In response to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the U.S. Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, authorizing the President, to determine what actions related to the treatment of suspected terrorist detainees constitute nongrave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. This Note examines how the Supreme Court should decide a case challenging one of the President's interpretations of what behavior falls within that category. It first examines the relevant cases including those addressing the power of the President to direct foreign policy, the political question doctrine, the implications of the legislative branch's authorization of executive actions, the Chevron doctrine, and treaty interpretation principles. It next applies the law in each of these areas to the President's authority tinder the Military Commissions Act and determines that any challenge to the President's authority pursuant to this Act should be either dismissed as nonjusticiable, or a decision should be rendered in favor of the President's interpretation. This Note concludes broffering other methods through which persons could bring a halt to offensive, torturous behavior.


This thesis considers the practical problem of constrained and unconstrained local optimization. This subject has been well studied when the objective function f is assumed to smooth. However, nonsmooth problems occur naturally and frequently in practice. Here f is assumed to be nonsmooth or discontinuous without forcing smoothness assumptions near, or at, a potential solution. Various methods have been presented by others to solve nonsmooth optimization problems, however only partial convergence results are possible for these methods. In this thesis, an optimization method which use a series of local and localized global optimization phases is proposed. The local phase searches for a local minimum and gives the methods numerical performance on parts of f which are smooth. The localized global phase exhaustively searches for points of descent in a neighborhood of cluster points. It is the localized global phase which provides strong theoretical convergence results on nonsmooth problems. Algorithms are presented for solving bound constrained, unconstrained and constrained nonlinear nonsmooth optimization problems. These algorithms use direct search methods in the local phase as they can be applied directly to nonsmooth problems because gradients are not explicitly required. The localized global optimization phase uses a new partitioning random search algorithm to direct random sampling into promising subsets of R. The partition is formed using classification and regression trees (CART) from statistical pattern recognition. The CART partition defines desirable subsets where f is relatively low, based on previous sampling, from which further samples are drawn directly. For each algorithm, convergence to an essential local minimizer of f is demonstrated under mild conditions. That is, a point x∗ for which the set of all feasible points with lower f values has Lebesgue measure zero for all sufficiently small neighborhoods of x∗. Stopping rules are derived for each algorithm giving practical convergence to estimates of essential local minimizers. Numerical results are presented on a range of nonsmooth test problems for 2 to 10 dimensions showing the methods are effective in practice.


The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of short-term plyometric training interposed with 24 or 48 hours of rest between training sessions on explosive and endurance adaptations in young soccer players. A total of 166 players, between 10 and 17 years of age, were randomly divided into 3 groups: a control group (CG; n = 55) and 2 plyometric training groups with 24 hours (PT24; n = 54) and 48 hours (PT48; n = 57) of rest between training sessions. Before and after intervention, players were measured in squat jump, countermovement jump, 20 (RSI20) cm drop jump reactive strength index, broad long jump, 20-m sprint time, 10 × 5-m agility time, 20-m multistage shuttle run test, and sit-and-reach test. The plyometric training program was applied during 6 weeks, 2 sessions per week, with a load from 140 to 260 jumps per session, replacing some soccer-specific drills. After intervention, the CG did not show significant performance changes. PT24 and PT48 groups showed a small-to-moderate significant improvement in all performance tests (p < 0.001), with no differences between treatments. Although it has been recommended that plyometric drills should not be conducted on consecutive days, the study shows that plyometric training applied twice weekly on consecutive or nonconsecutive days results in similar explosive and endurance adaptations in young male soccer players.


Abstract The emergence of markets for mitigation of climate change presents new opportunities for increasing economic and ecological returns to rangelands in developing countries. Improving rangeland management is a potentially significant source of mitigation from sequestration. It is appealing due to the likely links to sustainable agricultural development and poverty reduction. Many of the changes needed to sequester carbon are also associated with improved rangeland productivity and incomes. We provide an overview of the key issues that arise in determining the potential of carbon markets to support improved rangeland management focusing on West Africa, an area where pastoralism is a major economic activity with extensive rangelands that offer considerable potential for sequestering carbon. Estimates of the potential for increasing sequestration through improved rangeland management are summarized. Per hectare amounts are low, but aggregate potential is high. Carbon emission reductions are generated by reducing or avoiding land degradation, rehabilitating degraded lands, and increasing native carbon stocks by increasing aboveground and belowground biomass. Avoiding degradation and rehabilitating lightly degraded lands are the least costly and can generate significant carbon emission reductions. Carbon offsets from agricultural sources are currently limited under regulatory cap and trade regimes, and prices in voluntary markets are relatively low. Low returns to carbon offsets per hectare mean that significant co-benefits in the form of increased rangeland productivity and incomes would be necessary to induce participation. High transactions costs can be a problem in carbon markets and in adopting improved rangeland management practices, highlighting the need for institutions to provide effective coordination, monitoring, and enforcement. Evidence from Burkina Faso suggests the potential for existing local-level institutions to play an important role in future carbon payment programs, should they emerge.


Root of Play (stylized as √play) is a simple card game used to generate game design ideas in a short period of time. This game was designed to meet the needs of a unique classroom – a weeklong intensive summer workshop with students ranging from undergraduates to full professors. The purpose of Root of Play is combining theoretical discussions of games with practical applications of game design. The result is a card game that generates playable games. Using the principle of creativity through constraint, Root of Play leads students from brainstorming to playable prototypes. The game is suitable for all levels of gamers, from novices to game designers. Cards provide prompts and frameworks for players to make simple games and test out different development ideas. Currently, the game is utilized at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, BC, Canada.


The conformational propensities of the 21-residue peptide and its Oglycosylated analogs were studied by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. This polypeptide motif comprises the tandem repeat of the human mucin (MUC1) protein core that is differently glycosylated in normal and cancer cells. To evaluate the structural effects of O-glycosylation on the polypeptide backbone, conformations of the nonglycosylated peptide and its glycosylated analogs were monitored during the 1 ns MD simulations. Radius gyration for whole peptide and its fragments, as well as root-meansquare-deviation between coordinate sets of the backbone atoms of starting structures and generated structures, were calculated. It was shown that O-glycosylation promotes and stabilizes the extended conformations of the whole peptide and its central PDTRP fragment. O-glycosylation of the specific Thr residues significantly affects the conformational distributions of the flanking Ser residues. It was also shown that Oglycosylation promoted backbone conformations of the immunodominant region PDTRP that were similar to the structural features of the peptides presented by the major histocompatability complex (MHC) to T-cell receptors


Functional Analysis of Mammalian Coronin 3 Coronin, an F-actin binding protein, is expressed in a variety of organisms from Dictyostelium to humans. The mammalian coronin family comprises at least seven members, six of which show a similar size and domain structure. Their expression patterns are tissue-specific but overlapping, implying that they possess diverse functions. Little is known about mammalian coronin 3, which was studied in this work. This protein is expressed in different amounts in many mouse tissues, being most abundant in the brain. Due to this, mouse neuroblastoma (Neuro-2a) cells were chosen for the in vivo studies presented here. By immunofluorescence, endogenous coronin 3 was detected both in F-actin-rich structures like growth cones, neurites and intracellular small particles, and in the cytosol. Treatment of cells with colchicine and taxol did not provide any hints that coronin 3 localization depends on microtubules. Proper localization of EGFPHcoronin 3 required both the NH2- and COOH-terminus. Expression of EGFPHcoronin 3 (72-404) that lacked both termini had an inhibitory effect on neurite elongation, which was not the case for the proteins truncated at either terminus. This suggests that coronin 3 is involved in the generation of F-actin-rich cortical extensions. Subcellular fractionation and 2D gel electrophoresis demonstrated that during differentiation of Neuro-2a cells, endogenous coronin 3 translocated from a phosphorylated cytosolic pool to an unphosphorylated membrane- and F-actin associated fraction. A role of PKC in the regulation of other coronins has been reported in the literature. However, addition of the PKC activator PMA and the inhibitor bisindolylmaleimide to differentiated Neuro-2a cells did not significantly change the pI value of coronin 3 in cytosolic and cytoskeletal fractions, nor did it change the localization of the protein. This indicates that the phosphorylation of coronin 3 is independent of protein kinase C. In further experiments, the role of distinct coronin 3 domains for protein function was tested in vitro and in vivo. It turned out that the C-terminal part harbored several features required for molecular interactions. Gel filtration analysis showed that, in contrast to other coronins, coronin 3 is exclusively extracted as an oligomer from both the cytosolic and cytoskeletal fraction. Under native conditions, the cytosolic pool resides in a large complex and the COOH-terminal coiled-coil is essential for the formation of this complex. The COOH-terminal region mediated oligomerization of recombinant fragments in vitro. Furthermore, F-actin cosedimentation assays showed that the COOH-terminal amino acid residues 315-444 without the coiled coil domain are sufficient for F-actin binding and crosslinking in vitro. In contrast to this, the NH2- terminal region had no affinity for F-actin. The fragment coronin 3 (315-474) that contained the coiled coil was capable of recruiting the NH2-terminal coronin 3 (1-71) domain to actin filaments in vitro, implying that intramolecular or intermolecular interactions between the NH2- and COOH-terminal parts might be involved in the association with actin filaments in vivo.


ZSM-5 membranes have been prepared using a novel seeding method. By sonicating ZSM-5 seed crystals in the presence of a stainless steel mesh of size followed by a controlled low temperature synthesis step it has been shown by XRD, FTIR, and SEM-EDX. The growth of ZSM-5 zeolite at stainless steel can be used to produce ZSM-5 zeolite membranes on reactor vessel with surface-to-volume ratio was the highest of the reactor vessel. Surface-to-volume ratio influences the heat-transfer during the synthesis, which further governs the crystallization of ZSM-5. It was found that the higher the surface-to-volume of the reactor, the more crystalline the resulting product. The result for the theoretical review paper were necessary to research the synthesis of ZSM-5 membrane based on the variation of type and size stainless steel and pretreatment of thestainless steel to use as a membrane suppport. The ratio of surface area to volume of the first reactor is the highest 1.44 influence more effective heat transfer process and the crystallinity of the zeolite ZSM-5 in the synthesis of ZSM-5 zeolite.


The methodological framework of LCA has a number of well-known problems and limitations. This has generated a lot of scientific efforts to eliminate or alleviate these. This paper can be seen as one contribution to these efforts, with a particular focus on energy issues in LCA. It has been concluded that a future comprehensive methodological framework for LCA must include a number of principles for comparison and aggregation of different energy forms or of their environmental impacts. In economics, the central concept of value is encapsulated in the term numeraire. This signifies the function of money as a common, universal currency, a measure of value or a unit of account. A numeraire can be used both for comparison and aggregation. A basic requisite for a numeraire is generality. It is here discussed whether it is possible to define an energy numeraire for use in LCA methods, in particular when the LCA is to be used for specific kinds of optimisation. I conclude that the exergy concept needs quite a lot of further theoretical development before it can be included in LCA methodology. Attempts to do so at the present stage would be premature and lead to disappointment and confusion


Evaluating a company's performance often entails wading through a thicket of numbers produced by a few simple metrics, writes the author, and senior executives leave measurement to those whose specialty is spreadsheets. To take ownership of performance assessment, those executives should find qualitative, forward-looking measures that will help them avoid five common traps: Measuring against yourself. Find data from outside the company, and reward relative, rather than absolute, performance. Enterprise Rent-A-Car uses a service quality index to measure customers' repeat purchase intentions. Looking backward. Use measures that lead rather than lag the profits in your business. Humana, a health insurer, found that the sickest 10% of its patients account for 80% of its costs; now it offers customers incentives for early screening. Putting your faith in numbers. The soft drinks company Britvic evaluates its executive coaching program not by trying to assign it an ROI number but by tracking participants' careers for a year. Gaming your metrics. The law firm Clifford Chance replaced its single, easy-to-game metric of billable hours with seven criteria on which to base bonuses. Sticking to your numbers too long. Be precise about what you want to assess and explicit about what metrics are assessing it. Such clarity would have helped investors interpret the AAA ratings involved in the financial meltdown. Really good assessment will combine finance managers' relative independence with line managers' expertise.


The increasingly widespread use of non-ionic surfactants as main ingredients in domestic detergent formulations requires an understanding of their performance during washing, not only as separate products but also as binary mixtures with anionic surfactants. In order to attain acceptable levels of biodegradability and toxicity, alkyl polyglucosides (APGs) have appeared on the market. These non-ionic surfactants, obtained from natural substances (saccharides), are 100% biodegradable and have very attractive features for application to washing. They are highly soluble, only slightly sensitive to the presence of electrolytes and rarely affected by water hardness. The aim of our work was to analyze behavior in the staining of undyed cotton fabric with the dye desorbed in the washing of cotton fabric previously dyed and finished with resin and softened, by means of the use of the surfactant APGs with sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate, separately and in mixtures in different proportions. Likewise, the staining of undyed diacetate, polyamide, polyester, acrylic, cotton and wool fabrics was obtained. The cotton was previously dyed with red, orange and blue direct dyes. The behavior of the discoloration of dyed and finished and unfinished cotton fabric and the staining of undyed fabrics in washing were related to the zeta potentials of the fabrics obtained by the streaming potential method in the presence of the surfactants and their mixtures used After washing, the undyed fabric with the anionic surfactant showed a greater difference in color than non-ionic surfactant and when the concentration of the non-ionic surfactant in the mixture was increased the color difference decreased. The zeta potentials (absolute values) of undyed and dyed and finished cotton fabric in the presence of these surfactants gave the same order values, which increased with the surfactant concentration.


INTRODUCTION
The motor and non-motor symptoms associated with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) may compromise the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of some individuals living with this debilitating condition. Although growing evidence suggests that PD may be more prevalent in rural communities, there is little information about the life quality of these individuals. This study examines whether HRQOL ratings vary in relation to rural and metropolitan life settings.

METHODS
An analytic cross-sectional study was conducted to compare the HRQOL of two separate samples of people with PD living in metropolitan Melbourne and rural Victoria. The metropolitan sample consisted of 210 individuals who had participated in the baseline assessment for an existing clinical trial. The rural sample comprised 24 participants who attended community-based rehabilitation programs and support groups in rural Victoria. Health-related quality of life was quantified using the Parkinson's Disease Questionnaire-39 (PDQ-39).

RESULTS
The HRQOL of participants in rural Australia differed from individuals living in a large metropolitan city (p=0.025). Participants in rural Australia reported worse overall HRQOL, after controlling for differences in disease duration. Their overall HRQOL was lower than for city dwellers. Rural living was also found to be a significant negative predictor of HRQOL (β=0.14; 95% CI -1.27 to -0.08; p=0.027).

CONCLUSION
The findings of this study suggest that some people with PD living in rural Victoria perceive their HRQOL to be relatively poor. In order to minimise the debilitating consequences of this disease, further studies examining the factors that may contribute to the HRQOL of individuals living in rural and remote areas are required.


A finite formulation is presented for the solution of coupled problems of steady-state electric and transient thermal conductions in 3-D regions. The model is based on the cell method approach and takes advantage of the very agile algebraic formulations that it can provide for field theories. Dual barycentric cell complexes are used for both space and time domains, the latter inducing a Crank-Nicolson time integration scheme. An example of application is given, consisting in the simulation of a treatment for the thermal ablation of liver cancer. Comparisons are given with a commercial finite-element method program


Despite repeated calls to improve the quality of Australian business higher education, sector-wide improvement has been elusive. This paper presents an analysis of a multi-institutional project undertaken by the Australian Business Deans Council Teaching and Learning Network. Earlier studies of change in higher education demonstrated the need to move beyond decontextualised, one-size-fits-all models. Building on this earlier work, we suggest that processual approaches to change management, emphasising the instability of organisations rather than stability, are more appropriate within this complex context. The paper makes a case for effecting adaptive change by working with, and through, a network of associate deans. The evolution of this network and the processes that began with one collaborative project designed with a deliberate aim to identify tangible follow-on projects for sector-wide, sustainable improvement is described. The resultant positive and unfolding outcomes that became a potent vehicle for change within and beyond the duration of the original project is reported.


The research field is the intersection between photography and modern fiction.

The research, which resulted in a published paper, an international conference presentation ('The Photograph', University of Manitoba) public symposium paper ('Out of the Box', Tate Modern) and scholarly symposium paper (Leeds Humanities Research Institute) analysed works of modern fiction in which textual descriptions of photographs are used to structure narratives.

Particular attention is given to Penelope Lively's 'The Photograph'. It is argued that an incriminating photograph discovered by chance at the start of the narrative comes to dominates the novel and that the narrative is predicated on the main character (depicted in the photograph) finally becoming reincorporated into the lives of the other characters. Theoretically two themes prevail in the research. First (based on Kermode), that secrets within literature are not always hidden. Second (based on Bakhtin) that photographs might function as 'organising centres' for the fundamental narrative events of a novel so that a small detail (the clandestine linked hands described by Lively) might act as a vanishing point (or chronotype) through which all of what happens in the novel can be traced back. The argument is made that The Photograph is a fictional world holding photographs, narratives and secrets in a tight, mutually dependent dynamic.

Reference was also made to writers who also used photographs in ways similar to Lively such as Carol Shields, Donna Tartt and Kate Atkinson. As the symposium at Leeds the works of other writers were drawn into the presentation including Peter Dickinson and Nina Raine.


Seldom has so much been written on such an important topic that has produced so little agreement and so much controversy. It starts with "what is leadership and how does it differ from managership?" It continues with the development of competing big, mid-range, and small leadership theories (Muczyk & Adler, 2002). Most recently, scholars are preoccupied with attempting to develop a leadership theory or model by creating a critical match between leader characteristics, subordinate attributes, and the circumstances of the situation. More and more, the influence of national cultures in this global economic village is taken into consideration. This effort is also an attempt at creating such a match in a cultural context that is perceived to be useful by practitioners, is based on reason, and factors in important variables identified in the accepted leadership theories or models.


As the population of the Internet grows rapidly the development of web technologies becomes extremely important. For the evolvement of Web 2.0, web services are essential. Web services are programs that allow computers of different platforms on the web to interactively communicate without the need of extra data for human reading interfaces and formats such as web page structures. Since web service is a future trend for the growth of internet, the tools that are used for development is also important. Although there are many choices of web service frameworks to choose from, developers should choose the framework that fits best to their application based on performance, time and effort for the framework. In this project, we chose four common frameworks to compare them in both qualitative and quantitative metrics. After running the tests, the results are statistically analyzed by SAS.


ABSTRACT Introduction Perinatal palliative care (PnPC) is a growing field where healthcare providers from multiple disciplines are supporting families and providing holistic care for their babies with life-limiting illnesses. It is important to have an approach that includes the standardized management of end-of-life symptoms that are anticipated around the time of birth. Areas covered A need was identified to develop medication orders for the initial pharmacological management of symptoms at end-of-life for infants with life-limiting conditions intended for use outside of an intensive care setting. The choice of medications was based on a review of the literature, discussion with content experts and guided by their ease of use, accessibility and noninvasive route of delivery. The recommendations can be used as a guide for the initial management of common symptoms encountered in perinatal palliative care. Expert opinion There are studies looking at many qualitative aspects of perinatal palliative care including perceptions of care, decision-making, and bereavement; however, few specifically focus on symptom management in the delivery room and postpartum ward settings. There is a need for standardization of the medical management of infants born with life-limiting conditions whose parents choose to pursue palliative care.


The purpose of the research conducted for this thesis was to investigate perceptions of
responsibility and blame for rising levels of consumer debt in the UK, focusing on two key
stakeholder groups often associated with the issues relating to consumer debt: individual
borrowers and consumer credit lenders. Research was conducted with these stakeholders;
debtors represented the individual borrowers and debt collectors from a large multi national
credit card company represented lenders. Three central research questions lay at the heart of the research: what are the respondents' perceptions of why and how debtors use consumer credit; how are debtors perceived and treated by their creditors (i.e. through contact with debt collectors); what are the respondents' perceptions of who is to blame for consumer debt?

A mixed method approach was adopted, using primarily qualitative research methods in
accordance with the interpretivist approach of the research. An online survey and in-depth
interviews were adopted for the debtor respondents and focus groups and in-depth interviews were adopted for the debt collector respondents. The debtor respondents were recruited from the National Debt Line website, the biggest online money advice website in the UK, by posting an online survey on the site. The debt collector respondents were recruited from the shared employer of the respondents and the researcher, a large multi national credit card company.

In answer to the research questions, the research revealed that, firstly, the majority of debtor respondents perceived that their consumer credit use was to supplement their low income, which contradicted previous stereotypes of debtors as reckless spendthrifts and, instead, proposed they are agentic rational decision makers. Secondly, debtors were negatively perceived and treated by their creditors (debt collectors) in that they were stigmatised and labelled as deviant. This occurred during the debtors' social interaction with debt collectors during the debt collection process. In line with the labelling theory of deviance, this societal reaction then led to self-labelling by the debtors, who expressed feelings of shame. Thirdly, therefore, both the debtors and debt collectors primarily blamed the debtor stakeholder group as responsible for increasing levels of consumer debt, although the debtors also placed some of the blame on the creditors for acting unethically in their lending practices, namely by lending irresponsibly to debtors without an accurate assessment of the affordability of the loan.

This thesis makes an original contribution to sociological knowledge of the ways in which blame and responsibility for increasing levels of debt is perceived by different societal groups. A key part of the thesis' originality exists in its utilisation of concepts drawn from different strands of sociological theory to explore perceptions of debt, in particular the sociology of deviance and symbolic interactionism, such as labeling, stigma and shame.


Optimal transport (OT) theory describes general principles to define and select, among many possible choices, the most efficient way to map a probability measure onto another. That theory has been mostly used to estimate, given a pair of source and target probability measures $(\mu, \nu)$, a parameterized map $T_\theta$ that can efficiently map $\mu$ onto $\nu$. In many applications, such as predicting cell responses to treatments, pairs of input/output data measures $(\mu, \nu)$ that define optimal transport problems do not arise in isolation but are associated with a context $c$, as for instance a treatment when comparing populations of untreated and treated cells. To account for that context in OT estimation, we introduce CondOT, a multi-task approach to estimate a family of OT maps conditioned on a context variable, using several pairs of measures $\left(\mu_i, \nu_i\right)$ tagged with a context label $c_i$. CondOT learns a global map $\mathcal{T}_\theta$ conditioned on context that is not only expected to fit all labeled pairs in the dataset $\left\{\left(c_i,\left(\mu_i, \nu_i\right)\right)\right\}$, i.e., $\mathcal{T}_\theta\left(c_i\right) \sharp \mu_i \approx \nu_i$, but should also generalize to produce meaningful maps $\mathcal{T}_\theta\left(c_{\text {new }}\right)$ when conditioned on unseen contexts $c_{\text {new }}$. Our approach harnesses and provides a novel usage for partially input convex neural networks, for which we introduce a robust and efficient initialization strategy inspired by Gaussian approximations. We demonstrate the ability of CondOT to infer the effect of an arbitrary combination of genetic or therapeutic perturbations on single cells, using only observations of the effects of said perturbations separately.


The European Union is still far from having a consolidated defence market but the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base (EDTIB) has emerged as a policy framework through which to liberalize and regulate defence markets, protect and sustain jobs and to improve the interoperability of Europe's armed forces; all at the EU level. This article argues that a purely economic rationale for defence-industrial cooperation is being reformulated to include also questions of strategic relevance. Indeed, by charting the transition from a past policy framework called the European Defence Equipment Market (EDEM) to the EDTIB, the article examines the European Commission's role as a key driver in this policy evolution. This article shows how the European Commission is using dual-use technologies to increase its policy relevance in the defence-industrial policy milieu, but it also reaffirms the enduring role of the member states and the importance of national interests.


D. Joy, F. Li, N.L. Clarke and S.M. Furnell Centre for Security, Communications and Network Research (CSCAN) Plymouth University, Plymouth, United Kingdom Security Research Institute, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia firstname.lastname@example.com Network forensics is becoming an increasingly important tool in the investigation of cyber and computerassisted crimes. Unfortunately, whilst much effort has been undertaken in developing computer forensic file system analysers (e.g. Encase and FTK), such focus has not been given to Network Forensic Analyser Tools (NFATs). The single biggest barrier to effective NFATs is the handling of large volumes of low-level traffic and being able to exact and interpret forensic artefacts and their context – for example, being able extract and render application-level objects (such as emails, web pages and documents) from the low-level TCP/IP traffic but also understand how these applications/artefacts are being used. Whilst some studies and tools are beginning to achieve object extraction, results to date are limited to basic objects. No research has focused upon analysing network traffic to understand the nature of its use – not simply looking at the fact a person requested a webpage, but how long they spend on the application and what interactions did they have with whilst using the service (e.g. posting an image, or engaging in an instant message chat). This additional layer of information can provide an investigator with a far more rich and complete understanding of a suspect's activities. To this end, this paper presents an investigation into the ability to derive high-level application usage characteristics from low-level network traffic meta-data. The paper presents a three application scenarios – web surfing, communications and social networking and demonstrates it is possible to derive the user interactions (e.g. page loading, chatting and file sharing ) within these systems. The paper continues to present a framework that builds upon this capability to provide a robust, flexible and user-friendly NFAT that provides access to a greater range of forensic information in a far easier format.


We present a stochastic clustering algorithm which uses pairwise similarity of elements and show how it can be used to address various problems in computer vision, including the low-level image segmentation, mid-level perceptual grouping, and high-level image database organization. The clustering problem is viewed as a graph partitioning problem, where nodes represent data elements and the weights of the edges represent pairwise similarities. We generate samples of cuts in this graph, by using Karger's contraction algorithm (1996), and compute an "average" cut which provides the basis for our solution to the clustering problem. The stochastic nature of our method makes it robust against noise, including accidental edges and small spurious clusters. The complexity of our algorithm is very low: O(|E| log/sup 2/ N) for N objects, |E| similarity relations, and a fixed accuracy level. In addition, and without additional computational cost, our algorithm provides a hierarchy of nested partitions. We demonstrate the superiority of our method for image segmentation on a few synthetic and real images, both B&W and color. Our other examples include the concatenation of edges in a cluttered scene (perceptual grouping) and the organization of an image database for the purpose of multiview 3D object recognition.


In the course of my investigations in the field of comparative acarid morphology (Van der Hammen, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1964a, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1968a, 1968b, 1968c, 1969, 1969a, 1970, 1970a, 1970b), I have paid attention to various groups of mites, viz., all orders of Anactinotrichida, except Ixodida (apart from a small paper on the palp) ; and all orders of Actinotrichida, except Tarsonemida and Acaridida. One of the most important gaps is now constituted by the Tarsonemida, of which the systematic position has been controversial, although recent authors generally classified the group with the Trombidiformes or Prostigmata. Published data on the morphology, notwithstanding the fact that very important studies have recently appeared (e.g. Beer, 1954; Cross, 1965; Karafiat, 1959; Krczal, 1959; Schaarschmidt, 1959 ; Suski, 1966, 1967, 1968), are difficult to compare with data known from other groups of mites. It is evident that, in view of the need of a satisfactory classification and a complete morphology of the mites, a reinvestigation of the Tarsonemida, with special attention to homologies, now has some priority. The present paper is my first orientation in the group. I have simply chosen a species of which I had numerous materials. In many characters, this species appeared to be an average representative. It will be important to return to the group for the study of a more primitive species (e.g. a species of Pyemotidae). This study, however, must form part of my program of continued morphological investigation. The group of the Tarsonemida (generally named Tarsonemini or Heterostigmata) consists of the families Pyemotidae, Scutacaridae, Tansonemidae, and Podapolipidae. Originally, several authors recognized relationships of the


Sequential stochastic optimization has been used in many contexts, from simulation, to e-commerce, to clinical trials. Much of this analysis assumes that observations are made soon after a sampling decision is made, so that the next sampling decision can benefit from the most recent data. This assumption is not true in a number of contexts, including clinical trials. In this paper we extend sequential sampling tools from simulation optimization to be useful when there exists a delay in observing the data from sampling, with a specific focus on the situation in which the sampling variance is unknown. We demonstrate the benefits of doing so by benchmarking the optimization algorithms with data from a published clinical trial.


Objectives: The current article identifies the shock patients heart rate variability factors. Specially, it aims to determine the mean and variance heart rate variability factors for shock patients.
Background: The casual factors of heart rate variability for shock patients are partially known in the literature. Methods: The response heart rate for shock patients is positive & heterogeneous. It may belong to exponential family distribution. Generally, joint generalized linear models (JGLMs) (Lognormal or gamma) fitting may be used.
Results: The mean hear rate decreases as the systolic blood pressure (BP) (SBP) (P=0.0281), or age (P<0.0001), or diastolic BP (DBP) (P<0.0001), or cardiac index (P<0.0001), or hematocrit (HCT) (P=0.0606), or mean circulation time (MCT) (P=0.0606) decreases, and vice versa. The mean heart rate is partially higher of female (P=0.1478) than male shock patients, and it is directly partially related with the shock types (P=0.1065). The heart rate response decreases as the mean arterial BP (MAP) (P<0.0001), or appearance time (AT) (P<0.0001), or body surface index (BSI) (P=0.1361) increases. It is inversely partially correlated with the card sequence (RECORD) (P= 0.0591). The heart rate variance decreases as the MAP (P=0.0110), or age (P=0.0055) increases. The heart rate variance is lower for female (P=0.0057), than male shock patients, and it is negatively partially associated with the shock types (P=0.1104). The heart rate variance increases as the diastolic BP (P=0.0615), or mean central venous pressure (MCVP) (P=0.0060), or urinary output (UO) (P=0.0076), or red cell index (RCI) (P=0.0243) increases.
Conclusion: Impacts of many factors such as gender, age, SBP, DBP, MAP, MCVP, CI, MCT, HCT, BSI, AT, RECORD on heart rate for shock patients have been derived based on statistical modeling. Many of the current results are new in the shock patients heart rate literature.


Here is a great introduction to the remarkable mind of Shigeo Shingo, indisputably one of the great forces in manufacturing. In this book Dr. Shingo describes his approach to manufacturing improvements, developed and refined over the course of a brilliant career. He called it the Scientific Thinking Mechanism (STM). The Sayings of Shigeo Shingo leads you through the five stages of STM, with appropriate examples taken from notes Dr. Shingo collected during his consulting trips to American and Japanese plants. It shows how, in many cases, the most brilliant ideas are often so simple they're overlooked. Or they're dismissed because they seem ridiculous: * A Japanese plant, after first rejecting the idea as "too silly," finds that unhulled rice is ideal for smoothing the rough surfaces on pressure-formed ebonite switches* Granville-Phillips, in Boulder, Colorado, reduced defects to zero in one process after Dr. Shingo suggested illuminating circuit boards from below to reduce errors involved in the insertion of diodes and resistors The Sayings of Shigeo Shingo is must reading for plant managers and engineers. It formalizes the powerful and creative way of thinking that Shingo himself used time and again to overcome problems that seemed virtually insurmountable.


A study to evaluate the effect of molecular speciation con- sidering methodologies to assign partial charges and conformational search processes for a docking test was made with mangiferin (MGF). This compound was selected as a model to explore speciation effects on drug design due to the speciation studies previously performed, and because it is a bioconjugate containing carbohydrate and polyphe- nolic xanthonoid groups, both moieties important as potential-drug candidates. PEOE (Partial Equalization of Orbital Electronegativity) resulted the best method to assign partial charges, with a good com- promise between precision and computational cost, among different Classical Molecular Force Fields and Quantum Mechanics methods that were compared with Density Functional Theory calculations as the reference methodology. The number of conformations in energy minima showed to be extremely dependent upon partial charge assig- nation, as well as their geometry. In docking simulations of MGF on albumin drug-site 1, it was showed the relevance of choosing the properly expected chemical species for the pH value of interest since neutral MGF or deprotonated at the hydroxyl group on position 1 results in orientations significantly different from those predicted for the species deprotonated at the hydroxyl group on position 6, which is the predominant deprotonation site in accordance with the speciation study. The first two species present a tendency to expose the carbohy- drate region to solvent occupying the same region in the binding site, while the molecule deprotonated in position 6 exhibits a preference for a different region of the site with its xanthonoid moiety exposed. Carbohydrate-polyphenol bioconjugates, such as MGF combine two types of bioactive molecules being both important as leaders for drug design.


The aim of this thesis is to explore pregnancy and perinatal outcomes in diagnosed
HIV-infected women receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) in the UK (United
Kingdom) and Ireland. Population-based surveillance data on HIV-infected pregnant
women and their children is collected through the National Study of HIV in
Pregnancy and Childhood (NSHPC), which includes information on over 8000
pregnancies delivered between 1990 and 2007. The majority of diagnosed infected
women now take highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in pregnancy, which
reduces the risk of mother-to-child HIV transmission. However, there have been
concerns over the potential for maternal and fetal adverse effects, with conflicting
findings from European and American studies regarding the association between
HAART and premature delivery.
In this thesis, trends over time in the demographic characteristics of HIV-infected
pregnant women in the UK and Ireland are described, along with changes in the
uptake of interventions for preventing mother-to-child transmission. Transmission
rates are explored over a period when HAART was routinely available, and
subgroups of women managed in the context of regularly updated national guidelines
are compared with respect to their risk of transmission. Multivariable logistic
regression models are used to assess the association between type of ART exposure
in pregnancy and adverse outcomes including pre-eclampsia, prematurity, stillbirth,
neonatal death and congenital abnormality. In addition, using data from the European
Collaborative Study and the Pediatric Spectrum of HIV Disease project alongside the
UK and Ireland data, the effects of differences in populations and methodologies
(study design and analytical approach) on the observed association between HAART
and premature delivery are investigated, and a pooled analysis of individual motherchild
pairs is carried out. Finally, the risks and benefits of ART in terms of adverse
pregnancy outcomes and mother-to-child transmission were jointly modelled using
Monte Carlo simulation methods, to produce a risk-benefit ratio.


The genre of writing known as crónicas throughout the Spanish-speaking world has been described by Mexican novelist and cronista Juan Villoro as "the platypus of prose". These short, column-length prose pieces published regularly in newspapers and magazines in Spanish America and in Spain may take the form of an essay, narrative, reportage or opinion piece or any combinations of these. Villoro's comparison of the crónica with the odd looking, egg-laying, Australian monotreme underscores the hybrid nature of the genre, which, like the platypus, appears to be both one thing and another: both fact and fiction, real and imagined, serious and humorous, critical and, at times, whimsical. In making this analogy, however, the Mexican author was very likely unaware that, in fact, the Spanish-language crónica had in recent decades migrated successfully, if improbably, to the home of the platypus: Australia. Literary work in Spanish is an important part of Australia's multicultural heritage. With over 110,000 Australians speaking Spanish at home, it is not surprising that this linguistic community has its share of writers producing poetry and short stories, novels, plays, biographies and autobiographies. Translated work, however, represents a very small proportion of the Spanish-speaking community's literary output. Significantly, crónicas written in Australia and published through a range of Australian newspapers and magazines have never been translated. This chapter aims to address this gap by bringing to attention the work of one of Australia's cronistas and by arguing that crónicas represent a significant aspect of this migrant nation's literary heritage. This chapter will provide an overview of crónicas in Australia, with a particular focus on the work of Michael Gamarra, who for over thirty years has been involved as editor and writer of Spanish-language publications in Sydney. It argues that his crónica-style columns from the 1980s, written under the pseudonym of Ernesto Balcells, provide a mediating space that allow the consequences and implications of "being translated", in the sense of being "carried across" to new geographic, linguistic and cultural contexts, to be explored within a popular and familiar literary tradition.


Fourier self-deconvolution (FSD) is used to enhance the spectral resolution of Fourier transform infrared results obtained from thick solution-cast films of bisphenol-A-polycarbonate-poly(dimethylsiloxane) blends and random block copolymers. Despite the severity of band overlap in the region from 1300 to 1200 cm−1, accurate determinations of bulk composition are made from the deconvolved absorbance (transmission mode) spectra of eleven blends and three random block copolymers. With compositions expressed in terms of each component's relative concentration, these results are used to develop a multicomponent Beer's law relationship that is verified through the determination of appropriate homopolymer absorptivities. Fourier transform infrared attenuated total reflectance results are compared to the multicomponent Beer's law relationship in an effort to quantitate the surface excess of siloxane 0.004–1.6 µm from the air/solid interface.


This study aims to investigate the effects of authentic learning methods — applied in science courses — on the problem-solving skills and attitudes towards those courses. As a research design, a quasi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test control groups was used in the study. The data of the study were collected from 92 students at the level of 6th grade in Van, Turkey in the 2017-2018 academic year. As data collection tools, the Problem-Solving Skills Test and Science Attitude Scale were used throughout the study. During the data analysis phase, descriptive statistics, one-factor analysis of variance for unrelated samples, t-test for related samples, Kruskal Wallis-H and Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test were used. As a result of the study, it was realised that there was a significant difference between the experimental group and control groups' problem-solving skills total scores in favour of the experimental group. Furthermore, it was ascertained that authentic learning practices improved the problem-solving skills of the experimental group students to a significant extent. In terms of attitude points towards science, it was determined that the post-test scores of the experimental group were significantly higher than the control groups and authentic learning practices had a positive effect on attitude.


Abstract A radical new inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion concept, the magnetically channeled IEC trap array (MCTA), is studied as a candidate power unit for interplanetary space travel. IEC fusion concepts are widely recognized to be attractive for space power because they are simple and lightweight. However, existing experimental IEC concepts, while very successful for low-level power neutron sources, do not project to high-power space applications because of poor confinement-time scaling and grid heating/losses. The MCTA concept addresses both issues: eliminating the need for a central grid by injecting energetic ions into this unique hybrid configuration and providing improved confinement by connecting a number of traps. Because of the linearly connected geometry and compatibility with an efficient traveling wave direct-energy converter, aneutronic fuels, such as D-3He, can be implemented. Thus, the MCTA concept has the potential to accomplish the demanding requirements of future deep-space propulsion and power by providing a high power-density propulsion system. This promise was amply demonstrated in an earlier, reasonably detailed design study by University of Illinois researchers that used an MCTA to accomplish a fast manned mission to Jupiter. In the present paper, we discuss the basic MCTA concept and examine stability issues that must be resolved to access the feasibility of this concept. Some important supporting data carry over from prior IEC experiments, but a full MCTA configuration has yet to be studied experimentally. If proven feasible, the MCTA development path would involve experiments at progressively higher powers aimed at the ultimate demonstration of a full-scale, several-hundred-MW propulsion unit.


Measuring Labour Markets in Canada and the United States: 2010 Edition is the sixth installment in our ongoing research to assess the performance of labour markets and explain why results differ among jurisdictions. This study provides a series of specific evaluations as well as a comprehensive measure of labour market performance. Indicators of labour performance such as job creation, unemployment, and productivity are used to assess Canadian provincial and US state labour market performance. This study also examines those characteristics and regulations of the labour market that have been shown to affect its performance. Below are some of the main findings of the 2010 edition of Measuring Labour Markets in Canada and the United States.


One of the key objectives of Directive 2013/11/EU (the Consumer ADR Directive) has been to promote high quality ADR entities through the creation of a certification scheme for ADR providers. In parallel, the Directive has also established a monitoring framework in which Member States' 'Competent Authorities' play pivotal roles to ensure ADR providers' continuous performance and compliance. Against this background, key questions arise with regard to the enforcement of those quality standards, and the behaviour of those entities that are in charge of monitoring. While presenting the particularities of ADR monitoring schemes established in Member States, this paper argues that, despite the efforts made to promote high quality ADR schemes, the Consumer ADR Directive has ultimately fallen short of securing a consistent approach to ADR monitoring across the EU and has left open the possibility for patchy and disorganised initiatives at Member States' level. This is due to the high number of national Competent Authorities currently operating in the EU and issues with monitoring architectures, insufficiency of the quality standards set out in the Directive, and risks of highly diverging monitoring behaviour from Competent Authorities. Moreover, the possible coexistence of certified and non-certified ADR providers in some Member States tends to undermine the overall homogeneity of ADR sectors and creates confusion for consumers. A more structured and effective approach to ADR monitoring is needed for meeting consumers' expectations, ensuring consistency, and creating a levelled playing field for all ADR providers. Competent Authorities have the capacity to contribute significantly to a better rationalisation of ADR sectors, and a better embedment of ADR within civil justice systems. Revised monitoring architectures should help maximise their interventions. In the context of the upcoming publication of the national monitoring reports expected by 9 July 2018, considering these changes appear particularly timely.


The goal of this report is to give a comprehensive overview of the rich field of forward physics, with a special attention to the topics that can be studied at the LHC. The report starts presenting a selection of the Monte Carlo simulation tools currently available, chapter 2, then enters the rich phenomenology of QCD at low, chapter 3, and high, chapter 4, momentum transfer, while the unique scattering conditions of central exclusive production are analyzed in chapter 5. The last two experimental topics, Cosmic Ray and Heavy Ion physics are presented in the chapter 6 and 7 respectively. Chapter 8 is dedicated to the BFKL dynamics, multiparton interactions, and saturation. The report ends with an overview of the forward detectors at LHC. Each chapter is correlated with a comprehensive bibliography, attempting to provide to the interested reader with a wide opportunity for further studies.


Biological methods have gained attention as an alternative treatment for oil degradation in pollution remediation. External and internal factors have a great influence on crude oil biodegradation. This experiment studied the effect of oil concentrations and ratios of Ammonium and Phosphate on oil degradation in mixed cultures of local strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Arthrobacter simplex. The oil degradation ability of this mixed culture was compared to the dormant culture of Epyzim. The increase of oil concentration, from 1, 3, 5 and 10% (w/v), significantly lowered the ability of both cultures to degrade the oil i.e from 83 % for 1% oil concentration to 64% for 10% oil concentration using local strains. The local strains showed better capability compare to the dormant culture. Medium composition was designed by three levels of ammonium concentration (7.6, 37.9 and 75.8 mg l-1) and two levels of phosphate concentration (2.0 and 9.9 mg l-1). The ratio of ammonium to phosphate of 3.8:1.0 in the growth media has resulted the maximum level of oil degradation, i.e 83% and 88%, for dormant and local cultures respectively. The results suggest a potential usage of local microorganisms in degrading crude oil-polluted water.


From the earliest Japanese literature, the crab coexisted with the human in ritual and symbol. The meaning of the crab in literature changed; we can see this change in historical records and narrative texts in later epochs. In ancient times, crab was a popular dish for the emperors, even though the imperial palaces were usually far from the sea. The crab was not only the object of gourmets as an offering or gift between central government and regional rulers, the "scissors" (pincers) were also considered a (magic) weapon. It was assumed that this magical force from the water could protect the Emperor's successor, i.e. a young prince, from the enemies of the next world. The multi-faceted images of this animal underwent changes over time.
Every society leaves behind traces of its thinking and value system in its artistic production, and so the socio-cultural significance and symbolism of the crab can be seen from ancient times through contemporary narratives. I shall analyze in detail an Emperor's legend from the Kojiki, Buddhist narratives, and fairy tales of the quarrel between the crab and the monkey, up to the 20th century, in order to delineate the development of the motif and imaginative figure of the crab.


From two of the world's leading postmodern historians, this thoroughly original collection of articles allows students and researchers to understand and learn important new ways of thinking and writing about the past. This book includes a thorough two-part introduction on theory and practice as well as introductory material in each section that allows the reader to fully engage with the theoretical aspects of the book. It provides a deeper understanding of how to engage with the past today. Fourteen thought-provoking experimental pieces of historical writing tackle subjects as diverse as lynching in South Carolina, the life of an eighteenth-century Marquise, and a journey to a string of Pacific islands, and demonstrates how little-considered factors such as the impact of emotions, authorial subjectivity, the confining character of boundaries, and even a sense of boredom with conventional historical writing practices, can intrude on historical practice This text works as a Reader companion alongside the Routledge best-seller Rethinking History and provides students with an innovative, engaging and easy-to-read research tool to enhance all history-related course studies.


Androniscus dentiger is a terrestrial isopod distributed from Great Britain to North Africa, inhabiting humid edafic environments, superficial underground compartments and both natural and artificial caves. In this study allozyme data have been used to investigate the geographic variation and the genetic relationships of several populations of A. dentiger from Central Italy, using as outgroups populations from four congeneric species, A. calcivagus, A. cfr. subterraneus, A. spelaeorum, and A. degener. Multivariate analysis of A. dentiger allele frequencies indicates the existence of a group of populations (group A) distributed in a wide geographic area which are genetically slightly differentiated, and several populations (arbitrarily defined as group B) which show differentiation levels comparable to those observed between the morphologically well differentiated species. The low valley of the river Tiber seems to act as an effective geographic barrier between the populations from group A and the remaining ones. The genetic divergence between populations within the group A seems to have a recent origin. This is suggested by the low genetic distances and heterozygosity values within the group A, and by the very low number of private alleles occurring in this group. The high degree of intraspecific and interspecific genetic differentiation is not consistent with the levels of morphological differentiation traditionally used to distinguish different species within this genus. On the whole, these data suggest that A. dentiger might be considered as a complex of cryptic/sibling species.


Focusing on "where we've been, where we are, and where we're going," the authors examine minority women's and White women's progress in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) over the past decade. Starting from an exploration of participation and achievement data, the authors move on to cover the theories behind SMET gender differences, including those based on testing, biology, social-psychology, and cognitive sciences. Looking at practice as well as theory, the authors explore the impacts that interventions and contextual influences, such as societal change and education reform, have had on efforts to achieve gender parity in SMET. The article concludes with the recommendation of logical next steps to preserve and expand the gains made by women in these fields.


Abstract Horizontally steerable ECRH antenna system of central cell on GAMMA 10 is developed for efficient electron heating. The steering mirror antenna can shift horizontally absorption position at the resonance surface in the range of -7.3 ~ +7.3 mm from standard position without significant power reduction which is examined with both calculation and cold power test. As a result of the plasma experiments of the antenna position scan, it is found the horizontally optimized position for ECRH. The spilled RF from mirror(the stray RF) seems to deteriorate the hot ion confinement. The newly installed efficient antenna system which has higher transmission efficiency of ~90% has shown improved heating performance.


Calls to define 'terrorism' as a legal concept arose in the context of efforts to extradite 'political offenders' from the 1930s onwards, with many efforts, over 80 years to the present, to define, criminalize, and depoliticise a common global concept of 'terrorism'. Those international efforts remain largely unsuccessful to this day. After the terrorist attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001 ('9/11'), many states enacted 'terrorism' offences, spurred on by the perceived threat of global religious terrorism, obligations imposed by the UN Security Council, gaps in existing criminal liabilities and police powers, and the expressive function of stigmatising terrorism as a special kind of violence against public interests. National laws remain, however, startlingly diverse and there is still a global divergence. At the international level, there is certainly a basic legal consensus that terrorism is criminal violence intended to intimidate a population or coerce a government or international organisation; some national laws add an ulterior intention to pursue a political, religious or ideological cause. There remain intense moral and political disagreements, however, on whether there should be exceptions for just causes (such as liberation violence and rebellion), armed conflicts, and state violence. As a result, a conceptual impasse continues, even if agreement has been edging closer.


This book contains the proceedings of the 7th Conference on Editing Islamic Manuscripts titled "Editing Manuscripts on Literature and Language". This conference was organised by the Centre for the Study of Islamic Manuscripts, at Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, and convened at the Foundation's headquarters in London on 25-26 November 2015. Within the conference themes, the papers addressed: the methodology of critical edition of poetry manuscripts; critical edition of Andalusian poetry manuscripts; problems of critically editing language manuscripts; critical edition of Arabic language manuscripts: Ibn Dahān's explanation of al-Luma' fī al-'Arabiyyah by Ibn Jinnī as an example; methodologies of authoring and editing language manuscripts: books on horses as an example; Maghribī critical editions of manuscripts in rhetoric (al-balāghah) and criticism (al-naqd): al-Manza' al-Badī' as an example; and the Būlāq publications on language and literature: an approach to critical edition. The conference secured the participation of around thirty highly qualified and expert delegates in the different disciplines from British and international higher education and heritage institutions. The lectures were presented by a group of leading scholars and critical editors from around the world. Their research and academic papers addressed the reality and aspirations of the manuscript editing movement in the area of literature and language.


Evidence has been found for reduced sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in a number of forests at high northern latitudes and alpine locations. Furthermore, at some of these sites, emergent subpopulations of trees show negative growth trends with rising temperature. These findings are typically referred to as the 'Divergence Problem' (DP). Given the high relevance of paleoclimatic reconstructions for policy-related studies, it is important for dendrochronologists to address this issue of potential model uncertainties associated with the DP. Here we address this issue by proposing a calibration technique, termed 'stochastic response function' (SRF), which allows the presence or absence of any instabilities in growth response of trees (or any other climate proxy) to their calibration target to be visualized and detected. Since this framework estimates confidence limits and subsequently provides statistical significance tests, the approach is also very well suited for proxy screening prior to the generation of a climate-reconstruction network. Two examples of tree growth/climate relationships are provided, one from the North American Arctic treeline and the other from the upper treeline in the European Alps. Instabilities were found to be present where stabilities were reported in the literature, and vice versa, stabilities were found where instabilities were reported. We advise to apply SRFs in future proxy-screening schemes, next to the use of correlations and RE/CE statistics. It will improve the strength of reconstruction hindcasts


Estimates from the
WHO
indicate that
Trichomonas
vaginalis
(TV)
infection is
the
most common curable sexually transmitted infection
world
wide.
Unfortunately
compared to other curable
sexually transmitted infections, not
much attention
has
been given to its control.
This,
however, is
changing
due to
recent
reports
linking
Trichomonas vaginalis
infection to
adverse
birth
and reproductive
health
outcomes
and also its facilitation of acquisition of
the
Human immuno
deficiency
virus.
Studies in this thesis address
aspects
of the
epidemiology
of
Trichomonas
vaginalis
infection with a view to
enhancing
control
programmes.
Pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in
Kumasi,
Ghana,
participated in
the
study. Data on socio-demographic characteristics, sexual
behaviour,
ano-genital
hygiene, and partner
behaviour
were
taken.
Genital
examinations were
also
done.
Vaginal swabs were
taken for the
detection
of
Trichomonas
vaginalis
by
6
methods;
latex agglutination, wet prep
microscopy, culture, enzyme immuno-assay,
polymerase chain reaction,
and
lateral flow.
Women infected
with
TV
were
treated
with standard 2g metronidazole single
dose
and
had tests
of cure
done
after a
week.
Four main findings are
highlighted;
socio-demographic,
behavioural
and clinical
factors
independently
associated
with
TV infection
were; young
age, neither
being
of
Akan
nor
northern origin,
having
no religious
faith,
and
douching.
Also,
not using
toilet roll
for
menstrual
hygiene,
complaining of
a vaginal
discharge,
clinical
detection
of
vaginal
discharge
and a vaginal
pH
more than
5
were
independently associated
with
infection.
However, these factors
either
singly or
in
combination,
could
not predict
TV
infection.
using a
combination
of
morphologically
based traditional
TV
diagnostics
(wet prep
and
culture)
and molecular techniques
(PCR),
no
evidence
for
the involvement
of rectal and oral trichomonads in
the
aetiology
of
vaginal
trichomoniasis
as speculated
recently,
was
found.
iii. a developing country-
friendly
TV
diagnostic, the latex
agglutination
test,
compared
favourably
with culture, the
gold
standard in
TV
diagnosis.
With 91% sensitivity and
99%
specificity,
it
is
easy to train to
use,
easy
to
use, enables same
day treatment,
and
does
not require any
equipment.
It
is
apparently stable in
field temperatures
and relatively
cheap.
iv. the use
of
2g
single
dose
metronidazole therapy
by
a
directly
observed
strategy
is feasible. It
was well tolerated
and
had
a cure rate of
99.4%
after I week.
These findings contribute
some new
information to the
epidemiology of
TV
infection. Such attributes of
the latex
agglutination
test
and
the
excellent clinical
efficacy of single dose metronidazole
therapy
should make
the
control of
TV
infection feasible.


Groundwater decline poses a significant sustainability challenge in arid and semi-arid areas where groundwater plays a major life sustaining role. Recent years have marked a drastic decrease in the groundwater table (about 1.1 m/yr equivalent to 19.3 million cubic metres) in the Firuzabad Plain, Iran, where policies to restore groundwater have mostly failed. A holistic view is required to manage the basin9s water resources, taking into account key biophysical, socio-economic, and political aspects. This paper applies system dynamics simulation as an integrative approach for modeling the causal relationships that drive the long-term system trajectory. Results suggest that increasing groundwater withdrawal is creating limits to growth archetypal behavior. Groundwater stress affects the livelihood of agricultural communities by reducing profitability and resource depletion. Re-establishing regional groundwater balance within the next 30 years requires that irrigation efficiency be improved to reduce net consumptive water use while maintaining the current level of agricultural production.


This article examines the nature of social attitudes toward adult rape in South Africa and the ways in which they may influence the response of criminal justice professionals to cases of rape. Tis article draws on a small study of law students who completed a questionnaire that sought to examine specific beliefs regarding rape victims and their behavior during and following rape. Te questionnaire examines issues that do not appear to have been explored within attitude surveys thus far in South Africa. Te findings from this survey, along with the wider research literature on attitudes toward rape, suggest that rape myths and stereotypes are widespread in South African society and that they are also shared by some criminal justice professionals. Te article also notes some encouraging trends in South Africa. In particular, the judiciary has shown clear disapproval of the institutional failure to protect victims of rape and sexual assault. Te judiciary has also explicitly rejected myths pertaining to the behavior of rape victims, which will be discussed in this article. Although these trends are encouraging, there remains a clear need to address the problem of rape myths and stereotypes both in the general population and within the criminal justice system.


A number of developing countries are currently promoting vocational education and training (VET) as a way to build human capital and strengthen economic growth. The primary aim of this study is to understand whether VET at the high school level contributes to human capital development in one of those countries—China. To fulfill this aim, a longitudinal data on more than 10,000 students in vocational high school (in the most popular major, computing) and academic high school from two provinces of China are used. First, estimates from instrumental variables and matching analyses show that attending vocational high school (relative to academic high school) substantially reduces math skills and does not improve computing skills. Second, heterogeneous effect estimates also show that attending vocational high school increases dropout, especially among disadvantaged (low-income or low-ability) students. Third, vertically scaled (equated) baseline and follow-up test scores are used to measure gains in math and computing skills among the students. The results show that students who attend vocational high school experience absolute reductions in math skills. Taken together, the findings suggest that the rapid expansion of vocational schooling as a substitute for academic schooling can have detrimental consequences for building human capital in developing countries such as China.


We will discuss the construction of bases in a space of analytic functions for a given domain and isomorphic classification of spaces of analytic functions. We will focus on results in one dimensional case. In one dimensional case, we consider the construction of bases in two different ways. Using one of them, we construct interpolational bases for the space of analytic functions on a compactum K and in that part, results of Leja, Walsh, and Zahariuta are used. Then, isomorphic classification follows by the use of Potential Theory. Using the second way, we construct a common basis for the spaces of analytic functions of a regular pair "compact set domain" by the Hilbert methods that was proposed by Zahariuta. GKS-duality is used for both of the cases. In multidimensional case, some results about bases and isomorphisms of spaces of analytic functions in several variables that were proved by Zahariuta are represented (see also Aytuna). Since a multidimensional analogue of GKS-duality does not exist, interpolational bases cannot be constructed as in one dimensional case. But the bases constructed by Hilbert methods proves to be applicable for studying the isomorphism of the space of analytic functions on D to the space of analytic functions on the unit circle of n-dimensional complex plane. Keywords: Hilbert scales, spaces of analytic functions, Green potential, regularity, GKS-duality.


Bulk crystalline Silicon solar cells are covering more than 85% of the world's roof top module installation in 2010. With a growth rate of over 30% in the last 10 years this technology remains the working horse of solar cell industry. The full Aluminum back-side field (Al BSF) technology has been developed in the 90's and provides a production learning curve on module price of constant 20% in average. The main reason for the decrease of module prices with increasing production capacity is due to the effect of up scaling industrial production. For further decreasing of the price per wattpeak silicon consumption has to be reduced and efficiency has to be improved. In this paper we describe a successive efficiency improving process development starting from the existing full Al BSF cell concept. We propose an evolutionary development includes all parts of the solar cell process: optical enhancement (texturing, polishing, anti-reflection coating), junction formation and contacting. Novel processes are benchmarked on industrial like baseline flows using high-efficiency cell concepts like i-PERC (Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell). While the full Al BSF crystalline silicon solar cell technology provides efficiencies of up to 18% (on cz-Si) in production, we are achieving up to 19.4% conversion efficiency for industrial fabricated, large area solar cells with copper based front side metallization and local Al BSF applying the semiconductor toolbox.


Abstract
 The diversity of lignicolous freshwater fungi along a north-south latitudinal gradient are currently being studied in Asia. In this paper, we report on 18 collections of asexual morphs of Tubeufiaceae from submerged wood in rivers, streams and a lake in Yunnan Province, China. Taxa are characterized based on morphological characters and analyses of ITS, LSU and TEF1α sequence data. The new genera, Muripulchra with a single species, M. aquatica and Neohelicomyces with three new taxa (N. aquaticus, N. grandisporus, N. submersus) are introduced. Muripulchra is characterized by micronematous conidiophores and obpyriform, septate to muriform conidia. Neohelicomyces is characterized macronematous conidiophores and multi-septate, helicoid conidia. Tubeufia aquatica is introduced as a new species and its phylogenetic relationships with other taxa is discussed. The phylogenetic analyses of a concatenated ITS, LSU and TEF1α dataset place all collections in the family Tubeufiaceae (Tubeufiales) and provide evidence to support the establishment of our new taxa. The asexual morph of Tubeufia cylindrothecia, the type species of Helicomyces (H. roseus) are described herein, phylogenetic relationships assessed and reference specimens are given for these two species. Descriptions and illustrations for the new genera and species are provided with notes on their taxonomy and phylogeny.


The aim of this study is to examine the factors affecting the profitability of listed commercial banks in Vietnam. The data is collected from balance sheets and income statements (audited financial statements) over the period of five years, spans from 2015 to 2019. The sample consists of 12 commercial banks listed on Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange. The findings from the analysis are as follows. First, equity is positively related with bank profitability indicating that higher equity leads to better performance. Second, operating cost is inversely related with bank profitability suggesting higher operating can be detrimental to bank performance. Finally, agriculture financing is positively and significantly related with bank performance. This indicates that a high share of agricultural finance in the total financing can positively impact the banks' profitability. The findings have several policy implications which are provided in the last section. The directions for future research are also clearly identified towards the end of the paper.


This series will include all those people who, by means of their contributions, great
and small, played a part in the consolidation of ichthyology in Argentina.
The general plan of this work consists of individual factsheets containing a list of
works by each author, along with reference bibliography and, whenever possible,
personal pictures and additional material.
The datasheets will be published primarily in chronological order, although this is
subject to change by the availability of materials for successive editions.
This work represents another approach for the recovery and revalorization of those
who set the foundations of Argentine ichthyology while in diverse historical
circumstances.
I expect this to be the beginning of a major work that achieves the description of
such a significant part of the history of natural sciences in Argentina.


NEARLY 15 YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE JIM VANDER WALL AND I WROTE AGENTS of Repression. Of course, many things have happened during the intervening period that reflect upon the book's content and might thus be considered worth including in a South End Classics Edition. Incorporating such material would, however, have necessitated a substantial reworking of the book, and thus have detracted from the idea of a classic edition, per se. Moreover, none of the additional information would have altered any of the basic arguments and conclusions originally advanced. Rather, it would serve only to reinforce, amplify, and in a few cases clarify lingering ambiguities with respect to what we had already said. Brief summaries of some of the more significant developments since 1988 should prove sufficient to make the point. In some respects, most important is the fact that Leonard Peltier, whose blatant frame-up forms one of the central themes discussed, remains entombed within the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas (27 years and counting). That this is so despite his prosecutor's open admission before the Eighth Circuit Court that the government had "no idea" who had actually committed the acts for which Peltier was convicted (see pp. 324-325), as well as the court's consequent determination that much of the "evidence" resulting in Peltier's conviction had been false (p. 325), results not least from the FBI having taken the historically unprecedented step of dispatching several hundred agents to conduct a public protest outside the White House at a time when it seemed likely Bill Clinton might commute Peltier's sentence to time served. (1) More or less simultaneously, it seems certain that ranking FBI officials put Clinton on notice that a pardon for Peltier would translate into a concerted investigation of the president himself once he had left office in January 2001 (allegations included everything from perjury in conjunction with the Lewinsky affair, to profiteering from Whitewater and related scams, to criminal abuses of authority committed amid the myriad cover-ups attending everything else). (2) These maneuvers were coupled with an attempt by the FBI to rewrite the broader narrative of its counterinsurgency operations on Pine Ridge during the mid-1970s. That rewriting centered upon a pamphlet prepared and distributed at taxpayer expense in which the Bureau purportedly rebutted on a case-by-case basis the roster of fatalities among American Indian Movement (AIM) members and its supporters compiled by Vander Wall and me and attributed to the FBI's "reign of terror" on the reservation (see pp. 199-218). (3) In almost every instance, and all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, the pamphlet asserted that each death had been investigated "whenever [it was] appropriate" for the FBI to do so, that all resulting cases had long since been satisfactorily resolved, and that, for the most part, there had been no indication of murder in the first place (e.g., several victims allegedly died from "shooting accidents" or "hit and run" incidents involving "unidentified perpetrators"). (4) Apart from the obvious utility of its doing so vis-a-vis the Peltier case, there are additional motives prompting the Bureau's renewed desire to confuse or distort popular appreciations of what transpired on Pine Ridge and why. It seems, for example, that the FBI retains a strong institutional interest in obscuring the truth of what actually happened to Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, an AIM activist from Canada killed execution-style on the reservation in late 1975 or early 1976. Given that Aquash was demonstrably bad-jacketed by FBI provocateur Douglass Durham in the months before her death, it has always been generally understood that she had fallen victim to this most well-refined and insidious of the Bureau's many "political neutralization" tactics (see pp. 211-217). Suspicions have remained rife in AIM circles, moreover, that the role of FBI personnel was far more direct than merely setting the victim up to be murdered. …


Evidence, anecdotal and scientific, suggests that people treat (or are affected by) products of prestigious sources differently than those of less prestigious, or of anonymous, sources. The "products" which are the focus of the present study are poems, and the "sources" are the poets. We explore the manner in which the poet's name affects the experience of reading a poem. Study 1 establishes the effect we wish to address: a poet's reputation enhances the evaluation of a poem. Study 2 asks whether it is only the reported evaluation of the poem that is enhanced by the poet's name (as was the case for The Emperor's New Clothes) or the enhancement is genuine and unaware. Finding for the latter, Study 3 explores whether the poet's name changes the reader's experience of it, so that in a sense one is reading a "different" poem. We conclude that it is not so much that the attributed poem really differs from the unattributed poem, as that it is just ineffably better. The name of a highly regarded poet seems to prime quality, and the poem becomes somehow better. This is a more subtle bias than the deliberate one rejected in Study 2, but it is a bias nonetheless. Ethical implications of this kind of effect are discussed.


We describe a smart-pixel circuit that permits the use of a GaAs/AlGaAs multiple quantum well diode to be used both as a detector for data input and a modulator for data output. The module provides the ability to double the number of inputs or outputs to the array and is well suited to cascaded optoelectronic system architectures that require bidirectional communition.


The use of annotated maps to manage the information needed by autonomous mobile robots is discussed. Annotations tie specific information to particular locations of objects in the map, such as the description of a landmark or the proper control strategy for crossing an intersection. Descriptor annotations are retrieved on demand. Triggers are automatically sent to a specified process when the robot reaches a given location. The most ambitious runs involved navigating through a suburban neighborhood, including image processing to follow roads, 3-D perception for landmark identification, and inertial navigation to turn at intersections. Annotated maps were built by first driving the robot by hand and recording the location of roads and the location and description of objects along the way. During mission planning, triggers were added to specify how and where to drive and what to look for. While executing the mission, the triggers specified when to use image processing, when to slow down and identify landmarks, how to negotiate intersections, and when to stop at the goal.<<ETX>>


Do you believe that at Christmas time the gas prices, the economy and the number of suicides peak? Do you think that the value of presents you are giving to your beloved is of importance? We show in this paper that conventional wisdom about Christmas is often doubtful. Furthermore, we give an idea of how Santa Claus - and maybe you - is able to finance Christmas celebrations, why emergency departments are a place to especially avoid during this time of the year and why Christmas tree growers might care to explain the differences across species to you this year. We cannot clearly establish whether Christmas entails a welfare loss or gain, however, we give you an idea as to which institutional settings might reduce a potential welfare loss. Also, we give advice about which behaviours might get you more Christmas presents from Santa this year. Finally, we find that more research is needed to give conclusive reasons why Santa Claus actually brings presents to (nearly) everyone.


The link between orogenic activity and foreland basin stratigraphy is well established; however, potential controls by foreland basin stratigraphy on thrust belt architecture have not been fully evaluated. Mechanical properties of typical foreland basin stratigraphic successions influence the structural development of fold-thrust belts in predictable ways. Fundamental features of foreland basins include the onset of rapid subsidence and deposition of a coarsening-upward sedimentary succession. In the lower part of this succession are fine-grained, distal foreland basin deposits. Enlargement of the orogenic wedge through frontal accretion incorporates the foreland basin strata into the thrust belt, and distal foreland basin depositional units may be preferentially exploited as a thrust detachment zone, resulting in multiple detachment levels. We propose that foreland basin stratigraphic architecture has significant influence on the structural development of thrust belts and that, by extension, processes that influence foreland basin sedimentation may ultimately influence orogenic evolution far removed in time and space.


In this paper I study a new business cycle fact recently documented by Bachmann and Bayer (2011): the dispersion of the distribution of investment rates across firms is procyclical. Using data from German firm, the authors find a correlation coefficient between the standard deviation of investment distribution and the cyclical component of output of 0.45. They also report a correlation coefficient for US economy of 0.33. Using a model similar to Khan and Thomas's (2003), that is standard to heterogeneous firms literature, I obtain a correlation coefficient of 0.57. In the model I also consider a government sector that collects taxes on corporate profits. In such model, with a corporate tax of 23.5%, which corresponds to German economy, I obtain a correlation coefficient of 0.46 and when I consider a corporate tax rate of 18.79% that corresponds to US economy I find a correlation coefficient of 0.51.


Abstract Judging from the active participation of Zen leaders and institutions in modern Japanese imperialism, one might conclude that by its very nature Zen succumbs easily to ideological co-optation. Several facets of Zen epistemology and institutional history support this conclusion. At the same time, a close examination of Zen theory and praxis indicates that the tradition does possess resources for resisting dominant ideologies and engaging in ideology critique. ********** D. T. Suzuki once proclaimed that Zen is "extremely flexible in adapting itself to almost any philosophy and moral doctrine" and "may be found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy, atheism or idealism, or any political or economic dogmatism" (1973:63). Scholars have recently delineated how, in the midst of Japan's expansionist imperialism, Zen exhibited that flexibility in "adapting itself" and becoming "wedded" to the reigning imperial ideology. And for all of its rhetoric about "not relying on words and letters" and functioning compassionately as a politically detached, iconoclastic religion, Zen has generally failed to criticize ideologies--and specific social and political conditions--that stand in tension with core Buddhist values. Several facets of Zen may account for its ideological co-optation before and during WWII. Since its full introduction to Japan in the late twelfth century, Zen has been highly embedded in Japanese society and maintained a symbiotic relationship with those in power. This enmeshment has been exacerbated by a religious epistemology centered on "becoming one with things" (narikiru), (1) the doctrines of no-soul (muga) and indebtedness (on), and Zen appropriation of Confucian social ethics, with all the emphasis on hierarchy, loyalty, and obedience. Cognizant of these factors, postwar Zen ethicist Ichikawa Hakugen argues that Zen has generally remained stuck in its contemplative peace of mind (anjin), in its "elite intuition that formerly directed actions in the face-to-face relations in medieval villages" (1992:457). Despite the historical record, Zen and the larger Buddhist tradition of which it is part do offer resources for avoiding co-optation and responding to dominant ideologies, and in recent decades Buddhist ethicists have started drawing from these resources to engage in ideology critique. Arguably, the criticism of those ideologies and Zen entanglement in them is the prolegomenon to the construction of a rigorous Zen social ethic. For the sake of this article, "ideology" can be defined as a system of representations that serves the interests of a group. (2) Ideologies hinder our ability to see reality clearly, for they usually distort or obscure certain things. They may portray certain values, practices, and institutions--and perhaps even the ideology itself--as archaic, (3) or as natural, in the sense of being rooted in nature and hence inevitable. (4) The representations comprising an ideology come to appear self-evident and commonsensical. (5) Further, ideologies tend to reify certain things. They also function to shape and control people; in particular, they unify people, offering a sense of identity in opposition to other groups or conditions perceived negatively. Finally, though never monolithic or unchanging, ideologies are conveyed by various practices, institutions, and media, all of which are inscribed by power relations. Buddhist and especially Zen analyses of suffering focus on dimensions of human psychology that parallel these facets of ideology. Much of the historical Buddha's analysis of human suffering focuses on "views," in Pali, ditthi (Skt. drsti). Thai scholar-monk Ven. P. A. Payutto highlights the individual and social connotations of ditthi (2002:89): This term covers all kinds of views on many different levels--our personal opinions and beliefs; the ideologies, religious and political views[,] espoused by groups; and the attitudes and worldviews held by whole cultures and societies. …


This thesis comprises two parts. In the first part an overview is given of the Standard Model, Supersymmetry and R-hadrons. R-hadrons are predicted within the framework of the Split-SUSY theory, in which the gluino can have a sufficiently long lifetime to hadronise into so-called R-hadrons. These will then propagate through the ATLAS detector as (meta)stable particles. The R-hadrons, which interact strongly, have the property of changing electric charge in interactions as they move through matter. In this thesis a strategy to search for R-hadrons with the ATLAS detcector is developed.The second part describes the ATLAS detector and the developement of the digitizer system of the ATLAS hadronic calorimeter. The digitizer system is the digitial readout system, in which data is read out from the detector to data buffers via an optical link. In the LHC environment, the operation of radiation-hard circuitry is essential. Therefore a quality control program was used to control that the design conforms to the requirements of radiation tolerance. An important part of the work was to test the devices to study their functionality and properties. This work is described in this thesis.


The words "free will" have uses in ordinary talk as in "free will offering" and, most commonly, in the expression "of my (your, etc.) own free will." We all know what states of affairs make this expression applicable, and its standard use is defined by this application. Yet philosophers discuss, or used to discuss, whether the will is free, libertarians saying that it is and determinists denying this. Are they, or were they, asking whether anyone ever acts of his own free will? If so, the question asked was absurd.


As the water requirement for food production and other human needs grows, quantification of environmental flow requirements (EFRs) is necessary to assess the amount of water needed to sustain freshwater ecosystems. EFRs are the result of the quantification of water necessary to sustain the riverine ecosystem, which is calculated from the mean of an environmental flow (EF) method. In this study, five EF methods for calculating EFRs were compared with 11 case studies of locally assessed EFRs. We used three existing methods (Smakhtin, Tennant, and Tessmann) and two newly developed methods (the variable monthly flow method (VMF) and the Q90_Q50 method). All methods were compared globally and validated at local scales while mimicking the natural flow regime. The VMF and the Tessmann methods use algorithms to classify the flow regime into high, intermediate, and low-flow months and they take into account intra-annual variability by allocating EFRs with a percentage of mean monthly flow (MMF). The Q90_Q50 method allocates annual flow quantiles (Q90 and Q50) depending on the flow season. The results showed that, on average, 37% of annual discharge was required to sustain environmental flow requirement. More water is needed for environmental flows during low-flow periods (46–71% of average low-flows) compared to high-flow periods (17–45% of average high-flows). Environmental flow requirements estimates from the Tennant, Q90_Q50, and Smakhtin methods were higher than the locally calculated EFRs for river systems with relatively stable flows and were lower than the locally calculated EFRs for rivers with variable flows. The VMF and Tessmann methods showed the highest correlation with the locally calculated EFRs (R2=0.91). The main difference between the Tessmann and VMF methods is that the Tessmann method allocates all water to EFRs in low-flow periods while the VMF method allocates 60% of the flow in low-flow periods. Thus, other water sectors such as irrigation can withdraw up to 40% of the flow during the low-flow season and freshwater ecosystems can still be kept in reasonable ecological condition. The global applicability of the five methods was tested using the global vegetation and the Lund-Potsdam-Jena managed land (LPJmL) hydrological model. The calculated global annual EFRs for fair ecological conditions represent between 25 and 46% of mean annual flow (MAF). Variable flow regimes, such as the Nile, have lower EFRs (ranging from 12 to 48% of MAF) than stable tropical regimes such as the Amazon (which has EFRs ranging from 30 to 67% of MAF).


The concern with persistant high government deficits and debts has been one of the most
controversial and discussed issues among academics and policymakers during the last
two decades of the twentieth century. Despite recent efforts towards fiscal consolidation
in most developed countries, expensive welfare programs and unfunded social security
systems can exert a considerable strain on public finances over the next generations.
The main objective of this thesis is to investigate whether current fiscal policies are
sustainable, that is, able to guarantee the government's solvency, and what are the
consequences of unsustainability on monetization, inflation and interest rates. The first
question is tested by examining the long-run univariate and multivariate stochastic
properties of the fiscal variables, as implied by the intertemporal budget constraint. The
second question is assessed within a vector autoregressive framework, which allows the
consideration of feedback mechanisms often neglected in the literature. More
specifically, the econometric methodology employed throughout the study comprises
recent developments in cointegration analysis, panel data techniques, bounds-ARDL
procedure, and Granger non-causality. The empirical analysis is focused on a comparative study of six core members of the
European Union, during the post-war period: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy,
Netherlands and United Kingdom. The evidence suggests that only Germany and the
Netherlands have been following a sustainable fiscal path, although the latter remains
vulnerable to the consequences of an ever-increasing stock of debt. However,
unsustainable fiscal policies do not seem to have imposed an excessive burden on
monetary policies, as predicted by the conventional economic theory. Apart from Italy,
there is no empirical evidence that high deficits necessarily imply monetary financing,
growing inflation and rising interest rates.