Online multiplayer games and virtual worlds are difficult to design; they contain economies and other complex systems where the decisions of one player can have far-reaching implications for other players. When considering the welfare of players, game designers have a difficult job; they must create systems, which optimize outcomes for a body of players who often have different motivations for playing the game (Bartle, 1996; Cummings & Ross, 2011; Yee, 2006). In addition, knowledge of how to create and tune game systems - when it does exist - is often institutionalized. There is no shared theory of how to build and maintain a virtual society. The recent development of telemetry systems has helped to mitigate this issue by providing developers with real-time feedback regarding the state of a population, but telemetry systems are not theoretical. Machine learning does not provide developers with insights into why outcomes occur, or how to develop social systems that are optimal for engagement, enjoyment, or the formation of meaningful relationships.

This paper proposes a tool that can provide game developers and researchers with such insights. The Institutional Analysis and Design (IAD) Framework was developed specifically for identifying the universal elements of institutions and draws from decades of research regarding human behavior in various institutional settings (Ostrom, 2005). The IAD framework is not a prescriptive solution detailing how to solve all institutional problems; rather, it is a tool for evaluating the arrangement of different institutional elements. Coupled with various theories of human behavior (game theory, economic theory, social psychological theory) the IAD can provide predictions about player behavior and macro-social outcomes. When used correctly, it can provide developers with theory, which explains why social systems can equilibrate into undesirable outcomes - anti-social behavior or a suboptimal distribution of resources - and identifies institutional designs that can solve social problems.

In this paper we examine how the IAD framework can be applied to an existing arrangement, specifically targeting the Looking-for-Raid (LFR) loot system of World of Warcraft. The LFR system, released in November 2011, is a game mechanic that matches players into 25-person groups and delivers them into a raid. Once there, the group navigates through a dungeon filled with enemies, occasionally encountering a powerful enemy that requires coordinated teamwork to defeat. Along the way the group finds a few valuable items, which are distributed by allowing eligible players to enter a lottery.

In most cases, the 25 players in the group are strangers. They generally have no knowledge of their fellow group members' playing abilities, and no knowledge about their needs or strategies when it comes to obtaining loot. All of the loot items are tagged for specific classes and roles, allowing only players who fit the prerequisites to enter the lottery; however, players who fit the prerequisites can enter the lottery whether they actually need the item or not. This system relies on a player to honestly report their need of an item; in practice, most players report rampant greed (e.g. players "needing" items that they already possess) and dissatisfaction with the system. Interestingly, most players report honest intentions and a desire for honest behavior. Unfortunately, most players also have expectations that others will be greedy, and most players report changing their own behavior - acting in a more greedy ways - because of expectations of greed. One example of this change in behavior can be seen in loot sharing: players bring friends along on the raid, collaborate to "need" on items, and share them with each other to improve the odds of winning a piece of loot. Even though these players are working within the rules of the system to increase their odds of winning, they are also contributing to the very practice that they find undesirable.

In this paper, we use two interviews with focus groups and surveys distributed to 317 active World of Warcraft players to analyze players' expectations regarding loot in the LFR system as well as their reported behavior in loot situations. We demonstrate that the reported behavior and expectations follow the predictions of the IAD model (with game theory) under the assumptions of players as boundedly rational agents playing an N-player mixed-motive game. We explore the theoretical potential of the IAD for game developers who are attempting to predict the outcomes of social systems within games, and we also propose a few potential solutions involving information/communication channels, social norms with sanctions, and auctions that could shift the equilibrium of the current system to a more optimal outcome.


We consider a coupled system consisting of a kinetic equation coupled to a macroscopic Stokes (or Navier-Stokes) equation and describing the motion of a suspension of rigid rods in gravity. A reciprocal coupling leads to the formation of clusters: The buoyancy force creates a macroscopic velocity gradient that causes the microscopic particles to align so that their sedimentation reinforces the formation of clusters of higher particle density. We provide a quantitative analysis of cluster formation. We derive a nonlinear moment closure model, which consists of evolution equations for the density and second order moments and that uses the structure of spherical harmonics to suggest a closure strategy. For a rectilinear flow we employ the moment closure together with a quasi-dynamic approximation to derive an effective equation, The effective equation is an advection-diffusion equation with nonisotropic diffusion coupled to a Poisson equation, and belongs to the class of the so-called flux-limited Keller-Segel models. For shear flows, we provide an argument for the validity of the effective equation and perform numerical comparisons that indicate good agreement between the original system and the effective theory. Finally, a linear stability analysis on the moment system shows that linear theory predicts a wavelength selection mechanism for the cluster width, provided that the Reynolds number is larger than zero.


Performance of human subjects in a wide variety of early visual processing tasks improves with practice. HyperBF networks (Poggio and Girosi 1990) constitute a mathematically well-founded framework for understanding such improvement in performance, or perceptual learning, in the class of tasks known as visual hyperacuity. The present article concentrates on two issues raised by the recent psychophysical and computational findings reported in Poggio et al. (1992b) and Fahle and Edelman (1992). First, we develop a biologically plausible extension of the HyperBF model that takes into account basic features of the functional architecture of early vision. Second, we explore various learning modes that can coexist within the HyperBF framework and focus on two unsupervised learning rules that may be involved in hyperacuity learning. Finally, we report results of psychophysical experiments that are consistent with the hypothesis that activity-dependent presynaptic amplification may be involved in perceptual learning in hyperacuity.


People display systematic priorities to self-related stimuli. As the self is not a unified entity, however, it remains unclear which aspects of the self are crucial to producing this stimulus prioritization. To explore this issue, we manipulated the valence of the self-concept (good me vs. bad me) — a core identity-based facet of the self — using a standard shape-label association task in which participants initially learned the associations (e.g., circle/good-self, triangle/good-other, diamond/bad-self, square/bad-other), after which they completed shape-label matching and shape-categorization tasks, such that attention was directed to different aspects of the stimuli (i.e., self-relevance and valence). The results revealed that responses were more efficient to the good-self shape (vs. other shapes), regardless of the task that was undertaken. A hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) analysis indicated that this good-self prioritization effect was underpinned by differences in the rate of information uptake. These findings demonstrate that activation of the good-self representation exclusively facilitates perceptual decision-making, thereby furthering understanding of the self-prioritization effect.


Background: The body's physiological stability is maintained by the influence of the autonomic nervous system and the dynamic interaction of the organ systems which regulate all aspects of the body's function. These physiological systems and their function have been overlooked by the genetic paradigm. A better understanding of these systems may lead to an improved understanding of the fundamental relationship involving sense perception, neural function and organ networks, and cellular and molecular biology. This article follows earlier articles by the author which illustrate that sleep, blood pressure and blood glucose are neurally regulated physiological systems. Aims: The purpose of this article is to discuss how Grakov's mathematical model of the physiological systems (i) influences the contemporary understanding of the processes which regulate the pH in biological systems i.e. that pH is a neurally regulated physiological system; (ii) is a significant factor in the emergence of changes to cell morphology and, ultimately, the onset of pathologies; and (iii) involves environmental factors more commonly associated with phenotype. Results: It considers the fundamental role played by pH e.g. regulating the levels and redox state of minerals, protein conformation, the activation of proteins and enzymes, and how this influences metabolic function. It considers the consequences of increased acidity, in particular from alcoholic beverages and acidified soft drinks, and how this influences the processes which regulate the body's physiological stability. Conclusions: The article concludes that the body's impaired ability to regulate its acidity, exascerbated by the consumption of highly acidic beverages, is a considerably underestimated factor in the subsequent development and onset of many common pathologies e.g. diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, alzheimer's disease, cancers, etc.


Background Approximately 16% of all sports injuries in the Netherlands are the result of playing outdoor soccer. Objective The aim of this intervention study is to investigate the cost-effectiveness of an injury prevention program ('The11' from FIFA) in male amateur soccer players. The hypothesis is that the 'The11' exercises have a beneficial effect on injury incidence, injury severity, medical costs and/or absenteeism. Design The study is a two-armed cluster randomised controlled trial. Randomisation has taken place on a cluster level: the regional competitions. Setting First class amateur teams, in two separated districts in the Netherlands, participate in this study. All participating teams have practice sessions 2–3 times a week. Participants Male players aged 18–40 years were eligible for inclusion in the study. 22 teams participated in this study, resulting in 460 players performing an intake at the start of the intervention season (intervention group 214 players, control group 246 players). Intervention The teams in the intervention group were instructed to perform 'The11', during each practice session throughout the 2009–2010 season (September–June). All teams of the control group were asked to continue their practice sessions as usual. Main outcome measurements The primary outcomes of the study include injury incidence, healthcare use and absenteeism. These outcomes were registered online during the competitive season 2009–2010. Results Preliminary results show that the proportion of injured players was almost equal for both groups (58.9% vs 57.7%). The injury risk for both research groups was the same (0.92). The sports absenteeism was on average 1 day longer in the intervention group (30.3 vs 29.3 days). Conclusions First impression is that there are no significant differences between the two research groups. However, more extensive results of this study, particularly focused on possible confounders and cost-effectiveness, are expected in January 2011 and can be presented in Monaco.


Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a method of reducing crime through the design and manipulation of the built environment. Based upon the New Opportunity Theories of crime, CPTED focuses upon blocking opportunities for criminal behaviour through subtle techniques to maximise informal surveillance, territoriality and guardianship, to minimise through movement and to set sta ndards of physical security that are proportionate to crime risk. This chapter will discus s the principles of CPTED and the theories from which it evolved, before exploring how CPTED is applied internationally in terms of policy, guidance and practice. Examples include Chile, Mexico, and Brazil , as well as countries with more established processes of implementing CPTED within the planning process (England and Wales , Netherlands and Australia). Evidence regarding effectiveness will be pres nted and consideration will be given to the extent to which principles, practice and proce dure can be transferred to different countries and cultures.


Despite the enormous popularity of her books, particularly Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery's role in the development of Canada's national culture is not often discussed by literary historians. This is curious as some of Canada's leading writers, including Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Jane Urquhart, have acknowledged their indebtedness to Montgomery's fiction. That scholars have not mined the 'Canadianness' of Montgomery's writing is redressed by this collection. It is the first systematic effort to investigate and explore Montgomery's active engagement with Canadian nationalism and identity, including regionalism, canon formation, and Canadian-American cultural relations. It examines her work in relation to the many dramatic changes of her day, such as the women's movement and the advent of new technologies; and it looks at the national and international consumption of Anne of Green Gables, in the form of both 'high' culture and cultural tourism. The wide range of contributors represent views from across disciplines and boundaries, including feminist, biographical, psychoanalytical, historical, and cultural approaches. The scholarly reflections are punctuated to great effect by creative pieces, personal reflections, and interviews. This ground-breaking collection will appeal to all fans of Montgomery's work and to students of Canadian letters. It places Montgomery and her work squarely in the mainstream of Canadian literary history, affirming her importance to our country's cultural development.


Lipids are major constituents of the cell. They are responsible for major properties of the cellular membranes: hydrophobicity, selective permeability and being the scaffold of signaling proteins. Many diseases are associated with alterations in the lipid distribution in the cell and the composition of membrane domains. Metabolic syndrome, obesity, atherosclerosis, as well as Alzheimer's, Huntington's diseases and cancer, have an impact in the levels of lipids, with observed alterations in their concentrations compared to the healthy state. Applying computational techniques along with systematic modeling of lipid metabolism can provide insights that can guide biomedical research and develop potential strategies for prevention and cure. In the present study we developed a comprehensive model of the sphingolipid biosynthesis in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Sphingolipids are one of the four major lipid categories, along with (glycero)phospholipids, sterols and fatty acids synthesized in the yeast S. cerevisiae. The importance of sphingolipids present in any higher eukaryote has been demonstrated in many recent studies. For this study, S. cerevisiae has been chosen as a model organism due to its high homology of cellular processes with mammalian cells. The developed model will be an essential part towards the construction of a detailed kinetic model of the whole lipidome of the cell. We first constructed a stoichiometric model that contains all the currently known reactions for the biosynthesis of ceramides and complex sphingolipids in the yeast. Additionally, we have accounted for all five reported hydroxylation states, along with the reactions synthesizing the necessary precursor metabolites from other lipid pathways (i.e. palmitate-CoA from fatty acid synthesis and phosphatidylinositol from the phospholipids metabolism). We next developed a kinetic model and we used a large number of lipidomic measurements of wild type yeast to consistently calibrate our model. Curation of the kinetic information of the model came from the comprehensive mining of references for operation of the enzymes as well as ranges of kinetic parameters from online databases. These datasets created the pool for a sampling technique that accounts for the uncertainty in the parameters of the model. This lead to a robust dynamic model, containing mass balances for all the components of the biochemical network as well as terms that accounted for the dillution of these molecules in the cell due to growth. We performed a thorough kinetic analysis of the system by examining the impact of different assumptions in enzyme operation on the levels of ceramides and complex sphingolipids (e.g. substrate competition, (un)competitive inhibition). By applying the principles of Metabolic Control Analysis (MCA) we were able to quantify the effect of enzyme activities on the lipid profiles and we identified enzymes of the biochemical reaction network as efficient targets for metabolic engineering towards a desired state. We also applied a reverse engineering method and we were able to identify enzyme perturbations responsible for an observed altered state compared to the wild type cellular lipidomic profile. Such an approach could lead to the identification of genetic mutations by imploring the information containd within metabolomic measurements. Although we demonstrate the application of the method in models of lipid metabolism it is possible to be applied to biochemical systems of various parts of metabolism and sizes creating a modular platform for kinetic analysis of cellular operations.


Although depicted as an instrument oriented towards improving European governance as well as the democratic quality of European decision-making, the application of online consultations (OC) by the European Commission is accompanied by scepticism about their actual use. Based on a large-N, quantitative analysis, this article examines the application of and participation patterns in OC. With regard to the most relevant indicators applied in the study – openness, transparency and inclusiveness – the analysis reveals rather mixed results: while OC enhance the involvement of interested parties and formally offer the possibility to give qualitative input, at present, OC are far from being inclusive, nor is their practice transparent.


This Article outlines a novel First Amendment compelled speech claim against a growing body of abortion restrictions, including fetal demise and fetal burial laws, premised on a state interest in "expressing respect for potential life." It weaves limitations imposed by the Court's abortion jurisprudence together with developments set out last year in NIFLA v. Becerra to demonstrate that the Court's expanding First Amendment jurisprudence has made such laws uniquely vulnerable to a compelled expressive conduct challenge. This vulnerability results from the fact that the Court's abortion jurisprudence requires all previability fetal-protective abortion regulations to be expressive, whether or not they require abortion providers to speak. Due in large part to these Fourteenth Amendment limitations, where life-protective abortion regulations compel conduct, they compel expressive conduct under the First Amendment. These laws are thus subject to heightened scrutiny under the newly rigorous compelled speech framework set out in NIFLA. Laws intended to communicate respect for potential life to people not seeking abortions receive strict scrutiny. Laws targeting women actively seeking abortions, as part of informed consent, are subject to intermediate scrutiny. Many new fetal-protective laws diverge from traditional mediums of informed consent and therefore fail First Amendment scrutiny.


Abstract The mammal fauna of the Willwood Formation, central Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, is ideal for paleoecological analysis because it is extensive, well studied, and continuously distributed over sediments representing the first 3 Myr of the early Eocene. The geology of the Bighorn Basin is also well known, providing a precise temporal framework and climatic context for the Willwood mammals. Previous analysis identified three "biohorizons," based on simple counts of the first and last appearances of species. This study uses species diversity and appearance rates calculated from more extensive collections to approximate the ecological dynamic of the ancient fauna and assess whether the biohorizons were significant turnover events related to recently described climatic variation. Diversity and appearance data collected for this project are extensively corrected for uneven sampling, which varies by two orders of magnitude. Observed, standardized appearance and diversity estimates are subsequently compared with predicted background frequencies to identify significant variation. Important coincident shifts in the biotic parameters demonstrate that ecological change was concentrated in two discrete intervals ≤300 Kyr each that correspond with two of the original biohorizons. The intervals coincide with the onset and reversal of an episode of climate cooling identified directly from Bighorn Basin floras and sediments. Ecological changes inferred from the diversity and turnover patterns at and following the two biohorizons suggest short- and long-term faunal response to shifts in mean annual temperature on the order of 5–8°C.


A 58 years old man with widespread myofascial pain in dorsa lumbar paraspinal area and shoulder girdle muscles received whole bee venom injections (apipuncture) on trigger points and acupoint of Kid 3- 10, Ren 2-4 and UB 25. Before apipuncture injections intradermal allergy tests were performed.
Patient experienced pain reduction at least 60 % following venom injections as measured by VAS, verbal description for pain intensity and unpleasantness, palpable muscle firmness and pressure pain thresholds.
Bee venom which blocks muscle contraction by inhibiting nociceptive sensory impulses, appears to be an effective treatment on focal myofascial pain syndromes.


We consider semiclassical black holes and related rescalings with N massless fields. For a given semiclassical solution of an N = 1 universe, we can find other solution of a large N universe by the rescaling. After the rescaling, any curvature quantity takes a sufficiently small value without changing its causal structure. Via the rescaling, we argue that black hole complementarity for semiclassical black holes cannot provide a fundamental resolution of the information loss problem, and the violation of black hole complementarity requires sufficiently reasonable amounts of N. Such N might be realized from some string inspired models. Finally, we claim that any fundamental resolution of the information loss problem should resolve the problem of the singularity.


For a long time, natural language processing (NLP) has relied on generative models with task specific and manually engineered features. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest for neural networks in the machine learning community, obtaining state-of-the-art results in various fields such as computer vision, speech processing and natural language processing. The central idea behind these approaches is to learn features and models simultaneously, in an end-to-end manner, and making as few assumptions as possible. In NLP, word embeddings, mapping words in a dictionary on a continuous low-dimensional vector space, have proven to be very efficient for a large variety of tasks while requiring almost no a-priori linguistic assumptions. In this thesis, we investigate continuous representations of segments in a sentence for the purpose of solving NLP tasks that involve complex sentence-level relationships. Our sequence modelling approach is based on neural networks and takes advantage of word embeddings. A first approach models words in context in the form of continuous vector representations which are used to solve the task of interest. With the use of a compositional procedure, allowing arbitrarily-sized segments to be compressed onto continuous vectors, the model is able to consider long-range word dependencies as well. We first validate our approach on the task of bilingual word alignment, consisting in finding word correspondences between a sentence in two different languages. Source and target words in context are modeled using convolutional neural networks, obtaining representations that are later used to compute alignment scores. An aggregation operation enables unsupervised training for this task. We show that our model outperforms a standard generative model. The model above is extended to tackle phrase prediction tasks where phrases rather than single words are to be tagged. These tasks have been typically cast as classic word tagging problems using special tagging schemes to identify the segments boundaries. The proposed neural model focuses on learning fixed-size representations of arbitrarily-sized chunks of words that are used to solve the tagging task. A compositional operation is introduced in this work for the purpose of computing these representations. We demonstrate the viability of the proposed representations by evaluating the approach on the multiwork expression tagging task. The remainder of this thesis addresses the task of syntactic constituency parsing which, as opposed to the above tasks, aims at producing a structured output, in the form of a tree, of an input sentence. Syntactic parsing is cast as multiple phrase prediction problems that are solved recursively in a greedy manner. An extension using recursive compositional vector representations, allowing for lexical infor- mation to be propagated from early stages, is explored as well. This approach is evaluated on a standard corpus obtaining performance comparable to generative models with much shorter computation time. Finally, morphological tags are included as additional features, using a similar composition procedure, to improve the parsing performance for morphologically rich languages. State-of-the-art results were obtained for these task and languages.


In the mid-1980s, Amy Tan was a successful but unhappy corporate speechwriter. By the end of the decade, she was perched firmly atop the best-seller lists with The Joy Luck Club, with more hugely popular novels to follow. Tan's work - once pigeonholed as ethnic literature, a niche market with limited appeal - resonates with universal themes that cross cultural and ideological boundaries, and proved wildly successful with readers of all stripes. Tender, sincere, complex, honest and uncompromising in its portrayal of Chinese culture and its affect on women - Amy Tan's work earned her both praise and excoriation from critics, adoration from fans, and a place as one of America's most notable modern writers. This reference work offers an introduction to and overview of Amy Tan's life, her body of literature, and her characters, motifs and themes. The main text is comprised of entries covering characters, dates, historical figures and events, allusions, motifs and themes from Tan's works, among other topics. The entries combine both critical insights with generous citations from primary and secondary sources. Each entry concludes with a selected bibliography. There is also a chronology of Tan's family history and her life. Appendices provide an overlapping timeline of historical and fictional events in Tan's work; a glossary of foreign terms found in her writing; and a list of related writing and research topics. An extensive bibliography and a comprehensive index accompany the text.


Introduction: The provision of an effective extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) service requires a dedicated unit with sufficient caseload and access to specialised resources.1 Moving unstable patients, with refractory respiratory failure on conventional mechanical ventilation, to the specialised centre for ECMO poses great risk to the patient.1,2 Therefore, there is a need to have mobile ECMO capabilities with specialised retrieval teams, capable of initiating ECMO in the referral hospital and safely transporting the patient to the ECMO centre. Transport of patients on ECMO has been demonstrated to be safe, if undertaken by well-trained teams2–7 providing seamless care.8 However, most studies pay little attention to the role of the ambulance service within the ECMO team. The ideal configuration of the team has yet to be demonstrated, with different regions using different models.2 The ELSO guidelines recommend, beside the ECMO specialist and cannulating physician, a transport nurse or respiratory therapist to provide ongoing critical care to the patient.9 This recommendation presupposes a model where nurses are routinely involved in interfacility transport of patients. It further ignores the role of ambulance service staff, who potentially play an integral role in the movement of the patient. This model is by no means universal, and certainly not the case in Qatar, hence the decision to include Critical Care Paramedics (CCP) as an integral part of the Qatar ECMO team, in service of safe ECMO patient transport. Multidisciplinary team dynamics in patient transport: As with the management of the ECMO patient within the ICU unit, the success of each retrieval and transport depends as much on team dynamics as on the technical skills of the individual specialities represented in the team.10 Due to the specialised nature of ECMO, the retrieval team cannot rely on the referring hospital having all the required equipment. Thus, the team needs to be self-sufficient and the team members interdependent on each other. Prior to activation of the team, each speciality is responsible for ensuring their specific retrieval equipment has been checked and sealed in readiness for the next retrieval. As part of this process, the ECMO retrieval team developed a set of checklists for each of the equipment sets (checked weekly) and a master retrieval checklist to be used by the CCP on activation of the team. The use of checklists ensures that all equipment boxes, required for cannulation and patient care, are loaded into the transport vehicles.9 The design of the retrieval service vehicle and High Acuity Patient Transport Trolley has factored in the principle of redundancy, realising that the patient on ECMO has limited physiological reserve if equipment, power or oxygen supply failure should occur. The close working relationship between the ECMO director and the Ambulance Service staff has helped develop a platform and system that provides redundancy and limits the requirement for the ECMO team to have to carry additional backup equipment. Once at the referring hospital, each member of the team has preassigned roles. The ECMO physician takes lead on assessment of the patient, deciding on the eligibility for ECMO. The decision to initiate ECMO requires consent from the family to begin. During that time, the rest of the team begin the process of identifying additional resources within the hospital. The ECMO specialist nurse begins assessing the needs of the patient prior to movement. Once consent is obtained, the team can begin the process of preparing the patient for transfer to theatre (unless the decision has been made to cannulate in the ICU) and to prepare the operating theatre for cannulation. Delegating the role of patient safety and logistics to the CCP frees up the need for the lead physician to multitask, thus being able to concentrate on the task of patient assessment, reducing the risk of error and co-ordinating the requirements for cannulation of the patient at the receiving hospital. The CCP also plays a support role for the ECMO nurse specialist in preparing the patient for transfer to the theatre (infusions, monitoring and ventilation), and becomes lead for the safe movement of the patient from the unit to the theatre, and later to the ambulance. Each step in the patient preparation and movement is confirmed as per the safety checklist to ensure nothing is missed, and the risk of accidental dislodgment of invasive lines or ET tube is minimised. Having a dedicated safety person allows other team members to concentrate on their primary task. Background:Building the Ambulance Service–Medical Intensive Care Unit relationship: Following the outbreak of MERS coronavirus, the leadership of HMC made a decision to develop a severe respiratory failure (SRF) service, including the implementation of an ECMO programme, as none existed in the country or the region. This service would be based at Hamad General Hospital in Doha. A centralised model of care would be used, thus requiring the establishment of an ECMO retrieval service. The project development was tasked to the MICU Director, who also held the Deputy Medical Directorship of the Ambulance Service. This relationship had previously led to the Ambulance Service and the Medical Intensive Care Unit co-developing a multidisciplinary, simulation-based training programme in preparation for the launching of a High-Acuity Adult Retrieval Programme. This model paired MICU intensivists with Critical Care and Ambulance Paramedics on a purpose-built Mobile Intensive Care Ambulance, with the CCP as team leader. Based on the success of this programme, it was decided to include a small group of experienced CCPs in the ECMO training programme, which was initiated in November 2013. The envisaged role of the CCPs was to undertake the logistic lead and patient and team safety role on ECMO retrieval development. As part of the initial training programme, two of the CCPs were included in the team that were sent for training with an established ECMO service in the UK. Their role was to get insight into the logistical requirements and evolution of ECMO retrieval and then become the project leads for the development of the Ambulance Service's capacity to support a seamless ECMO retrieval service. The ECMO retrieval team: In Qatar, the ECMO retrieval team is made up of either two ECMO specialists or an ECMO specialist and a MICU consultant, with an ECMO specialist nurse, perfusionist and respiratory therapist. In addition, the team has a CCP as an integral member of the team, with a central role in logistics and safety. The CCP helps link the decision-making and execution of patient movement and transport to any additional resources within the Ambulance Service that may be required and adds additional clinical capacity to the retrieval team. In many countries, Critical Care or Intensive Care Paramedics play a central role in the interfacility transport of critically ill or injured patients, either by ground or air ambulance. Advanced Life Support Paramedics receive additional training in Critical Care Transport and Aeromedical Medicine, and then, work in multidisciplinary teams geared to the safe transport of high acuity patients, either by ground or by air. These Critical Care Teams may be composed of two CCPs, or a CCP working with a Critical Care Nurse or Physician. CCPs develop their skills of leadership, required for working in high-stress environments, through their training and through experience working in complex and austere clinical environments. In many of the countries mentioned above, paramedics are required to gain experience in the emergency setting, before being permitted to transfer into Critical Care Transport teams. This model ensures that the CCP/ICP is not only competent in Advanced Life Support skills but has had time to master the complexity of assessing and managing critical patients, patient advocacy and professional engagement with other healthcare professionals. Qatar recruits its CCPs from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, USA and South Africa. All these countries have established Critical Care Transport programmes through tertiary-based paramedic education (Associate Degrees or Degrees). CCPs, within the Ambulance Service in Qatar, are able to provide advanced airway interventions (rapid sequence induction and intubation), use multimodal mechanical ventilation and provide advanced cardiovascular life support – including infusion devices, inotropes, external pacing and mechanical chest compression devices. In addition, the group of CCPs selected to be part of the ECMO programme all had more than 10 years of clinical experience and were trained and experienced in aeromedical work. Being familiar with the equipment and systems of the Ambulance Service, the competencies of interfacility patient transport and having been trained with the MICU multidisciplinary team in the process of ECMO, allowed them a unique ability to take on a lead role in the logistics process and patient safety roles and provide an additional resource for the provision of airway care, ventilation or advanced cardiac life support. From late 2014 to date, the Qatar ECMO team have undertaken 13 retrievals, including one international transport from Qatar to India, without any adverse incidents. The strong relationship between the ECMO team and the Ambulance Service has facilitated the development of a safe and effective retrieval service. Future plans to include the initiation of ECMO transport simulations to ensure maintenance of skills and develop team dynamics with new staff being added to the Service.


There is much evidence to demonstrate that the presence of the metabolic syndrome (MetS) is associated with an increase in the incidence of pre-Alzheimer's disease. The possible underlying mechanisms linking pre-Alzheimer's disease and MetS are still unclear. This study summarizes and discusses the potential mechanisms involved in pre-Alzheimer's disease under MetS conditions, including an increased brain oxidative stress, brain inflammation, brain mitochondrial dysfunction, hyper-phosphorylated tau protein, and amyloid beta production. This report focuses on brain mitochondrial altera- tions in cases of pre-Alzheimer's disease where MetS is also extant. The data from in vitro , in vivo, and clinical studies are included. In addition, potential interventions against pre-Alzheimer's disease in conjunction with MetS are summarized and discussed.


The IOTA (Infrared Optical Telescope Array) has been routinely operating with two-telescopes since 1994, a mode destined to become obsolete following its recent conversion to a three-telescope array. In two-telescope mode, the IOTA has made numerous scientific and technical contributions, see e.g. our list of publications at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/cfa/oir/IOTA/PUBLI/publications.html. We present preliminary results on three different topics using recent data from the two-telescope IOTA: (1) measurements of Mira star diameters simultaneously in three different near-infrared spectral bands, (2) measurement of the characteristic size and shape of the source of near-infared emission in the x-ray binary system CI Cam, and (3) aperture synthesis of the Carbon star V Hydrae combining data from the IOTA and from aperture masking at the Keck-I telescope.


People are motivated to process threatening information in a defensive manner. For instance, in self-reports, group members consistently reject threatening outgroup criticism compared with the same criticism from the ingroup (intergroup sensitivity effect). Because self-reports are a poor proxy for actual behavior, it remains unknown whether this defensiveness motivates hostile actions. We fill this gap in the literature: Five experiments (total N = 787) show that group members pay to punish critical outgroup comments, exclude outgroup commenters from a subject pool, and reject ultimatum bargaining offers from outgroup commenters compared with ingroup commenters voicing the same criticism. These defensive behaviors represent hostile actions and are robust in a meta-analysis across our 5 studies. Intergroup sensitivity thus motivates hostile defensive actions. We discuss potential consequences for intergroup relations.


Railway transitions like bridge approaches experience differential movements related to differences in track system stiffness, track damping characteristics, foundation type, ballast settlement from fouling and/or degradation, as well as fill and subgrade settlement. A recent research study at the University of Illinois has used advanced geotechnical instrumentation to identify and quantify different factors contributing to recurrent differential movement problems at three different bridge approaches along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (NEC) near Chester, Pennsylvania. Field instrumentation data have indicated excessive ballast movement to be the primary factor contributing to the "bump" development at these bridge approaches. Among the different remedial measures applied to mitigate the recurrent track geometry issues were: (1) Chemical Grouting, (2) Stone Blowing, and (3) Under-Tie Pads. This paper will discuss the implementation methods using track geometry records and instrumentation data, and highlight the effectiveness of chemical grouting and stone blowing to mitigate the differential movement problem at railroad bridge approaches. According to the trends in the transient ballast deformation data collected under train loading, both remedial measures were effective in significantly reducing excessive ballast deformation, which was the primary mechanism behind the bump development at these locations. Ballast degradation and presence of excessive fine particles in the ballast layer adversely affected the ability of the grout to bond with aggregate particles. A "clean" ballast layer, on the other hand, facilitated adequate bonding between the grout and ballast particles leading to significantly improved long-term track performance.Copyright © 2016 by ASME


For civic journalism, the road to acceptance among practitioners, educators and scholars has been a rocky one.1 Since its inception in the mid-1990s, the movement has earned supportors who think that a bedrock goal of journalism is to help solve civic problems, and that engaging the public in dialogue offers hope of fixing a troubled U.S. press and democracy.2 Doubters and detractors, however, think that civic journalism seems unnecessary, insufficient or improbable-or that it sounds too much like advocacy and threatens the media's objective stance and credibility.3 Civic journalism has been a particularly thorny issue for higher education, which counts practitioners and scholars among its ranks. Many educators believe that the profession has lost its moral compass and that curriculum reform might foster a journalism more accountable to the public interest.4 Yet the subject has not been widely or deeply integrated into many programs' curricula. And despite fervent academic debates over civic journalism's consequences for education and the profession, few scholars have investigated the attitudes of college students-a group that includes current and future media professionals and consumers-toward the practice. Journalism researchers and educators need a current snapshot showing 1) to what degree college students support a range of civic journalism approaches, 2) whether greater support for the "new" values of civic journalism correlates with less support for traditional ones such as objectivity, and 3) what characteristics among students arc linked to greater support for civic journalism values and practices. This study, a survey of more than 400 journalism students, seeks to answer these basic questions. Research on doing-and teaching-civic journalism Much of the empirical research on civic journalism has focused on the attitudes of practitioners and educators. For instance, in his 1999 surveys of 1,037 journalists for the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), Paul Voakes found strong support for several dimensions of civic journalism. In that study, 59% of respondents said they strongly approved of developing enterprise stories, and 62% said they strongly approved of providing information on alternative solutions. These results "seem to confirm preliminary findings from earlier research that a new conception of journalism's role in society may be emerging."5 The ASNE surveys also concluded that age, education and gender were not reliable predictors of support for civic journalism; newspaper size, job title, approval for joining civic organizations, and respect for community news showed strong correlations. Another survey of newspaper staff by M. David Arant and Philip Meyer showed that a majority adhered to traditional values and did not support civic journalism values that depart from traditional journalism; they found that journalists who supported certain civic journalism practices were at least as sensitive to traditional ethical concerns as those who did not.6 In a different survey of newspaper editors and journalism educators, both groups reported more support for initiating dialogue about community issues than for developing or participating in solutions to public problems-with editors endorsing such goals at significantly higher levels than educators.7 Studies on teaching civic journalism have shown a perceived need for new understandings of the relationship between journalism and society-and for new ways to educate students about this relationship. Jay Rosen, for example, notes that civic journalism classes help students experience the news production process with a degree of contemplation and self-reflection that contrasts with the routinized reporting of conventional journalism.8 Common practices such as superficial analysis of events, standard story frames and the reliance on elite sources discourage innovative thinking about solutions to long-standing problems in a community. …


Online forums contain huge amounts of valuable user-generated content. In current forum systems, users have to passively wait for other users to visit the forum systems and read/answer their questions. The user experience for question answering suffers from this arrangement. In this paper, we address the problem of "pushing" the right questions to the right persons, the objective being to obtain quick, high-quality answers, thus improving user satisfaction. We propose a framework for the efficient and effective routing of a given question to the top-k potential experts (users) in a forum, by utilizing both the content and structures of the forum system. First, we compute the expertise of users according to the content of the forum system—-this is to estimate the probability of a user being an expert for a given question based on the previous question answering of the user. Specifically, we design three models for this task, including a profile-based model, a thread-based model, and a cluster-based model. Second, we re-rank the user expertise measured in probability by utilizing the structural relations among users in a forum system. The results of the two steps can be integrated naturally in a probabilistic model that computes a final ranking score for each user. Experimental results show that the proposals are very promising.


Efficiency and patient safety are two important intersecting health policy goals. Efficiency should not be exploited for political expediency, but instead balanced against concerns with patient safety. Too often, the concept of efficiency has been used to justify cost saving or cost containment measures that create further adverse effects. There is clear evidence that nurseto- patient ratios have a direct impact on patient safety, but the government has resisted staffing more nurses on the basis of cost. This causes a greater cost in terms of human suffering and avoidable medical errors. Therefore, efficiency-based claims made by the government should be viewed with caution. Governments should establish a solid evidentiary foundation before advancing any efficiency claims in the health sector.


The food situation in Sub-Saharan Africa is an issue of growing concern. It is the contention of the paper that the primary issue is not overall supplies of food, but access to existing stocks of food and access to the means of production to produce food. Sen's concept of food entitlement is used as a means of analysing the food situation from the perspective of access to food. In the first section, the content of Sen's food entitlement approach is outlined. In the subsequent sections, various proposals for food security, both at the international and national levels, are outlined briefly and evaluated on the basis of the food entitlement approach. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the policy options designed to improve food entitlement systems.


DLS-Forgetter is a reasoning tool that aims to compute restricted views of a knowledge base of first-order logic formulae via semantic forgetting. Semantic forgetting achieves this by eliminating predicate symbols in an equivalence preserving way up to the remaining symbols. Forgetting has many applications such as information hiding, explanation generation and computing logical difference. DLS-Forgetter combines ideas from two Ackermann-based approaches: the DLS algorithm and a modal logic inference system inspired by the algorithm. The tool enhances the DLS algorithm by incorporating an ordering over the symbols in the forgetting signature. This allows more control over the forgetting process and the application of the elimination rules. The theory behind the tool is provided by a first-order Ackermann calculus, a first-order generalisation of the rules outlined by the modal logic inference system. The purpose of the tool is to provide the research community with an experimental tool to allow further research to be conducted in the area. This paper describes the DLS-Forgetter tool along with its underlying calculus, it outlines the forgetting process used in the implementation, and presents results of an empirical evaluation.


Background Prior research has identified higher rates of COVID-19 mortality among people of color (relative to non-Hispanic whites) and populations in high-poverty neighborhoods (relative to wealthier neighborhoods). It is unclear, however, whether non-Hispanic whites in high-poverty neighborhoods experience elevated mortality, or whether people of color living in wealthy areas are relatively protected. Exploring socioeconomic position in combination with race/ethnicity can lead to a more detailed understanding of the specific processes that result in COVID-19 inequities. Methods and Findings We used census and individual-level mortality data for the non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic/Latinx populations of Cook County, Illinois, USA. We excluded deaths related to nursing homes and other institutions. We calculated age and gender-adjusted mortality rates by race/ethnicity, census tract poverty quartile, and age group (0-64 and [≥]65 years). Within all racial/ethnic groups, COVID-19 mortality rates were greatest in the highest-poverty quartile and lowest in the lowest-poverty quartile. The mortality rate for younger non-Hispanic whites in the highest-poverty quartile was 13.5 times that of younger non-Hispanic whites in the lowest-poverty quartile (95% CI: 8.5, 21.4). For young people in the highest-poverty quartile, the non-Hispanic white and Black mortality rates were similar. Among younger people in the lowest-poverty quartile, non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic/Latinx people had mortality rates nearly three times that of non-Hispanic whites. For the older population, the mortality rate among non-Hispanic whites in the highest-poverty quartile was less than that of lowest-poverty non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic/Latinx populations. Conclusions Our findings suggest racial/ethnic inequalities in COVID-19 mortality are partly, but not entirely, attributable to the higher average socioeconomic position of non-Hispanic whites relative to the non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic/Latinx populations. Future research on health equity in COVID-19 outcomes should collect and analyze individual-level data on the potential mechanisms driving population distributions of exposure, severe illness, and death.


Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic microbes living on glaciers worldwide. A phylogenic study revealed that the glacial cyanobacteria have 20 major phylotypes and their community structure geographically vary among glaciers. Each phylotype should have suitable growth conditions on glaciers and dispersal limitation. However, such information is little known. Cyanobacteria on glaciers often form cryoconite granules, which are microbe-mineral aggregates. The cryoconite granule can reduce surface albedo of glaciers and accelerate the melting rate of the ice. Therefore, it is important to know the factors to determine the community structure of cyanobacteria on the glaciers. In this study, we investigated the spatial distribution of biomass and species composition of three major taxa of cyanobacteria (Oscillatoriales A, B, C) on Urumqi Glacier No.1 in Tien Shan Mountains in China. The spatial distribution was compared with chemical and physical conditions on the glacier surface to find the environmental factors to control the growth for each cyanobacterial taxon. Microscopic analysis revealed that biomass and species composition of the three cyanobacterial taxa varied spatially on a glacier. The mean total biomass of the three taxa is significantly larger in the central part compared with those in the left or right side of the glacier. There is a significant positive correlation between the total biomass and mineral abundance of the surface, suggesting that mineral particle affect the growth of cyanobacteria regardless of the taxa. The spatial distribution of the three taxa showed different patterns on the glacier. Oscillatoriales A was the smallest percentage at the all of the site. Oscillatoriales B was dominated at the lower west side on the glacier. Oscillatoriales C was dominated at the upper east side of the glacier. According to the remote sensing study, winter snow cover over the Urumqi Glacier No.1 melted from the lower west side and extended to the upper part. This suggests that Oscillatoriales B dominates where the bare ice surface exposed earlier while Oscillatoriales C dominates where winter snow remains later. Duration of exposure to sunlight may be a factor to determine the dominance of Oscillatoriales B or C.


The current paper aimed to analyze the predictive power of conscientiousness and agreeableness which are important personality characteristics of businessmen and related to potential to work with customers. The sample consisted of 122 respondents, 42 women and 80 men (average age was 28.71 and standard deviation 2.98) working in business area with customers. The data were collected through NEO-Five Factor Inventory which measured the level of agreeableness and conscientiousness developed by McCrae and Costa (1987) in Slovak translated by Hřebičková and Urbánek (2001) and SKASUK- Scale of potential to work with customer developed by Sonnenberg in Slovak translated by Kováč (2006). Based on the confirmed aspects it was concluded that motivation to help had significant predictive power in predicting conscientiousness. Dominance and social appreciation did not have significant predictive power in predicting conscientiousness. We found that characteristics which are potential to work with customer did not have significant predictive power in predicting agreeableness. Social appreciation contributed to prediction of agreeableness at significant level.


Henderson Island, an uninhabited raised coral atoll in the Pitcairn group, has recently been designated a World Heritage Site because of its unique and relatively undisturbed ecosystem. The island is believed to have been uplifted and subaerially exposed during the last 275 kyr. This therefore provides the maximum age for the terrestrial biota that includes several endemic taxa. Henderson today supports 16 strictly terrestrial species of snails, about half of which are endemic. Analyses of sediments beneath Polynesian occupation horizons dated between the 11th and 17th centuries AD, have yielded 11 species of land snail present in the modern fauna, together with at least six (and possibly as many as eight) further species that no longer occur on the island. These extinct taxa are illustrated and formal descriptions provided for five (Pleuropoma hendersoni, Orobophana carinacosta, Minidonta macromphalus, Philonesia pyramidalis, P. weisleri); a sixth, known only from broken shells, appears to belong to the genus Hiona. The two remaining taxa are 'tornatellinids' that have not been recognized among the modern fauna. Radiocarbon dates from bones of associated extinct land birds confirm their occurrence on Henderson before the first signs of Polynesian settlement. The extinction of these taxa seems to coincide with the Polynesian occupation and evidence for large-scale burning, at least around parts of the plateau margin, suggests that their demise can be linked with habitat destruction. At least three species, Gastrocopta pediculus, Lamellidea oblonga and Pupisoma orcula, first appear in Polynesian occupation horizons. Their status as prehistoric introductions is therefore confirmed but G. pediculus no longer lives on Henderson. Pacificella variabilis, Tornatellides oblongus parvulus and Elasmias sp., all previously thought to have been other prehistoric introductions to Henderson, were recovered from pre-Polynesian levels and are therefore native.


Urban mindscapes are structures of thinking about a city, built on conceptualisations of the city's physical landscape as well as on its image as transported through cultural representation, memory and imagination.
This book pursues three main strands of inquiry in its exploration of these 'landscapes of the mind' in a European context. The first strand concerns the theory and methodology of researching urban mindscapes and urban 'imaginaries'. The second strand investigates some of the representations, symbols and collective images that feed into our understanding of European cities. It discusses representations of the city in literature, film, television and other cultural forms, which, in James Donald's phrase, constitute 'archives of urban images'. The third and last section of the volume concentrates on the relationship between the collective mindscapes of cities, urban policy and the practice of city marketing.


Tomographic reconstruction of fluorescence optical projection tomography (OPT) data is usually performed using the standard filtered back projection (FBP) algorithm. However, there are several physical aspects of fluorescence OPT that pose major challenges for the FBP algorithm. These include blurring, and the fact that for an isotropically emitting point source (or fluorophore), the power received by an objective aperture decreases with the inverse square of the distance to the source. These two effects are shown to result in qualitative and quantitative inaccuracies in fluorescence OPT reconstructions obtained using standard FBP. A model of image formation is developed which includes the effects of isotropic emission and blurring. The model is used to calculate a probabilistic system matrix for use in the maximum likelihood expectation maximisation algorithm, which leads to reconstructions that are both qualitatively superior and quantitatively correct.


Current methods for evaluating research are based on counting the number of citations received for publications. Thus, the more an article is cited and the more its impact is considered as important. In this article, we propose a new method for assessing the reputation of scientific journals, based on a Web application in which are gathered the votes of expert researchers. The voting results indicate degrees of preference for one journal over another. Our system uses, in addition, the publications of an expert in order to quantify his expertise in specific fields. These values are coupled with those of votes to determine the relevance, according to the field, of each journal in each topic. An iterative process of transferring values given to journals by experts to values of the experts themselves given their publications has been implemented.


In the introduction to a 1992 edition of Legends of the Bible, Louis Ginzberg's collection of Jewish lore. Shalom Spiegel defines "legend" by describing the persistent allure of Hebrew scripture to new readers: "legend may be taken to imply whatever will come to be read by successive ages into an event or record of the past: the ever-new and ever-changing rereading of old sources by new generations of men. ... Each following period pours its inner life into the patient and pliant texts of old" (xi). The vitality of the Tanakh derives from its endless applicability; it is an old flask into which we can pour and repour new wine. Students of African-American history thus commonly note the ways in which enslaved and free blacks poured themselves into the stories of the Exodus. In novels, hymns, songs, poems, speeches, and sermons, African Americans cast themselves in the role of the Israelites. enslaved but chosen by God for a glorious new freedom, oppressed but selected for a divine destiny. Indeed, in The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, Allen Dwight Callahan argues that African Americans heard, read, and retold the story of the Exodus more than any other biblical narrative. ... Exodus was the Bible's narrative argument that God was opposed to American slavery and would return a catastrophic judgment against the nation as he had against Egypt [and] signified God's will that African Americans too would no longer be sold as bondspeople, that they too would go free. (83) If Exodus was God's love letter to African Americans and a firm promise that He would liberate and deliver retributive justice. American blacks' corporate identification with Biblical Hebrews also served as a foundation for establishing group identity. Werner Sollors terms the process by which a people comes to develop a group consciousness through identification with a text "typological ethnogenesis" (57), and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. analyzes instances of the Biblical form of typological ethnogenesis in nineteenth-century African-American communities, arguing that blacks' identification with the Israelites was crucial to the development of their concepts of group and national unity. (1) By seeing themselves in the enslaved Hebrews, nineteenth-century blacks built a vocabulary of African-American peoplehood--and effectively founded African America. Glaude's study could easily extend into the twentieth century, revealing numerous examples of African Americans' continued appropriation of the Torah's stories of Moses and the Israelites. However, in its passage into the post-bellum period and the twentieth century, the idiom began to show signs of wear. Though the end of the Civil War formally abolished slavery, Southern sharecropping kept many of its worst aspects intact, and while the Exodus narrative promised not only freedom but a promised land, blacks living in America remained in a nation scarred. by the memories of their oppression. (2) Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Jim Crow laws demonstrated that African-American freedom was an attenuated version of true liberty, a condition that only became more discomfiting as the decades passed and emancipation did not give way to total equality, especially in the American South. While the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968--along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965--ended many forms of institutionalized racism, prejudice and violence continued through the 1970s. The Exodus myth thus provided a decreasingly effective template for re-imagining African-American experience. (3) Two twentieth-century African-American novelists who understood this were Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed, and in their fictions both questioned the usefulness of the Exodus story for black culture in the twentieth century. In 1939, on the brink of World War II, and near the end of the Great Migration that brought millions of black Americans from the still-segregated, Jim Crow South to the urban North, Zora Neale Hurston published Moses, Man of the Mountain, a novel-length reworking of the Torah that features an ethnically ambiguous Moses enlisted by a shadowy Mountain god to free a people who are not his own. …


... it is not true that the Caribbean people have no history, it is true that they are alienated from their history ... what is needed is not a unitary History, but instead a reconciliation to and with the multiple fragments and histories of Caribbean experience. (Oscherwitz 145) Introduction For reasons deeply rooted in history, it is imperative to constitute the Caribbean novel, and, indeed, the entire Caribbean literary tradition as an elemental and relentless engagement with the immense forces of History. This is history with an uppercase "H" referring to its colonial legacies and imperial hegemony as well as its violence and predatory disposition to the peoples of the Caribbean. It is the History of European empire-building in the marginal spaces of the peripheral world outside the circumference of the West. In the European imagination, it is the only History that validly exists. This History of violence and violence of History was manifest in the conquest and near annihilation of the aboriginal Amerindian population, the Arawaks and Caribs. Its repeated births also witnessed the brutal uprooting, dislocation and displacement of whole populations across the Atlantic to a life of slavery on the vast plantations of the New World. The Caribbean Islands have, through the conspiracies of History, become postcolonial outposts or satellites of dominant metropolitan political, economic and socio-cultural formations of diverse European nations which they look to as centers of cultural life and standards. The very idea of history in the Caribbean constitutes a contested and contestable site. To some informed writers like the St. Lucian Nobelist, Derek Walcott, history does not exist in the Islands. It ended with the sea which brought the agglomerations of peoples to the Islands. Walcott's perspective is strengthened by his argument that there is nothing celebratory, noble or ennobling about the violence, agonies, humiliations and dehumanization that characterized and defined this history. In the rigid distinction of history as culture and as myth--as if the two are monadic and mutually exclusive--Walcott settles for the mythical axis of history. To him, history in the Caribbean is myth rather than a cultural construction. As he further argues, "History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake" ("The Muse of History" 1). In one of his poems, "The Sea is History," Walcott again foregrounds the absence of a history in the Caribbean as he problematizes this history employing rhetorical strategies thus: "Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, / In that grey vault. The sea. The sea is History" (364). The negation of this History by Walcott because of its discomfiting character contrasts radically with the perspective of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, another prominent Caribbean writer. To Brathwaite, this history can be characterized as fragmentary and dispersed and the imperative is "how to study the fragments/whole" (199) of the Caribbean historical reality whose substrata are plantation slavery, colonial domination and cultural pluralism. Thus, to him, to deny the area the heritage of history will be tantamount to willful violence to facts. He, therefore, refracts the Caribbean as possessing a valid and legitimate history even as the European imperial History remains the preferred category. And even though the sea was partial and prejudiced in its disposition to the histories of the captain and the cargo, Braithwaite contends that that is not synonymous with the absence of history. Edouard Glissant enters the argument on a note of affirmation of Caribbean history. In his validation of Caribbean history, he postulates that the history exists except that it is fractured and dispersed, constituting itself as "the site of history characterized by ruptures and that began with a brutal dislocation, the slave trade" (61). This means that both the histories of the captain and of the cargo were admitted except that the latter has been accorded subordinate or subaltern status while the former has been elevated and assigned a transcendental place. …


Backward inhibition (BI) is a performance cost that occurs when an individual returns to a task after 1 (vs. more than 1) intervening trial, and it may reflect the inhibition of task-set components during switching. In 3 experiments, we support the theory that inhibition can target cue-based preparatory stages of a task. Participants performed a cued target-localization task that had been previously shown to produce BI. In Experiment 1, reassignment of arbitrary cue-target pairings midway through the experiment doubled the size of BI, though cue, target, and response sets remained unchanged. In Experiment 2, we controlled for effects of order of conditions or simple change of cue meaning. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that the effect depends on re-pairing members of the same cue and target sets. The results are attributed to heightened conflict (and hence greater inhibition) during cue-target translation when a previously learned cue-target mapping is remapped.


Abstract The effectiveness of the integration of health impact assessment (HIA) and environmental impact assessment (creating an environmental and health impact assessment' (EHIA) process) is investigated, drawing on an example of a mandatory requirement in the power plant project sector in Thailand. The analytical framework is based on that outlined in by the authors in 2013, focusing on procedural, substantive, transactive and normative effectiveness criteria, and the evaluation served also to critique this framework in practice. Using documentary analysis and interviews, it was found that a sample of EHIAs are partially effective from the four perspectives of effectiveness. The findings suggest that integrating HIA and EIA still has a long way to go to achieve effective practice. Insufficient resources have been allocated to deliver the level of public participation expected in the regulations, or a sufficient standard of EHIA practice and monitoring. The existing analytical framework was found to be inadequate for transactive effectiveness, and a new criterion added: T5 – Availability of human resource in EHIA practice. Recommendations are provided to support the practical integration of HIA into EIA practice in Thailand.


Southeastern Minnesota contains an extensive karst, developed in limestones and dolomites ranging in age from Early Ordovician to Middle Devonian. Preliminary results from U-series dated speleothems from caves within the karst show cyclic deposition of secondary calcium carbonate that coincides with cycles of late Pleistocene glaciation. Peak intervals of deposition, which broadly correlate with interglacial or interstadial climates, occur from the present to 13,000 yr B.P., from 35,000 to 70,000 yr B.P., from 90,000 to 170,000 yr B.P., and an undivided interval from 170,000 to 350,000 yr B.P. Intervals of little or no deposition are thought to reflect glacial climates. The youngest growth intervals can be interpreted in terms of known glacial records in the Midwest, but for the older intervals, where the glacial record is not well defined and beyond the range of radioactive dating, it becomes more difficult to correlate speleothem deposition to glacial cycles. Although the groups of ages are in general agreement with sea-level curves, the correlation is not exact. Local climatic conditions seem to have had as much importance in determining when deposition occurred as did the major climatic cycles recorded in the marine record.


ABSTRACT: The contents of this dissertation fit in the field of computer science, more precisely in the area of computer systems, structures and networks, within which the dissertation deals with distributed search in content networks built on peer-to-peer architecture.

Distributed contents are those that are not located on specialized servers only, but also on several end computers. The main research issues in systems with distributed contents are: enabling content accessibility without regard to its location; management and control over the contents during their existence in the system, and effective collaboration among the system users.

The dissertation deals with query message routing in unstructured content networks with peer-to-peer architecture. Knowing that the quantity of repeated queries is considerable, it focuses predominantly on achieving lower number of redundant query transfers.

The introduction outlines the main problems of distributed search and relates them to query message routing. The need for more effective content based routing in systems with high local autonomy is exposed.

The second chapter describes content network properties, focusing on content placement and content aggregation. With regard to these two characteristics, the content networks are classified in four families. For each family, the level of query routing difficulty is assessed and syntactic content oblivious networks, shortly type A content networks, are found to be the most challenging.

The third chapter reviews the characteristics of peer-to-peer architecture and its implementation areas. Especially those properties are emphasized that strongly affect the choice for or against the peer-to-peer architecture: decentralization, scalability, anonymity, dynamicity, self-organization, desired level of autonomy and security.

The fourth chapter focuses on query routing in the selected type of network overlays. We analyze the overlay topology properties, namely power laws and small world property. Afterwards, we choose an algorithm suitable for generating artificial topologies with these properties, which we would use for the simulation purposes.

We also present an overview of the most important research achievements concerning distributed search in unstructured peer-to-peer systems.

In the fifth chapter, we first describe the basic routing mechanism – flooding. Then we suggest two improvements, based on the aforementioned topological properties and the fact that some queries are frequently repeated. We call the first improvement remembering past answers and the second one metadata exchange. Each node stores metadata about the answers that were passed to other nodes. When a node receives a subsequent query, it tries to find a match within the stored metadata. If a match is found, the query is not flooded to all of the node's neighbors, but rather it is routed to the neighbor from whom the matching answer was obtained earlier. When using metadata exchange, the neighbor nodes exchange their metadata collections and build shortest paths towards the contents within their neighborhood in a distributed fashion.

We have to stress that we are talking about content routing here, namely routing towards the desired contents, not towards a known destination node. In content routing, the destination address is not important since the query is satisfied as soon as the contents are found at any node. Contrary to the systems indexing all or a part of the system contents, information regarding the destination node is not stored - only routing information, i.e. information on the neighbor node is stored.

We also describe how our routing scheme deals with network dynamicity and state our expectations regarding improved routing behavior.

In the sixth chapter, we formally present a conceptual model of the described system, serving as a base for the simulation execution. We explain network topology, routing strategies, query distribution and replication, contents distribution and replication. The contents may be either equally or not equally popular. The queries may target the contents either uniformly or proportionally to their popularity. The contents may be either replicated uniformly or may the more popular contents have also more copies within the system.

We have performed the simulation on four types of topologies: random graph, lattice, lattice with randomly reconnected links, and GLP topology, which follows the power law and small world requirements. We have also experimented with two topology sizes – in the bigger one, the reach of the query is less than the longest of shortest paths in the graph, while in the smaller one these two quantities are roughly the same.

In the seventh chapter, we present model validation and verification and describe a couple of metrics used for interpretation of the simulation results.

In the eighth chapter, we present the most important simulation results. We show that the suggested improvements can reduce the total number of query hops for up to two orders of magnitude, compared to the basic flooding, whereas from the user's point of view, the quality of service remains the same. We present the differences in routing behavior over several combinations of system parameters and topology properties. We also evaluate the results by means of the metrics described earlier. At last, we give some suggestions for practical use of the presented routing improvements.

In the conclusions, we evaluate our contributions again and suggest possible directions for further research of this interesting and quickly developing area.

Our main contributions to science are:

• We evaluated the behavior and topological properties of content networks with peer-to-peer architecture and considered their role in traffic reduction.

• We suggested two improvements for routing of repeated queries, where the nodes consider previously forwarded answers and may also exchange these metadata with their neighbor nodes.

• According to the simulation results and the analysis of suggested routing modifications we observed that in the modeled systems, it is advisable to upgrade the basic flooding with the suggested modifications.


A multi-purpose rotor-bearing dynamic simulator was designed and fabricated for the purpose of experimentally evaluating and validating performance of advanced oil-free and back-up bearings under realistic dynamic conditions. The rotor-bearing dynamic test rig is capable of operation to 25,000 RPM, has a 54 kg test rotor, is designed to simulate a medium size aero gas turbine engine rotor, and incorporates an electromagnetic loader/shaker capable of applying both static and dynamic loads to the rotating shaft. Testing was completed with the rotor fully supported by magnetic bearings, compliant foil bearings, hybrid foil/magnetic and Zero Clearance Auxiliary Bearings. These tests demonstrated numerous advances in oil-free bearing technology. The first ever achievements include: operation of a rotor with a mass in excess of 50 kg supported solely by foil bearings, operation of hybrid foil/magnetic bearings to high speed, continued operation following simulated magnetic bearing failures for a fully hybrid foil/magnetic bearing support system, and operation of a rotor supported solely by Zero Clearance Auxiliary Bearings. Data from several tests of the bearing systems are presented.Copyright © 2002 by ASME


markdownabstractThe research in this dissertation explores the social significance of local memory websites. Local memory websites offer local residents a platform where they collect and share memories about particular places or experiences in their neighbourhoods and districts. Following a systematic review and a broad field study, a narrative approach is developed to study collective levels of empowerment within the 'Memory of East' and the 'Memory of West', both in Amsterdam.
Two empirical questions steer a double case study:
1) 'How does the organizational development influence the online dynamics?' and
2) 'What collective empowerment do the online dynamics express?'

With its stronger social capital, the Memory of East is more likely to resist official memory intuitions, commercial popular culture and local politics than the Memory of West. On the other hand, with its more inclusive character, the Memory of West is more representative for the broad cultural backgrounds of its inhabitants than the Memory of East. These findings are shown to be related to five organizational continuums on which both websites are plotted to indicate their crucial organizational differences. Apart from a claim about the theoretical value of this model, it is illustrated how it functions as a discursive tool for the core groups behind both websites.


The authors of the set of essays on various aspects of reviewing recently published in ARD (no. 102 [2007]:13-35) argue en ensemble that reviews continue to fill a function in scholarly communications-an unofficial system of checks and balances that can and often does set limits on how cases are presented to the public. I am less convinced of this than the authors, at least as to their value in the library acquisitions process. At any rate, the greater their value, the greater the need to optimize the production and reception by launching a number of reforms that would have the effect of providing this argument with grounds that could make it even stronger. Book reviews have long been touted as a means to influence institutional purchasing, not only of scholarly books but of all books. Focusing on the former, it strikes me that this could never have been much the case. In the days of print monopoly, substantive reviews appeared long after the books being reviewed did-anything less than a year could be considered almost miraculous. Sure, there were a few prominent organs (Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, etc.) designed to do nothing other than publish reviews, sometimes even before the books appeared in the marketplace. These still exist and still serve the same purpose, but then and even more so now, only a tiny fraction of published works could be attended to, and there was and is no reason to assume that this tiny fraction contained a disproportionate number of especially significant books, although being reviewed in these organs might have made them significant after the fact. Nowadays, of course, rather than holding a monopoly, print seems barely to be hanging on, derided by many as inadequate in the face of competing electronic formats. These have the capacity to offer book reviews more quickly than before and at whatever length a reviewer expounds but, like the TLS and others, the electronic review tools seem satisfied to publish only a few reviews, and very few works get multiple reviews across the band of electronic resources. So, while it is probably incorrect to argue that no research libraries depend on reviews to decide what to buy and what not to, it is surely the case that most such libraries, even those with qualified subject specialists, have accepted the obvious-and the expedient-and handed the task of supplying materials, especially university press publications, over to megaproviders such as Blackwell and YBP, under the hardly unreasonable assumption that these titles have already been vetted extensively enough to accept a priori that they belong in research library collections. By the time reviews of these imprints do appear, they have long since been acquired by libraries working under the assumption that they were fair grist for their mills. As to trade publications, expectations are lower, but materials are often ordered on the basis of prepublication announcements and the like, in which the only 'reviews' are the blurbs by friends of the authors that can often be found on die book jacket flap or back cover.1 In the circumstances it strikes me as highly inadvisable for libraries to wait on several reviews of a work before deciding whether to buy it, as apparently is the case at Rhodes House Library. Even with high-speed review organs such as Choice, it should be many months, and could be many years, before this occurs. Indeed, it is known to be the case that many, maybe most, academic tomes never receive as many as three reviews.2 This fact of life has little relationship to their quality, their price, or their promotion, but rather to the vagaries of the review process, not the least of which is available space and interest.3 Thus waiting for multiple reviews of any book could also be a case of waiting for Godot. And then what to do if the balance of the reviews is neither positive nor negative? On the other hand, that reviews provide "a significant amount of intellectual capital" that can prime librarians to meet the after-purchase needs of their users is less exceptionable, although it is worth distinguishing in this between reviews in library journals (usually terse and intended for librarians) and journals within the relevant disciplines. …


The modern world is facing rapid urbanisation, increasing urban population, constant growth of cities and the construction of new neighbourhoods. Moreover, new neighbourhoods often lack the elements of identity in the context of the place and the people who live there. Therefore, it is necessary to construct these identities together with the physical and natural structure of place and the cultural identity of the people. The construction of spatial identities has been studied in two case studies of "new" neighbourhoods, Mađir (Banjaluka, BosniaHerzegovina) and Ilsvika (Trondheim, Norway), using a qualitative analysis method. The comparison makes use of a triangle model that includes three elements of identity construction as three points of analysis: a) spatial context, b) participation in processes of planning and construction and c) action in place. The two cultural contexts and two ways of constructing spatial identity in the new neighbourhoods studied show certain similarities and differences. The study points to the universal significance of this phenomenon and indicates that the process could be improved in each case by applying positive experiences from the other, with adaptation to the specific context. Considering the importance and interrelation of the three elements involved in construction of spatial identities, they should be harmonised in all stages of development.


This paper examines two types of expressions that seem to exist in all languages, demonstratives and interrogatives. Based on a representative sample of 100 languages it is shown that demonstratives and interrogatives have some striking features in common. They cross-cut the boundaries of several word classes and encode the same semantic features: person, thing, place, direction, manner, time, and amount. It is the central hypothesis of this study that the crosslinguistic parallelism between demonstratives and interrogatives is motivated by their pragmatic functions: both initiate a search for information that is guided by their semantic and syntactic features. Further, it is argued that demonstratives and interrogatives have a special status in language. Although both types of expressions are commonly considered grammatical markers, they do not serve an ordinary grammatical function. Grammatical markers organize the information flow in the ongoing discourse, whereas basic demonstratives and interrogatives are immediately concerned with the speaker-hearer interaction.


To have insight into the molecular mechanisms governing the function of Tbx1, a transcription factor involved in DiGeorge syndrome (DGS) and cardiovascular development,
we searched for proteins interacting with it. Using an affinity purification protocol followed by
a candidate protein approach, we found that Smad1/5/8 interacted with Tbx1. To confirm this
interaction, protein extracts from mouse embryos were co-immunoprecipitated with an
antibody anti Tbx1 and analyzed by western-blot. Results confirmed the interaction and
revealed that Smad1 is the protein directly interacting with Tbx1. Next, we tested TBX1
missense mutations found associated with a DGS phenotype but. Results indicate that one of
the mutant isoforms is unable to bind Smad1.
To examine the role of Tbx1 in the regulation of transcriptional responses induced by
Smad1 we performed luciferase assays and the results show that Tbx1 is capable of
suppressing the activity of a Smad signaling reporter in a dosage-dependent manner. We also
found, using a Co-IP approach, that Tbx1 inhibits Smad signaling activity by competing with
Smad4 for binding to Smad1.
Using a Tbx1 mutant isoform that prevents DNA binding, we found that this suppression is
not dependent upon Tbx1-DNA binding.
We in addition provided evidence that Tbx1 overexpression in mice causes a phenotype
similar to that caused by loss of Smad1-dependent signaling in the same tissues (including
cleft lip and outflow heart defects) and downregulates Smad1 target genes such as Msx1 and
15
Msx2. In conclusion, our data demonstrate a mechanism by which Tbx1 interferes with the
Bmp/Smad1 signal transduction pathway in tissue culture and during mammalian
development. In addition, we provide evidence that a T-box transcription factor can have
functions not directly related to or mediated by its transactivation activity.


AIMS: Very high energy (VHE; E>100 GeV) gamma-ray studies were performed for 18 active galactic nuclei (AGN) from a variety of AGN classes. METHODS: VHE observations of a sample of 14 AGN, considered candidate VHE emitters, were made with the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) between January 2005 and July 2007. Large-zenith-angle observations of three northern AGN (Mkn 421, Mkn 501, 1ES 1218+304), known to emit VHE gamma rays, were also performed in order to sample their spectral energy distributions (SEDs) above 1 TeV. In addition, the VHE flux from 1ES 1101-232, previously detected by HESS in 2004-2005, was monitored during 2006 and 2007. RESULTS: As significant detections from the HESS observation program are reported elsewhere, the results reported here are primarily integral flux upper limits. The average exposure for each of the 14 VHE-candidate AGN is ~7 h live time, and the observations have an average energy threshold between 230 GeV and 590 GeV. Upper limits for these 14 AGN range from <0.9% to <4.9% of the Crab Nebula flux, and eight of these are the most constraining ever reported for the object. The brief (<2.2 h each) large-zenith-angle observations yield upper limits for Mkn 501 (<20% Crab above 2.5 TeV) and 1ES 1218+304 (<17% Crab above 1.0 TeV), and a marginal detection (3.5 sigma) of Mkn 421 (50% Crab above 2.1 TeV). 1ES 1101-232 was marginally detected (3.6 sigma, 1.7% Crab above 260 GeV) during the 2006 (13.7 h live time) observations, but not in the 2007 (4.6 h live time) data. The upper limit in 2007 (<1.9% Crab above 260 GeV) is below the average flux measured by HESS from 2004-2006.


A laboratory-scale dc HTS prototype cable has been built and tested. The cable consists of two layers of HTS YBCO tapes with lengths of 1 m. In order to investigate the current distribution among the two HTS layers, the dc measurement was first performed to the cable wound with only the inner HTS layer in advance of the measurement of the completed cable with both layers. The contact resistances relevant to each HTS layer obtained from the measurement are considered as constant parameters to obtain the current of each HTS layer. It turns out that the nonuniform current distribution among each layer in the dc condition mainly results from the contact resistance with operating current less than the cable critical current and tends to become uniform when the operating current increases toward the cable critical current. A modified 2-D H-formulation, which takes into account the voltage drop due to the joint parts of the cable termination, has been applied to simulate the current distribution of the cable. A good consistency is obtained between the experimental and numerical modeling results.


Abstract:
Energy transitions are a matter of competitions between multiple emerging systems and a dominant, established system. Understanding the complex dynamics of these interactions can assist better-informed decision making and policy interventions. This paper presents a coupled modelling-narrative approach, consisting of a System Dynamics (SD) model interlinked with a narrative transitions-theoretical framework. The approach is geared at understanding the dynamics of emerging on-grid electricity sources, such as renewables, in power sector transitions.
The value of implementing such a coupled approach is twofold. Firstly, it empowers the SD modelling process. As SD modelling itself is agnostic to the conceptualisation of the (societal) system under study, it is left to the modeller to design an appropriate SD structure - i.e. Causal Loop Diagram. The approach presented in this paper provides a narrative theoretical framework based on the state-of-the-art of Sustainability Transitions literature and a generic SD model (applicable to similar energy transition cases) which directly translates the key concepts and dynamical hypotheses. The theoretical framework enables the creation of highly structured narratives that not only provide a clear overview of the case, but also assist the identification of case specific boundary conditions, parameters, feedback loops and therefore in setting up and validating the SD model. Secondly, the close connection between the narrative theoretical framework and the SD model enables considerable explanatory power that cannot be obtained from simply using a model or a narrative. Where the narrative case description, for example, outlines the developments following a certain policy intervention, the SD model allows interrogating the detailed interactions of the chain of causes and consequences following the intervention. SD models are able to represent and reproduce complex causal relations including feedbacks, non-linearity, threshold effects and time delays - dynamics which are impracticable to analyse with human mental models alone.
This paper presents how the SD model is structured based on the core concepts of the narrative theoretical framework. Examples from an existing application by the authors of the framework on the case of the emergence of on-grid solar electricity in India are used to illustrate how the coupling of the SD model with the narrative theory helps addressing questions going beyond modelling or narrative analysis in isolation.


We seek to align agent behavior with a user's objectives in a reinforcement learning setting with unknown dynamics, an unknown reward function, and unknown unsafe states. The user knows the rewards and unsafe states, but querying the user is expensive. To address this challenge, we propose an algorithm that safely and interactively learns a model of the user's reward function. We start with a generative model of initial states and a forward dynamics model trained on off-policy data. Our method uses these models to synthesize hypothetical behaviors, asks the user to label the behaviors with rewards, and trains a neural network to predict the rewards. The key idea is to actively synthesize the hypothetical behaviors from scratch by maximizing tractable proxies for the value of information, without interacting with the environment. We call this method reward query synthesis via trajectory optimization (ReQueST). We evaluate ReQueST with simulated users on a state-based 2D navigation task and the image-based Car Racing video game. The results show that ReQueST significantly outperforms prior methods in learning reward models that transfer to new environments with different initial state distributions. Moreover, ReQueST safely trains the reward model to detect unsafe states, and corrects reward hacking before deploying the agent.


Think you can't have fun learning statistics? Think again. The Manga Guide to Statistics will teach you everything you need to know about this essential discipline, while entertaining you at the same time. With its unique combination of Japanese-style comics called manga and serious educational content, the EduManga format is already a hit in Japan. In The Manga Guide to Statistics, our heroine Rui is determined to learn about statistics to impress the dreamy Mr. Igarashi and begs her father for a tutor. Soon she's spending her Saturdays with geeky, bespectacled Mr. Yamamoto, who patiently teaches her all about the fundamentals of statistics: topics like data categorization, averages, graphing, and standard deviation. After all her studying, Rui is confident in her knowledge of statistics, including complex concepts like probability, coefficients of correlation, hypothesis tests, and tests of independence. But is it enough to impress her dream guy? Or maybe there's someone better, right in front of her? Reluctant statistics students of all ages will enjoy learning along with Rui in this charming, easy-to-read guide, which uses real-world examples like teen magazine quizzes, bowling games, test scores, and ramen noodle prices. Examples, exercises, and answer keys help you follow along and check your work. An appendix showing how to perform statistics calculations in Microsoft Excel makes it easy to put Rui's lessons into practice. This EduManga book is a translation from a bestselling series in Japan, co-published with Ohmsha, Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan.