The number of claims languishing on administrative dockets has become a new "crisis" — producing significant backlogs, arbitrary outcomes and new barriers to justice. Coal miners, disabled employees, and wounded soldiers sit on endless waitlists to appeal the same kinds of administrative decisions that frequently result in reversal. Refugees seeking asylum from the same country play a dangerous game of "roulette" before arbitrary decisionmakers. Defrauded consumers and investors miss out on fair compensation, as agencies settle the same claims with wrongdoers without victim participation or meaningful judicial oversight. Reformers have called for new resources, more administrative law judges and improved attorney fee arrangements. But surprisingly, commentators have largely ignored tools long used by courts to resolve common claims raised by large groups of people: the class action and other complex litigation procedures. Almost no administrative law process allows groups to aggregate and resolve common claims for relief. As a result, in a wide variety adjudicatory proceedings, administrative agencies routinely (1) waste resources on repetitive cases, (2) reach inconsistent decisions for the same kinds of claims, and (3) deny individuals access to the affordable representation that aggregate procedures otherwise promise. Moreover, procedural and substantive hurdles — including exhaustion of administrative remedies and judicial deference to agency expertise — often prevent federal courts from providing class-wide relief to parties in agency adjudications.We argue that agencies themselves should adopt aggregation procedures, like those under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, to adjudicate common claims raised by large groups of people. After surveying the current tools by which agencies could promote more efficiency, consistency and legal access — including rulemaking, stare decisis, attorneys fees and federal court class actions — we find agency class action rules more effectively resolve common disputes by: (1) efficiently creating ways to pool information about recurring problems and enjoin systemic harms; (2) achieving greater equality in outcomes than individual adjudication; and (3) securing legal and expert assistance at a critical stage in the process. In this way, The Agency Class Action represents a new kind of decision-making for administrative agencies — a blend of adjudication and rulemaking for large groups of people who similarly depend upon the administrative state for relief.


This paper examines the relationship between firms' wage offers and workers' supply of effort using a three-period experiment. In equilibrium, firms will offer deferred compensation: first period productivity is positive and wages are zero, while third period productivity is zero and wages are positive. The experiment produces strong evidence that deferred compensation increases worker effort; in about 70 percent of cases subjects supplied the optimal effort given the wage offer, and there was a strong effort response to future-period wages. We also find some evidence of gift exchange; worker players increased the effort levels in response to above equilibrium wage offers by a human, but not in response to similar offers by a computer. Finally, we find that firm players who are initially hesitant to defer compensation learn over time that it is beneficial to do so.


A CI (Cochlear Implant) is a medical device that electrically stimulates the hearing nerve in the cochlea (inner ear). Combined with actively training the hearing, it allows Cl-patients to hear again. In my research, I approached the model underlying the training programme linguistically, to see which theories on speech perception could also apply to the speech perception of CI-patients. Specifically, I examined their speech perception on phoneme level using VC-word lists. With the goal of contributing to an effective hearing training, I have tried to answer the following questions:- which phonemes are particularly difficult for patients?- what kind of confusions are made between phonemes?Mainly based on the literature on hard-of-hearing and normally hearing people, some hypotheses and a research question were formulated. Data-analysis was used to further investigate these hypotheses. A number of significant differences in difficulty were found between different phoneme categories, as well as patterns in the confusion of phonemes. It was found, for example, that long vowels are easier to perceive than short vowels and that for consonants a division can be made between plosives and fricatives on the one hand and nasals and approximants on the other, the latter group causing more problems. The research results are now being used for training CI-patients in Leiden.


Background: Sustainability of health interventions is a global concern, as program benefits are lost as soon as programs lose donor funding. An assessment of the Uganda Rural Water and Sanitation (RUWASA) project revealed that program gains can be sustained decades later. We analysed RUWASA implementation to draw sustainability lessons for maternal and child health interventions in Uganda. Methods: Administrative data from 1997 was combined with key informant interviews and focus group discussions in Kamuli and Pallisa undertaken in 2012. Data on borehole installation, coverage of safe water and latrine construction before and after the termination of the RUWASA project was obtained. Results: Latrine coverage increased from 24% (2001 project end) to 68% (2011) in Pallisa and from 60% (2001 project end) to 83% (2011) in Kamuli districts. Access to safe water increased from 7% (2001 project end) to 68% (2011) in Pallisa and from 38% (2005 project end) to 67% (2011) in Kamuli districts during RUWASA and after it was terminated. Factors crucial to the sustainability of the project included; involvement of communities, community contributions towards installation of the boreholes and mandatory prerequisite of installation of pit latrines by all households prior to borehole installation. Conclusions: Community engagement, contributions, use of structures and ownership of RUWASA was critical for the sustainability of the intervention. These are critical lessons for sustainability of maternal and child health programs.


A table-based method for high-speed function approximation in single-precision floating-point format is presented in this paper. Our focus is the approximation of reciprocal, square root, square root reciprocal, exponentials, logarithms, trigonometric functions, powering (with a fixed exponent p), or special functions. The algorithm presented here combines table look-up, an enhanced minimax quadratic approximation, and an efficient evaluation of the second-degree polynomial (using a specialized squaring unit, redundant arithmetic, and multioperand addition). The execution times and area costs of an architecture implementing our method are estimated, showing the achievement of the fast execution times of linear approximation methods and the reduced area requirements of other second-degree interpolation algorithms. Moreover, the use of an enhanced minimax approximation which, through an iterative process, takes into account the effect of rounding the polynomial coefficients to a finite size allows for a further reduction in the size of the look-up tables to be used, making our method very suitable for the implementation of an elementary function generator in state-of-the-art DSPs or graphics processing units (GPUs).


Fever is a temperature increasing because of microorganism or non microorganism which causes leucosit produced interleukin I/IL 1 (pirogen endogen) it can cause prostaglandin production in hipotalamus, which can increace temperature in order to became fever. Strawberry contain of
salucylate acid as antipyretic because salicylates can avoid the making prostaglandin the purpose of this research in to know the influence of strawberry juice. In somekind of dose at temperature decrasing of male rats and the dosa of strawberry juice which is more effective.
The research kinds is true experimental research,use the pretest posttest control group design 28 rats consist of 7 treatment group in four times treatment is the sample random sampling. This research use free variable that is strawberry juice dose, variable depend on rat temperature
decreasing.then control variable are sex of rat, age of rat, weight of rat, DPT vaccine dose, rat stable condition kinds of food and water for rat. Experiment planning use " rancangan acak lengkap" data analyzis use ANAVA and duncan's test.
Based on research result and variant analyzis result, it can conclude that "F hitung > F table" on 1 % signify level shows the influence of strawberry juice in some doses on rat temperature decreasing after 6 hours controlling oftemperatur decreasing.from the result of duncan's test.
Strawbeery juice 1 %dose. Goup 6 (16 ml/gr strawberry juice) is the most effective to decrease rat temperature to became normal temperature. Almost this result is not different with group B (pacetamol 0,083 mg/gr BB).
Research result show that after 6 hours consuming 16 ml/gr BB strawberry juice is affective as antipyretic to decrease temperature until normal. In the order hand, it need more research about toxic test and clinic test for bigger mammals than rat, for exsample rabbit, cat and volunteer to
know influence of strawberry juice for human of body. Finally it also need to do a research for leaves, rat and stem of strawberry as antiseptic.


The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-encoded Latent membrane proteins (LMP) 2A and LMP2B are frequently expressed in a number of EBV-associated malignancies. Although the true function of these proteins remains to be elucidated, LMP2A appears to function as a surrogate B-cell receptor in B-cells, preventing BCR signalling and ensuring viral latency. Much less is known about the function of these proteins in epithelial cells, although LMP2A has been shown to modulate Wnt/\(\beta\)-catenin, MAPK and PI3K/Akt signalling, whilst LMP2A and LMP2B have been shown to promote cell motility and to alter the turnover of certain classes of immune receptors. Viral infection of the host cell triggers the innate immune system to promote and sustain the initiation of an anti-viral state. Viruses have developed immune evasion strategies to counteract the effects of this immune response and to prevent recognition of viral antigens by the adaptive immune response. Here novel functions for LMP2A and LMP2B are described with respect to modulation of innate immunity, findings which have implications for the role of these proteins in EBV-driven oncogenesis. The first wave of the innate immune response is mediated by Toll-like receptors (TLRs), a family of PAMP receptors that transduce signals to activate the type I interferon response. Findings presented here show that LMP2A attenuates signalling from a number of these receptors in response to TLR agonist stimulation. These data were observed only in LMP2A expressing cells while those expressing LMP2B showed no alteration of TLR signalling, indicating that the amino-terminal signalling domain of LMP2A controls these functions. Preliminary findings have also identified a role for LMP2A and LMP2B in the control of vesicular trafficking, with both proteins increasing endosomal-lysosomal trafficking and lysosomal acidification, an effect that important for degradation and turnover of receptors. These data present novel mechanisms by which EBV may evade immune responses and in doing so, contribute to the progression of the EBV-associated epithelial cell malignancy, NPC.


During the last decade, lisianthus (Eustoma grandiflorum) has been introduced in Iran in the horticultural cut-flower industry. This crop is currently produced in more than 800 small greenhouses on a surface of an estimated 0.8 km2 in the Pakdasht region (southeast of Teheran Province). Plants exhibiting virus-like symptoms were observed in several greenhouses in 2010. The infected plants produced yellow and necrotic spots on the leaves and became severely deformed because of a strong leaf curling and the production of shorter internodes. Flower breaking has not been observed in the blue flowering plants. Approximately 85% of the plants were apparently infected in the inspected greenhouses. Extracts of infected material inoculated onto some indicator plant species induced mosaic and leaf malformation on Nicotiana benthamiana, mottling on Capsicum annuum, necrotic lesions on Datura stramonium, chlorotic local spots on Vigna unguiculata, systemic necrotic spots on Emilia sonchifolia, chlorotic local spots on Cucumis sativus, and necrotic local lesions on Petunia hybrida. Back-inoculation of infected material on lisianthus seedlings resulted in several chlorotic spots on the inoculated leaves and a severe downward curling of the systemic infected leaves. No symptoms were observed after inoculation of Pisum sativum, Phaseolus vulgaris, Vicia faba, and Chrysanthemum spp. The virus could also be transferred from infected to healthy N. benthamiana plants by pricking leaves with a Pasteur pipette. Spherical tombusvirus-like particles of approximately 29 nm were found by transmission electron microscopy in leaf-dip and partially-purified preparations of infected N. benthamiana. Since Tomato bushy stunt virus (TBSV; genus Tombusvirus, family Tombusviridae) and Moroccan pepper virus (MPV) have been found in Iran, we studied by using ELISA whether our samples matched with TBSV. Since a negative response was obtained, two primers were designed on the basis of the available sequences of the coat protein in the GenBank (Accession No. EU27780) of an MPV isolate from soil in Fars Province, Iran. A reverse transcription (RT)-PCR of total RNA extract from infected lisianthus and N. benthamiana with the primers MPV-R (5'-TTACAACAATGTGGCATCATTG-3') and MPV-F (5'-ATGGCAATGGTAGTAAG AAAC-3') resulted in a DNA fragment of 1,176 bp. This fragment from N. benthamiana was cloned, sequenced (Accession No. HQ663881), and showed a 96% nucleotide and 99% amino acid identity with the coat protein of the soil isolate. MPV was originally found in pepper (1), tomato and pelargonium (4), pear tree (3), and surface water (2). To our knowledge, this is the first report of MPV on lisianthus in Iran and worldwide. This virus, which persists in soil, water, and plant debris, can be considered as a substantial threat for the lisianthus industry in Iran because farmers do not apply strict crop rotation or other sanitation measures. References: (1) H. U. Fischer and B. E. L. Lockhart. Phytopathology 67:1352, 1977. (2) R. Koenig and D.-E. Lesemann. Phytopathol. Z. 112:105, 1985. (3) M. Russo et al. J. Plant Pathol. 84:161, 2002. (4) H. J. Vetten and R. Koenig. 108:215, 1983.


Abstract In most documented occurrences, violarite (FeNi2S4) occurs as a product of the supergene alteration of primary pentlandite or millerite. Earlier experimental phase relations studies predicted the possible existence of a stable violarite-pentlandite tie line, though there has been little field evidence supporting this hypothesis, and the preferred topology in the Ni-Fe-S system involves a pyrite-millerite tie line. This paper documents the occurrence of violarite-pentlandite±pyrite assemblages which, on the basis of mineral chemistry and textural evidence, appear to be hypogene. Primary cobaltian violarite (with 2.1− 13.2 wt.% Co) occurs as lamellae in pentlandite in the MKD5 nickel sulphide orebody at Mount Keith, central Western Australia. These lamellae are interpreted to be of exsolution origin. Cobalt is preferentially partitioned into violarite, resulting in high Ni:Co ratios in the associated pentlandite relative to pentlandite in violarite-free assemblages. Hypogene violarite-millerite±pentlandite assemblages were also noted. In all hypogene assemblages, violarite differs in both textural and mineral chemical characteristics from supergene violarite from the upper portions of the MKD5 orebody. The implications of the assemblages for the known low-temperature phase relations in the Ni- Fe-S-(Co) system are discussed.


We present 3DP3, a framework for inverse graphics that uses inference in a structured generative model of objects, scenes, and images. 3DP3 uses (i) voxel models to represent the 3D shape of objects, (ii) hierarchical scene graphs to decompose scenes into objects and the contacts between them, and (iii) depth image likelihoods based on real-time graphics. Given an observed RGB-D image, 3DP3's inference algorithm infers the underlying latent 3D scene, including the object poses and a parsimonious joint parametrization of these poses, using fast bottom-up pose proposals, novel involutive MCMC updates of the scene graph structure, and, optionally, neural object detectors and pose estimators. We show that 3DP3 enables scene understanding that is aware of 3D shape, occlusion, and contact structure. Our results demonstrate that 3DP3 is more accurate at 6DoF object pose estimation from real images than deep learning baselines and shows better generalization to challenging scenes with novel viewpoints, contact, and partial observability.


Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers play an important role in the ethics and governance of AI, including through their work, advocacy, and choice of employment. Nevertheless, this influential group's attitudes are not well understood, undermining our ability to discern consensuses or disagreements between AI/ML researchers. To examine these researchers' views, we conducted a survey of those who published in two top AI/ML conferences (N = 524). We compare these results with those from a 2016 survey of AI/ML researchers and a 2018 survey of the US public. We find that AI/ML researchers place high levels of trust in international organizations and scientific organizations to shape the development and use of AI in the public interest; moderate trust in most Western tech companies; and low trust in national militaries, Chinese tech companies, and Facebook. While the respondents were overwhelmingly opposed to AI/ML researchers working on lethal autonomous weapons, they are less opposed to researchers working on other military applications of AI, particularly logistics algorithms. A strong majority of respondents think that AI safety research should be prioritized more and a majority that ML institutions should conduct pre-publication review to assess potential harms. Being closer to the technology itself, AI/ML researchers are well placed to highlight new risks and develop technical solutions, so this novel data has broad relevance. The findings should help to improve how researchers, private sector executives, and policymakers think about regulations, governance frameworks, guiding principles, and national and international governance strategies for AI.


We examined the coverage given by General Psychology textbooks, representing 8 major commercial publishers, regarding the professions of psychology, counseling, marriage & family therapy, and social workers. Of the 24 textbooks assessed, we found substantial bias favoring the coverage of psychology. While 25% of the texts mentioned social workers, there was relatively little attention given to professional counselors or marriage & family therapists. A case is made for more parity to be shown for a larger cross-section of professions in these texts--since General Psychology courses tend to hold some measure of gate-keeping exposure for the human service professions. ********** The human service professions have a sordid history relative to collaboration (Schmitt, 2001). This partly relates to their history, with psychology deriving itself first from philosophy and then the hard sciences (Hunt, 1993), whereas counseling emerged from the American guidance movement, following World War II (Capuzzi & Gross, 1997; Nowlin, 2006). Social work sketches a separate family tree, tracing its roots to caring for the poor, indigent, and immigrants at the turn of the century who were mistreated or needed advocacy in society (Barker, 1998). Marriage & family therapy largely was derived eclectically from behavioral and cognitive psychology, with many of the original founders being psychoanalytically trained (Gurman & Fraenkel, 2002). Although all the professions share much in common, they also possess differences that bear unique emphases for training, supervision, and practice. Traditional clinical psychologists have advocated a historic scientist-practitioner model of the profession (Albee, 2000)--whereas counselors, marriage & family therapists, and social workers--comparatively, are more practice-oriented (Booth & Cottone, 2000; Houston, 2005). Psychologists often are considered the leading profession, since they require the doctoral degree as the entry-level credential for state licensure. The other helping professions require only a master's degree for independent practice. Inter-professional collaborative efforts have not generally been strong between the main human service professions (Goldin, 1997). Weigle (1977) notes that the 1970's became a period when increased conflicts among the professions arose, mostly due to licensure laws being passed by the states for the respective professions. Randolph (1988) labeled the mental health community organizations as their own worst enemies in this regard. This largely is because of the inter-professional squabbles and sometimes outright hostility that exists between the groups--often expressed in the open media. Goodyear (2000) indicates that the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 began the modern tension and that the professions had relatively little conflict prior to that time, compared to present quarrels. This act provided federal funds for reimbursing the fees of particular mental health professionals. As this act has been updated over time, and insurance companies heavily have weighed-in on the matter, the contention has grown worse--not better. Irvine, Kerridge, McPhee, and Freeman (2002) concluded: "Conflicts over authority, power, control, and jurisdiction pose an undeniable barrier to effective collaboration and teamwork, particularly when occupational groups attempt to defend activities that are thought to be strategic to the maintenance of their professional identity" (p. 204). Cummings (1990) notes further evidence of battles between these professional organizations vis-a-vis the Joint Commission on Interprofessional Affairs (JCIA) in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Although the organization was initiated to encourage cooperation among various mental health organizations, they chose to include only four major professions: psychiatry, psychology, social work, and psychiatric nursing. …


Maintaining the current course of the global society is threatening the human civilization. The urgency of the situation, understood from empirical research, has caused many researchers to call for more prescriptive research as a necessary supplement, to better support decision making for sustainability. While policymakers need to direct and stimulate sustainable production and consumption through, e.g., legislation and market phenomena such as eco-labelling, business represents a significant proportion of the necessary resources, capabilities and mechanisms for the innovation needed for a transition towards sustainability. However, while businesses more and more realize the self-interest in working proactively with sustainability, there is a desire for better support for how to do this also from this end. Such support needs to consider a significant shift going on in business; that individual businesses tend to no longer compete as autonomous entities, but rather as supply chains. Thus, no company is more sustainable than its supply chain partners. Therefore, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) as a business function, and sustainable procurement as a subset thereof, plays an increasingly pivotal role for sustainable development. The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to sustainable development by studying how three phenomena; eco-labelling, procurement and supply chain management are related to each other and to a strategic sustainability perspective, and to suggest how these phenomena can be integrated with such a perspective to provide better support for decision making and innovation for sustainability. For this purpose, a framework for strategic sustainable development, including a definition of sustainability and generic guidelines to inform stepwise strategic plans towards sustainability, is used as a foundational methodology. The development of new approaches is also based on case studies with eco-labelling and sustainable public procurement bodies, businesses and public institutions. Information is collected by shadowing of criteria development and collaboration processes, interviews and literature studies. While the findings point to a clear rational for all of the phenomena and several strengths in existing schemes and practices, the findings also point to several shortcomings. Sustainability is not defined, and as a result, there is no foundation for strategic and proactive approaches. Furthermore, decisions are not based on considerations of all dimensions of sustainability, the whole life cycle of products, all relevant stakeholders and a long-term perspective. As a result, the full potential of these phenomena for contributing to sustainable development is not utilized. This thesis prescribes enhanced processes for eco-labelling, sustainable procurement and SSCM, and shows how these can support organisations in developing from reacting individually on known sustainability-related problems to acting proactively and collaboratively in supply chains, in a coordinated and economically viable way, on society's remaining gap to the full scope of ecological and social sustainability.


Using longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey (2001-2013) we examine the relationship between the dynamics of work-limiting disability and employment, hours of work, earnings and life satisfaction. We employ two alternative classifications of the dynamic trajectories of disability and, in doing so, are able to explicitly consider the influence of disability exit in addition to examining onset by chronicity and severity. After controlling for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find that the positive impact of disability exit is smaller in magnitude and shorter-lived than the negative impact of onset. Further, while individuals are found to recover from a one period disability within three years, there is no sign of adaptation even after ten years for those whose disability is chronic, defined as evident for three or more years post-onset, and severe.


The emergence of digital mobile broadband communication systems for voice, data, multimedia and positioning is coupled to the continuous progress of silicon CMOS-technology. Single chip integration with digital part, high integration density, low power consumption, low cost under mass production aspects and excellent RF performance are the current system design challenges. This paper focuses on design issues of classical RF-transceiver function blocks like LNAs, PAs, VCOs and mixers in context with multimode-/ multiband- SoC challenges. State of the art achievements are presented and an outlook on future RF-CMOS integration trends is given.


This article proposes that certain laws or forms of law can be characterized as "postmodern" because they, like their counterparts in literature or architecture, share similar attributes. Consistent with postmodernism's rejection of modernism, these laws appear to defy the modernist attributes of unitary core principles or singular meaning and stasis. Instead, these postmodern laws are: fragmentary, decentralized, uncertain and allow a multiplicity of interpretations; they reject master-narratives and embrace paradox; they are grounded or rooted in daily life; and are also connected to the internet, cyber-space and high technology. The identification and characterization of certain laws as "postmodern" have the paradoxical modernist effect of reducing or "normalizing" such otherwise uncertain law. More practically, however, this labeling, which is a modernist act, creates a normative tool for bridging the postmodern and modern. A shared dialogue can emerge where this new form of "postmodern law" can be identified, appreciated, critiqued, and placed in an historic context.The use of "postmodern" as a label also keeps the concept of postmodernism alive at a time when members of the academy have called it dead or passe. Far from being dead, postmodernism is deeply entrenched in the law's lexicon and culture, much in the same way it is widely used and embedded in popular culture. To pretend it is dead or insignificant restricts the legal academy's ability to acknowledge postmodernism's contribution to the academy and its usefulness as a tool in both practice and theory.In this article, the label "postmodern" is applied, as an example, to the privacy law that has emerged from the Safe Harbor Agreement between the United States and the European Union and which arose out of the EU Privacy Directive. By viewing the Agreement as a "postmodern law", the weaknesses of the law from a modernist perspective are exposed, but its strengths, from a postmodernist and pragmatic perspective, can be appreciated. This article also applies the label to computer code that is deemed a form of law by scholars such as Lawrence Lessig. The label "postmodern" applied to code, highlights this "law's" ontological uncertainty and allusiveness under more traditional and modern definitions of law. It is the paradox of these laws being flexible and adaptable while simultaneously being normative that makes the postmodernist aspect of these laws valuable. In this postmodern era of technology and cyberspace, a postmodern law such as the Safe Harbor Agreement, is likely to be the model for future legal regimes that can be flexible, dynamic, evolving, and multifaceted while still providing for the normative needs of regulation in the emerging global legal system.


The Internet — specifically its graphic interface, the World Wide Web — has had a major impact on all levels of (information) societies throughout the world. For media professionals whose work has primarily been defined as creative storytelling — whether in advertising, journalism, public relations or related fields — this poses fascinating opportunities as well as vexing dilemmas. The central question seems to be to what extent storytelling can be content– or connectivity–based, and what level of participation can or should be included in the narrative experience. Although these two issues have been part of creative decision–making processes in media work before the Web, new technologies of production, distribution and communication are 'supercharging' them as the central dilemmas in the contemporary media ecosystem. This paper discusses the history and contemporary examples of media work combining various elements of storytelling as a hybrid form between content and connectivity, and considers the normative and economical implications for the professional identity of media workers in journalism and advertising.


A number of studies have long shown that the probability of studying at university is influenced by the distance to the next university. This study shows for the first time that distance to university also influences the choice of subject/faculty and institution. Moreover, these findings are important because the distance effect in terms of these decisions is associated with significantly less risk of endogeneity than the effect in the analysis of the willingness and ambition to attend university. The results also show that distance does not influence study choices among students from the highest socioeconomic group, a finding that further indicates that distance to university is an expression of differences in the cost of a university education.


The aim of this colloquium is to gather the European scientific community to exchange on recent developments regarding the coupling mechanisms in granular fluid-flows at different scales, from that of the single grains to that of the mesoscopic deformation of an assembly of grains. A specific attention is to be paid on the two types of granular transport mostly encountered in geophysical and industrial applications, namely granular-fluid flows induced by gravity and/or shearing fluid on top of grains. Contributions should help at improving our knowledge on (i) the coupling mechanisms between grains and the surrounding fluid, and/or (ii) the multiscale modelling of granular-fluid flows for geophysical and industrial purposes. Web Site


Background: Various anatomical measurements and noninvasive clinical tests, singly or in various combinations can be performed to predict difficult intubation. Upper lip bite test (ULBT) and ratio of height to thyromental distance (RHTMD) are claimed to have high predictability. Hence, we have conducted this study to compare the predictive value of ULBT and RHTMD with the following parameters: Mallampati grading, inter-incisor gap, thyromental distance, sternomental distance, head and neck movements, and horizontal length of mandible for predicting difficult intubation. Materials and Methods: In this single blinded, prospective, observational study involving 170 adult patients of either sex belonging to American Society of Anesthesiologists physical Status I–III scheduled to undergo general anesthesia were recruited. All patients were subjected to the preoperative airway assessment and, the above parameters were recorded correlated with Cormack and Lehane grade and analyzed. The number of intubation attempts and use of intubation aids were also noted. Results: ULBT and RHTMD had highest sensitivity (96.64%, 90.72%), specificity (82.35%, 80.39%), positive predictive value (92.74%, 91.53%), and negative predictive value (91.3%, 78.8%), respectively, compared to other parameters. While odds ratio and likelihood ratio >1 for all the tests. Conclusion: ULBT can be used as a simple bedside screening test for prediction of difficult intubation, but it should be combined with other airway assessment tests for better airway predictability. RHTMD can also be used as an acceptable alternative.


With the ongoing release of 3D movies and the emergence of 3D TVs, 3D imaging technologies have penetrated our daily lives. Yet choosing from the numerous 3D vision methods available can be frustrating for scientists and engineers, especially without a comprehensive resource to consult. Filling this gap, Handbook of 3D Machine Vision: Optical Metrology and Imaging gives an extensive, in-depth look at the most popular 3D imaging techniques. It focuses on noninvasive, noncontact optical methods (optical metrology and imaging). The handbook begins with the well-studied method of stereo vision and explains how random speckle patterns or space-time varying patterns substantially improve the results of stereo vision. It then discusses stereo particle image velocimetry as a major experimental means in fluid dynamics, the robust and easy-to-implement structured-light technique for computer science applications, digital holography for performing micro- to nanoscale measurements, and grating, interferometry, and fringe projection techniques for precisely measuring dynamically deformable natural objects. The book goes on to describe techniques that do not require triangulation to recover a 3D shape, including time-of-flight techniques and uniaxial 3D shape measurement, as well as 3D measurement techniques that are not restricted to surface capture, such as 3D ultrasound, optical coherence tomography, and 3D endoscopy. The book also explores how novel 3D imaging techniques are being applied in the promising field of biometricswhich may prove essential to security and public safety. Written by key players in the field and inventors of important imaging technologies, this authoritative, state-of-the-art handbook helps you understand the core of 3D imaging technology and choose the proper 3D imaging technique for your needs. For each technique, the book provides its mathematical foundations, summarizes its successful applications, and discusses its limitations.


As diseased shellfish show only very seldom symptoms, any mortality event can be a disease suspicion. In theory, monitoring of mortality events in shellfish can thus provide a tool for early detection of infectious diseases in order to implement effective control measures. This consists in passive mortality event reporting by shellfish farmers to the local competent authority. Sensitivity of the detection of mortality events is a key quality indicator for this type of surveillance. Since 2008, increased mortality outbreaks occur in Pacific oysters Crassostrea gigas in France, leading to economic losses. It is important to evaluate how much the outbreaks have altered the quality indicators of the reporting system and if this modification is long-standing, to achieve an effective early detection tool. The yearly evolution of sensitivity of the passive farmer reporting was estimated during 2007-2010 in the main oyster production area in France, using a capture-recapture analysis and accounting for unequal catchability. Information on mortality events were obtained from existing annual databases of mandatory mortality reporting (capture) and from a questionnaire-based cross-sectional survey conducted in 2010 as part of larger study of oyster mortalities (recapture). Sensitivity significantly varied according to the year, from 0.55 (CI95% 0.31-1.00) to 0.76 (CI95% 0.64-0.93), 0.53 (CI95% 0.43-0.71) and 0.72 (CI95% 0.59-0.92) in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, respectively. Important under-reporting was observed in 2007. Sensitivity increased concurrently with outbreaks occurrence and with implementation of financial incentive for mortality reporting. The achieved completeness was satisfactory. However, bottlenecks for reporting or solutions to facilitate reporting have to be identified to improve sensitivity of the reporting system on a long term period, whatever the epidemiological situation is.


The structural characteristics of cement mortars, impregnated with nano silica (NS), silica fume (SF) and fly ash (FA), were comparatively studied using Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR), thermogravimeter-differential thermogravimeter (TG-DTG) and scanning electron microscope (SEM). The mechanical strengths of the specimens were determined at early (7th day) and standard (28th day) curing ages. The compressive strengths and flexural strengths developed in the mortar specimens containing NS particles were found considerably higher than those of the corresponding specimens of SF and FA over and above the control at both ages. FTIR, TG-DTG and SEM analyses results were consistent with the remarkable increase in the mechanical strength of the mortars with NS. These increases in the strengths of the mortars with NS are attributable to the nano sized particles and extensive surface area of NS. The nano sized particles, as nucleating agents, promoted the hydration of C3S and C2S and the formation of C - S - H phase. Plenty of active sites on the surface of NS particles induced their pozzolanic reactivity and the extent of bond formation between NS particles and free CH.


In May 2008 the EUCAARI-LONGREX aircraft field campaign was conducted within the EUCAARI intensive observational period. The campaign aimed at studying the distribution and evolution of air mass properties on a continental scale. Airborne aerosol and trace gas measurements were performed aboard the German DLR Falcon 20 and the British FAAM B.4e-146 aircraft. This paper outlines the meteorological situation over Europe during May 2008 and the temporal and spatial evolution of predominantly anthropogenic particulate pollution inside the boundary layer and the free troposphere. Time series data of six selected ground stations are used to discuss continuous measurements besides the single flights. The observations encompass total and accumulation mode particle number concentration (0.1-0.8 mu m) and black carbon mass concentration as well as several meteorological parameters. Vertical profiles of total aerosol number concentration up to 10 km are compared to vertical profiles probed during previous studies. During the first half of May 2008 an anticyclonic blocking event dominated the weather over Central Europe. It led to increased pollutant concentrations within the centre of the high pressure inside the boundary layer. Due to long-range transport the accumulated pollution was partly advected towards Western and Northern Europe. The measured aerosol number concentrations over Central Europe showed in the boundary layer high values up to 14 000 cm(-3) for particles in diameter larger 10 nm and 2300 cm(-3) for accumulation mode particles during the high pressure period, whereas the middle free troposphere showed rather low concentrations of particulates. Thus a strong negative gradient of aerosol concentrations between the well mixed boundary layer and the clean middle troposphere occurred.


As universities look to provide more access and increase the level of participation in their international education curricula, the focus on international experiences at home has intensified. However, extremely little research has been conducted on the factors associated with participation in these forms of experiences. The purpose of this study was to address this lack of research by identifying factors that influence university students' participation in a broad scope of internationally-themed experiences. The study was designed to identify significant factors that indicate the influence of habitus, rational cost-benefit analysis, and the context of the student within the university on a student's likelihood of participating in international experiences while at a university. Results from an on-line questionnaire survey of students at a large research university in the United States (n=422) were analysed through cross-tabulations and logistic regression analysis. The findings of this study indicate that the importance that students perceive participation has in achieving their goals, their participation in other cultural and travel experiences, their financial status, and their field of study are significantly associated with participation in international experiences. The findings support the work by Perna (2006), Salisbury et al. (2009), and Glaesser and Cooper (2013) that argue that habitus, rational action, and the context of the student within the university work in conjunction to influence a student's educational choices and outcomes. Given that factors such as race, financial status, and field of study showed differing associations with the two outcomes of participation in abroad and at home international experiences, this study suggests that international at home experiences provide an opportunity for universities to establish international experiences that are more accessible to students that typically do not study abroad.


Elvis Presley's television debut in January 1956 is often cited as the moment when popular music and television came together. Murray Forman challenges that contention, revealing popular music as crucial to television years before Presley's sensational small-screen performances. Drawing on trade and popular journalism, internal television and music industry documents, and records of audience feedback, Forman provides a detailed history of the incorporation of musical performances into TV programming during the medium's formative years, from 1948 to 1955. He examines how executives in the music and television industries understood and responded to the convergence of the two media; how celebrity musicians such as Vaughn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Fred Waring struggled to adjust to television; and how relative unknowns with an intuitive feel for the medium were sometimes catapulted to stardom. Forman argues that early television production influenced the aesthetics of musical performance in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those of emerging musical styles such as rock and roll. At the same time, popular music helped to shape the nascent medium of television—its technologies, program formats, and industry structures. Popular music performances were essential to the allure and success of TV in its early years.


Introduction: Intellectual disability or intellectual retardation is a condition in which total mental functioning is distinctively below average and there are disabilities in adaptive behaviors during growth. According to the definition of American Mental Disability Community in 1992 a person is considered intellectually disabled if he or she has an IQ (intelligence quotient) of less than 70 and has a limitation in one or multiple adaptive skills. There are many different causes of intellectual disability that one of them is the genetically and chromosomal abnormalities. The aim of this paper was to study translocation breakout t (1; 4) (p21; p14) in a number of mental retardation patients in Iran. Materials and methods: This descriptive study was carried out on 100 persons with light mental disability by using cytogenetic methods. Lymphocytes were cultured in the dedicated environment by G-Banding karyotype of each person after obtaining patient's blood sample. The data were statistically analyzed by logistic regression. Results: The findings showed that none of the patients with a mental disability was afflicted to the chromosomal translocation, (1; 4) (p21; p14). Conclusion: The lack of translocation in this study was equivalent with the obtained frequency in the same studies which have been carried out on the subjects suspected to have a translocation. Also, it seems that chromosomal analysis may be a usefulness diagnostic tool for children with mental retardation.


Within the academy, science and theories have historically been constructed in ways that maintain and privilege the centrality, superiority, legitimacy and universality of western thinking as 'regimes of truth'. The theoretical value of indigenous theories and science has often been denied because theorizing has been evaluated on the premise that western academic epistemologies and paradigms are the most relevant for teaching and for conducting researching in higher education. Indigenous scholars/researchers and students have been questioning these assumptions, and in the past fifteen years or so, opportunities for establishing the Kaupapa Maori Theory (KMT) in New Zealand and eZiko Sipheka Sisophula (eZiko for short) theoretical framework in South Africa have emerged. These are both rooted in indigenous worldviews, philosophical foundations, cultural values and languages, and have relevance for teaching and researching for the improvement of the quality of lives within indigenous contexts. The purpose of this philosophical exposition is to first provide an introduction and background information; a historical overview of the construction of western-based scientific knowledge as 'regimes of truth;' pioneers and pathfinders for cultural freedom of African minds; an exposition of eZiko Sipheka Sisophula theoretical framework; commonalities between (KMT and eZiko) and present seven pillars of eZiko and illustrate their methodological implications for teaching, researching and community engagement practices within indigenous contexts.


Background: The yeast strain IB09 was isolated from the gut of Calosoma sp. (Carabidae, Coleoptera, Insecta) that were collected in the central Amazon rainforest. First, tolerance of the strain to ethanol and heat was tested. Then, IB09 was cultivated in a medium using sugarcane bagasse hemicellulosic hydrolyzate as a carbon source, and cell growth (OD 600 ), specific growth rate (µ MAX , h -1 ), biomass yield (Y B , g.g -1 ) and relative sugar consumption (RSC, %) were evaluated. Taxonomic identification was determined by sequencing the ITS1 region of IB09 and comparing it to sequences obtained from the GenBank database (NCBI). Results: IB09 showed both ethanol tolerance and thermotolerance. Relative sugar consumption indicated that IB09 was able to perform saccharification of sugarcane bagasse hemicellulosic hydrolyzate, increasing the total reducing sugar concentration by approximately 50%. The μ MAX value obtained was 0,20, indicating that cell growth was slow under the assessed conditions. Biomass yield was 0,701 g per g of consumed sugar, which is relatively high when compared with other findings in the literature. After 120 hrs of cultivation, 80,1% of total reducing sugar had been consumed. Sequencing of the ITS1 region identified IB09 as Trichosporon mycotoxinivorans . Conclusion: This is the first report to document this species in the central Amazon rainforest at this host. Trichosporon mycotoxinivorans has great biotechnological potential for use in the saccharification of sugarcane bagasse hemicellulosic hydrolyzate and for biomass production with this substrate as carbon source.


We propose a new design for large-scale multimedia content protection systems. Our design leverages cloud infrastructures to provide cost efficiency, rapid deployment, scalability, and elasticity to accommodate varying workloads. The proposed system can be used to protect different multimedia content types, including videos, images, audio clips, songs, and music clips. The system can be deployed on private and/or public clouds. Our system has two novel components: (i) method to create signatures of videos, and (ii) distributed matching engine for multimedia objects. The signature method creates robust and representative signatures of videos that capture the depth signals in these videos and it is computationally efficient to compute and compare as well as it requires small storage. The distributed matching engine achieves high scalability and it is designed to support different multimedia objects. We implemented the proposed system and deployed it on two clouds: Amazon cloud and our private cloud. Our experiments with more than 11,000 videos and 1 million images show the high accuracy and scalability of the proposed system. In addition, we compared our system to the protection system used by YouTube and our results show that the YouTube protection system fails to detect most copies of videos, while our system detects more than 98% of them.


This qualitative, interdisciplinary research study explores the experiences of women abused by their intimate partners who appear as litigants in family court proceedings in Ontario, and the responses of judges presiding over those proceedings. Domestic violence and abuse affects families from all social, economic and cultural groups. Women have been overwhelmingly identified as the victims of domestic violence and abuse. Children exposed to domestic violence and abuse, either directly or indirectly, are also negatively impacted. The term "woman abuse" has been employed to denote the gendered nature of the phenomena. Studies of abused women's interactions with the legal system across common law jurisdictions have found that abused women are usually dissatisfied with the legal response to domestic violence and abuse. The extant literature examining the experiences of abused women in family court proceedings has revealed that abused women appearing as litigants in family courts do not think that their stories of domestic violence and abuse are believed, and, consequently, they do not obtain the legal relief they seek. This dissertation combines law and legal research with sociological methodologies within a feminist epistemological framework in a phenomenological study of abused women's experiences in the family courts of Ontario. Employing grounded theory, the narratives of abused women are analyzed to provide a thematic rubric from which questions were derived to pose to judges to explore their understanding of the nature of woman abuse and the impact of the phenomena of domestic violence and abuse on abused women and their children. Judges' narratives were also analyzed using grounded theory. Critical discourse analysis was used to analyse relevant case law. A comparative critical analysis was undertaken to identify any disconnects in intersubjective understanding of the phenomena of domestic violence and abuse between abused women and the judiciary.


We propose a modular approach to paraphrase and entailment-rule learning that addresses the morphosyntactic variability of lexical-syntactic templates. Using an entailment module that captures generic morpho-syntactic regularities, we transform every identified template into a canonical form. This way, statistics from different template variations are accumulated for a single template form. Additionally, morpho-syntactic redundant rules are not acquired. This scheme also yields more informative evaluation for the acquisition quality, since the bias towards rules with many frequent variations is avoided.


Despite temporary migration programmes (TMPs) being heralded as achieving a triple win – whereby the host state, the sending state and the migrants themselves all benefit – the UK government has now terminated all such programmes, including the long- standing Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS). At the same time, TMPs have been heavily criticised by both the academic and policy sectors, as they tie workers to employers in rigid ways and lack integration measures. This paper reviews the SAWS scheme, including the policy evolution of the programme and the reasons for the closure. We argue that the government is inflicting a multiple loss scenario, whereby permanent immigration may increase, labour market shortages will be rife, remittances and skills transfers will be lost, and irregular immigration and in turn exploitation of migrant worker rights may be exacerbated. Whilst the policy design of SAWS was far from perfect, we argue that a modified version, targeting agricultural students, should be retained, which could restore the triple-win scenario.


With an increasing life expectancy and a decreasing reproduction rate, the population structure changes. A Jenapharm R & D program investigates the endocrinology of aging men. In men, a decrease in production of sex steroids and other hormones with age can be observed. The typical patterns of daily rhythmicity become less distinct. This is part of a very complex picture in which not only isolated hormones are involved, but also the influence of hormones on each other. Many factors from the external and intemal environment mediated by neurotransmitters constantly affect the highly sensitive hormonal balance. Therefore, aging has also been defined as "the gradual dysfunction of homeostatic processes". Declining testosterone (T) levels are involved in 'andropausal' symptoms in men: loss of libido, erectile dysfunction, insulin receptor resistance, obesity, osteoporosis, disturbances of lipid metabolism, myocardial and circulatory disturbances, impaired well-being and mood. Data are derived from studies in hypogonadal men treated by T replacement. In such parients under T treatment libido increases, fat mass decreases, muscle strenth, bone mineral density and erythropoesis increase. Whether the symptoms of andropause in aging men could successfully be treated by T substitution remains to be investigated. Negative effects of T, especially on the prostate and the cardiovascular system, are under discussion. There is increasing evidence that low T levels seem to be a risk factor for both the prostate and the cardiovascular system. Jenapharm's new testosterone undecanoate formulation for intramuscular injection can be administered every three months. T levels remain within the physiologic range. No supraphysiologic peaks occur. In women, estrogens have beneficial non-genital effects. Studies concentrate on synthetic estrogens for men without feminizing properties such as gynecomastia and reduced testicular size. Several derivatives of 17- alpha estradiol have been synthesized some of which show selectivity for the central nervous system. CNS effects have been demonstrated in female and male animals. Cardiovascular protection by estrogens has been shown in animal and human studies. Atherosclerotic plaque size was reduced after estrogen injections in cholesterol-fed rabbits. Phytoestrogen-fed monkeys had lower total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol and higher HDL cholesterol. Apart from atherosclerotic lesions, coronary artery vascular reactivity was improved. Some of these experimental findings were confirmed in human studies in postmenopausal women with and without estrogen treatment. Whether all of the described estrogenic effects can be seen in men remains to be investigated. (Med J Indones 2001; 10: 127-33) Keywords : aging, andropause, testosterone, estrogens


Background: Facebook has become one of the most popular advertising platforms on social media. It is therefore important for social media marketers and researchers to have an understanding of the predictors of Facebook users' engagement with Facebook advertising across all brands and Facebook advertising types. Objectives: This study aimed to determine whether the theory of planned behaviour could be applied to understand and predict engagement with Facebook advertising. Method: Non-probability convenience sampling resulted in a sample size of 656 Facebook users above the age of 18 who resided in South Africa. The data collected by means of an online survey were analysed using regression analyses. Results: The findings indicated that attitude was the strongest predictor of behavioural intention to engage with Facebook advertising, followed by subjective norms. However, perceived behavioural control was found not to be a significant predictor of behavioural intention to engage with Facebook advertising. Furthermore, behavioural intention to engage with Facebook advertising was found to predict actual engagement. Conclusion: Social media marketers need to focus on influencing attitudes and subjective norms to increase engagement with their Facebook advertisements. Furthermore, the theory of reasoned action was found to be more appropriate to predict engagement with Facebook advertising, as it excludes perceived behavioural control.


Problem statement: An accurate knowledge of geographic positions of sonobuoys is critical for the conduct of antisubmarine warfare operations and detected target localization. Deployed from an airborne platform or a surface vessel, arrays of sonobuoys could be used to efficiently track and localize submarines. Lastly, some sonobuoys were being equipped with GPS for improving system accuracy and potentially allowing networked Sonobuoy positioning. However, the computation of the range using the propagation loss profile and the data of one sonobuoy usually leads to inaccurate target localization due to several effects and uncertainties. It was, alternatively, reported that if the target is within the detection rage of two or more sonobuoys, greatly improved target localization can be achieved. Approach: Aim of this research was to investigate the feasibility of fusing data from a distributed field of GPS sonobuoys to create an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based model for the error of the range computation in case of the target being detected by only one sonobuoy. Proposed module was designed utilizing Adaptive Neuron-Fuzzy Inference Systems (ANFIS) to estimate the range error associated with the computation using the propagation loss profile when the target is within the detection range of only one sonobuoy. The architecture of the proposed ANFIS system had two unique features. First was the real-time cross-validation applied during the update (training) procedure of the ANFIS-based module while the target was detected by two sonobuoys and the range was computed. Second feature was the use of non-overlapping and moving window for the real-time implementation of the ANFIS-based data fusion module. Results: Performance of the proposed system was examined with simulation data considering different scenarios for both the array of GPS sonobuoys and the target. Results showed that the corrected positioning by one sonobuoy is completely following the positioning by two sonobuoys over the entire experiment with the error in between evaluated to have RMSE value of 0.004 Nm and 0.008 for both scenarios. Conclusion: These results revealed that with aided from the proposed ANFIS model; significant enhancements to the underwater target tracking accuracy in cases of single sonobuoy detection could be achieved and thus maintaining consistent levels of accuracy over the whole tracking mission.


Using a survey of Dutch households, we find that individuals who have experienced higher national unemployment rates over their lifetime save more and borrow less, after controlling for aggregate shocks, income, wealth, and demographics. These results are consistent with experience-based learning and inconsistent with rational learning. Furthermore, these individuals find it more important to save for retirement and are more worried about losing their job. These observations suggest that periods of high unemployment depress aggregate demand because of persistently more pessimistic beliefs.


Abstract In December, 1995, when Hamas announced the establishment of the Islamic National Salvation Party, a political organisation separate from its military wing, it opened the way for involvement of the Islamic movement in the political processes brought about in the West Bank and Gaza with the signing of the Oslo Accords and the arrival of the Palestinian National Authority. In speaking of the rights of different groups, including women, in its founding statement, and in setting up in Gaza a Women's Action Department, the new Party opened its doors to the 'new Islamic woman' and to a significant evolution in Islamist gender ideology in Gaza, if not in the West Bank – where, due to Hamas' policy there of targeting only males, there exists no parallel to the Salvation Party or organisational support for women like that represented by the Women's Action Department in Gaza. Hamas' gender ideology, like that of the secularist parties, remains contradictory, and doors to women's equality only partly open; nevertheless, Islamist women have managed to build impressive, well‐organised women's constituencies among highly educated and professional women coming from poor and refugee backgrounds; and the Salvation Party shows an increasing tendency to foster gender equality and more egalitarian social ideals, while holding fast to the agenda of national liberation. These advances have been achieved both through alternative interpretations of Islamic legal and religious texts, and through positive engagement with the discourses of other groups, whether secular feminists or nationalists. In contrast, secularists are losing ground by advocating a discourse of rights in isolation from the national agenda and in the absence of a mobilising organisation. These developments suggest possibilities for mutual accommodation between Islamist and other Palestinian groups. They suggest also that the nature of the state proposed by Islamists will depend to a large extent on the visions and challenges posed by other nationalist and secularist groups.


We investigate how payoff-irrelevant terms can negatively impact relational contracts. In a lab experiment we compare two economically equivalent contracts – a fixed-term renewable and an open-ended at-will contract. Each contract provides partners with full flexibility regarding the length and termination of their interaction. When only one contract type is available, principals and agents in our experiment manage to form long-term profitable relationships irrespective of the contract type. However, when both contracts are available offering a fixed-term instead of an open-ended contract is perceived as unkind and results in lower effort provided by the agents. We show that this observed difference is not a matter of sorting, but a direct response to the contract type. Our results demonstrate that a relational contract might be affected by payoff-irrelevant terms and their perceived kindness.


The paper is devoted to analysis of the cold half-year (October to March) frequency of cyclones in the Mediterranean-Black Sea region associated with the global processes in the ocean-atmosphere system the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Firstly, climatic conditions in the North Atlantic-European region during positive and negative phases of these global oscillations were shown using NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data for 1948 2016 and data of the NASA GISS Atlas of Exratropical Strom Tracks in 1961 1998. Mean monthly values / anomalies (composites) for equal periods of the negative and positive AMO and PDO phases were calculated and compared. The results of the study support the idea that the Pacific and Atlantic influence on the climatic (multidecadal) scale is realized via change of the large-scale fields of the North Atlantic anomalies typical for the interannual scale. Then spatial distribution of the frequency of cyclones in the Mediterranean-Black Sea region was obtained using global NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data sets on 1000 hPa geopotential height in 1948 2013. It was shown that during the positive AMO phase, frequency of cyclones in the Mediterranean was higher by absolute values in November to March over the Tyrrhenian and Ionic Seas and lower over the Anatolian peninsula. During the negative PDO phase, frequency of cyclones over the Anatolian peninsula in January to March is significantly higher than in the positive PDO phase. Article history: Received 29 November 2016 Revised 9 March 2017 Accepted 23 April 2017


Embedding knowledge graphs is a common method used to encode information from the graph at hand projected in a low-dimensional space. There are two shortcomings in the field of knowledge graph embeddings for link prediction. The first shortcoming is that, as far as we know, current software libraries to compute knowledge graph embeddings differ from the original papers proposing these embeddings. Certain implementations are faithful to the original papers, while others range from minute differences to significant variations. Due to these implementation variations, it is difficult to compare the same algorithm from multiple libraries and also affects our ability to reproduce results. In this report, we describe a new framework, AugmentedKGE (aKGE), to embed knowledge graphs. The library features multiple knowledge graph embedding algorithms, a rank-based evaluator, and is developed completely using Python and PyTorch. The second shortcoming is that, during the evaluation process of link prediction, the goal is to rank based on scores a positive triple over a (typically large) number of negative triples. Accuracy metrics used in the evaluation of link prediction are aggregations of the ranks of the positive triples under evaluation and do not typically provide enough details as to why a number of negative triples are ranked higher than their positive counterparts. Providing explanations to these triples aids in understanding the results of the link predictions based on knowledge graph embeddings. Current approaches mainly focus on explaining embeddings rather than predictions and single predictions rather than all the link predictions made by the embeddings of a certain knowledge graph. In this report, we present an approach to explain all these predictions by providing two metrics that serve to quantify and compare the explainability of different embeddings. From the results of evaluating aKGE, we observe that the accuracy metrics are better than the accuracy metrics obtained from the standard implementation of OpenKE. From the results of explainability, we observe that the horn rules obtained explain more than 50% of all the negative triples generated.


There has been much research conducted into the effects of early career experiences on future practice. The research indicates that early career academics are particularly susceptible to burnout, as they are still developing their professional knowledge base, and are therefore more reliant on their theoretical knowledge or idealism to interpret practice. They may also be more self-critical and may begin identifying with their negative self-perceptions. The current article describes the importance of re-storying the negative perceptions of one's early career practices; it asserts how hidden stories can encourage beliefs of incompetency that continue to disempower teacher practice. To illustrate, it introduces a narrative of an experienced practitioner, who re-stories a particularly negative early career encounter to construct a more positive self-identity. This narrative seeks to demonstrate how teachers can become vibrant and self-empowered professionals by mentoring the vulnerable selfhoods that exist within their negative tellings.


We target open-world feature extrapolation problem where the feature space of input data goes through expansion and a model trained on partially observed features needs to handle new features in test data without further retraining. The problem is of much significance for dealing with features incrementally collected from different fields. To this end, we propose a new learning paradigm with graph representation and learning. Our framework contains two modules: 1) a backbone network (e.g., feedforward neural nets) as a lower model takes features as input and outputs predicted labels; 2) a graph neural network as an upper model learns to extrapolate embeddings for new features via message passing over a feature-data graph built from observed data. Based on our framework, we design two training strategies, a self-supervised approach and an inductive learning approach, to endow the model with extrapolation ability and alleviate feature-level over-fitting. We also provide theoretical analysis on the generalization error on test data with new features, which dissects the impact of training features and algorithms on generalization performance. Our experiments over several classification datasets and large-scale advertisement click prediction datasets demonstrate that our model can produce effective embeddings for unseen features and significantly outperforms baseline methods that adopt KNN and local aggregation.


Now that you've bought the amazing Canon EOS Rebel T3i/600D, you need a book that goes beyond a tour of the camera's features to show you exactly how to use the Rebel to take great pictures. With Canon EOS Rebel T3i/600D: From Snapshots to Great Shots, you get the perfect blend of photography instruction and camera reference that will take your images to the next level! Beautifully illustrated with large, vibrant photos, this book teaches you how to take control of your photography to get the image you want every time you pick up the camera.Follow along with your friendly and knowledgeable guide, photographer and author Jeff Revell, and you will:Learn the top ten things you need to know about shooting with the RebelUse the Rebel's automatic modes to get better shots right awayMove on to the Creative zone, where you have full control over the look and feel of your imagesMaster the photographic basics of composition, focus, depth of field, and much moreLearn all the best tricks and techniques for getting great action shots, landscapes, and portraitsFind out how to get great shots in low lightFully grasp all the concepts and techniques as you go, with assignments at the end of every chapterWith Canon EOS Rebel T3i/600D: From Snapshots to Great Shots, you'll learn not only what makes a great shot workyou'll learn how to get that shot using your Rebel.And once youve got the shot, show it off! Join the books Flickr group, share your photos, and discuss how you use your Rebel to get great shots at flickr.com/groups/canonrebelt3i600dfromsnapshotstogreatshots.


Cross-document coreference, the task of grouping all the mentions of each entity in a document collection, arises in information extraction and automated knowledge base construction. For large collections, it is clearly impractical to consider all possible groupings of mentions into distinct entities. To solve the problem we propose two ideas: (a) a distributed inference technique that uses parallelism to enable large scale processing, and (b) a hierarchical model of coreference that represents uncertainty over multiple granularities of entities to facilitate more effective approximate inference. To evaluate these ideas, we constructed a labeled corpus of 1.5 million disambiguated mentions in Web pages by selecting link anchors referring to Wikipedia entities. We show that the combination of the hierarchical model with distributed inference quickly obtains high accuracy (with error reduction of 38%) on this large dataset, demonstrating the scalability of our approach.


Urban water in Gulf Cooperation Council countries is principally supplied from desalination plants. However, desalination could be interrupted by natural hazards such as cyclones or harmful algal blooms. Four scenarios have been considered to help public institutions in Muscat to establish a water strategy for emergency situations. The numerical simulations of groundwater pumping have shown that the aquifer can supply emergency water in a safe way without any apparent risk of seawater intrusion to the Al-Khod Aquifer. The results show that Muscat can be easily supplied by emergency groundwater for up to 10 consecutive days with volumes varying between 24 and 71 l/cap/day at a low cost of US$0.18 per m3. Covering up to 66% of the total regular demand during an emergency is technically feasible but would bring the cost up to US$1.49 per m3 for groundwater and a cost of US$38.6 per m3 for storage reservoirs made of concrete. The cost per m3 of using concrete reservoirs is close to the market price of bottled water. Finally, the Public Authority for Electricity and Water might think of decentralizing the water storage at house levels by requiring new houses to be equipped with reservoirs on the roofs.


X-ray diffraction (XRD) surface analysis and ultrastructural interfacial characterization using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) confirmed that the functional monomer 10–methacryloyloxydecyl dihydrogen phosphate (10-MDP) self-assembles into nano-layers at adhesive-tooth interfaces. Self-assembled nano-layering is thought to contribute to the durability of bonding to tooth dentin, although this has not been proven yet. In order to disclose this potential bond-durability contribution of nano-layering, we observed the 3-dimensional (3D) spreading of nano-layering by a series of focused-ion-beam (FIB) milled cross sections by scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) and examined the mechanical properties of self-assembled nano-layering using scanning probe microscopy (SPM). A commercial 10-MDP-containing 3-step self-etch adhesive partially demineralized dentin up to submicron depth, forming a submicron hydroxyapatite-rich hybrid layer. TEM chemically and ultrastructurally confirmed the formation of interfacial nano-layering. FIB-SEM 3D reconstructions disclosed a 3D network of self-assembled nano-layering extending from the hybrid layer up to within the adjacent adhesive-resin layer. SPM revealed that nano-layering within the adhesive-resin layer possessed a higher elastic modulus than that of the surrounding adhesive resin, hereby suggesting that nano-layering contributes to the mechanical strength of adhesives like filler particles do. Nano-layering's 3D expanded structure is expected to strengthen the surrounding resin, as well to better interconnect the adhesive-resin layer to the hybrid layer. In conclusion, this exploratory study demonstrated that nano-layering constitutes a strong phase at the adhesive interface, which may contribute to the clinical longevity of the 10-MDP-based bond to dentin.


In the framework of a wider systematic survey aimed at studying non-indigenous species in Italian harbours and marinas, the ascophoran bryozoan Celleporaria brunnea was detected for the first time in the western Mediterranean Sea. The species is presumably native to the Pacific coasts of North America and is distributed from British Columbia to the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador). In the Mediterranean Sea, C. brunnea was first recorded in 2004 in the inner part of Izmir Bay near Alsancak harbour (Turkey) and later reported along the Lebanese coasts. The species was recently detected in Cascais marina in Portugal and in the Arcachon Basin (France), documenting the first records in the eastern Atlantic. The finding in the Italian harbours of La Spezia (Liguria), Olbia (Sardinia) and Lampedusa (off Sicily) marks its western and northernmost occurrence within the Mediterranean basin. Pathways of introduction into the western Mediterranean Sea are discussed, concluding that hull fouling is the most likely vector. The species may be expected to appear soon in other harbours of the Mediterranean basin.


In many image-processing applications, one object of interest must be segmented. The techniques used for segmentation vary depending on the particular situation and the specifications of the problem at hand. In methods that rely on a learning process, the lack of a sufficient number of training samples is usually an obstacle, especially when the samples need to be manually prepared by an expert. The performance of some other methods may suffer from frequent user interactions to determine the critical segmentation parameters. Also, none of the existing approaches use online (permanent) feedback, from the user, in order to evaluate the generated results. Considering the above factors, a new multi-stage image segmentation system, based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) is introduced as the main contribution of this research. In this system, the RL agent takes specific actions, such as changing the tasks parameters, to modify the quality of the segmented image. The approach starts with a limited number of training samples and improves its performance in the course of time. In this system, the expert knowledge is continuously incorporated to increase the segmentation capabilities of the method. Learning occurs based on interactions with an offline simulation environment, and later online through interactions with the user. The offline mode is performed using a limited number of manually segmented samples, to provide the segmentation agent with basic information about the application domain. After this mode, the agent can choose the appropriate parameter values for different processing tasks, based on its accumulated knowledge. The online mode, consequently, guarantees that the system is continuously training and can increase its accuracy, the more the user works with it. During this mode, the agent captures the user preferences and learns how it must change the segmentation parameters, so that the best result is achieved. By using these two learning modes, the RL agent allows us to optimally recognize the decisive parameters for the entire segmentation process.


Computer security is an old problem which has lost none of its relevance — as is evidenced by the annual Security issue of ;login:. The systems research community has increased its attention to security issues in recent years, as can be seen by an increasing number of security-related papers published in the mainstream systems conferences SOSP, OSDI, and USENIX. However, the focus is primarily on desktop and server systems. I have argued two years ago in this place that security of embedded systems, whether mobile phones, smart cards, or automobiles, is a looming problem of even bigger proportions, yet there does not seem to be a great sense of urgency about it. Although there are embedded operating-system (OS) vendors working on certifying their offerings to some of the highest security standards, those systems do not seem to be aimed at, or even suitable for, mobile wireless devices.


China has implemented an initial wave of death penalty reforms that returned final review power of all capital cases to the Supreme People's Court and reportedly significantly curbed executions. After reviewing recent legal developments concerning capital cases, this Article explores how the initial push to reduce use of the death penalty has given way to a more complex and nuanced debate over what factors should determine when the death penalty is appropriate. At this juncture in the reform trajectory, the dilemma of when to be lenient and when to be severe is particularly acute as public opinion chafes against a rapid decline in executions, especially when those treated leniently are affluent and/or politically well-connected.


British television viewers who tuned into the Rediffusion network at 9:45 pm on the evening of May 6th, 1964 saw a program that began with a silhouette of three early modern trumpeters playing a fanfare.1 After the fanfare subsided, lights came up to reveal that the trumpeters were actually John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. The shot then cut to a troupe of actors entering a thrust stage which was ringed by a screaming throng of young fans treated to the sight of Paul McCartney under a ridiculous styrofoam helmet as Pyramus, John Lennon in white dress, blonde pigtails and gap-tooth as Thisbe, George Harrison with lantern and dog as Moonshine, and Ringo in costume as Lion.2 In the present essay I want to suggest that the performance which followed was a mass media enactment of festive uncrowning-not only of Shakespeare himself, but perhaps more importantly, of a certain established way of relating to his works, one which was epitomized in the more formal quatercentenary celebrations of Shakespeare's birth that were taking place at precisely the same moment, in the spring of 1964. As a particular episode in the history of Shakespeare in mass media, the Beatles' television skit anticipates a large-scale transformation in the forms of adoration commonly associated with Shakespeare in contemporary mass culture, from the august object of bardolatry to a figure more our contemporary, like the Beatles themselves, one whose conspicuous strangeness and oddity might now be construed as endearing, in much the same way that theirs had become. You Say It's Your Birthday: Bardolatry's Proprietary Rite In contradistinction to the Beatles' television performance, the other, more notable celebrations of Shakespeare's 400th birthday were largely the expression of a cultural elite, endorsed by a collection of temporarily affiliated economic and political interests. The quatercentenary prompted a predictably enormous number of commercial tie-ins, with most of the nation's important cultural institutions participating to some extent.3 Even at the time, the event seems to have been recognized as what I would call a "proprietary rite," a ritual observance principally distinguishable by the way in which certain stakeholders in the occasion projected an annoying, self-appointed sense of priestly stewardship over it. On the day before Shakespeare's birthday, The Times chose to take the high road, pointedly reprinting a brief editorial column that had appeared exactly one hundred years previously, on April 22, 1864: Was ever a mighty reputation so ruthlessly sold for the last farthing it would fetch? Did ever local selfishness, and personal vanity, and fussy self-importance, and greediness, and meanness of all kinds sit to gorge themselves upon so noble a quarry? The poet of the world is made a commodity, the anniversary of his birth is made a commercial and educational speculation... The high road is often a short road, however; the following day's paper featured a large ad for Shell oil that depicted a hitchhiking Shakespeare: "What's the best way to Stratford-on-Avon? Go to Stratford-on-- Shell. All's well that goes Shell." The epicentre of the quatercentenary celebrations was undoubtedly Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon. On the morning of the 23rd, the Duke of Edinburgh arrived by helicopter to officially open the Shakespeare Exhibition there, which led visitors through a reconstruction of the Globe theatre complete with voice recordings of famous Shakespearean actors, and past various portraits, miniatures, and other artistic installations which ranged wildly in style, according to one Times reporter, from "baroque to beatnick." At a luncheon that day, the Duke was in attendance as Lord Avon conveyed a message from the Queen to 750 members of the assembled Diplomatic Corps and other cultural luminaries. Later, the Duke attended a performance of Henry IV, part one at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, where the RSC had mounted a sequence of the history plays. …


Abstract Introduction COVID-19 has affected national guidelines and availability of resources, resulting in different approaches to treating burns. This project aimed to identify changes to burns management in the UK during the "first wave" of COVID-19, and how the lessons learned can be applied to the current "second wave". Methods Between 11th July-15th September, 18 burns services across the UK completed a MDT survey and contributed data on service evaluation. The MDT survey captured perspectives of multiple stakeholders and included changes to burns services, disruptions to supply chain, and service improvements resulting from COVID-19. Service evaluation data was collected retrospectively and prospectively on patients who received inpatient/outpatient treatment during COVID-19. Patients in the retrospective cohort were first seen by burns services between 6th-30th April (coinciding with the UK's COVID-19 peak), and the prospective cohort were first seen between 30th April-15th September. Each cohort consisted of 10-20 patients per burns service. Service evaluation covered key areas of burns aetiology, referral pathway changes, patient presentation delays to tertiary services, patient management decisions, and outpatient dressing clinic management. Data from the MDT survey and the service evaluation were analysed by descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. Results The changes to burns services include delays in burn referrals, increase in conservative management, and increased use of telemedicine. Conclusion Across the UK, safe and effective burns care continued to be delivered despite difficulties from the pandemic. We hope the learning points identified in this study will be of use during the "second wave" of the pandemic.


Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR) is used to interrogate fiber sensors adhered to various structures. Temperatures in excess of 1000°C are observed on a thermal-barrier coated stainless steel test plate as it is exposed to a high-temperature torch. The surface temperature distribution is mapped with 5 mm spatial resolution at 100 Hz, revealing large spatial and temporal thermal gradients at coating defect locations. Results and response times are compared with conventional K type thermocouples. Also presented in this work, are real-time position, shape and twist measurements of a simple structure as it is subjected to various loads.


The disparity in educational outcomes between majority White and minority African American populations has become known as the African American achievement gap. The authors examine the under performance of African American university students by providing an overview of the major cultural, communication, and learning style characteristics of Black students and the schooling conditions and practices at predominantly White universities. By not teaching based on diversity, professors may be unintentionally setting up some students for frustration and possible failure. INTRODUCTION The minority achievement gap remains one of the most pressing and perplexing problems in U.S. education today. Diverse and sustained research is needed to gain a better understanding of the persistent academic under achievement of minority students in U.S. higher education (Alien, 1985). The research literature suggests that efforts to close the academic achievement gap between racial minority and Caucasian students have been largely unsuccessful and that differences in educational performance persist at all achievement levels-the greatest gap between students of color, and their White and Asian American peers with higher achievement levels (Schwartz, 2000). The reasons for this lack of minority student progress are not entirely clear and many causes have been suggested to include claims that the hip-hop and "gangsta" cultures, as popularized by the media, and the general move away from the more positive images of Blacks, may have contributed to greater sentiments of apathy and alienation of young Blacks in a misdirected attempt to reaffirm Black culture (Boyd, 1997). Additionally, during the Reagan administration, the Black inner-city communities were hard hit by government economic and social policies, which rolled back many of The Great Society programs of the Johnson administration (Patillo-McCoy, 1999). Affirmative action came under attack as more conservative voices arose in both the White and Black communities regarding equity and the issue of the social advancement of Black people (McWhorter, 2000). At the same time, the urban economy lost more jobs previously held by Blacks in factories to ones in technologies, located primarily in the White suburbs (Boyd, 1997). Moreover, the following factors are frequently mentioned in the research literature as contributing to the achievement gap: limited education levels of parents, students' lack of access to high-quality preschool and K-12 education, weak study habits, negative peer influences, White faculty and administrators who have low-academic expectations of Blacks, Eurocentric curricula and pedagogy, poor campus racial climate, relatively limited financial resources among many Black college students, and the absence of a strong and relatively large core of Black students on campus (e.g., Bennett, 2002; Hale-Benson, 1986; McWhorter, 2000; "Persisting Racial Gap," 2004). While many educational researchers focus on examining student achievement in the K-12 student population, the U.S. still struggles to bridge the achievement gap in higher education (e.g., Wilds, 2000). Fewer African Americans go on to college than White high school graduates 39 % versus 44 % among 18 to 24 year olds (Haycock, Jerald, & Huang, 2001), and many of those who do well academically on predominantly White campuses exhibit a marked decrease in performance from their high school grades beyond what is expected for adjustment to college-level work (Alien, 1985). Moreover, Black students obtain college degrees at substantially lower rates than White students (Haycock, Jerald, & Huang, 2001; Hoffman, LIagas, & Snyder, 2003), and many of those students who do earn degrees take longer than the traditional four years (Forte, 2002). The nationwide college graduation rate for Black students is a distressing 40% ("Persisting Racial Gap," 2004). This figure is 21 percentage points below the 61 % rate for White students. …


A second tumor inoculum is often inhibited in its growth by the presence in the recipient animal of an earlier implanted, growing tumor. The tumor resulting from the first inoculum may, paradoxically, continue to grow despite the simultaneous inhibition of the growth of the second inoculum, a phenomenon usually called "concomitant immunity." Evidence now suggests that the phenomenon can be observed in the absence of any recognizable type of immune reaction and might often be named more appropriately "concomitant tumor resistance." Consideration of a variety of probably related observations suggests that concomitant tumor resistance can best be explained by the competitive interaction of two opposing influences: a local diffusible, tumor-facilitating environment, produced by both tumor and normal tissues, that is counteracted by circulating inhibitors that are also produced by both tumor and by normal tissues. In an implanted small tumor, because of geometric considerations and diffusion, the action of the local facilitating environment is weak; in a larger tumor the local facilitating environment has a relatively greater influence and thus the larger tumor can continue to grow despite levels of circulating tumor inhibitors capable of inhibiting the smaller growth.


Record-high 19.25Gb/s real-time end-to-end dual-band optical OFDM (OOFDM) colorless transmissions across the entire C-band are experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, in reflective electro-absorption modulator (REAM)-based 25km standard SMF systems using intensity modulation and direct detection. Adaptively modulated baseband (0-2GHz) and passband (6.125 ± 2GHz) OFDM RF sub-bands, supporting signal line rates of 9.75Gb/s and 9.5Gb/s respectively, are independently generated and detected with FPGA-based DSP clocked at only 100MHz as well as DACs/ADCs operating at sampling speeds as low as 4GS/s. The two OFDM sub-bands are electrically multiplexed for intensity modulation of a single optical carrier by an 8GHz REAM. The REAM colorlessness is experimentally characterized, based on which optimum REAM operating conditions are identified. To maximize and balance the signal transmission performance of each sub-band, on-line adaptive transceiver optimization functions and live performance monitoring are fully exploited to optimize key OOFDM transceiver and system parameters. For different wavelengths within the C-band, corresponding minimum received optical powers at the FEC limit vary in a range of <0.5dB and bit error rate performances for both baseband and passband signals are almost identical. Furthermore, detailed investigations are also undertaken of the maximum aggregated signal line rate sensitivity to electrical sub-band power variation. It is shown that the aforementioned system has approximately 3dB tolerance to RF sub-band power variation.


The growth in functionality of digital technologies, and the drop in price, is one of the key trends of the modern age. And it is occurring at the same time as another significant trend – the aging of the population. Digital technologies are increasingly being employed to help older and disabled people live more independent and productive lives. In 2005 Connection Research Services was commissioned to produce a report on the key issues in the use of technology for the aged and disabled. The research in this report identified four key areas where digital technologies can be used to improve the lives of the aged, disabled and chronically ill: Health: Many Australians need help in managing their health – an enormous burden on the public health care system. If just a small proportion can manage some aspect of their healthcare through the use of technology, the potential savings will be enormous. Home automation, security and safety: Independence at home is important in maintaining quality of life, as well as decreasing the number of carer support hours needed, Communication: Communication is very important for people whose mobility is limited, or who live alone. Communications technologies greatly improve the quality of life of the aged and disabled. Lifestyle: The various home automation and digital technologies can benefit the aged and the disabled, improving their quality of life by enhancing their independence. Many people are in institutions simply because they can't cope at home. Technology has the potential to extend their physical independence, so they can stay for longer in their homes. It gives them a more dignified life, and it saves public and private money.