Plx1 activity, and cyclin A-cdc2 kinase fails to activate Plx1 and its consequence, cdc25c activation in cycling extracts.


In this paper, we focus on multi-task classification, where related classification tasks share the same label space and are learned simultaneously. In particular, we tackle a new setting, which is more realistic than currently addressed in the literature, where categories shift from training to test data. Hence, individual tasks do not contain complete training data for the categories in the test set. To generalize to such test data, it is crucial for individual tasks to leverage knowledge from related tasks. To this end, we propose learning an association graph to transfer knowledge among tasks for missing classes. We construct the association graph with nodes representing tasks, classes and instances, and encode the relationships among the nodes in the edges to guide their mutual knowledge transfer. By message passing on the association graph, our model enhances the categorical information of each instance, making it more discriminative. To avoid spurious correlations between task and class nodes in the graph, we introduce an assignment entropy maximization that encourages each class node to balance its edge weights. This enables all tasks to fully utilize the categorical information from related tasks. An extensive evaluation on three general benchmarks and a medical dataset for skin lesion classification reveals that our method consistently performs better than representative baselines.


The ATLAS detector will begin taking data from p-p collisions in 2009. This experiment will allow for many different physics measurements and searches. The production of tau leptons at the LHC is a key signature of the decay of both the standard model Higgs (via H → ττ) and SUSY particles. Taus have a short lifetime (cτ = 87 μm) and decay hadronically 65% of the time. Many QCD interactions produce similar hadronic showers and have cross-sections about 1 billion times larger than tau production. Multivariate techniques are therefore often used to distinguish taus from this background. Boosted Decision Trees (BDTs) are a machine-learning technique for developing cut-based discriminants which can significantly aid in extracting small signal samples from overwhelming backgrounds. In this study, BDTs are used for tau identification for the ATLAS experiment. They are a fast, flexible alternative to existing discriminants with comparable or better performance.


Fibre/fibre interaction in composite materials is a very important micromechanical phenomenon that dictates the composite mechanical behaviour especially the toughness and failure process. A number of models have been developed to predict the fibre/fibre interaction in composite materials, but none of the existing models has considered the effect of interphase toughness on fibre/fibre interaction. In this study, micro-Raman spectroscopy (MRS), with the ability to measure strain in graphite fibres with a spatial resolution of 2 µm, was used to measure fibre/fibre interaction in graphite/epoxy model composites with three different interphases. An energy-based model was used to calculate the strain energy release rate (Gi) for the three interphases used in this study. The three interphases, unsized, sized, and PMMA coated, yielded strain energy release rates of 40, 30, and 10 J m−2 respectively. Using the values calculated for strain energy release rate of the interphase and interfacial crack length, the energy-based model predicated stress concentration factor values in agreement with those experimentally measured. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Climate projections for the Midwestern United States predict southerly climates to shift northward. These shifts in climate could alter distributions of species across North America through changes in climate (i.e., temperature and precipitation), or through climate-induced changes on land cover. Our objective was to determine the relative impacts of land cover and climate on the abundance of five bird species in the Central United States that have habitat requirements ranging from grassland and shrubland to forest. We substituted space for time to examine potential impacts of a changing climate by assessing climate and land cover relationships over a broad latitudinal gradient. We found positive and negative relationships of climate and land cover factors with avian abundances. Habitat variables drove patterns of abundance in migratory and resident species, although climate was also influential in predicting abundance for some species occupying more open habitat (i.e., prairie warbler, blue-winged warbler, and northern bobwhite). Abundance of northern bobwhite increased with winter temperature and was the species exhibiting the most significant effect of climate. Models for birds primarily occupying early successional habitats performed better with a combination of habitat and climate variables whereas models of species found in contiguous forest performed best with land cover alone. These varied species-specific responses present unique challenges to land managers trying to balance species conservation over a variety of land covers. Management activities focused on increasing forest cover may play a role in mitigating effects of future climate by providing habitat refugia to species vulnerable to projected changes. Conservation efforts would be best served focusing on areas with high species abundances and an array of habitats. Future work managing forests for resilience and resistance to climate change could benefit species already susceptible to climate impacts.


Over the past four decades, many actions to promote access to and use of buildings by persons with disabilities have been effective. Different criteria, parameters, research and regulations have evolved in this area, enhancing the personal autonomy of the users of buildings. However, important deficiencies persist regarding accessibility in cases of emergency evacuation, especially in public buildings or in those that host special events. Consequently, the evacuation of users with disabilities is mainly dependent on the availability of technical aid and support elements (usually 'special wheelchairs'). This paper presents research in this field with regard to public buildings in Spain. In particular, it aims to serve as a baseline for studying the accessibility of emergency exits in sport facilities (specifically in competition swimming pools). A review of the scientific literature and existing regulations allowed for the identification of the parameters to be incorporated into the present fire protection and accessibility regulations. It must be said that no specific regulations were found regarding the emergency evacuation of sport facilities, in general, or swimming pools, in particular. The research revealed that there is no synergy between fire protection regulations and the content of scientific publications in regard to the evacuation of persons with disabilities. It also verified that the regulations do not consider the possibility of disabled persons being able to evacuate buildings on their own in emergency situations, thus in this manner, limiting their personal autonomy. To improve this situation, the key aspects for developing solutions that would allow disabled users to evacuate buildings in emergency situations by their own means are identified, and suitable systems that could be adequate for this purpose are proposed. The key to achieving better conditions for the evacuation of persons with disabilities involves the incorporation of improvements in warning and alarm signals, in the signposting of the accessible routes to the exits, and the adoption of solutions that enable persons with disabilities to move in an autonomous manner in regard to the evacuation routes.


Emerging out of the distinct tradition of Spanish-language film adaptations of Verne novels, the 2005 Venezuelan movie 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE retells the source novel as an actual experience of the author, becoming a meditation on the novel Le Superbe Orénoque, Verne's life, and much more. Verne himself and another historical individual, Count Ermanno Stradelli, replace the book's male protagonists, leaving the androgynous heroine as the other point in the triangle. The modernist dimension of gender roles becomes the basis for a metaphorical exploration of the source of sexual identity that parallels the journey to the source of the Orinoco. 1888–EL EXTRAORDINARIO VIAJE DE JULES VERNE is also one of the few non-documentary films in which Verne is brought to the screen, becoming here part of the creation of his own text, tapping the sources of inspiration, of love, and of identity.


Overview, Shillcock, Altmann. Introduction to the Chapters by Werker and Jusczyk, Clifton. How Word Recognition may Evolve from Infant Speech Perception Capacities, Jusczyk. Developmental Changes in Cross-language Speech Perception: Implications for Cognitive Models of Speech Processing, Werker. The Time Course of Prelexical Processing: The Syllabic Hypothesis Revisited, Dupoux. Language-specific Processing: Does the Evidence Converge? Cutler. Representation and Access of Derived Words in English, Tyler, Waksler, Marslen-Wilson. What Determines Morphological Relatedness in the Lexicon? Comments on the Chapter by Tyler, Waksler, and Marslen-Wilson, Burani. Modularity and the Processing of Closed-class Words, Shillcock, Gurman Bard. Issues of Process and Representation in Lexical Access, Marslen-Wilson. Bottom-up Connectionist Models of 'Interaction', Norris. Competitor Effects During Lexical Access: Chasing Zipf's Tail, Bard, Shillcock. Connections, competitions, and Cohorts: Comments on the Chapters by Marslen-Wilson, Norris, and Bard & Shillcock, Tabossi. More Oncombinatory Lexical Information: Thematic Structure in Parsing and Interpretation, Tanenhaus et al. Reconsidering Reactivation, Nicol.


BACKGROUND
Influenza virus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are among the most common viruses causing infections of the lower respiratory tract in young children. Although there are important differences in the immunopathogenesis of these 2 viral pathogens, little is known about how they affect antigen-presenting cells in children with acute infections.

METHODS
To characterize the immune cells that are mobilized to the respiratory tract by influenza virus and RSV, we analyzed nasal wash and blood samples obtained from children hospitalized with acute respiratory infections.

RESULTS
Influenza virus and RSV mobilize immune cells, including myeloid dendritic cells (mDCs) and plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs), to the nasal mucosa. Patients with influenza virus infection had greater numbers of mDCs, pDCs, and monocytes in nasal wash samples than did patients with RSV infection. The frequencies of respiratory tract and blood T cell subsets were not affected by infection with influenza virus or RSV. Monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 concentrations in nasal wash samples were significantly increased in patients with influenza virus infection but not in those with RSV infection. RANTES (regulated on activation, normally T cell expressed and secreted) concentrations were increased only in the blood of patients with influenza virus infection.

CONCLUSIONS
Infection with influenza virus or RSV mobilizes antigen-presenting cells to the respiratory tract. The differences in antigen-presenting cell numbers and cytokine concentrations suggest that there are distinctive, early immune responses to these 2 viruses.


Early efforts in runtime verification show that parametric regular and temporal logic specifications can be monitored efficiently. These approaches, however, have limited expressiveness: their specifications always reduce to monitors with finite state. More recent developments showed that parametric context-free properties can be efficiently monitored with overheads generally lower than 12-15%. While context-free grammars are more expressive than finite-state languages, they still do not allow every computable safety property. This paper presents a monitor synthesis algorithm for string rewriting systems (SRS). SRSs are well known to be Turing complete, allowing for the formal specification of any computable safety property. Earlier attempts at Turing complete monitoring have been relatively inefficient. This paper demonstrates that monitoring parametric SRSs is practical. The presented algorithm uses a modified version of Aho-Corasick string searching for quick pattern matching with an incremental rewriting approach that avoids reexamining parts of the string known to contain no redexes.


This paper is concerned with efficiently coloring sparse graphs in the distributed setting with as few colors as possible. According to the celebrated Four Color Theorem, planar graphs can be colored with at most 4 colors, and the proof gives a (sequential) quadratic algorithm finding such a coloring. A natural problem is to improve this complexity in the distributed setting. Using the fact that planar graphs contain linearly many vertices of degree at most 6, Goldberg, Plotkin, and Shannon obtained a deterministic distributed algorithm coloring n-vertex planar graphs with 7 colors in O(log n) rounds. Here, we show how to color planar graphs with 6 colors in polylog(n) rounds. Our algorithm indeed works more generally in the list-coloring setting and for sparse graphs (for such graphs we improve by at least one the number of colors resulting from an efficient algorithm of Barenboim and Elkin, at the expense of a slightly worst complexity). Our bounds on the number of colors turn out to be quite sharp in general. Among other results, we show that no distributed algorithm can color every n-vertex planar graph with 4 colors in o(n) rounds.


BY intent and by design, the Ten-State Nutrition Survey (TSNS) of 1968-1970 was concerned with both undernutrition and overnutrition. One concern was caloric and nutrient insufficiency and the effects of inadequate nutrition on growth and development. A second concern was caloric excess, as reflected by the level of fatness, and especially the prevalence of obesity, in different socioeconomic groupings and in different population segments.
 In the design of the TSNS, it was obvious that weight alone—or even weight relative to height—was an inadequate measure of fatness. A child might be "overweight," yet of less than average fatness; another child or adult might be underweight, yet actually obese. Accordingly, two fatfold measurements (commonly but improperly called "skinfolds") were incorporated into the anthropometric program.
 One benefit of the TSNS may be seen in the fact that we now have nine-decade triceps or subscapular fatfold data on more than 40,000 individuals; nearly one half of them are American Negro (i.e., black), for whom scant data were previously available. A second benefit is that these new data are sufficient in scope to describe lifelong changes in fatness, including some phases not previously known in detail. A third benefit is the socioeconomic partitioning of fatness, showing both an economic-related fatness increase in the male at all ages and an economic "reversal" of fatness in the female at adolescence and beyond.
 The TSNS was conducted on a household and family-line basis, including both parents and their children.1 So we have the opportunity to compare true family-lines, parents and their children, brothers and sisters, and husbands with wives.


Pekka Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire reflects critical historiographical turns—indigenous power, responses to settler colonialism, and a reorientation of perspective—while uncovering new directions in American Indian history. Moreover, his four-part framework for understanding power—spatial control, economic control, assimilation, and influence over neighbors—provides a useful model for analyzing indigenous polities in other places and times. However, by not explicitly framing the narrative of the Comanche empire within notions of sovereignty, Hamalainen leaves open opportunities for other scholars of the Comanche and of Native North America. Future historical studies of Native sovereignty, though, should include tribally specific notions of sovereignty and ways of knowing and remembering the past.


Machine learning can improve handling large volumes of observations, modeling, analysis, and forecasting of the environment by increasing the speed and accuracy of computations, but success requires great care in designing and training the machine learning models.


"Publication Design Workbook" is packed with information regarding the ins and outs of publication design. The media featured includes magazines, literature systems, newsletters, exhibition catalogues, annual reports, newspapers, and retail catalogues. Both current and historical approaches are provided to give readers a complete background on design style, application, and techniques involved in creating effective publications. Readers will develop a clear understanding of publication design through a comprehensive and accessible workshop-style format. Fundamentals of form and content are included, along with diagrams to further textual understanding. This is the most complete book for designers on applied publication design principles combined with an awe-inspiring collection of the best work from around the world.


Speech Adaptation to Kinematic Recording Sensors Elise Hansen Hunter Department of Communication Disorders, BYU Master of Science This thesis examined the time course of speech adaptation prior to data collection when using an electromagnetic articulograph to measure speech articulator movements. The stimulus sentence and electromagnetic sensor placement were designed to be sensitive to changes in the fricatives /s/ and /ʃ/. Twenty native English speakers read aloud stimulus sentences before the attachment of six electromagnetic sensors, immediately after attachment, and again at 5, 10, 15 and 20 minutes after attachment. Participants read aloud continuously between recordings to encourage adaptation to the presence of the sensors. Audio recordings were rated by 20 native English listeners who were not part of the production study. After listening to five practice samples, these participants rated 150 stimuli (31 repeat samples) using a visual analog scale (VAS) with the endpoints labeled as precise and imprecise. An acoustic analysis of the recordings was done by segmenting the fricatives /s/ and /ʃ/ from the longer recording and computing spectral center of gravity and spectral standard deviation in Hertz. Durations of /s/, /ʃ/ and the sentence were also measured. Results of both perceptual and acoustic analysis revealed a change in speech precision over time, with all post attachment recordings receiving lower perceptual scores. Precision ratings beyond the 10 minute recording remained steady. It can be concluded from the results that participants reached a height of adaptation after 10 minutes of talking with kinematic recording sensors attached, and that after the attachment of sensors, speech production precision did not at any point return to pre attachment levels.


Background and objectives Chronic liver disease (CLD) encompasses a variety of etiologies, and the infectious causes are mainly hepatitis B and hepatitis C virus. Chronic alcohol abuse and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease also have a major contribution to CLD. The Child-Pugh scoring system indicates the probable prognosis and mortality risk of a patient with cirrhosis. The primary objective of this research is to observe the mortality risks of CLD caused by a variety of etiologies mentioned above. The secondary objective is to determine the biochemical markers that are correlating with the severity of the study groups. Another aim was to determine the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) scoring of each study group predicting the severity of disease among the Child-Pugh classification. Materials and methods We broadly classified the etiologies into two study groups: (1) hepatitis B, C associated CLD (hepatitis B, C-CLD) and (2) non-hepatitis B, C associated CLD (non-hepatitis B, C-CLD). This study was conducted as a descriptive, retrospective study involving patients admitted to the Gastroenterology Department at Dow University Hospital between July 2019 and December 2019. All patients who met the inclusion criteria were included in the study in order to document their levels of severity markers of CLD. A total of 167 individuals met the inclusion criteria, and the sampling was done through non-probability consecutive methods. All continuous variables were described as mean and standard deviations, which were then compared using an independent sample t-test. The comparison of categorical data was done either using the chi-square test or Fisher's exact test accordingly. A p-value of <0.05 was considered statistically significant (two-tailed). Results The mean age of the study population was 51.83 ± 13.67, with no difference in gender and type of CLD. The frequent co-morbidities (other than CLD) found in the study population were diabetes, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, and chronic kidney disease, with most of them having significant association with non-hepatitis B, C-CLD. Both types of CLD had equal gender proportion (p=0.708). Among the study groups, 56.28% (n=94) had hepatitis B, C-CLD, out of which 18 (19%) belonged to Child-Pugh class A, 36 (38%) to Child-Pugh class B, and 40 (43%) to Child-Pugh class C, whereas 43.72% (n=71) had non-hepatitis B, C-CLD, comprising of 13% (n=10) of Child-Pugh class A patients, 42% (n=31) of Child-Pugh class B patients, and 44% (n=32) of Child-Pugh class C patients (p=0.631). Bilirubin levels (p=0.055), serum creatinine (p=0.201), and International normalized ratio (INR) are found higher in non-hepatitis B, C-CLD (p=0.312), whereas thrombocytopenia was more likely to be associated with hepatitis B, C-CLD (p=0.205). Hyponatremia was slightly associated with non-hepatitis B, C-CLD (p=0.281). The mean MELD score was comparable among the two study groups in both Child-Pugh classes A and B, but in Child-Pugh class C it was significantly higher in non-hepatitis B, C-CLD patients as compared to hepatitis B, C-CLD (p=0.006). Conclusion Non-hepatitis B, C-CLD was proved to be milder in Child-Pugh class A as compared to hepatitis B, C-CLD, but its mortality risk increases with severity, as mean MELD score was found significantly higher in Child-Pugh class C. Our research was able to identify severe biochemical markers in both types of CLD.


Eight P elements carrying a beta-galactosidase (lacZ) reporter have been mapped to sites within the Drosophila bithorax complex. The bithorax complex contains three homeotic genes, and at least nine regulatory regions which control their expression in successive parasegments of the fly. The enhancer traps inserted at the promoter of one of the genes, Ultrabithorax, express lacZ in patterns which mimic the Ultrabithorax protein pattern. Enhancer traps in the regulatory regions do not mimic the endogenous genes, but express lacZ globally in the relevant parasegments. Some P elements carry large DNA fragments upstream of the lacZ promoter but internal to the P element. In cases where these internal sequences specify a lacZ pattern, that pattern is generally suppressed when the element is inserted in the bithorax complex. In embryos mutant for genes of the Polycomb group, the lacZ expression from the enhancer traps spreads to all segments. Thus, the enhancer traps reveal parasegmental domains that are maintained by Polycomb-mediated repression. Such domains may be realized by parasegmental differences in chromatin structure.


Primarily the paper seeks to find out the whys and wherefores in which a landlocked country such as the Kingdom of Bhutan wanting to adopt or is being able to be green as well as maintaining a clean natural environment. And secondarily, the paper too finds out the various ways in which the Kingdom is able to be green in terms of recycling, reducing and reusing its plastics. Environmental cleanliness in Bhutan too can be taken as being green and up-keeping a clean or unpolluted natural environment as well as ensuring and/ or upping Bhutan"s Gross National Happiness (GNH). Some key challenges faced and solutions adopted in the Bhutanese context are also discussed.


This paper develops an empirical measure of growth poles and uses it to examine the phenomenon of multipolarity. The authors formally define several alternative measures, provide theoretical justifications for these measures, and compute polarity values for nation states in the global economy. The calculations suggest that China, Western Europe, and the United States have been important growth poles over the broad course of world history, and in modern economic history the United States, Japan, Germany, and China have had prominent periods of growth polarity. The paper goes on to analyze the economic and institutional determinants, both at the proximate and fundamental level, that underlie this measure of polarity, as well as compute measures of dispersion in growth polarity shares for the major growth poles.


Despite recent progress in spin-current research, the detection of spin current has mostly remained indirect. By synchronizing a microwave waveform with synchrotron x-ray pulses, we use the ferromagnetic resonance of the Py (Ni_{81}Fe_{19}) layer in a Py/Cu/Cu_{75}Mn_{25}/Cu/Co multilayer to pump a pure ac spin current into the Cu_{75}Mn_{25} and Co layers, and then directly probe the spin current within the Cu_{75}Mn_{25} layer and the spin dynamics of the Co layer by x-ray magnetic circular dichroism. This element-resolved pump-probe measurement unambiguously identifies the ac spin current in the Cu_{75}Mn_{25} layer.


Abstract. The Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) is the baseline ground-based network of instruments that record solar absorption spectra from which accurate and precise column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO2 (XCO2), CH4 (XCH4), CO (XCO), and other gases are retrieved. The TCCON data have been widely used for carbon cycle science and validation of satellites measuring greenhouse gas concentrations globally. The number of stations in the network (currently about 25) is limited and has a very uneven geographical coverage: the stations in the Northern Hemisphere are distributed mostly in North America, Europe, and Japan, and only 20 % of the stations are located in the Southern Hemisphere, leaving gaps in the global coverage. A denser distribution of ground-based solar absorption measurements is needed to improve the representativeness of the measurement data for various atmospheric conditions (humid, dry, polluted, presence of aerosol), various surface conditions such as high albedo (>0.4) and very low albedo, and a larger latitudinal distribution. More stations in the Southern Hemisphere are also needed, but a further expansion of the network is limited by its costs and logistical requirements. For this reason, several groups are investigating supplemental portable low-cost instruments. The European Space Agency (ESA) funded campaign Fiducial Reference Measurements for Ground-Based Infrared Greenhouse Gas Observations (FRM4GHG) at the Sodankylä TCCON site in northern Finland aims to characterise the assessment of several low-cost portable instruments for precise solar absorption measurements of XCO2, XCH4, and XCO. The test instruments under investigation are three Fourier transform spectrometers (FTSs): a Bruker EM27/SUN, a Bruker IRcube, and a Bruker Vertex70, as well as a laser heterodyne spectroradiometer (LHR) developed by the UK Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. All four remote sensing instruments performed measurements simultaneously next to the reference TCCON instrument, a Bruker IFS 125HR, for a full year in 2017. The TCCON FTS was operated in its normal high-resolution mode (TCCON data set) and in a special low-resolution mode (HR125LR data set), similar to the portable spectrometers. The remote sensing measurements are complemented by regular AirCore launches performed from the same site. They provide in situ vertical profiles of the target gas concentrations as auxiliary reference data for the column retrievals, which are traceable to the WMO SI standards. The reference measurements performed with the Bruker IFS 125HR were found to be affected by non-linearity of the indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) detector. Therefore, a non-linearity correction of the 125HR data was performed for the whole campaign period and compared with the test instruments and AirCore. The non-linearity-corrected data (TCCONmod data set) show a better match with the test instruments and AirCore data compared to the non-corrected reference data. The time series, the bias relative to the reference instrument and its scatter, and the seasonal and the day-to-day variations of the target gases are shown and discussed. The comparisons with the HR125LR data set gave a useful analysis of the resolution-dependent effects on the target gas retrieval. The solar zenith angle dependence of the retrievals is shown and discussed. The intercomparison results show that the LHR data have a large scatter and biases with a strong diurnal variation relative to the TCCON and other FTS instruments. The LHR is a new instrument under development, and these biases are currently being investigated and addressed. The campaign helped to characterise and identify instrumental biases and possibly retrieval biases, which are currently under investigation. Further improvements of the instrument are ongoing. The EM27/SUN, the IRcube, the modified Vertex70, and the HR125LR provided stable and precise measurements of the target gases during the campaign with quantified small biases. The bias dependence on the humidity along the measurement line of sight has been investigated and no dependence was found. These three portable low-resolution FTS instruments are suitable to be used for campaign deployment or long-term measurements from any site and offer the ability to complement the TCCON and expand the global coverage of ground-based reference measurements of the target gases.


To study the effects of N-fertilization and diazotroph inoculation on yield and its` components of Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) cv Giza 5 in new land soil at toshka project south valley region, tow field experiments were carried out in the farm of Toshka Research Station, Agriculture Research Center. During 2015 and 2016 seasons. Results showed that increasing N fertilization levels from 20 to 60 kgN/feddan and use of rhizobia + enterobacter inoculation, significantly increased No. pods/plant, Wt.pods/plant(g), Wt.seeds/plant(g), seed index, Wt.pods/fed.(ton) and Wt.seeds/fed. (ton). Oil and protein % in seeds compared to control treatment. The studied characters of yield and its attributes were significantly affected by the interaction between N fertilizer levels and diazotroph inoculation. Peanut fertilized with 60 kg N/fed. With rhizobium+enterobacter treatment recorded the highest significant values of most studied characters than the other treatments.


Abstract. In anthropogenically influenced atmospheres, sulphur dioxide (SO2) is the main precursor of gaseous sulphuric acid (H2SO4), which in turn is a main precursor for atmospheric particle nucleation. As a result of socio-economic changes, East Germany has seen a dramatic decrease in anthropogenic SO2 emissions between 1989 and present, as documented by routine air quality measurements in many locations. We have attempted to evaluate the influence of changing SO2 concentrations on the frequency and intensity of new particle formation (NPF) using two different data sets (1996–1997; 2003–2006) of experimental particle number size distributions (diameter range 3–750 nm) from the atmospheric research station Melpitz near Leipzig, Germany. Between the two periods SO2 concentrations decreased by 65% on average, while the frequency of NPF events dropped by 45%. Meanwhile, the average formation rate of 3 nm particles decreased by 68% on average. The trends were statistically significant and therefore suggest a connection between the availability of anthropogenic SO2 and freshly formed new particles. In contrast to the decrease in new particle formation, we found an increase in the mean growth rate of freshly nucleated particles (+22%), suggesting that particle nucleation and subsequent growth into larger sizes are delineated with respect to their precursor species. Using three basic parameters, the condensation sink for H2SO4, the SO2 concentration, and the global radiation intensity, we were able to define the characteristic range of atmospheric conditions under which particle formation events take place at the Melpitz site. While the decrease in the concentrations and formation rates of the new particles was rather evident, no similar decrease was found with respect to the generation of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN; particle diameter >100 nm) as a result of atmospheric nucleation events. On the contrary, the production of CCN following nucleation events appears to have increased by tens of percents. Our aerosol dynamics model simulations suggest that such an increase can be caused by the increased particle growth rate.


This paper applies the infra-marginal analysis, which is a combination of marginal and total cost-benefit analysis, to a model with both constant returns and increasing returns in production and with exogenous and endogenous comparative advantages. It demonstrates that as transaction conditions are improved, the general equilibrium discontinuously jumps from autarky to partial division of labor with a dual structure, then to the complete division of labor where dual structure disappears. Two types of dual structure may occur in the transitional stage of economic development and globalization. One of them involves the division of labor in the developed economy and autarky in the less developed economy, generating increasing disparity of per capita real income between the two types of economies. The other involves a domestic dual structure in the less developed economy, where the population is divided between commercialized sector which trades with foreign country and self-sufficient sector which is not involved in trade. All gains from trade go to the developed economy. This paper shows that deterioration of a country' s terms of trade may concur with an increase of gains that this country receives from trade provided productivity progress from an expanded network of division of labor outpaces the deterioration of terms of trade. In the model with both endogenous and exogenous comparative advantages, a country may exports a good with exogenous comparative disadvantage if endogenous comparative advantage dominates this exogenous comparative disadvantage.


Background Medicines administration errors are a well-known safety risk for patients and a lack of knowledge is one major cause of errors. Therefore, every effort is made to close knowledge gaps among medicine users to make drug administration safe. However, rarely the medicine users were prospectively asked for specific drug administration problems and training needs. Purpose The first step in preventing errors is to study their aetiology. Therefore, we qualitatively assessed the medicine users' drug administration problems in order to investigate causes of errors and training needs. Material and methods Focus groups with patients, caring relatives, and nurses were conducted using semi-structured interview guides for a focused exploration of participants' drug administration experiences and training needs. All discussions were audiotaped and videotaped. After verbatim transcription, data were analysed using Mayring's qualitative content analysis. Ethical approval was obtained from the local ethics committee and informed consent was signed by all participants prior to the study. Results We conducted three focus groups with eleven patients and caring relatives, two focus groups with ten nurses from a nursing home, and one focus group with four nurses from a university hospital. In accordance with the published literature, patients and nurses reported drug administration problems related to different dosage forms, and potentially at every step in the administration process. The qualitative content analysis revealed that patients frequently trivialised drug administration, were unaware of errors, and primarily blamed the dosage form for administration problems. In contrast, nurses also sought out the patient as potential causes of administration problems e.g. due to dysphagia. Conclusion Patients who are unaware of problems will not ask for help, and hence might not be reached by a traditional educational intervention. For the implementation and evaluation of the success of an educational intervention it is crucial to ask the intended target group, i.e. medicine users, for training needs. References and/or acknowledgements Conflict of interest.


Purpose - This research aims to assess the risks and benefits of outsourcing for organisations, sectors and nations. The literature on outsourcing contains little evidence of research on holistic issues of its impact at systems levels beyond the firm, notably sectors and nations. Design/methodology/approach - A Delphi study with senior strategists from private and public sectors captured perspectives and specific observations on benefits and risks of outsourcing. Emergent issues on outsourcing policy, strategy and decision-making processes were synthesised into a framework for analysing factors associated with outsourcing. Findings - The findings suggest that a more holistic view of outsourcing is needed, linking local, organisational issues with sector and national level actions and outcomes. In this way, aggregate risks and benefits can be assessed at different systems levels. Research limitations/implications - Future research might address the motivations for outsourcing; currently there is little research evidence to assess whether outsourcing is a mechanism for failing to solve internal problems, and moving responsibility and risk out of the firm. Additionally most outsourcing research to date has concentrated on an activity either being "in" or "out"; there is little research exploring the circumstances in which mixed models might be appropriate. Practical implications - The framework provides an aid to research and an aide memoire for managers considering outsourcing. Originality/value - This paper contributes to knowledge on understanding of outsourcing at different systems levels, particularly highlighting the implications of outsourcing for sectors and nations. Previously most research has focused at the level of the firm or dyadic relationship.


The new vision of the Mexican State, recently accepted, has focused on the fight against corruption, in order to reverse the dramatically high social, political and economic costs derived from it. The struggle against the problem requires the analysis of the achievements and the alternative ways that have been implemented, in order to unveil the strengths and weaknesses of the mechanisms proposed to abate such issue.
Among the efforts made there is the implementation of strategies that allow the State to be transparent, based upon three patterns that in just over fifteen years have been implemented, but that do not yield the expected results or meet the expectations. We refer to the National System of Transparency, the National Anticorruption System and the Alliance for Open Governments. In this context, this paper goes through the impact of these models in the municipalities of the country, considering that they are one of the links that present the biggest delay in terms of transparency, due to the variety of problems that characterize them, such as inequity; the lack of mechanisms for proper document´s management, the lack of qualified and trained personnel; regulatory gaps or the scarcity of resources.


Objective: The purpose of this study was to compare pelvic floor muscle activity and frequency of urinary incontinence (UI) in female athletes to that of female non‐athletes. Study Design: The research design was quasiexperimental without random assignment of subjects. Background: Millions of women, including young athletes, report urinary incontinence. Previous research indicates that elite, weight‐being athletes report greater incidence of incontinence when compared with agedmatched female non‐athletes. Methods and Measures: Females aged 18 to 25 years were recruited into 2 groups based on weekly exercise time and athletic involvement; participants in a NCAA Division I sport (n=56), and female non‐athletes (n=75). Pelvic floor muscle activity, measured via surface electromyographic (EMG) electrodes, was recorded during the execution of a pelvic floor muscle contraction by each subject. Subjects also completed questionnaires regarding frequency of UI. Descriptive statistics were compiled for both groups, and data were analyzed with parametric and nonparametric tests. Results: There was no significant difference in pelvic floor muscle activity between groups. Athletes reported significantly greater frequency of experiencing UI with exercise than non‐athletes (p < .001). Athletes also reported significantly greater exercise time per week than non‐athletes (p < .001). Both groups reported a greater frequency of UI with greater exercise time. Conclusions: Although there was no significant difference in pelvic floor muscle activity between athletes and non‐athletes, the athletes did report a greater frequency of UI with exercise. Athletes also reported significantly greater exercise time. This suggests that pelvic floor muscle activity alone does not predict UI and that activity related to incontinence should also be considered. Future studies may focus on the role of increasing pelvic floor muscle strength to prevent urinary incontinence in female athletes.


P-Grid is a decentralized DHT-based peer-to-peer system with logarithmic search complexity. As it is intended to provide a platform for distributed information management beyond mere file-sharing it supports an update functionality with lazy consistency guarantees, identity management disentangling the DHT from the underlying networking infrastructure, and decentralized load balancing. In this paper we first give a brief overview of the theoretical foundations of P-Grid and the supporting functionalities. Then we highlight some interesting implementation details and present briefly some experimental evaluation results. To our knowledge this is one of the first reports on experimental evaluation results of a structured peer-to-peer system in a real-world networking environment.


Background Replacement of diseased areas of the joint with tissue-engineered osteochondral grafts has shown potential in the treatment of osteoarthritis. Bioactive glasses are candidates for the osseous analog of these grafts. Questions/purposes (1) Does Bioactive Glass 13-93 (BG 13-93) as a subchondral substrate improve collagen and glycosaminoglycan production in a tissue-engineered cartilage layer? (2) Does BG 13-93 as a culture medium supplement increase the collagen and glycosaminoglycan production and improve the mechanical properties in a tissue-engineered cartilage layer? Methods In Study 1, bioactive glass samples (n = 4) were attached to a chondrocyte-seeded agarose layer to form an osteochondral construct, cultured for 6 weeks, and compared to controls. In Study 2, bioactive glass samples (n = 5) were cocultured with cell-seeded agarose for 6 weeks. The cell-seeded agarose layer was exposed to BG 13-93 either continuously or for the first or last 2 weeks in culture or had no exposure. Results Osteochondral constructs with a BG 13-93 base had improved glycosaminoglycan deposition but less collagen II content. Agarose scaffolds that had a temporal exposure to BG 13-93 within the culture medium had improved mechanical and biochemical properties compared to continuous or no exposure. Conclusions When used as a subchondral substrate, BG 13-93 did not improve biochemical properties compared to controls. However, as a culture medium supplement, BG 13-93 improved the biochemical and mechanical properties of a tissue-engineered cartilage layer. Clinical Relevance BG 13-93 may not be suitable in osteochondral constructs but could have potential as a medium supplement for neocartilage formation.


This paper investigates the determinants of credit spreads (levels and changes) via credit derivatives, using an Australian sample. We incorporate a number of different relationships to assess the contributions of various market-wide and firm-specific factors in determining levels, and changes in credit spreads, of corporate bonds. Using over-the-counter credit default swap (CDS) premium data as a proxy for the default risk of the entity, we find that both CDS and liquidity are priced into credit spreads, with liquidity explaining more credit spreads than credit risk (proxied using CDS premia) itself. We also find that a number of firm-specific and market-wide variables, namely, firm leverage, market-to-book ratio, market value, volatility, liquidity, the spot rate, the slope of the yield curve, the time to maturity of the underlying bond and the level and return on the All Ordinaries Index, are in many cases significant determinants of credit spreads. Finally, in additional robustness testing, a potential sample selection bias is accommodated via the Heckman ((1979) Sample selection bias as a specification error. Econometrica 47: 153–162) procedure.


Background:Pervasive poverty and high uninsurance rates in the US-Mexico border region coupled with rising US health care costs and the availability of alternatives to formal US health services—both in the United States and Mexico—have resulted in widespread use of alternatives to formal US health care. Objectives:We investigate variation in the purchase of substitutes for formal US health services among border residents reporting health-related cost constraints. Preferences for various means of substitution (informal US services, formal Mexican services, and informal Mexican services) are identified. Research Design:Cross-sectional study of purposive interview data from the Texas Borderlife Project regarding the purchase of a continuum of informal services/goods, including health care services and prescription medications. Subjects:Study respondents included 320 Latino/Hispanic residents of the Texas border region. Measures:Eight health substitutes (medical care, prescription medication, and dental care) were ordered from formal services/goods in Mexico to informal services/goods in Mexico and the US. The independent variable was reporting having gone without seeing a physician in the past 12 months because of cost. Results:Border residents reporting cost constraints were significantly more likely to purchase substitutes for formal US health services. Further, our findings suggest that when substitutes to formal US health care are used, Texas border residents prefer to access formal Mexican health care first, followed by informal US health services. Conclusions:Increasing access to US health services may require greater effort and resources in border communities given the availability of substitutes for formal health care services in this region.


In this study, the influence of Mg2+ on the aggregation and morphology of precipitated aragonite crystals is investigated at different temperatures. Different from some investigations described in the literature, aragonite precipitates in chemical systems in which Mg2+ acts specifically as crystal habit modifiers and not as polymorphic selectors. The results show that at increased Mg2+ concentration and temperature the aragonite crystals are less aggregated and that the amount of crystals sharing {110} faces and having larger extension of {001} faces increases. These outcomes may be relevant in biological, geochemical and technological contexts.


Using networks as a means of computing can reduce the communication flow over networks. We propose to distribute the computation load in stationary networks and formulate a flow-based delay minimization problem that jointly captures the costs of communications and computation. We exploit the distributed compression scheme of Slepian-Wolf that is applicable under any protocol information. We introduce the notion of entropic surjectivity as a measure of function's sparsity and to understand the limits of functional compression for computation. We leverage Little's law for stationary systems to provide a connection between surjectivity and the computation processing factor that reflects the proportion of flow that requires communications. This connection gives us an understanding of how much a node (in isolation) should compute to communicate the desired function within the network. Our results suggest that to effectively compute different function classes with different surjectivities, the networks can be restructured with the transition probabilities being tailored for functions, i.e., task-based link reservations, which can enable mixing versus separately processing of a diverse function class. We numerically evaluate our technique for search, MapReduce, and classification functions, and infer how sensitive the processing factor to the surjectivity of each computation task is.


PAHs are major constituents of creosote, and it has been suggested that their volatilization from treated wood could make a major contribution to the U.K. atmospheric emission inventories. This paper reports a study to elucidate the volatilization characteristics of selected PAHs from creosote-treated wood and to estimate the potential significance of this source to the U.K. atmospheric source inventory. Desorption kinetics from untreated and treated wood were measured at 4 and 30 °C for five PAHs (acenaphthene, fluorene, phenanthrene, anthracene, fluoranthene) using chambers in the laboratory. Rates of desorption followed first-order kinetics for all compounds and were higher at 30 than 4 °C. Mean ∑PAH fluxes varied from 2.57 ± 1.52 to 29.5 ± 6.1 mg/m2 treated wood/day at 4 and 30 °C, respectively. A prolonged study of the kinetics at 4 °C showed that the volatilization rate remained constant over about 7 weeks, after which >85% of the compounds still remained sorbed on the wood. Initial desorption rates were governed by partitioning between the substrate (wood) and air and subsequently by the rates of compound diffusion from the interstices of the wood. A strong negative correlation was observed when the percent increment in the desorption rate from 4 to 30 °C was plotted as a function of the octanol−air partition coefficient (KOA) (r 2 = −0.93); vapor pressure was strongly positively cor related (r 2 = 0.92). Desorption half-lives ranged from 0.7 to 31 yr at 4 °C and from 0.3 to 1 yr at 30 °C for fluoranthene and acenaphthene, respectively. Estimates of annual U.K. emissions for the compounds specified from freshly treated wood (i.e., ignoring long-term releases from previously treated wood) were subject to a number of important assumptions, but were in the range of 100 t ∑PAH. This is less than the annual U.K. emissions of ∑PAHs estimated for domestic heating (600 t) and believed to be similar to that from vehicle emissions (80 t) at the present time.


Thermal insulation materials for buildings provide thermal energy cost savings, hence much attention is directed towards improving their performances and construction of new ones. Inorganic fibrous materials - stone and glass wool and organic foamy materials- expanded and extruded polystyrene are dominant on the European market. However, the EU priorities of creating products with improved ecological footprint have led towards research for developing new insulation materials. Evaluation of the performance of insulation materials is a multi-criteria problem, which has to be carried out with respect to: physical properties, health and environmental protection, applicability as building elements and their cost. Recycled textile waste has already found commercial application as insulation material but so far only waste that is easy to open down to fibers has been used. This paper proposes an alternative solution of a new textile structure that will be used for thermal insulation of buildings' internal walls in order to prevent the loss of a valuable resource, pre-consumer apparel cutting waste. The designed textile structure is composed of polyester fabric apparel cutting waste which is shredded, rather than opened. Thermal conductivity - λ(W/mK) of the textile structure was measured with the Heat flow meter FOX600 instrument. The main goal was to determine the thermal insulation of the structure compared to the standard insulation structures, as well as textile insulating structures in form of fibers. The results of the 10 samples showed thermal conductivity coefficient (λ=0,052-0,060 W/mK), comparable to the values of standard insulation materials (λ=0,030-0,045 W/mK) and the values of insulation materials made from recycled textile fibers (λ=0,039-0,041 W/mK). In addition to the economic benefits, production of this kind of insulation material will have an ecologic benefit by decreasing environmental pollution arising from polyester apparel cutting waste.


Estrogens are a broad class of compounds which exert many physiological effects. In addition to gonadal and peripheral endogenous estrogen production, humans can be exposed to exogenous estrogenic compounds (xenoestrogens) from medicinal, dietary and environmental sources. These compounds can exert effects similar to that of 17β-estradiol (E2) through estrogen receptor (ER)-mediated mechanisms, or via ER-independent pathways. Although estrogens are used for a number of medical purposes such as birth control and for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the treatment of post-menopausal symptoms, studies have found adverse health effects from their use. Increased risk of stroke and invasive breast cancer are associated with medicinal estrogen use. As an alternative to HRT, diets rich in phytoestrogens are used by many women. Even though phytoestrogen consumption is associated with reduced risk of hormone-dependent cancers and antioxidant properties, concerns about adverse effects, such as endocrine disruption, cannot be dismissed. Widespread use of chemicals with estrogenic properties in agriculture and industry has resulted in endocrine disruption in wildlife populations although the impact on human health is still in debate. In general, the ranking order of estrogen equivalent factors compared to E2 is medicinal estrogens > phytoestrogens > environmental estrogens. Serum concentrations of estrogens vary among populations depending on choice of diet, use of medicinal estrogens, and environmental exposure. Thus, determination of total exposure levels (i.e. E2 equivalent concentration) is complex and can vary greatly within a larger population.


Case-based reasoning systems for medical application are increasingly multi-purpose systems and also multi-modal, using a variety of different methods and techniques to meet the challenges from the medical domain. In this paper, some of the recent medical case-based reasoning systems are classified according to their functionality and development properties. It shows how a particular multi-purpose and multi-modal case-based reasoning system solves these challenges. For this a medical case-based reasoning system in the domain of psychophysiology is used.


The need for high energy density batteries becomes increasingly important for the development of new and clean energy technologies, such as electric vehicles and electrical storage from wind and solar power. The search for new energetic materials of primary and secondary batteries with higher energy density has been highlighted in recent years. This review surveys recent advances in the research field of high energy density electrode materials with focus on multi-electron reaction chemistry of light-weight elements and compounds. In the first section, we briefly introduce the basic strategies for enhancement of the energy density of primary batteries based on multi-electron reactions. The following sections present overviews of typical electrode materials with multi-electron chemistry and their secondary battery applications in aqueous and non-aqueous electrolytes. Finally, the challenges and ongoing research strategies of these novel electrode materials and battery systems for high density energy storage and conversion are discussed.


A meshed network with N transport paths can be effectively protected against single link failures using network coding and protection cycles (p-cycles). This so called 1+N protection scheme provides instantaneous recovery from single link failures. The performance of this scheme has thus far been considered for a network with unit traffic demands, and the reported results were based on simulations. In this paper, we give an analytical upper bound on the required transport capacity for 1+N protection in full-meshed networks with unit traffic demands. Next, we consider networks with uniform and exponentially distributed traffic demands, and derive more realistic bounds for the achievable network performance of 1+N protection in full-meshed networks.We will show analytically that the gains decrease significantly relative to a unit-traffic demand distribution, independent of the protection mechanism used.


"Graphics Programming with GDI+ explores and exploits a wonderful range of GDI+ programming concepts, techniques, and applications for programmers of beginner to intermediate abilities. Being a prolific contributor to the Internet community of developers, Mahesh Chand is offering what seems to be a natural extension of what he does best-sharing his programming skills with other talented programmers. Each chapter compels to the next." i? i? i? i? i? i? i? i? i? -Jason Hattingh, Director, Greystone Digital FX"Mahesh does a very good job getting .NET developers up to speed using the GDI+ features supported in the .NET Framework. There is good coverage of graphics fundamentals that helps the reader better understand the concepts of graphics programming with GDI+, and there are some excellent sample applications that demonstrate the graphics topics covered to reinforce the concepts presented." i? i? i? i? i? i? i? i? i? -Charles G. Parker, President, Parallel Consulting, Inc."Graphics Programming with GDI+ is a comprehensive reference for anyone who wants to leverage this technology. It presents a clear discussion of the topics in such a manner that is comprehensible to the beginner, but sufficiently in-depth to challenge seasoned programmers." i? i? i? i? i? i? i? i? i? -Deborah J. Bechtold, MCSD, MCDBA"This is the most comprehensive book about graphics programming using GDI+ so far. This book will be a very useful handbook for everyone who does graphics programming for Windows."i? i? i? i? i? i? i? i? i? -Min Liu, Software Design Engineer of GDI+, Microsoft CorporationGraphics Programming with GDI+ is the .NET developer's guide to writing graphics applications for Windows and the Web. Through the use of detailed examples it provides experienced programmers with a deep understanding of the entire GDI+ API defined in the .NET Framework class library.The book begins with an introduction to GDI+ and the basics of graphics programming in Windows. The core of the book is a hands-on guide to practical topics, including how to use Windows Forms and optimize GDI+ performance. Chapters demonstrate how to develop real-world tools such as GDI+Painter, GDI+Editor, ImageViewer, and ImageAnimator. The author provides extensive reusable sample code in C# throughout, and complete downloadable source code in C# and Visual Basic .NET is available online, as are color versions of screen shots from the book.Key topics include: How GDI+ compares to GDI How GDI+ is defined and used in the .NET Framework How to draw, paint, and fill graphics objects Viewing and manipulating images Transforming graphics objects, images, and colors Printing in .NET How to develop GDI+ Web applications How to optimize drawing quality and performance Interactive color blending and transparent colors GDI interoperability Answers to frequently asked GDI+ questionsGraphics Programming in GDI+ is the most in-depth treatment available on writing effective graphics applications for the .NET Framework.


In this study, struvite precipitation coupled with an activated sludge process was applied to slaughterhouse wastewaters. Biological treatability characteristics of the wastewater were evaluated in a wide organic loading range of 0.06–0.42 g COD (g MLVSS)−1d−1 to assess COD removal as well as the extent of nitrification. Results of biological treatment of raw wastewater indicated that COD removal varied between 88% and 99% and complete nitrification was achieved at 0.1 g COD (g MLVSS)−1d−1 and lower organic loadings. Biological treatment of the struvite‐precipitated sample, which required no nitrification, yielded 86% COD removal at the organic removal of 0.3 g COD (g MLVSS)−1d−1. Struvite precipitation of both raw and biologically treated wastewater was at effective stoichiometric magnesium and phosphate doses to ammonia and between pH values of 9.0 and 9.5, providing ammonia concentrations of 20–30 mg N L−1 in the effluent and being independent of initial concentrations. The application of struvite precipitation both prior to and after biological treatment resulted in similar effluent qualities and provided the additional benefit of having a high‐rate activated sludge system instead of a low organic loading system with nitrification–denitrification. An additional benefit of struvite precipitation was the production of sludge which had recovery potential as a fertilizer. Among the tested treatment schemes, biological treatment following struvite precipitation seemed to be more advantageous in terms of process stability.


This paper reviews nonlinear optical-fiber designs for signal processing using optical Kerr effects. The requirements for designing nonlinear fibers are described first. Then, the design concept is discussed and design examples are shown to illustrate the tradeoffs among the different fiber properties such as effective area, dispersion, and attenuation. Furthermore, fiber designs with distributed Brillouin frequency shift to mitigate the effect of simulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in nonlinear fibers are discussed in detail. An SBS-threshold increase of 7 dB over conventional nonlinear fibers is experimentally demonstrated.


It is the end of an historical epoch, but to an old professor of physics, Victor Jakob, sitting in his unlighted study, eating dubious bread with jam made from turnips, it is the end of a way of thinking in his own subject. Younger men have challenged the classical world picture of physics and are looking forward to observational tests of Einstein's new theory of relativity as well as the creation of a quantum mechanics of the atom. It is a time of both apprehension and hope. In this remarkable book, the reader literally inhabits the mind of a scientist while Professor Jakob meditates on the discoveries of the past fifty years and reviews his own life and career--his scientific ambitions and his record of small successes. He recalls the great men who taught or inspired him: Helmholtz, Hertz, Maxwell, Planck, and above all Paul Drude, whose life and mind exemplified the classical virtues of proportion, harmony, and grace that Jakob reveres. In Drude's shocking and unexpected suicide, we see reflected Jakob's own bewilderment and loss of bearings as his once secure world comes to an end in the horrors of the war and in the cultural fragmentation wrought by twentieth-century modernism. His attempt to come to terms with himself, with his life in science, and with his spiritual legacy will affect deeply everyone who cares about the fragile structures of civilization that must fall before the onrush of progress.


We present a case study designed to highlight some of the practical issues that can arise when using linear robustness analysis techniques such as the structured singular value mu to analyse the robustness of uncertain nonlinear systems. The problem considered in the case study is the familiar ball and beam position control task, where the mass of the ball and the time-delay in the beam actuator are assumed to be uncertain. Using a symbolic linear fractional transformation (LFT)-based modelling approach, it is shown how both the original nonlinear and linearised plants may be represented in the form of LFT's. A linear controller is designed for the uncertain linearised plant using a mu-synthesis approach. The robustness of the linear and nonlinear closed-loop systems is then checked using mu-analysis and the Popov criterion, respectively. It is shown that as the degree of nonlinearity in the plant is increased, a sharp fall in the robustness properties of the controller from those predicted by the linear analysis is observed. The results of the study highlight the need for additional nonlinear analysis to confirm robustness analysis results derived using linearised models of nonlinear systems, as is usually the case in practice.


Modern search engines receive large numbers of business related, local aware queries. Such queries are best answered using accurate, up-to-date, business listings, that contain representations of business categories. Creating such listings is a challenging task as businesses often change hands or close down. For businesses with street side locations one can leverage the abundance of street level imagery, such as Google Street View, to automate the process. However, while data is abundant, labeled data is not; the limiting factor is creation of large scale labeled training data. In this work, we utilize an ontology of geographical concepts to automatically propagate business category information and create a large, multi label, training dataset for fine grained storefront classification. Our learner, which is based on the GoogLeNet/Inception Deep Convolutional Network architecture and classifies 208 categories, achieves human level accuracy.