Rack Phase Difference or RPD may occur during jacking up at a location when the jack-up spudcan is eccentrically supported on the bottom or has lateral offset and the resulting moment and shear is carried essentially by the horizontal guide reactions. The RPD is the difference in vertical positions of rack teeth of different chords of one leg. This is a result of vertical shear deformation of the adjacent chords of one leg of a trussed jack-up. Among the causes of RPD the following are common: uneven or sloping seabed, preexisting spudcan holes, leg offset, rapid penetration, uneven jacking force on different chords of a leg, scour etc. While jacking up at a location, operating procedures normally dictate that the RPD be measured. When there is significant RPD, it means the leg chords are not centrally placed within the legwell area but one side could be touching the upper guide while the opposite side is in contact with the lower guides. There is a safe limit of the RPD that is normally specified for a given jack-up that has to be kept in mind while jacking up at a location.For a jack-up fitted with rack chocks, once at the elevated condition, the jack-up is designed to take up the moment produced at the legs due to the environmental loads by the vertical couple at the chocks and pinions rather than the horizontal couple at the guides. As a result, the brace size requirement is normally lower than units that do not have the chocks. For these units RPD becomes all the more important as it could be built-in unless suitable mitigating measures were taken before the chocks are engaged. The built-in RPD could affect the strength for design environmental loads.Unfortunately, the most commonly used guidelines for jack-up design such as SNAME T&R 5-5A, ISO 19905-1 or DNV OS-C104 do not have any detailed discussion on the topic. HSE Research Report 289 prepared by MSL Engineering has a good technical description of this phenomenon and some general qualitative guidelines. There are some studies published in the public domain that have details of RPD analysis. However, most of these papers deal with very simplified modeling of only one leg of the jack-up and idealized behavior.The present paper discusses complete and more realistic analysis of a 3D model of the jack-up that uses non-linear analysis methods for including large deformations and rotations. The nonlinearities come about due to physical reasons, such as pinion-rack contact is compression only and guide contact is also compression only with a gap. In addition, one may like to include nonlinearities due to geometric stiffness for large deformations and plasticity effects. Geometric stiffness allows it to include so-called P-delta effects and simulate buckling behavior of beam elements.The results of such 3D non-linear analysis for various levels of assumptions are compared with a more traditional single leg analysis. The paper brings out the important differences in behavior of these two types of models and discusses the importance of those in the analysis results. The authors think that the meaning of RPD has to be understood properly in relationship with moment or shear carrying capacity at the spudcan for a given jack-up. The behavior of a trussed leg jack-up depends heavily on the bracing pattern, chord and bay spacing as well as the size of the braces. The paper discusses these aspects also. Finally, although the analysis is for one particular jack-up, it recommends the most appropriate modeling for RPD analysis for similar jack-up rigs that could be beneficial to other rigs.Copyright © 2014 by ASME


Renewable energy (RE) is one of the most important topics of concern among the different parts of the world due to the growing shortage of fossil fuels and the rising prices of the energy supplies. Many countries have started to switch from the use of fossil fuels to the use of renewable sources such as hydroelectric, solar and wind energies, most of which is contributing more than 30% to their energy requirements. Yet, there are many countries that have not made use of these cleaner and cheaper forms of energy due to a lack of awareness, no government subsidies for cheaper energy supplies and the availability of abundant fossil fuels. This study highlights the views and opinions of the people of Qatar with the aim of understanding if they are aware of renewable sources of energy and if they support the idea of using cleaner energy as compared to the current trend of using natural fossil resources. The results obtained from public survey questionnaires indicate that the people were not well aware of the different forms of renewable energies or the rising concern for global climate change. Also it was seen that people did not want to initiate any public action towards the application of large scale renewable energy projects due to varying psychological and spatial factors, but that they were very supportive of the idea of keeping the environment clean and getting cheaper energy from renewable sources. Overall, this study was conducted on 120 individuals from both the capital of Qatar (Doha) and the surrounding suburban areas and it was seen that the people living in the suburbs were more welcoming of the idea of renewable energy than those in the capital.


Gary McGraw interviews Giovanni Vigna, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he works on Web security, vulnerability analysis, malware countermeasures, and intrusion detection. Vigna is also codirector of the UCSB Security Lab and a member of the Shellphish and Epic Fail hacker collectives. He cofounded Lastline (an antimalware company) and organizes the annual International Capture the Flag hacking competition (iCTF). Hear the full podcast series at www.computer.org/silverbullet. Show links, notes, and an online discussion can be found at www.cigital.com/silverbullet.


Climate change  is one of the most important challenges in recent years. Heavy flood, hot weather, early coldness, most of drought replications, risen of sea water level, pests and plant disease ,reducing of ozone layer thickness, global worming ,and melting ices, are cases that introduced climate change issue in recent decades more. Climate is one of the most important  factors for crop  changing rate and its yield in recent decades .in regard to that potato is one of the most important agricultural crops in country ,and almost is planted in most areas, in this survey we  have  considered to studying temperature impacts and fall raining and its  shifts  as most important parameter influencing on potato yield in Kermanshah province. Because of this reason , cities having acceptable agricultural and climatic statistics are  chosen.(6 cases )and then in regarding to phonological cycles  of potato and agricultural calendar , the climatic parameters are divided to 6 variants. According to different climatic characteristic  in Kermanshah, in GIS environment and using of zonal statistic capacity of this software ,statistical characteristics of production  yield and other variants  are  derived based on classifying climate and finally in SPSS software ,most important climatic parameters influencing on yield and also changes  trend  is measured in all of Kermanshah province .results showed that temperature of ending  winter and early spring  were important parameters influencing on potato yield in most areas  in Kermanshah province. And if these temperature is increased , yield rate of potato is increased  in most areas  in Kermanshah.


African autobiographies written in German. Forms of literary representation and identity construction with reference to Chima Oji's Unter die Deutschen gefallen
It is not obvious that a literature of migration from Africa has existed in Germany since the 1980s when one starts looking at seminars and conferences devoted to the critical reception and attempted legitimation of migrant literature. This paper aims to demonstrate how elements of autobiographical writing generate new forms of identity constructions which become socially salient in Germany. The analysis of the autobiographical novel entitled Unter die Deutschen gefallen by Nigerian migrant Chima Oji constitutes the focus of this paper.


Abstract The presence of highly non-linear friction damping in the suspensions of many freight vehicles reduces prediction accuracy when using traditional kinematic gauging techniques. These techniques, which are often applied to the more linear behaving passenger vehicles, are based on the quasi-static suspension behaviour. Due to this limitation and a market requirement for cost effective and rapid vehicle gauging, the current approach in the UK for freight vehicles is to use static vehicle gauges. This method can be very conservative and lead to in-efficient use of the available space between vehicle and infrastructure. Computer simulation-based dynamic gauging techniques offer a way to maximize the use of the space available, by introducing into the gauging analysis, the dynamic behaviour of the vehicle. This paper describes the process of dynamic gauging for friction damped freight vehicles. The benefits of this method in terms of potential increase of the vehicle size are shown, but also difficulties within the process, especially concerning the adequate validation of the simulation models.


The goal of this thesis is to advance the modeling of physical, chemical, and biological transformations that define the early diagenetic processes in sediments. Early diagenetic models encompass the mathematical formulation and numerical solution of complex biogeochemical reaction systems, and thus contribute to and profit from the advances made in the broader field of reaction transport models (RTMs). In chapter 2, the available information on individual biogeochemical reactions common to many natural systems (e.g. redox reactions, mineral dissolution/precipitation processes, and acid/base equilibria) is systematically compiled based on the concept of a Knowledge Base (KB), in order to facilitate the assemblage of RTMs. The KB is interfaced with one-dimensional transport descriptions relevant to many compartments of the Earth system (rivers, estuaries, groundwater or sediments) to yield a unified simulation environment. The flexibility of this modeling framework is illustrated in two applications dealing with biogeochemical processes in sediments and groundwater environments. A new approach is proposed in chapter 3 that yields the reaction-specific proton production and consumption rates, since the quantitative interpretation of pH distribution is a diagnostic indicator of biogeochemical processes. This method also provides a means to interpret the saturation state of pore waters with respect to mineral phases. Here, the chemical species participating in equilibrium reactions appear explicitly in the kinetic reaction stoichiometries and are treated as unknowns. The model is applied by simulating continental shelf sediments. Simulations are also used to determine the response of pH to variations in calcite dissolution kinetics and irrigation intensity. The developed RTM is used to interpret pore water oxygen and pH microprofiles in deep-sea sediments. Two pools of degradable organic matter (OM) are necessary and sufficient to reproduce the oxygen profiles. In contrast, the successful simulation of pH profiles is limited, due to the larger number of processes that affect the proton balance. As OM is unstable in early diagenetic environments, fitting the O2 distribution yields estimates of its deposition flux, while it is not possible to constrain the deposition flux of CaCO3 from the pH data, since the pore waters reach equilibrium with respect to calcite. Thus, the depth-integrated calcite dissolution rate is obtained from the best-fit pH profiles. The nonlinear calcite dissolution rate laws yield the best agreement between modeled and measured pH profiles. The last chapter presents a model of physical and chemical compaction for the interpretation of porosity profiles based on the conservation of mass and momentum. It is used to separate the effects of mechanical compaction from mineral dissolution or precipitation reactions. The hydraulic conductivity and elastic response of a set of deep-sea sediments are estimated through an inverse modeling approach. Preliminary results indicate an inverse relationship between the elastic response coefficient and the lithogenic content of the sediment. This highlights the possibility of linking the sediment compaction behavior to its composition. The simulation results indicate a slightly improved porosity fit to available data with the nonlinear calcite dissolution rate laws, and suggest that treating porosity as an unknown enhances the current early diagenetic modeling efforts.


South Asian economies are undergoing unprecedented transformation with changes in global markets and national level policy reforms to promote the liberalization and privatization of manufacturing and marketing. Yet little is known about the ways in which these changes are impacting on the poor and how these differ by region. There is also insufficient information on how the poor can take advantages of new opportunities that may arise from globalisation processes while minimising potentially negative consequences. There is a need to improve our understanding of these processes especially as they relate to the environment, rural livelihoods and labour markets and gender relations.


Critics have blamed fair value accounting for amplifying the subprime crisis and for causing a financial meltdown. It has been alleged that fair value accounting has created a vicious circle of falling prices, thereby increasing the overall risk in the financial system. In this paper, I investigate whether fair value accounting is associated with an increase in the risk of failure of the banking system as a whole. I find that the extent of fair value reporting is associated with an increase in contagion among banks. The increase in bank contagion is most severe during periods of market illiquidity. Further, my cross-sectional analyses suggest that increased bank contagion associated with fair value accounting is more likely to spread to banks that are poorly capitalized or have a relatively higher proportion of fair value assets and liabilities.


are desperately needed, given that some of the existing therapeutic antibodies are less effective or ineffective against certain variants and the impact of variants on vaccine efficacy is still poorly understood. activity = acute 2. a IC50 values presented are geometric mean if multiple experiments were performed and a weighted geometric mean for the Wuhan strain (n=10) 95% CI values were included for variants tested only once. IC50 for ACE2-binding inhibition of Wuhan sequence is presented as the consensus estimate as of 2021 achieved across repeat experiments. b Fold shifts are calculated comparing to the in-experiment Wuhan control. The geometric mean of the fold changes is provided if multiple experiments were performed. For ACE2-binding inhibition, no inhibition represents <50% ACE2-binding inhibition with up to 3.75 μg/mL mAb. For the soluble assay, the IgG secreted by B-cells was captured on beads using the constant region. Binding to secreted IgG immobilized onto beads was subsequently assessed using soluble fluorescently labeled SARS-CoV-2 S or SARS-CoV-2 RBD antigen. Beads or cells were flowed onto microfluidic screening devices and incubated with single antibody-secreting cells, and mAb binding to cognate antigens was detected via a fluorescently labeled anti-human IgG secondary antibody, or soluble antigen labeled with fluorophore. Positive hits were identified using machine vision and recovered using automated robotics-based protocols. preparations by infection of VeroE6 cells (ATCC CRL-1586) with serially diluted virus followed by staining with an anti-luciferase antibody (Novus Cat # NB600-307PEATT594) and analysis by fluorescence-activated cell sorting using a Becton Dickinson LSRFortessaTM X-20. Particle titers were determined by isolation of genomic RNA and quantitation by RT-qPCR (NEB # E3031) using an Applied Biosystems vii7A™ Real-Time PCR system. Relative luciferase reporter signal read-out was determined by luciferase assay (Promega Cat # E2650) of extracts from VeroE6 cells infected with serially diluted virus. Luciferase activity was measured on a PerkinElmer EnVision 2104 multilabel reader. concentration of mAb tested. experimental batch, data obtained duplicate or triplicate. potent vitro in vivo activity against SARS-CoV-2.


Organizations and businesses are applying sustainable development concepts in their management strategies in order to improve and rethink products, processes, services, and policies which will have significant potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, excess consumption, and improve the quality of lives. Cases on the Diffusion and Adoption of Sustainable Development Practices is a collection of case studies on the concepts and theories of successful sustainable practices. It also identifies key mechanisms and strategies that have allowed the successful diffusion of these practices into communities, regions and nations around the world. This reference source is essential for professionals, researchers, educators and leaders in pursuit of innovative solutions in sustainable development.


Various literature studies demonstrated that the cloud computing paradigm can help to improve availability and performance of applications subject to the problem of software anomalies. Indeed, the cloud resource provisioning model enables users to rapidly access new processing resources, even distributed over different geographical regions, that can be promptly used in the case of, e.g., crashes or hangs of running machines, as well as to balance the load in the case of overloaded machines. Nevertheless, managing a complex geographically-distributed cloud deploy could be a complex and time-consuming task. Autonomic Cloud Manager (ACM) Framework is an autonomic framework for supporting proactive management of applications deployed over multiple cloud regions. It uses machine learning models to predict failures of virtual machines and to proactively redirect the load to healthy machines/cloud regions. In this paper, we study different policies to perform efficient proactive load balancing across cloud regions in order to mitigate the effect of software anomalies. These policies use predictions about the mean time to failure of virtual machines. We consider the case of heterogeneous cloud regions, i.e regions with different amount of resources, and we provide an experimental assessment of these policies in the context of ACM Framework.


Piano bass tones raise questions related to the perception of multicomponent, inharmonic tones. In this study, the influence of the relative phases among partials on pitch and timbre was investigated for synthesized bass tones with piano-like inharmonicity. Three sets of bass tones (A0 = 27.5 Hz, 100 partials, flat spectral envelope) were generated; harmonic, low inharmonic, and high inharmonic. For each set, five starting phase relations among partials were applied; sine phases, alternate (sine/cosine) phases, random phases, Schroeder phases, and negative Schroeder phases. The pitch and timbre of the tones were influenced markedly by the starting phases. Listening tests showed that listeners are able to discriminate between tones having different starting phase relations, and also that the pitch could be changed by manipulating the relative phases (octave, fifth, major third). A piano-like inharmonicity gives a characteristic randomizing effect of the phase relations over time in tones starting with nonrandom phase relations. A measure of the regularity of the phase differences between adjacent partials is suggested for quantifying this randomization process. The observed phase effects might be of importance in synthesizing, recording, and reproducing piano music.


We investigated the regulation of PG production in human endometrial stromal cells (ESC) by IL-1beta. We found that cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) mRNA and protein levels and PGE(2) production in ESC were significantly increased by IL-1beta. COX-2 mRNA, protein, and PGE(2) levels in IL-1beta-treated ESC were decreased by a PKA inhibitor, a nuclear factor (NF-kappaB) inhibitor, and an ERK1/2 inhibitor, but not by a p38 MAPK inhibitor or a PKC inhibitor, suggesting the possible involvement of PKA, NF-kappaB, and/or the ERK1/2 signaling pathway(s) in IL-1beta-mediated COX-2 gene induction in ESC. We then transiently transfected deletion mutants of the COX-2 promoter fused to the luciferase reporter gene and variants of -360/+56 bp promoter construct carrying different site-directed mutations of selected cis-acting elements. We determined that a NF-kappaB site (-222/-213 bp), a nuclear factor for IL-6 expression site (NF-IL6, -132/-124 bp), and a cAMP response element (-59/-52 bp) were essential for the baseline COX-2 gene promoter regulation. The addition of IL-1beta, however, did not affect the activity of these COX-2 promoter constructs. To investigate the potential effects of IL-1beta on COX-2 mRNA stability, ESC were treated with actinomycin D, a general transcription inhibitor, in the absence or presence of IL-1beta. We found that 1) IL-1beta significantly increased COX-2 mRNA stability; 2) continuous transcription was not required to sustain the IL-1beta-induced COX-2 mRNA levels; and 3) COX-2 mRNA was highly unstable in the absence of IL-1beta. Additionally, we found that the ERK1/2 signaling pathway was essential for stabilizing COX-2 mRNA. We conclude that levels of COX-2 mRNA, protein, and enzyme activity in ESC are controlled by various signaling pathways, including PKA, ERK1/2, and NF-kappaB. Moreover, posttranscriptional mRNA stability is an important mechanism for IL-1beta-induced elevation of COX-2 expression in ESC.


Fourteen word frequency metrics were tested to evaluate their effectiveness in identifying vocabulary in a domain. Fifteen domain engineering projects were examined to measure how closely the vocabularies selected by the fourteen word frequency metrics were to the vocabularies produced by domain engineers. Six filtering mechanisms were also evaluated to measure their impact on selecting proper vocabulary terms. The results of the experiment show that stemming and stop word removal do improve overlap scores and that term frequency is a valuable contributor to overlap. Variations on term frequency are not always significant improvers of overlap.


BACKGROUND: One aspect of personalized medicine is better adaptation of therapeutic drugs to the specific situation of a given patient, part of which is determined by his or her unique genetic make-up. Pharmacogenomics attempts to assess the influence of genetic variation on drug response. The biomedical literature is the primary vehicle for reporting the association between gene variants and drugs. This information is generally extracted from text and curated manually in order to create reference knowledge bases, such as PharmGKB, which offers several levels of curation for the articles it references (in depth, curated and non-curated). Information extraction can be also automated using natural language processing (NLP) tools. Here, we explore two NLP approaches (one recall- and the other precision-oriented) to extracting pharmacogenomic information from PubMed/MEDLINE citations, which we compare to PharmGKB. METHODS: On the one hand, we extract drug-gene associations in a given article using MetaMap to identify drugs and links provided by the Entrez system between PubMed (articles) and Entrez Gene (genes). The second approach leverages SemRep for extracting named relations between genes and drugs from the title and abstract of articles. The two approaches were applied to a corpus of 47,315 articles indexed with "mutation" and exhibiting at least one drug name in the period 2001-2008. Drugs are restricted to ingredients in RxNorm and genes to human genes. Articles selected by our approaches are compared to articles listed as evidence by PharmGKB's curators. We reviewed some of the articles selected by our approaches for the drug warfarin. RESULTS: Number of article-drug-gene associations identified in our corpus: 23,264 (MetaMap), 6504 (SemRep) and 1340 (PharmGKB). Proportion of reference articles in PharmGKB (N=470) also identified by our approaches: 6% (MetaMap), 2% (SemRep) overall; 0.9% (MetaMap), 0.3% (SemRep) for the in-depth curated variants (196 articles). The two genes whose variants are associated with warfarin (in-depth curation in PharmGKB) are VKORC1 and CYP2C9. These associations are also identified by MetaMap and SemRep. The gene CYP2C19 identified by our approaches is discussed in the context of warfarin, albeit not positively linked to this drug. DISCUSSION: The automatic approaches only identified a fraction of the reference articles in PharmGKB. A failure analysis is necessary to elucidate why this is the case. In contrast, the automatic methods identified drug-gene associations for many drugs not currently curated in PharmGKB. SemRep contributes to identifying a smaller number of reference articles in PharmGKB than the approach based on MetaMap. However, unlike MetaMap, SemRep qualifies gene-drug associations with named relationships. The precision of the automatic methods remains to be evaluated. Anecdotal evidence suggests that automatic methods could help identify many relevant documents. CONCLUSION: The two automatic methods presented can help support the manual curation of pharmacogenomic knowledge. They allow high-throughput processing of the biomedical literature, helping to expand the scope of PharmGKB to additional drugs and to prioritize the manual curation.


Abstract Floodplain deposits in semiarid and subhumid settings with erratic rainfall may contain relatively high proportions of sand because of climatically controlled patterns of discharge and vegetation cover. Ancient formations with abundant floodplain sands may record fluvial systems with extreme discharge variability of this type but are difficult to interpret because of the paucity of published modern analogues. The Lower Burdekin and Haughton river alluvial and delta plains of north Queensland, Australia, are used here to illustrate this type of fluvial architecture. The modern Burdekin and Haughton channels have gravelly sand beds and transport a mixed load in the wet season. The channels have low-relief levees that decrease in amplitude downstream across the low-gradient floodplains. Tropical-cyclone activity results in high-magnitude, short-duration, sediment-charged floods that inundate large areas of the coastal lowland. Bankfull discharge is infrequently exceeded (return interval > 25 years) because the channels are enlarged by major cyclone-induced runoff events and between these events flows are too small to modify the channel form significantly. Suspended-sediment loads and the proportions of these that are sand are particularly high when intense rainfall occurs after prolonged drought, when vegetation cover is reduced. As a consequence of these factors, most of the deposition on the levees and floodbasins occurs in very large discharge events with significant suspended sand load. These floods carry a lot of sand out of the channel and efficiently in suspension over the floodplains because of deep inundation. Boreholes drilled in these floodplains encountered sharply bounded and gradationally bounded sand beds that fine upward or show no vertical grain-size trend. These are interbedded with thin silt, clay, and minor gravel beds. Holocene paleochannels make up about 30% of the floodplain area and consist predominantly of coarse sand that is similar to modern channel-bed deposits. The overbank sand, in contrast, is predominantly fine–medium-grained, and beds have distinctly different granulometry from each other and from channel-floor deposits. Efficient sediment partitioning in the runoff and extreme variation in flood magnitude explain variations in sand-bed granulometry. In the alluvial valley and upper delta plain individual sand beds are difficult to correlate between adjacent boreholes even over very short distances (tens of meters). In contrast, on the lower delta plain overbank sands have a more sheet-like geometry. This is explained by the lower-lying landscape, negligible levee development, greater inundation depths, and reduced surface roughness. In addition the channel bodies are thinner and wider and may be connected to overbank sand "wings."


The generation of the high species diversity of insects in Japan was profoundly influenced by the formation of the Japanese Archipelago. We explored the species diversification and biogeographical history of the Nemouridae family in the Japanese Archipelago using mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA markers. We collected 49 species among four genera: Indonemoura, Protonemura, Amphinemura and Nemoura in Japan, China, South Korea and North America. We estimated their divergence times—based on three molecular clock node calibrations—using Bayesian phylogeography approaches. Our results suggested that Japanese Archipelago formation events resulted in diversification events in the middle of the Cretaceous (<120 Ma), speciation in the Paleogene (<50 Ma) and intra-species diversification segregated into eastern and western Japan of the Fossa Magna region at late Neogene (20 Ma). The Indonemoura samples were genetically separated into two clades—that of Mainland China and that of Japan. The Japanese clade clustered with the Nemouridae species from North America, suggesting the possibility of a colonisation event prior to the formation of the Japanese Archipelago. We believe that our results enhanced the understanding both of the origin of the species and of local species distribution in the Japanese Archipelago.


Both the Bangladesh state and society are yet to settle the questions over and narratives related to the Liberation War of 1971. Broadly, there are two groups with contradictory and conflicting interpretations of the events related to that war. This has also led to the mushrooming of militant groups in the country. The beginning of trial of perpetrators of Liberation War crimes since 2010 and the execution of a few of the leaders has further polarised the society and politics of Bangladesh. The existing debates over the Bangladesh Liberation War cannot be studied without looking into the roles of India and Pakistan. The two countries have their own interpretations and political fallout of the 1971 liberation war.


This chapter focuses on the estimation and interpretation of gravity equations for bilateral trade. This necessarily involves a careful consideration of the theoretical underpinnings since it has become clear that naive approaches to estimation lead to biased and frequentlymisinterpreted results. There are now several theory-consistent estimation methods and we argue against sole reliance on any one method and instead advocate a toolkit approach. One estimator may be preferred for certain types of data or research questions but more often the methods should be used in concert to establish robustness. In recent years, estimation has become just a first step before a deeper analysis of the implications of the results, notably in terms of welfare. We try to facilitate diffusion of best-practice methods by illustrating their application in a step-by-step cookbook mode of exposition.


As in today's world databases contains huge data with the quick improvement of web information. Millions of data is present in the databases having multiple attributes as well as their relations and different characteristics. Query form is one of the most widely used user interfaces for querying databases. With the dynamic query form we can dynamically generates query forms. System mainly captures the attributes which is filled by user then ranked those attributes and generates the result. In Query Execution client fills current query and the result display on the basis of past history of user which is iterative. In each iteration system generates the ranking of data required by user and the user then adds the desired form components into the query form. If user is not satisfied with the result then user gives feedback to the system. Until the user is not satisfied with the result of query, query form could be dynamically refined. KeywordsQuery Form, Query Execution, Ranked


The effect of hypothyroxinaemia on postnatal progression of the motor nerve conduction velocity was studied in 33 very low birthweight infants. Serum concentrations of thyroid stimulating hormone, triiodothyronine, and thyroxine were determined at birth and at ages 3, 7, and 21 days. Nerve conduction velocity was measured in the first week of life, on day 21, and at 40 weeks' postmenstrual age. Seven infants maintained their thyroxine concentration above 60 nmol/l (4.67 micrograms/100 ml) throughout the study. Three of these infants needed mechanical ventilation and one had an intraventricular haemorrhage. Twenty six infants developed hypothyroxinaemia (thyroxine less than 60 nmol/l). The nerve conduction velocity was delayed in 13 infants, two on day 21 and 11 at 40 weeks' postmenstrual age. The delay was equivalent to 1.9-4.4 weeks. All these infants belonged to the group with depressed thyroxine concentrations. The delay in progression in nerve conduction velocity was associated with prolonged hypothyroxinaemia, especially in those infants who also required ventilation. Further studies are in progress to study the effect of thyroid hormone on the nerve conduction velocity in preterm infants.


The discovery of high concentrations of DNA in marine sediments unaccounted for by living biomass suggests the presence of a large fraction of extracellular DNA, which might play an important role in gene transfer via natural transformation as well as in phosphorous biogeochemical cycling. But a universally accepted procedure for extracellular DNA extraction is not available yet. In this study, we developed a new nuclease‐based procedure to extract extracellular DNA from marine sediments. Coastal sand and deep‐sea mud samples were collected to test the efficiency of extracellular DNA removal from different sediment types. Extracellular DNA concentrations were quantified at six sediment depths, and changes in base composition were investigated to gather information on extracellular DNA fate. The extraction procedure was highly specific and only extracellular DNA was hydrolyzed after nuclease treatment. Hydrolyzable DNA accounted for ≪10 to ≫70% of the total DNA pool, suggesting that extracellular DNA can only be partially degraded. Base composition changed vertically with depth in the sediment as deoxycytidine content increased and deoxyadenosine decreased with increasing depth. Integrating our results for the top 15 cm of the sediment, we calculate that more than 50% of extracellular DNA was recalcitrant to enzymatic degradation. This finding might explain why DNA accumulates in surface sediments and suggests that DNA might play a nonnegligible role in P biogeochemical cycle.


Natural fragments are an important source of richness for the management and conservation of a local flora. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of fragmentation on the structure and composition of the plant communities of forest fragments (FF) in Alter do Chao, eastern Brazilian Amazonia. The study sample consisted of 25 FF and nine continuous forest (CF) sites. We compared plant density and species richness between site categories by t-tests, analyzed the differences in composition by cluster analysis, and assessed the effect of fragment size and distance to CF on the basal area and diameter of FF assemblages by linear regression. Individual trees and shrubs with DBH ≥1.27 cm were measured in 2x250 m plots. 17,078 individuals were recorded - 75.32% in FF and 24.68% in CF, comprising 475 species, 216 genera and 64 families. Myrtaceae and Fabaceae were the most abundant families in both FF and CF. Average species richness in FF and CF was statistically different. The 20 species with the highest importance values were similar in FF and CF. The average plant diameter was similar in FF and CF, suggesting that both are "mature" forests composed of thin individuals. Average diameter and total basal area showed a negative relationship with distance to CF and fragment area, respectively. Similarity analysis revealed two groups, one composed exclusively of portions of fragmented forest. Fragments and continuous forest differed in species composition, but were similar in structure. Diameter distribution in fragments was similar to that of primary forests.


Phosphorus terminated polystyrene polymers with molar mass ranging from 2 to 25 kg/mol and narrow molar mass distribution were synthesized by Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization (ATRP) followed by phosphorylation reaction. Polymers were grafted onto a native silicon oxide surfaces of a silicon wafers by Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP). The self-limiting nature of the grafting to reaction provides an accurate control of the surface density of P atoms as a function of the molar mass of the polymer grafted. After removing the polymeric part of the grafted layer with by O2 plasma hashing, the phosphorus diffusion in the silicon substrate was promoted by high temperature thermal treatments.Phosphorus terminated polystyrene polymers with molar mass ranging from 2 to 25 kg/mol and narrow molar mass distribution were synthesized by Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization (ATRP) followed by phosphorylation reaction. Polymers were grafted onto a native silicon oxide surfaces of a silicon wafers by Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP). The self-limiting nature of the grafting to reaction provides an accurate control of the surface density of P atoms as a function of the molar mass of the polymer grafted. After removing the polymeric part of the grafted layer with by O2 plasma hashing, the phosphorus diffusion in the silicon substrate was promoted by high temperature thermal treatments.


Under the auspices of the Organic Analysis Working Group (OAWG) of the Comité Consultatif pour la Quantité de Matière (CCQM) a key comparison, CCQM K55.c, was coordinated by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) in 2012. Twenty National Measurement Institutes or Designated Institutes and the BIPM participated. Participants were required to assign the mass fraction of valine present as the main component in the comparison sample for CCQM-K55.c. The comparison samples were prepared from analytical grade L-valine purchased from a commercial supplier and used as provided without further treatment or purification. Valine was selected to be representative of the performance of a laboratory's measurement capability for the purity assignment of organic compounds of low structural complexity [molecular weight range 100–300] and high polarity (pKOW > −2). The KCRV for the valine content of the material was 992.0 mg/g with a combined standard uncertainty of 0.3 mg/g. The key comparison reference value (KCRV) was assigned by combination of KCRVs assigned from participant results for each orthogonal impurity class. The relative expanded uncertainties reported by laboratories having results consistent with the KCRV ranged from 1 mg/g to 6 mg/g when using mass balance based approaches alone, 2 mg/g to 7 mg/g using quantitative 1H NMR (qNMR) based approaches and from 1 mg/g to 2.5 mg/g when a result obtained by a mass balance method was combined with a separate qNMR result. The material provided several analytical challenges. In addition to the need to identify and quantify various related amino acid impurities including leucine, isoleucine, alanine and α-amino butyrate, care was required to select appropriate conditions for performing Karl Fischer titration assay for water content to avoid bias due to in situ formation of water by self-condensation under the assay conditions. It also proved to be a challenging compound for purity assignment by qNMR techniques. There was overall excellent agreement between participants in the identification and the quantification of the total and individual related structure impurities, water content, residual solvent and total non-volatile content of the sample. Appropriate technical justifications were developed to rationalise observed discrepancies in the limited cases where methodology differences led to inconsistent results. The comparison demonstrated that to perform a qNMR purity assignment the selection of appropriate parameters and an understanding of their potential influence on the assigned value is critical for reliable implementation of the method, particularly when one or more of the peaks to be quantified consist of complex multiplet signals. Main text. To reach the main text of this paper, click on Final Report. Note that this text is that which appears in Appendix B of the BIPM key comparison database kcdb.bipm.org/. The final report has been peer-reviewed and approved for publication by the CCQM, according to the provisions of the CIPM Mutual Recognition Arrangement (CIPM MRA).


The Black Sea remains one of the largest underexplored rift basins in the world. Future success is dependent on a better understanding of a number of geological uncertainties. These include reservoir and source rock presence and quality, and the timing of migration of hydrocarbons relative to trap formation. An appreciation of the geological history of the Black Sea basins and the surrounding orogens is therefore key. The timing of basin formation, uplift of the margins, and of facies distribution remain issues for robust debate. This Special Publication presents the results of 15 studies that relate to the tectono-stratigraphy and petroleum geology of the Black Sea. The methodologies of these studies encompass crustal structure, geodynamic evolution, stratigraphy and its regional correlation, petroleum systems, source to sink, hydrocarbon habitat and play concepts, and reviews of past exploration. They provide insight into the many ongoing controversies concerning Black Sea regional geology and provide a better understanding of the geological risks that must be considered for future hydrocarbon exploration.


Jan Floris de Jongh played an undoubtedly significant role in the development of social work within and beyond The Netherlands. Yet, he and his contributions to the field are barely known, particularly in The Netherlands. His achievements warrant much more attention given that this Dutchman was also one of the most relevant figures in the international social work community. According to data in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, Jan Floris de Jongh was born on April 7, 1910 in Buitenzorg in the former Dutch East Indies (now Bogor, Indonesia). The archives state that he was a registered lawyer in Amsterdam in 1933 and moved to The Hague to pursue a career as a civil servant in the Ministry of Economic Affairs in 1934. In the same year, he married Nel ter Weele. During his career at the Ministry (1934-1946) he witnessed considerable changes which influenced his views of society namely, the Great Depression and the German Occupation of The Netherlands in World War II.


Three different models of simple and inexpensive Urine-diverting Dry Toilets (UDDTs) are described: a portable one for squatting made from a barrel, another portable one made from wood and linoleum, and a permanent one for squatting made with palm wood. A simple, portable urinal made from two plastic bottles is also described. These can be made at very low cost, with abundant natural materials, salvaged post-consumer waste, and items that are readily purchased almost anywhere. They may be especially applicable in poor communities, slums, farms, disaster relief camps, and temporary events, plus they may be used to train and screen users before building more elegant UDDTs. With these designs, conversion to UDDTs may be more a matter of paradigm shift than capital investment..


This paper investigates feature level fusion for enhancing fault detection from vibration signals in an ocean turbine. Changes in vibration signatures from such rotating machinery typically indicate the presence of a problem such as a shift in its orientation or mechanical impact from its environment. We applied feature level fusion to vibration data acquired from two accelerometers attached to a box fan, and then assessed the abilities of twelve well known machine learners to detect changes in state from the raw accelerometer data and from the fused data. Analysis of the performance of these classifiers showed an overall performance improvement in all twelve classifiers in detecting the state of the fan from the fused data versus from the data from the two individual sensor channels.


The data presented in this paper describe trends in treated problem cannabis use in seven health board areas, namely: the Midland, Mid-Western, North Eastern, North Western, Southern, South Eastern and Western Health Boards. The total numbers include 6,164 cases who lived and were treated in the seven health boards between 1998 and 2002. In this paper, treated problem cannabis use is described in relation to person, place and time. This paper will assist policy makers and service planners develop appropriate responses to problem cannabis use. The analysis presented in this paper is based on data reported to the National Drug Treatment Reporting System (NDTRS).


Prior knowledge integration helps identify semantic entities and their relationships in a graphical representation, however, its meaningful abstraction and intervention remain elusive. This paper advocates a knowledge-inspired 3D scene graph prediction method solely based on point clouds. At the mathematical modeling level, we formulate the task as two sub-problems: knowledge learning and scene graph prediction with learned prior knowledge. Unlike conventional methods that learn knowledge embedding and regular patterns from encoded visual information, we propose to suppress the misunderstandings caused by appearance similarities and other perceptual confusion. At the network design level, we devise a graph autoencoder to automatically extract class-dependent representations and topological patterns from the one-hot class labels and their intrinsic graphical structures, so that the prior knowledge can avoid perceptual errors and noises. We further devise a scene graph prediction model to predict credible relationship triplets by incorporating the related prototype knowledge with perceptual information. Comprehensive experiments confirm that, our method can successfully learn representative knowledge embedding, and the obtained prior knowledge can effectively enhance the accuracy of relationship predictions. Our thorough evaluations indicate the new method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance compared with other scene graph prediction methods.


What is XML? XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, is a specification for storing information. It is also a specification for describing the structure of that information. And while XML is a markup language (just like HTML), XML has no tags of its own. It allows the person writing the XML to create whatever tags they need. The only condition is that these newly created tags adhere to the rules of the XML specification.In the seven years since the first edition of XML: Visual QuickStart Guide was published, XML has taken its place next to HTML as a foundational language on the Internet. XML has become a very popular method for storing data and the most popular method for transmitting data between all sorts of systems and applications. The reason being, where HTML was designed to display information, XML was designed to manage it.This book begins by showing you the basics of the XML language. Then, by building on that knowledge, additional and supporting languages and systems will be discussed. To get the most out of this book, you should be somewhat familiar with HTML, although you dont need to be an expert coder by any stretch. No other previous knowledge is required. XML: Visual QuickStart Guide, 2nd Edition is divided into seven parts. Each part contains one or more chapters with step-by-step instructions that explain how to perform XML-related tasks. Wherever possible, examples of the concepts being discussed are displayed, and the parts of the examples on which to focus are highlighted. The order of the book is intentionally designed to be an introduction to the fundamentals of XML, followed by discussions of related XML technologies. In Part 1 of the book, you will learn how to create an XML document. Its relatively straightforward, and even more so if you know a little HTML. Part 2 focuses on XSL, which is a set of languages designed to transform an XML document into something else: an HTML file, a PDF document, or another XML document. Remember, XML is designed to store and transport data, not display it. Parts 3 and 4 of the book discuss DTD and XML Schema, languages designed to define the structure of an XML document. In conjunction with XML Namespaces (Part 5), you can guarantee that XML documents conform to a pre-defined structure, whether created by you or by someone else. Part 6, Developments and Trends, details some of the up-and-coming XML-related languages, as well as a few new versions of existing languages. Finally, Part 7 identifies some well-known uses of XML in the world today; some of which you may be surprised to learn. This beginners guide to XML is broken down as follows: Introduction Chapter 1: Writing XML Part 2: XSL Chapter 2: XSLT Chapter 3: XPath Patterns and Expressions Chapter 4: XPath Functions Chapter 5: XSL-FO Part 3: DTD Chapter 6: Creating a DTD Chapter 7: Entities and Notations in DTDs Chapter 8: Validation and Using DTDs Part 4: XML Schema Chapter 9: XML Schema Basics Chapter 10: Defining Simple Types Chapter 11: Defining Complex Types Part 5: Namespaces Chapter 12: XML Namespaces Chapter 13: Using XML Namespaces Part 6: Recent W3C Recommendations Chapter 14: XSLT 2.0 Chapter 15: XPath 2.0 Chapter 16: XQuery 1.0 Part 7: XML in Practice Chapter 17: Ajax, RSS, SOAP and More


Abstract:New knowledge is produced at great speed and fed into a global epistemic machinery of data banks, publications, and think tanks. In reverse, global knowledge is absorbed and used locally. Locally produced knowledge is on the increase as society moves towards a knowledge society. Social science research adds to knowledge of societies. If it is locally produced, it can be interpreted as reflexive modernization in so far as it provides paradigms for an interpretation of social processes and structures. This article traces the development of social science research on Southeast Asia and its increasing localization. A model is developed to summarize the output of interpretative schemes and published documents. Statistical data on the global absorption of locally produced knowledge are used to measure the extent of the move towards a knowledge society. Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines have relatively high local social science output, whereas Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Laos have low output rates. We diagnose four different paths from 1970 to 2000: Indonesia shows a stable high level of dependence, Malaysia and the Philippines are increasing local output but also increasing dependence, whereas Singapore is increasing output with decreasing dependence on global social science knowledge.


By definition, celebrities exist in public as an association of physical traits or projected values. Celebrity was problematic for Emerson in three areas. First, celebrity heightened Emerson's anxieties about his friendships and intimate relationships. Emerson's relative comfort in the public arena of the lecture hall, as compared with the private arena of intimate relationships, carries mixed results when attention to his body rather than his ideas becomes the focus of his success. Second, celebrity accentuates the tension between interest in public persons and the social conformity that Emerson consistently urges his readers to shun. Third, celebrity's attention to the physical person leads to misinterpretations of Emerson's lectures. From the first generation of Emerson's biographers forward, critics have disparaged contemporary audiences as insensitive to the complexities of his lectures. This essay, however, considers the possible uses of the celebrity for the culture that both created and mistook him. Viewed in the light of Emerson's celebrity, misinterpretation of his lectures reveals his audiences' appreciation for intellectual accomplishment and their desire for the spiritual uplift brought by physical proximity to "genius." In addition, because Emerson's celebrity encouraged a range of interpretations of his cultural relevance, it required individuals to examine Emerson's reputation for themselves, and it thereby fostered the kind of self-reliant thinking that Emerson himself advocated. Emerson's case reveals that, in an age of mass culture, the ability to interpret celebrities' significance is a key to critical thinking and a valuable form of literacy.


What happens when explorations of sexuality, gender and the Bible go down under? This fascinating collection of essays, written by scholars located in the Antipodes, traverses the highly contested landscapes of sexuality, gender and biblical studies, revealing a myriad of sexual discourses voiced within both the biblical texts and their interpretative traditions. Recognizing that textual meaning is always shaped by the cultural and contextual baggage the reader brings to the interpretative task, contributors raise provocative questions about the meanings, identities and ideologies that surround biblical discourses of sexuality and gender, exploring how these have been and can be reshaped and reconceived.

Deane Galbraith examines the theological reflections of Augustine and Paul on Adam's 'perfect penis' in Eden while Roland Boer explores the earthy biblical vocabulary used to depict female genitalia. Christina Petterson, meanwhile, examines the Moravian Brethren's celebration of a Christ who bore on his body male and female genitalia. Travelling beyond the sexualized human body, Emily Colgan considers the problematic language of gender violence against the land that is voiced in Jeremiah. Elaine Wainwright blurs and queers the binary categories of human and non-human in the Sermon on the Mount. Yael Klangwisan continues this blurring of boundaries through her creative reading of Song of Songs.

Moving from the gendered body to the gendered voice, Alan Cadwallader probes Paul's rhetorical gender-bending in his 'masculinized' oral culture. Caroline Blyth and Teguh Wijaya Mulya empower Delilah to vocalize her queer potential in both the biblical narrative and popular culture. Gillian Townsley adds her own Kiwi voice to explore queer possibilities in Philippians 4.2-3 in the light of New Zealand's same-sex marriage legislation. The volume concludes with a queer reconsideration of the Antipodes themselves from the perspective of a northern-hemisphere biblical scholar, Hugh Pyper.

This compelling collection will make a substantive contribution to the bookshelves of scholars and interested readers in such areas as biblical studies, religion and gender-queer studies.


ABSTRACT Independent learning is one of the cornerstones of UK higher education yet it is poorly understood by students and is seen by politicians as a poor substitute for face to face teaching. This paper explores students' understandings, approaches and experiences of independent learning and how they may become more effective independent learners. This large scale qualitative study, funded by the HEA, included students-as-researchers, independent learning diaries, and student-led interviews. Findings suggest that students initially use low level reinforcing and organising skills and in later stages of their courses develop higher level extending and applying skills. Clearer guidance, clearer tasks and in-course support are amongst the students' recommendations for enhancing independent learning. However the most powerful influence on their independent learning was the support, collaboration and advice of other (more experienced) students in non-assessed scenarios. These findings have implications for staff involved in induction, student support, curriculum design and for staff and officers in Students' Unions.


Abstract The COPINE scale allows standardised classification of a person's child pornography collection while taking into account contextual considerations. However, despite its frequent usage in research studies, the scale has never been empirically validated with regards to its psychometric properties. This study describes a validation design to assess reliability and construct validity of the scale while considering ethical concerns. An online survey was conducted amongst psychological staff members of Correctional Services NZ as well as postgraduate students from a New Zealand University. Participants were asked to rate verbal descriptions of each item level of the original scale according to its perceived seriousness of the offence, suggesting a higher penalty for more serious image offending. Results revealed that students and correctional staff showed high inter-rater agreement in their rankings, and that rankings increased with higher-level images as defined in the original scale. Two areas of difference to the original scale ranks were identified, concerning levels 'Posing' and 'Sexual Explicit Activities'. The implications of these findings are discussed.


A newborn screen for Niemann-Pick disease type C was developed on the basis of discovery of a bile acid marker. Expanding the newborn screen Niemann-Pick disease type C (NPC) is a fatal neurologic disorder caused by the deficiency of an enzyme involved in cholesterol storage. Although this disease was untreatable in the past, new therapeutics are now in clinical trials, but they are most likely to be effective if treatment is started as early as possible, before neurodegeneration has occurred. Jiang et al. identified three bile acids that are greatly increased in the blood of patients with NPC compared to healthy controls. The authors also demonstrated that one of these bile acids can be reliably measured in dried blood spots using mass spectrometry, suggesting that this bile acid test should be evaluated for potential addition to neonatal screening programs. Niemann-Pick disease type C (NPC) is a fatal, neurodegenerative, cholesterol storage disorder. With new therapeutics in clinical trials, it is imperative to improve diagnostics and facilitate early intervention. We used metabolomic profiling to identify potential markers and discovered three unknown bile acids that were increased in plasma from NPC but not control subjects. The bile acids most elevated in the NPC subjects were identified as 3β,5α,6β-trihydroxycholanic acid and its glycine conjugate, which were shown to be metabolites of cholestane-3β,5α,6β-triol, an oxysterol elevated in NPC. A high-throughput mass spectrometry–based method was developed and validated to measure the glycine-conjugated bile acid in dried blood spots. Analysis of dried blood spots from 4992 controls, 134 NPC carriers, and 44 NPC subjects provided 100% sensitivity and specificity in the study samples. Quantification of the bile acid in dried blood spots, therefore, provides the basis for a newborn screen for NPC that is ready for piloting in newborn screening programs.


Introduction: Surgical management of urinary stones has witnessed major development in the last few decades. After the successful introduction of Shock wave lithotripsy (SWL), the urologist's armamentarium for treating stones became versatile by adoption of rapidly evolving technologies that increasingly replaced the traditional open surgery.There are special situations when SWL and endourology is not the optimal choice and open surgery was the only option at a time, here comes the role of laparoscopy to replace the open surgery for dealing with these cases where endourology has major limitations. Hereby we will highlight the current international trend in laparoscopic surgery for urolithiasis and demonstrate our limited experience in laparoscopic stone surgery in ten patients in Aden, Yemen. Patient and Method: From March 2011 to September 2017. Ten consecutive patients' ages 4-60 years (mean 38 years) with renal and ureteral stones underwent laparoscopic removal of their stones. The indications for laparoscopy were; unavailability of pediatric PNL setup in two children, failed of SWL in one, renal stones with concomitant PUJO in one, and large impacted ureter stones in the rest of patients. Result: Stone largest diameter ranged from 25 to 45 mm (mean 28 mm), operative time ranged from one to 4 hours (mean 2.3 hours) and hospital stay ranged from four to seven days (mean 5 days). The procedure completed successfully an all, but one patient in whom conversion to open ureterolithotomy performed, because of difficulty to access the large impacted intramural stone, no major intra or post-operative complications, no blood transfusion needed. One patient develop prolonged urine leakage for 10 days managed conservatively. Follow up after three, six and 12 months with plain abdominal x-ray (KUB) ultrasonography (US) and Urography (IVU) when indicated showed no residual stones and no newly developed hydronephrosis. Conclusion: Laparoscopic surgery is safe and effective in management of large renal and ureter stones in patients who are not suitable candidate for endourology.


The West Antarctic Ice-Sheet (WAIS) is likely to have been subject to very dynamic changes during its history as most of its base is grounded below modern sea-level, making it particularly sensitive to climate changes. Its collapse would result in global sea-level rise of 3-5 m. The reconstruction and quantification of possible partial or full collapses of the WAIS in the past can provide important constraints for ice-sheet models, used for projecting its future behaviour and resulting sea-level rise. Large uncertainties exist regarding the chronology, extent, rates as well as spatial and temporal variability of past advances and retreats of the WAIS across the continental shelves. By using the seafloor drilling device MeBo during an RV Polarstern cruise scheduled for early 2015, a series of sediment cores will be drilled on the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE) shelf, where seismic data show glacially-derived sequences covered by only a thin veneer of postglacial deposits in some areas. From analyses of seismic data, we infer that interglacial sediments can be sampled which may have been deposited under seasonally open water conditions and thus contain datable microfossil-bearing material. A shallow basin near the Pine Island Glacier front will be one of the prime targets for the drilling. The near-horizontal seismic reflection horizons may represent a sequence of continuously deposited, mainly terrigenous material, including ice-rafted debris, meltwater deposits and hemipelagic sediments deposited rapidly during the Holocene or a series of unconformities caused by erosion resulting from grounding line oscillations through many glacial cycles. Subglacial bedforms imaged in multibeam bathymetric data indicate fast glacial flow over some shelf areas of the ASE, where seismic profiles show acoustic basement near the seafloor. It is unknown, whether fast ice-flow in these areas was facilitated by water-lubricated sliding over bedrock or presence of a thin layer of deformable till (perhaps less than a metre in thickness). The nature of this layer holds important clues for understanding the processes that operated beneath the margin of the ice-sheet, beneath ice-flows and on ridges between ice-streams during the Last Glacial Maximum. Grounding zone wedges (GZWs) are widely thought to be important in stabilising grounding line positions during ice-sheet retreat, but hypotheses about the processes and duration of their formation and their composition, are mainly based on conceptual models. Drill sites on and near GZWs are aimed to establish the nature of their sediments, their formation processes, their rates of growth and the palaeo-environmental conditions in their surroundings.


In this paper, a generic framework for validating wideband MIMO channel models based on channel measurement results is proposed. The framework is formulated as a series of continuous functions (metrics) and a definition of distance of continuous function space (degree of approximation). The metrics characterize the MIMO channel from different perspectives, and the distance provides a quantitative measure of the degree of approximation for the specified model. Several fundamental metrics which reflect the spatial multiplexing gain, diversity capability, time and frequency variability, are derived for exploring the frequency-selective fading property. Based on an extensive measurement campaign at 5.25 GHz, the propagation channel is reconstructed by a WINNER-like model. The metrics are calculated from both the model generated channel realizations and the measured impulse response as a demonstration. The proposed framework can be applied to compare different channel models and to evaluate the simplified version of channel models.


In previous geographical genomics studies of the impact of lifestyle on gene expression inferred from microarray analysis of peripheral blood samples, we described the complex influences of culture, ethnicity, and gender in Morocco, and of pregnancy in Brisbane. Here we describe the use of nanofluidic Fluidigm quantitative RT-PCR arrays targeted at a set of 96 transcripts that are broadly informative of the major axes of immune gene expression, to explore the population structure of transcription in Fiji. As in Morocco, major differences are seen between the peripheral blood transcriptomes of rural villagers and residents of the capital city, Suva. The effect is much greater in Indian villages than in Melanesian highlanders and appears to be similar with respect to the nature of at least two axes of variation. Gender differences are much smaller than ethnicity or lifestyle effects. Body mass index is shown to associate with one of the axes as it does in Atlanta and Brisbane, establishing a link between the epidemiological transition of human metabolic disease, and gene expression profiles.


The effects of self-interaction in classical physics, in the presence of closed timelike curves, are probed by means of a simple model problem: The motion and self-collisions of a nonrelativistic, classical billiard ball in a space endowed with a wormhole that takes the ball backward in time. The central question asked is whether the Cauchy problem is well posed for this model problem, in the following sense: We define the multiplicity of an initial trajectory for the ball to be the number of self-consistent solutions of the ball's equations of motion, which begin with that trajectory. For the Cauchy problem to be well posed, all initial trajectories must have multiplicity one.

A simple analog of the science-fiction scenario of going back in time and killing oneself is an initial trajectory which is dangerous in this sense: When followed assuming no collisions, the trajectory takes the ball through the wormhole and thereby back in time, and then sends the ball into collision with itself. In contrast with one's naive expectation that dangerous trajectories might have multiplicity zero and thereby make the Cauchy problem ill posed ("no solutions"), it is shown that all dangerous initial trajectories in a wide class have infinite multiplicity and thereby make the Cauchy problem ill posed in an unexpected way: "far too many solutions."

The wide class of infinite-multiplicity, dangerous trajectories includes all those that are nearly coplanar with the line of centers between the wormhole mouths, and a ball and wormhole restricted by (ball radius)≪(wormhole radius)≪(separation between wormhole mouths). Two of the infinity of solutions are slight perturbations of the self-inconsistent, collision-free motion, and all the others are strongly different from it. Not all initial trajectories have infinite multiplicity: trajectories where the ball is initially at rest far from the wormhole have multiplicity one, as also, probably, do those where it is almost at rest. A search is made for initial trajectories with zero multiplicity, and none are found. The search entails constructing a set of highly nonlinear, coupled, algebraic equations that embody all the ball's laws of motion, collision, and wormhole traversal, and then constructing perturbation theory and numerical solutions of the equations. A future paper (paper II) will show that, when one takes account of the effects of quantum mechanics, the classically ill-posed Cauchy problem ("too many classical solutions") becomes quantum-mechanically well posed in the sense of producing unique probability distributions for the outcomes of all measurements.


Foreign direct investments are easier today then in the past owing to lower communication costs, improved and new information technology systems. In 1990, Brazil opened up for the global econ-omy and is today one of the tenth largest economies in the world, furthermore one of the largest recipients of foreign direct investments. Many different aspects need to be taken into consideration when investing in a foreign country such as motives, risks, entry modes and financing alternatives.The purpose with this thesis is to describe Swedish corporations' es-tablishment in Brazil, during 1990-2005. The authors aim to illus-trate the motives behind the establishment, choice of entry mode, the perceived risks of operating in Brazil and if these risks affect the financing decisions.To answer the purpose of this thesis both quantitative- and qualitative methods have been applied. A quantitative method has been employed when performing the preliminary study, by sending a standardized questionnaire by email to the entire population to as-semble those corporations who established in Brazil during 1990-2005. When designing the interview questionnaire and accomplishing the telephone interviews a combination of qualitative- and quantitative methods have been utilized.The most common motives to invest in Brazil are expanding markets and following already existing customers. When deciding upon how to enter the market, the majority of the respondents choose to start up from the ground, a Greenfield investment. The risks which had the largest impact of the corporation during the establishment were the political risk and protectionism. Intercompany financing has been the main financing alternative, though it is very expensive to borrow in Brazil. The risks affecting the financing decisions are the exchange rate, inflation and the interest rate.


Complexes (Cr(C8H5O4) (OH)2(H2O)3) and (Cr(C8H5O4) (OH)2(H2O)3)H2O were prepared by using chromium trioxide (CrO3) and phthalic acid. (Hereafter these phthalic acid complexes (Cr/H2Pht) will be named as Cr/H2Pht1 and Cr/H2Pht2 respectively). Their spectral characterization was done by using elemental analysis (C and H), ICP-OES, UV-Vis spectroscopy, FTIR spectroscopy, 1 H NMR and Fast Atomic Bombardment (FAB) Mass spectrometry, whereas thermal decomposition was investigated by differential scanning calorimetric (DSC). Study includes thermal decomposition kinetics and lability nature of the complexes prepared.


Following the Federal Circuit's 1998 decision in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc. holding that there was no per se exclusion from patentability for software-implemented business methods, the number of applications for and grants of such patents on increased dramatically. A large number of critics castigated them for two primary reasons: First, some contended that patents should simply not be allowed on such subject matter. Second, a much larger number of critics asserted that these patents were of singularly inferior quality because they had been issued without due consideration to the relevant prior art-documentary evidence of what others had done in the past. In response to these criticisms, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) instituted an initiative in March 2000 that it called the Second Pair of Eyes Review, intended to make it more difficult to obtain business method patents. Among other features, the SPER program called for a second-level review upon allowance for patent applications in Main Class 705. Each of the authors had independently conducted previous research leading us to conclude that software-implemented business method patents cited prior art that was not inferior in quantity or quality to other types of patents, and that the many prior art-related criticisms were not supported by empirical evidence. Although some business method patents undoubtedly were of low quality, one finds low-quality patents in all fields. Be that as it may, we believe it important to empirically assess the effects of the SPER initiative. The program requires substantial resources, and if it has not had significant positive effects, these wasted resources constitute a tax on innovation because the PTO is supported by user fees. Perhaps a more important reason for evaluating SPER's effects, however, is that the PTO declared it to be a success and announced plans to expand it to other fields. Whether or not the agency expands the program in the near term, it is important to know whether targeting patent reforms at particular technology fields is a model that should ever be replicated. Employing negative binomial regression models, we found that the SPER initiative did indeed have significant positive effects on the quantity and quality of prior art cited in patent applications to which it applied. Using logistic regression, we determined that the SPER initiative also led to a significant increase in the number of Main Class 705 patents that cited at least some prior art. Moreover, we found that, after SPER, examiners themselves added significantly more prior art references that did examiners of closely related patents with Secondary 705 classifications. Success within this narrow operative domain, however, is seriously tempered by a number of factors, leading to the conclusion that attempting to improve patent quality one technology at a time is not a model that should be repeated. Because of definitional problems that are impossible to overcome, and because the patent classification system is very poorly suited for this kind of task, such an approach to patent reform is and always will be grossly underinclusive and subject to gaming by both patent applicants and beleaguered patent examiners. Attempts to improve patent quality should not focus on a single field.


We report tests to failure of 300-nm-wide damascene copper interconnect lines in silicon oxide dielectric, under high amplitude, low frequency alternating current. The cyclic minimum and maximum resistances were obtained from the measured voltage and current waveforms, and remained essentially constant over the lifetime tests. In the lines tested to failure under voltage control at the highest current levels, observed features of the remaining copper deposits seemed to indicate repeated melting over multiple cycles of current. The lifetimes, plotted against temperature, formed a nearly straight line on a semi-log plot, even though the failures, particularly those run under voltage control, became considerably less catastrophic for the longer lifetimes. Understanding the individual and combined effects of the temperature, current, and thermomechanical stresses will open up the possibilities for utilizing these electrical tests in systematic assessments of interconnect reliability and quality control.


Background/question/methods: Understanding directions, rates and causes of recent trends in biodiversity is vital to planning conservation actions. State of Environment Reports turn to map statistics and aggregated indices to infer general trends, while empirical data are considered too patchy or inconsistent to contribute to an overview. Using examples from Australian heathlands, we asked what further insights on the status of biodiversity can be gained from available empirical studies. We reviewed a selection of long-term ecological experiments of 10-30 years duration. We aimed to identify major drivers of ecosystem dynamics, determine trends in different biota and diagnose causes of change.

Results/conclusions: The studies were continental in coverage and identified land clearing, fire regimes, climate processes and disease as major influences on heathland dynamics. Fire regimes are the most ubiquitous driver, but the mechanisms and nature of fire-driven changes vary among biota and across the continent. Land clearing caused severe historical losses of biodiversity in the south-west and continues to threaten coastal heathlands. Plant disease is driving the most rapid recent declines, primarily in southern Australia. Observed sensitivities of heathland biota to climatic factors signal potential losses of diversity under future climates. All of the studies advanced understanding of heathland dynamics. Concordance between studies with varied approaches suggests robustness of inferred trends. We conclude that long term ecological studies are under-utilised in conservation reporting and planning. Further investment in them will greatly strengthen capacity to detect and interpret trends in biodiversity. Similar insights could not be achieved with any certainty by short cut methods.


The standard neoclassical growth model with Cobb-Douglas production predicts a monotonically declining saving rate, when reasonably calibrated. Ample empirical evidence, however, shows that the transition path of a country's saving rate exhibits a rising or non-monotonic pattern. In important cases, hyperbolic discounting, which is empirically strongly supported, implies transitional dynamics of the saving rate that accords well with empirical evidence. This holds true even in a growth model with Cobb-Douglas production technology. We also identify the cases where hyperbolic discounting is observationally equivalent to exponential discounting. In those cases, hyperbolic discounting does not affect the saving rate dynamics. Numerical simulations employing a generalized class of hyperbolic discounting functions that we term regular discounting functions support the results.


Human drivers have a remarkable ability to drive in diverse visual conditions and situations, e.g., from maneuvering in rainy, limited visibility conditions with no lane markings to turning in a busy intersection while yielding to pedestrians. In contrast, we find that state-of-the-art sensorimotor driving models struggle when encountering diverse settings with varying relationships between observation and action. To generalize when making decisions across diverse conditions, humans leverage multiple types of situation-specific reasoning and learning strategies. Motivated by this observation, we develop a framework for learning a situational driving policy that effectively captures reasoning under varying types of scenarios. Our key idea is to learn a mixture model with a set of policies that can capture multiple driving modes. We first optimize the mixture model through behavior cloning and show it to result in significant gains in terms of driving performance in diverse conditions. We then refine the model by directly optimizing for the driving task itself, i.e., supervised with the navigation task reward. Our method is more scalable than methods assuming access to privileged information, e.g., perception labels, as it only assumes demonstration and reward-based supervision. We achieve over 98% success rate on the CARLA driving benchmark as well as state-of-the-art performance on a newly introduced generalization benchmark.


Abstract This paper describes how a weblog was utilized as a major component in a long-term, multi-site ethnography with both "virtual" and physically situated research components. "Ethnographic blogging" describes not only the act of writing on a website and hoping that someone will read it, but the process of regularly maintaining a blog, and the modes of interaction and observation that this process gradually enables. In my own study of self-identified 'geeks' and 'nerds,' ethnographic blogging involved traversing news sites, forums, and other blogs for relevant content, leading to opportunities for dialogue with other bloggers and readers; establishing a persona online as a researcher, which has encouraged subjects to invite me to public and private discussions about their culture and identities; and bringing together online subjects from multiple physical sites, among other opportunities. My own experience of integrating a blog into ethnographic research was largely experimental, though I offer these reflections to encourage researchers to consider what alternative means of qualitative analysis online may have to offer us.


Endogenous and synthetic DMT and their relation to pineal function have been the subject matter of numerous popular and scientific articles, crossing many disciplines. Correlations for visionary and psi-conducive states have been widely suggested. Numerous spiritual technologies have been retrieved from traditional cultures and new technologies based in frequencies and resonance have been concocted and sold to the public. Yet, in 2010, even the leading researcher Rick Strassman says that "we don't know if DMT does appear in the pineal…[or, if] endogenous DMT activity increases during particular non-drug altered states, such as dreams and near-death experiences." If it were, it would help explain the psychedelic characteristics of those altered states." This strongly suggests that new assays for low levels of endogenous DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, bufotenine, and metabolites in different tissues would be very useful. Such experiments were conducted in 2012 with positive results. Nevertheless, a review of the history and speculation on the psychoactive compounds remains of great interest to both researchers and the general public. What do these things mean?  The jury remains out, and we are wise to remember that theories remain just that. Baselines need to be established for normal waking consciousness, and comparisons made for a variety of states of consciousness. But perhaps the greatest result of such research is new understanding of what it means to be fully human.


WORDS ON THE LINE DOCUMENTING IN-DEPTH INFORMATION requires the ability to think about a topic from multiple perspectives. Successful technical-report or proposal writers maintain awareness that every document they write serves as a management tool for someone in the organization, and that different readers have different needs. The chief executive officer may want to read just the report's executive summary, the chief operating officer the strategic plan, the chief financial officer the budget, the chief information officer the technical requirements, and the chief learning officer the impact on organizational training. Polished writers also know that the same reader may pick up the document more than once for entirely different reasons. For instance, project managers may on first reading cover only the project description so that they can arrive at the project launch meeting prepared to request clarification on any point or to express approval or disapproval of a suggested tactic; during their second reading, they may turn to the project timeline to set dates in their scheduler; and well into the project, they may turn to the project management directory to determine whom they should call concerning an implementation issue. A major challenge for report writers involves balancing completeness with efficiency while addressing all those concerns. Numerous textbooks offer suggestions on what to include in reports or proposals; (1) however, writers in different industries have different concerns when reporting technical information. Consider the types of questions the following writers would ask themselves when composing their reports: an accountant in the publishing industry writing an audit report of a company's accounts payable system an airman in the US Air Force writing a causal analysis report on a malfunction of a helicopter's communication device a biologist for the state's environmental protection commission completing an investigative report on a wastewater project a chemist in the food industry describing the changes in chemical mixtures used to flavor potato chips a director of human resources for a pharmaceutical company developing a cost-benefit analysis of recent training initiatives an educational consultant for a school board composing an evaluation report on the district's proposed expansion of services a financial services advisor in the investment banking industry studying the impact of recent legislation on her firm's tax liability a mechanical engineer for an architectural engineering firm assessing the efficacy of a new heating and cooling system in a purified water processing plant a physicist for an alternative energy lobbyist crafting an argument against a nuclear power plant in a suburban town an attorney for a telecommunications company applying to the United States Patent Office for intellectual property rights to a new cell phone transmitter a researcher in the insurance industry reporting to underwriters on economic, legislative, and commercial trends in Kansas a social worker for a city's child welfare agency creating an analysis of unmet needs in children's programming Having consulted to these and many other types of professionals, I often hear writers relating their struggles to condense voluminous information. For this reason, I feel surprised to discover that most companies do not publish guidelines for writing complex reports. Writers seeking to jumpstart the writing process need not only templates and boilerplate text but also an idea design for their reports as well as a rationale for including those ideas. With this thought in mind, I offer here a report-writing checklist featuring the critical elements all on-the-job writers should consider for inclusion in their reports. The organizational pattern I describe in this article works well for long, formal, evaluative, investigative, periodic, research, or trip reports. …


When my study of the "normative basis" of Absalom and Achitophel first appeared, it challenged the prevailing interpretation of the poem by arguing that Aristotelian hylomorphism provides a basis for structuring references to the begetting of sons, that the contrasting father-son pairs were crucial to understanding the norms of the satire, that Dryden implies muted criticism of the king's morals while wholeheartedly supporting his politics in the Exclusion Crisis, and that the ethical norm of the poem is contained in the relationship between the figures of Barzillai and his son. Critics whose work focused on the poem as a series of parts--from Dryden's opening lines on the king's promiscuity as an example of his wit, to his satiric portraits, to his use of biblical allegory, to his orations by the king and the poem's titular characters--had overlooked the trajectory of the poem, which includes the contrasts of characters, including the contrasts of pairs as paternal figures, related to their sons. However disturbing these findings may have been to some of Dryden's critics, those who disagreed with this new reading simply skirted it in subsequent discussion, or else professed not to see the features I had delineated. But they did not provide refutations. Others developed their own readings based on my fathers and sons argument. (1) For all its innovations, deconstruction has treated Dryden with the same hostility exhibited by many of his more traditionally-minded critics. Nowhere is this attitude more apparent than in a critical approach to Absalom and Achitophel, where feminism has joined deconstruction in making Dryden an absolutist both in his sexism and in his politics and where, despite the poem's title and its seeming concentration on paternity, we are told that representations of maternity are "equally important." Such is the approach of Susan Greenfield, whose position serves as a convenient point of departure for a reconstruction of the poem's sexual roles and their concomitant values. (2) Her argument depends largely on a tradition concerning bodily generation that derives from Aristotle, who, along with Dryden, is presumed to operate from a sexist position. By asserting that the poem embodies "Dryden's attack on maternity" (267), Greenfield perpetuates a tradition of assailing Dryden under the guise of examining his poems, a tradition often involving misrepresentations that began during the poet's lifetime with John Dennis, the Duke of Buckingham, and perhaps most notably Jeremy Collier, who, as Dryden rightly complained in the "Preface to Fables," "perverted my Meaning by his Glosses; and interpreted my Words into Blasphemy and Bawdy" (Poems 1462). (3) Collier had misrepresented Dryden in describing him as implicitly materialistic: Our Minds (says [Dryden]) are perpetually wrought on by the Temperament of our Bodies, which makes me suspect that they are nearer Allied than either our Philosophers, or School-Divines will allow them to be. The meaning is, he suspects our Souls are nothing but Organiz'd Matter. (4) My contention is that Greenfield has performed a modern equivalent of what Dryden describes as Collier's efforts and that, in her discussion of form and matter as Dryden associates them with the male and female contributions to generation, she labors under a confusion as egregious as that of Collier. While I do not wish to dwell on her argument, Greenfield deals with the poem almost as if it demanded an esoteric reading, yet instead of finding hidden fissures in the text, she creates them in her reading. My own argument consists simultaneously of a refutation of her position and a reading that rehabilitates the values embedded in Dryden's poetic treatment of the male and female contributions to body and soul in procreation and how those roles are integral to the experience of the poem. Greenfield argues that "Dryden develops a model of maternal generation in order to defend the royalist tradition . …


Performance objectives are often neglected during the design phase of a project, and performance problems are often not discovered until the system is implemented. Therefore, there is a need from the industry to find a method to predict the performance of a system early in the design phase. One method that tries to solve this problem is the Software Performance Engineering (SPE) method. This report gives a short introduction to software performance and an overview of the SPE method for performance prediction. It also contains a case study where SPE is applied on an existing system.


This article introduces the term "the other marriage equality problem" to invite attention to a marriage equality issue distinct from gay men's and lesbians' access to the institution of civil marriage. That problem is captured in warnings about the growing class-based marriage divide and the "diverging destinies" of children that flow from these emerging patterns of family life, sometimes referred to as "the reproduction of inequalities." Growing family inequality warrants attention for many reasons, including the crucial role that families, along with other institutions of civil society, play in sustaining the American experiment in "ordered liberty." Strikingly, such warnings coexist with a different challenge to marriage, which questions whether a stable, well-ordered society needs marriage and cites to those affluent and successful Americans who remain single - and often, childless - by choice and insist that they can contribute to civil society and civic virtue, perhaps even to a greater extent than the married. To evaluate these two different stories about marriage, this article uses as foils two recent books that address the class-based marriage divide: Hanna Rosin's The End of Men and the Rise of Women and Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2012. This Article highlights the relevance of gender roles and gender equality to the marriage problem. For example, Rosin's and Murray's books, working within a heterosexual frame, pose the question: when economic and social factors force a change in roles within the family and the workplace, how do men and women cope? The Article situates current diagnoses of class-based marriage inequality in the context of earlier concerns, in the 1990s and early 2000s, about the low rate of marriage among low-income parents ("fragile families") and an evident gap between their marital aspirations and their marital practices. That gap preoccupied federal lawmakers debating welfare reform and welfare reauthorization and trying to shore up "personal responsibility" and family values. Recent studies, the article argues, find a similar gap in the fragile families of "Middle America," where marriage "have nots" fail to achieve their marital aspirations and decouple parenthood from marriage. This article shows the migration from a focus on the disappearance of marriage among low-income parents - and on the interplay of economic and cultural factors - to a similar focus on a growing swath of Americans. The Article concludes by identifying empirical and normative questions posed by, and possible law and policy responses to, the other marriage equality problem.


The RF fields present in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners can induce hazardous heating in patients wearing medical implants. The inherent design and locale of deep brain stimulators (DBS) and spinal cord stimulators (SCS) make them particularly susceptible. We apply antenna concepts and use electromagnetic (EM) simulation to explain the phenomenon and anticipate its sensitivity to lead wire length. We anticipate that a DC resistance of less than 50Ω/m and an RF impedance of more than 1.23kΩ/m would be required for a safe electrode for SCS use. We investigate the possibility of manipulating wire conductivity and diameter in order to use the skin depth effect to achieve a safe electrode. The effect of the thickness and permittivity of insulation surrounding the wires is explored.


BACKGROUND
Alcohol consumption causes motor vehicle accident (MVA) injury in a dose-response fashion. However, the relationship between how this risk is different with respect to fatal and nonfatal outcomes is not clear. A meta-analysis has already been completed for alcohol consumption and nonfatal MVA injury, but none exists for fatal injury. Thus, an analysis of the acute dose-response relationship between alcohol and motor vehicle injury death is warranted to generate single occasion- and dose-specific relative risks for the first time.

METHODS
A systematic literature review and inverse-variance weighted, random effects meta-analysis were conducted to fill this gap. Fractional polynomial regression was used to model the dose-response relationship. Usual tests of heterogeneity and publication bias were run.

RESULTS
Five studies meeting the inclusion criteria of this analysis were selected. At all levels of blood alcohol concentration (BAC), the odds ratio (OR) of fatal motor vehicle injury was significant. Overall, the 5 combined studies yielded an OR of fatal injury of 1.74 (95% CI: 1.43-2.14) for every 0.02% increase in BAC. At 0.08, the legal limit in most countries, the OR was 13.0 (95% CI: 11.1-15.2).

CONCLUSIONS
This study is able to definitively show and quantify, for the first time, the significantly increased OR for fatal motor vehicle injury. This analysis showed some evidence of both study heterogeneity and publication bias, likely due to the increased variation we could expect from a small study number. The alcohol-caused fatal motor vehicle injury literature is sparse with respect to dose-response information. More studies investigating this relationship and other injury types are recommended in this area to be able to calculate stable estimates of risk overall and by injury type specifically.


Abstract Composite temperature and precipitation anomalies during various stages of an event in the Southern Oscillation (SO) have been computed for several hundred stations across the globe. Large regions of coherent, significant signals are shown to exist for both extremes of the SO, with warm event signals generally opposite to those during cold events. In addition, during the year preceding the development of an event in the SO (year −1), climatic anomalies tend to be opposite to those during the following year (year 0). This confirms that the biennial tendency of the SO over the Pacific/Indian ocean sectors is also present in more remote regions with climatic signals related to the SO. Many of the signals are consistent enough from event to event to be useful for extended range forecasting purposes.


The Imperial Japanese Navy of World War 2 surpassed the Allied and Axis fleets in innovation and technology. This title covers the 12 Japanese battleships that saw service between 1941-45. Each class is considered in turn in light of its design and construction, its armament and wartime modifications. The author, Mark Stille, also uses first-hand accounts and dramatic photographs to tell the story of these mighty battleships at war, including major engagements during the raid at Pearl Harbor and the battle of Midway. He also examines the wider context of Japanese battleship development by looking at the naval strategy and cult of the battleship. This title will fascinate any naval enthusiast, and the detailed color plates will make it essential for modelers of the period.