ABSTRACT Twenty interbedded fluvial muds and sands (mud-sand pairs) from various rivers in Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas were collected and analyzed. Chemical treatments were used to isolate the solid silica (quartz plus chert) and feldspar from the sediments and point counts of grain mounts were made to determine the amounts of quartz, chert and types of feldspars in each sample. Atomic absorption spectrophotometry was used to obtain normative percentages of orthoclase, albite and anorthite. A combination of sieving and settling tube techniques was used to obtain the size distribution of solid silica plus feldspar fraction of each sample. In the samples analyzed, feldspar is finer grained than quartz plus chert and, therefore, the F/Q + C + F ratio in a mud is higher than the ratio in the associated sand. Consideration of a single size fraction (4.0-4.5 ) common to both the mud and sand members of the mud-sand pairs eliminated the influence of size on the ratio. Within the 4.0-4.5 size fraction the F/Q + C + F ratios for the mud and sand of a mud-sand pair are the same. The chert grains in our chert-rich samples are coarser-grained than the associated quartz grains so that the chert/solid silica ratios are larger in the sands than in the muds. However, as with the feldspar grains the ratios are the same if only the 4.0-4.5 size fraction of each sediment is considered. Most sandstones and almost all mudrocks contain sediment in the 4.0-4.5 size fraction and this study has established that the F/F + Q + C and C/Q + C ratios in this size fraction are the same in these two types of sediments at the time of deposition. This establishes a baseline against which the feldspar, quartz, and chert contents of ancient rocks can be compared to determine, for example, whether feldspar has been preferentially removed from sandstones during diagenesis; or whether authigenic chert has been formed in mudrocks.


AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
To develop a grounded theory to explain mental health nurses' responses to clients with suicidal behaviour.

BACKGROUND
Mental health nurses are an integral part of the multi-disciplinary teams supporting people who experience suicidal behaviour, yet limited research is available that explores how nurses respond to the needs of people at risk of suicide and what factors influence their responses and actions.

METHODS
Grounded theory was the methodology for this study. Interviews were conducted with 33 mental health nurses working in an urban area in the Republic of Ireland. Data were analysed using the concurrent processes of comparative analysis, theoretical sampling, theoretical sensitivity and memo writing. COREQ 32-item checklist was used.

RESULTS
The core category from the data was "Attenuating Anxieties." Participants' main concerns about caring for suicidal clients were related to their feelings of professional and personal vulnerability and the need to protect clients and themselves. This theory "Attenuating Anxieties" highlights the way in which nurses allay their anxieties by utilising historically known risk adverse strategies to care for the suicidal person. Acquisition of further psychotherapeutic training, clinical supervision as well as increased reflexivity protected some participants and enabled them to work creatively and collaboratively while supporting and facilitating therapeutic risk-taking.

CONCLUSIONS
The theory of "Attenuating Anxieties" identifies how participants worked within the context of mental health as members of the "risk society," wherein they worried about the possibility and probability of a negative or adverse effect for both the client and self, leaving them to feel constantly vulnerable and unsafe.

RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE
This theory highlights the need for a culture of openness that acknowledges nurses' and organisations' anxieties surrounding suicide and promotes a discourse among nurses that moves from a position of risk aversion to a relational and recovery-orientated approach.


Remotely-sensed data are commonly used to evaluate forest metrics, such as canopy cover, to assess change detection, and to inform land management planning. Often, canopy cover is measured only at the scale of the spatial data product used in the analysis, and there is a mismatch between the management question and the scale of the data. We compared four readily available remotely sensed landscape data products— Light detection and ranging (LiDAR), Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery —at different spatial grains and multiple extents to assess their consistency and efficacy for quantifying key landscape characteristics of forest canopy patches and sensitivity to change. We examined landscape-scale patterns of forest canopy cover across three landscapes in northern Arizona and assessed their performance using six landscape metrics. Changes in grain and extent affect canopy cover patch metrics and the inferences that can be made from each data product. Overall data products performed differently across landscape metrics. When performing analyses and choosing data layers, it is essential to match the scale of the data product to the management question and understand the limitations inherent in using canopy cover as a stand-alone metric.


Measurement precision is an important component in the process of evaluating the validity of an assessment. One way to examine measurement precision is through the reliability coefficients of classical test theory. Another is through the examination of consistency of scores across replications of a testing procedure. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing states that the latter approach employs different methods to examine this consistency in terms of standard errors, reliability coefficients per se, generalizability coefficients, error/tolerance ratios, item response theory (IRT) information functions, or various estimates of classification consistency (AERA, APA, NCME, 2014). For criterion-referenced tests that classify examinees into performance categories, a primary focus of measurement precision should be the degree of classification accuracy (CA) or classification consistency (CC). The CASAS GOALS test series are examples of criterion-referenced tests developed on an underlying IRT scale with a principal purpose of correctly and consistently classifying examinees into performance categories for adult education students. By estimating and examining the CA and CC during the development process, CASAS ensures that the final test forms meet the desired CA and CC, while adhering to the test blueprint. This paper describes and summarizes a now popular approach for using an item response theory-based method to estimate CA and CC and examines how this information informs test construction considerations such as item selection and test length. Index Terms – test development, classification accuracy, classification consistency, measurement precision, adult education, reliability


Between 1970 and 2005 former students of Norman Herzberg held a majority of the bassoon positions in major orchestras throughout the United States. Herzberg's varied musical background, education, and work environment influenced the development of an individual approach to teaching the bassoon. His career was examined in order to discover any especially influential events and surroundings. His approach to teaching, his ideas regarding the music curriculum, and his views on reed making and repertoire were explored in detail. Herzberg's nearly 40 years of teaching at the University of Southern California produced a large number of excellent bassoon performers and teachers. His students comprise many of today's best-known bassoonists, employed as faculty members at respected music schools, and as members of elite performing organizations. Additionally, his performing career spanned nearly six decades playing as principal bassoon in major symphonies and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, in hundreds of movies, television shows, and cartoons. His contributions to both bassoon pedagogy and performance have been enormous. This study provides a resource for bassoon teachers and performers, enhancing the potential musical development and overall education of current and future bassoon students. This study will have application for music educators regardless of instrument.


A partial skeleton from the Sigiloceras enodatum ammonite Subzone (lower Callovian, Middle Jurassic) of the Oxford Clay Formation of Quest Pit, near Stewartby, Bedfordshire, UK, represents one of the basalmost Middle Jurassic pliosaurids. Marmornectes candrewi gen. et sp. nov. possesses seven autapomorphies and a longirostrine snout. Reassessment of pliosauroid relationships demonstrates that Thalassiodracon hawkinsii, Hauffiosaurus spp. and Attenborosaurus conybeari are successively more derived basal representatives of Pliosauridae. This indicates that a longirostrine snout was acquired among Early Jurassic pliosaurids (such as Hauffiosaurus) but that these early taxa had a small body size, long neck, and gracile skull and limb bones relative to the contemporaneous rhomaleosaurids, which were robust, large-bodied macropredators. The pliosaurid lineage only acquired its 'characteristic' large size, robust skull and short neck in the late Middle Jurassic after the extinction of Rhomaleosauridae.


This paper estimated the expected on-day site demand for recreation, the elasticity with respect to the recreation cost, income and welfare benefit tourists derive from recreation at the Obudu Cattle Ranch (OCR). On-site individual observation Travel Cost Method (TCM), count data distribution, price and income elasticities of on-day site demand for recreation were the analytical tools adopted. In addition the Marshalian consumer surplus was used in estimating the welfare benefit the tourists derived from recreation in the ranch. The on-day site demand for recreation in the ranch was 3 days. The price elasticity of 18.44 implied the demand was elastic whileincome elasticity was 3.02. The recreation use benefit for a representative visitor for each day of visit was N380.00 which was N1, 140 for a three days visitand N196, 080 for the 172 sampled visitors Computing this for the 516 recreation days per year for the sample tourists, it was N101, 177,280. These implied recreation in OCR is a luxurious environmental commodity that can only benefit the elites and the affluent despite the great hidden economic value it holds to the society. Therefore, there is need for government to intervene through a subsidy regime and enhanced advertisement to attract indigenous and foreign tourists to the ranch.


Number entry is a common task in many domains. In safety-critical environments such as air traffic control or on hospital wards, incorrect number entry can have serious harmful consequences. Research has investigated how interface designs can help prevent users from making number entry errors. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of two possible interface designs aimed at helping users detect number entry errors using the idea of a checksum: an additional (redundant) number that is related to the to-be-entered numbers in such a way that it is sufficient to verify the correctness of the checksum, as opposed to checking each of the entered numbers. The first interface requires users to check their own work with the help of the checksum; the second requires the user to enter the checksum along with the other numbers so that the system can do the checking. In each case, two numbers needed to be entered, while the third number served as a checksum. With the first interface, users caught only 36% of their errors. The second interface resulted in all errors being caught, but the need to enter the checksum increased entry time by 46%. When participants were allowed to choose between the two interfaces, they chose the second interface in only 12% of the cases. Although these results cannot be generalized to other specific contexts, the results illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each way of using checksums to catch number entry errors. Hence our study can serve as a starting point for efforts to improve each method.


Objective
The aim of this study was to determine the knowledge levels of university students about infertility and investigate the differences in knowledge levels according to sociodemographic variables and some lifestyle factors.

Material and methods
The sample of the study consisted of 9693 undergraduate students (5002 females, 4691 males) from 12 regions. Regions were determined according to Statistical Region Units Classification-1 criteria. Infertility Knowledge Test (IKT) was used as a data collection tool.

Results
It was found that university students' IKT scores significantly differed according to gender (p<0.01); age (p<0.05); body mass index (p<0.05); reproductive health education status (p<0.001), presence of infertile individuals around (p<0.001); having sexual intercourse (p<0.001); smoking (p<0.001) and alcohol consumption frequency (p<0.05).

Conclusion
University students' lack of knowledge about family planning, effects of age and sexual intercourse timing on infertility was remarkable. However, it was determined that the knowledge level of infertility risk factors related to substance use and body mass index was high. It is believed that increasing the level of knowledge about infertility among individuals will positively effect their awareness of risk factors and facilitate their search for timely medical assistance. Sexual health education can be effective in increasing university students' knowledge of infertility.


The growing use of smart phones has also given opportunity to the intruders to create malicious apps thereby the security and privacy concerns of a novice user has also grown. This research focuses on the privacy concerns of a user who unknowingly installs a malicious apps created by the programmer. In this paper we created an attack scenario and created an app capable of compromising the privacy of the users. After accepting all the permissions by the user while installing the app, the app allows us to track the live location of the Android device and continuously sends the GPS coordinates to the server. This spying app is also capable of sending the call log details of the user. This paper evaluates two leading smart phone operating systems- Android and IOS to find out the flexibility provided by the two operating systems to their programmers to create the malicious apps


Farmlands are currently among the dominant uses of the land. When managed under low-input farming systems, farmlands are associated with diverse cultural and natural heritages around the world. Known in Europe as high nature value (HNV) farmlands, these agricultural landscapes and their associated farming systems evolved as tightly coupled socioecological systems, and are essential to biodiversity conservation and the delivery of ecosystem services to society. However, HNV farmlands are vulnerable to socioeconomic changes that lead to either agricultural intensification or land abandonment. We present a range of plausible future scenarios for HNV farmlands, and discuss the related management options and expected socioecological outcomes for each scenario. We then provide recommendations for policy, practice, and research on how to best ensure the socioecological viability of HNV farming systems in the future.


From the Publisher:
The development of electronic commerce and other applications on the Internet is held up by concerns about security. Cryptography--the science of codes and ciphers--will be a significant part of the solution, but one of the hardest problems is enabling users to find out which cryptographic key belongs to whom.
The main things that can go wrong with cryptography are similar to those that can go wrong with a signature stamp. A stamp can be stolen or counterfeit; or it may not belong to the person one thought it did. The first two risks can be controlled largely by technical measures. The third risk is the hard one, and the one that this book helps to solve.
Many people who use cryptographic services on the Internet have had their keys certified by one or more of about a thousand important keys. The pioneers of cryptography hoped that these keys would in turn be certified by the United Nations or by each other, or listed in the phone book. For a variety of political and competitive reasons, this has not happened. The result is chaos, and the situation is bound to get worse as both companies and governments try to stake out claims in cyberspace.
The primary aim of this book is to cut through the chaos by publishing the thousand or so important keys in paper form, as a kind of global phone book. The secondary aim is political: By printing these keys on paper, we can use established legal protections to limit government interference.


Abstract : The research aims to gain insight into optimal wargaming decision making mechanisms using neurophysiological measures by investigating whether brain activation and visual scan patterns predict attention, perception, and/or decision-making errors through human-in-the-loop wargaming simulation experiments. We investigate whether brain activity and visual scan patterns can explain optimal wargaming decision making and its development with a within-person design; ie, the transition from exploring the environment to exploiting the environment. In this report, we first describe ongoing research that uses neurophysiological predictors in two military decision making tasks that tap reinforcement learning and cognitive flexibility.


Focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) is the most common cause of pediatric epilepsy and the third most common cause in adults with treatment-resistant epilepsy. Surgical resection of the lesion is the most effective treatment to stop seizures. Technical advances in MRI have revolutionized the diagnosis of FCD, leading to high success rates for resective surgery. However, 45% of histologically confirmed FCD patients have normal MRIs (MRI-negative). Without a visible lesion, the success rate of surgery drops from 66% to 29%. In this work, we cast the problem of detecting potential FCD lesions using MRI scans of MRI-negative patients in an image segmentation framework based on hierarchical conditional random fields (HCRF). We use surface based morphometry to model the cortical surface as a two-dimensional surface which is then segmented at multiple scales to extract superpixels of different sizes. Each superpixel is assigned an outlier score by comparing it to a control population. The lesion is detected by fusing the outlier probabilities across multiple scales using a tree-structured HCRF. The proposed method achieves a higher detection rate, with superior recall and precision on a sample of twenty MRI-negative FCD patients as compared to a baseline across four morphological features and their combinations.


Markerless, vision based estimation of human hand pose over time is a prerequisite for a number of robotics applications, such as learning by demonstration (LbD), health monitoring, teleoperation, human-robot interaction. It has special interest in humanoid platforms, where the number of degrees of freedom makes conventional programming challenging. Our primary application is LbD in natural environments where the humanoid robot learns how to grasp and manipulate objects by observing a human performing a task. This paper presents a method for continuous vision based estimation of human hand pose. The method is non-parametric, performing a nearest neighbor search in a large database (100000 entries) of hand pose examples. The main contribution is a real time system, robust to partial occlusions and segmentation errors, that provides full hand pose recognition from markerless data. An additional contribution is the modeling of constraints based on temporal consistency in hand pose, without explicitly tracking the hand in the high dimensional pose space. The pose representation is rich enough to enable a descriptive human-to-robot mapping. Experiments show the pose estimation to be more robust and accurate than a non-parametric method without temporal constraints.


Cloth products are vital to the inheritance of local and ethnic identity and wisdom in Thailand. Currently, the local cloth markets are struggling to keep up with global fashion trends and make an impact upon the new generations of Thai society that will continue their inheritance for the future. This research studies the background of indigenous cotton cloth products of the Phu Thai ethnic group and the current conditions of and problems with the production of indigenous cotton cloth products. The ultimate aim was to study the integration of creative economic concepts in the development of products in order to create added economic value. Study of six weaving groups in Northeastern Thailand found that the Phu Thai groups in Thailand brought their original dress culture with them when they emigrated from Laos. There are two characteristics of cotton cloth products: self-woven products for personal use and products woven as tradable community goods. However, within the Phu Thai group it is more popular for people to wear market-bought clothing and the production of cloth goods is becoming more commercialized, which is having detrimental effects on the inheritance of the handicraft. This research proposes a three-stage model of integration, covering creativity, investment and commercialization to provide a solution to the problems in developing production and ensuring that creative economic concepts are integrated to add economic value to the indigenous cotton cloth of the Phu Thai ethnic group.


A wind-tunnel investigation was made to determine the characteristics of spoiler ailerons used as speed brakes or glide-path controls on an NACA 65-210 wing and an NACA 65-215 wing equipped with full-span slotted flaps. Several plug aileron and retractable-aileron configurations were investigated on two wing models with the full-span flaps retracted and deflected. Tests were made at various Mach numbers between 0.13 and 0.71. The results of this investigation have indicated that the use of plug or retractable ailerons, either alone or in conjunction with wing flaps, as speed brakes or glide-path controls is feasible and very effective.


I examine practices of modern census making with a specific focus on Canadian censuses of population from 1911-1951. My analysis builds on the work of two recent and related streams of research in the social sciences. One draws from Foucault's writings on biopower and post-Foucauldian governmentality studies. It examines the census as a political technology that produces a specific knowledge or political arithmetic (statistics) of the population, so that its forces and strengths can be acted upon by various state authorities. The census is thus understood as a field for the administration of the state. The other focuses on how censuses are socially constructed, on the 'making' of censuses as opposed to the 'taking' of censuses and the use of census data as 'evidence'. These studies document how the interests and political influence of various actors shape census making. The census is thus understood as a particular way of defining, collecting and organising social observations about individuals and not a simple reflection of an empirically existing reality. While the two streams of research have usefully challenged the facticity of census data, they have tended to reinforce a division between the real and the constructed. For if census data is not 'real' but a particular construction then what exactly does it represent? I contend that censuses are part of myriad identification practices that have come to produce subjects who are able to recognise and identify themselves in relation to the categories constructed and circulated by the census. It is through processes of double identification (state-citizen) that census categories come into existence, become facts and can then in turn not only be measured, analysed and assembled (objectification) but also be identified with (subjectification). The presence of such double identification makes an ostensible division between facticity and representation artificial.


This paper presents a Galois theory for separable algebras over a (not necessarily Noetherian) semi-local ring. Our theory is patterned after, but independent of the Galois theory of G. Hochschild; over a perfect field Hochschild's theory and ours coincide. In order to present this theory we first present some results concerning separable algebras over semilocal rings. The most important of these is a generalization of the Skolem-Noether theorem. Our theorem states that any algebra monomorphism of a separable subalgebra without central idempotents into a central separable algebra whose center is semilocal extends to an inner automorphism.


Electronic structure changes are at the origin of the making, breaking and transformation of bonds. These changes can be visualized by measuring the geometric structure in "real-time" during the course of a chemical reaction, a biological function or a physical process. Time-resolved X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) delivers information about both the electronic (via XANES) and geometric (via EXAFS) transient structural changes, when interfaced with an ultrafast laser in a pump-probe scheme. Moreover, XAS offers unique flexibility, since it is both element-selective and it can be applied to any kind of disordered or ordered systems. In this thesis, we successfully investigated the excited state electronic and geometric structures of two different transition metal complexes. In both cases, for the first time, their excited state molecular geometries were characterized "on the fly", without any a priori assumptions about its excited state structure. More importantly, it has been shown that time-resolved XAS is the only method capable of delivering the transient molecular structures of their short-lived excited states. First, we investigated ruthenium(II)-tris(2,2'-bipyridine), [RuII(bpy)3]2+. This molecule has served as a prototype and a model system of intramolecular electron and energy transfer reactions, due to its unique excited state properties. Our studies focused on the energy and structural relaxation process of the short-lived excited states of this molecule. By using the combined ultrafast laser and x-ray spectroscopies, we have determined various relaxation pathways of its excited states down to 15 fs lifetimes. The geometrical distortion of its lowest-lying excited state (3MLCT state) has also been determined by picosecond XAS, delivering a Ru-N bond contraction of ∼ -0.04 A. Second, our study focused on iron(II)-tris(2,2'-bipyridine) [FeII(bpy)3]2+. This class of compounds is being extensively studied in relation to the phenomenon of spin crossover, where a spin transition takes place, involving the low-spin (LS) ground state and the high-spin (HS) excited state. Here, we have characterized its excited states by means of both ultrafast optical and x-ray spectroscopy. The optical studies have revealed several new aspects concerning the relaxation pathways of its charge transfer and ligand-field states, including their corresponding lifetimes. The structural analysis has determined the geometric distortions taking place in the lowest-lying excited HS state of [FeII(bpy)3]2+.The extracted Fe-N bond elongation of 0.2 A agrees well with previously predicted values and it is for the first time that the room-temperature solvated structure of the HS short-lived excited state of a ferrous transition metal is obtained.


For system-on-chip applications with mixed-voltage I/O interfaces, I/O circuits with low-voltage devices must drive or receive high-voltage signals to communicate with other circuit blocks. With the consideration of low standby leakage in nanoscale CMOS processes, a new 2 × VDD-tolerant electrostatic discharge (ESD) clamp circuit by using only 1 × VDD devices was presented in this paper. The new ESD clamp circuit had a high-voltage-tolerant ESD detection circuit to improve the turn-on efficiency of an ESD clamp device, which consisted of a silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR) with a diode in series. This design had successfully been verified in a 65-nm CMOS process. The leakage current of this ESD clamp circuit under normal circuit operating condition was only on the order of 100 nA. The test patterns with 25- and 50-m SCR-based ESD clamp devices can achieve 2.6- and 4.8-kV human-body-model ESD robustness, respectively. Such high-voltage-tolerant ESD clamp circuits, by using only low-voltage devices with very low standby leakage current and high ESD robustness, were very suitable for mixed-voltage I/O interfaces in nanoscale CMOS processes.


The study of the hepatopancreas structure is important to provide the morphological and molecular information for future research involving the nutrition requirements of Portunus pelagicus culture. Thus, the study of histological characteristics and fatty acid (FA) composition in hepatopancreas of different ovarian maturation stages of the P. pelagicus were investigated. There are five stages in ovarian maturation of P. pelagicus which are: Stage I (immature), Stage II (early maturing), Stage III (advance maturing), Stage IV (mature) and Stage V (spawned/re-maturation/spent stage). The histological study of hepatopancreas showed that the lumens of most of the tubules were irregular-like shape in Stage I, circle-like shape in Stage III and ovul-like shape in Stage IV. A total of 29 types of FA were found in the hepatopancreas of P. pelagicus. The most dominant FA was C16:0 (Palmitic acid) with concentration of 456.10±266.23 mg/g(38.73±4.12%) at stage II. Second most dominant FA was C18:0 (Stearic acid) with concentration of 203.99±120.28 mg/g (13.97±1.62%) at stage III and followed by C20:5n3 (Eicosapentanoic acid) with concentration of 131.19±84.70 mg/g (8.98±1.13%) at stage III. In conclusion, the tubules structure and FA concentration of hepatopancreas play an important role in reproduction and diet formulation for portunid crab broodstock.


Educating girls has been argued to be a key contributor to a healthier and more affluent nation. Over the last years, poor menstrual hygiene management (MHM) possibilities for female students in low-income settings have been stressed to pose a major hinder for girls to access and complete their education. However, less attention has been directed to how female students can concentrate and thereby participate in school when being on their period. This thesis seeks to investigate how a menstrual cup is perceived to facilitate school participation according to female students. It was examined through a five months field study in three secondary schools in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe where female students received a menstrual cup to use. Quantitative surveys together with qualitative interviews were used for data collection. The results were analysed through the radical feminist theory and the capability approach. Together the two theories provided a comprehensive understanding of how the female body and menstruation is perceived in a Zimbabwean context and consequently the impact on the willingness to use the cup. The study concludes that the cup was perceived to improve confidence and comfort among the users, and hence their possibility to participate in school increased. (Less)


This paper presents the design and implementation of a peer-to-peer storage system that allows mobile users to transparently access and share data. The system employs a small networked portable storage device that is designed to compensate for weak wide-area connectivity by leveraging ad hoc peer-to-peer connectivity and an embedded storage element. Other key features of the system include the use of a location and topologysensitive multicast-like solution for locating data, lazy peer-to-peer propagation of invalidation information for ensuring consistency across multiple devices, and a distributed snapshot mechanism for supporting sharing and distributed backup. A common theme of the design decisions is minimizing the amount of distributed state and global coordination, while still achieving the desired functionality and good performance. Initial experiences with a prototype implementation suggest that we have largely achieved our objectives.


This thesis deals with modeling aspects of multi-processor system-on-chip (MpSoC) design affected by the on-chip interconnect, also called the Network-onChip (NoC), at various levels of abstraction. To begin with, we undertook a comprehensive survey of research and design practices of networked MpSoC. The survey presents the challenges of modeling and performance analysis of the hardware and the software components used in such devices. These challenges are further exasperated in a mixed abstraction workspace, which is typical of complex MpSoC design environment. We provide two simulation-based frameworks: namely ARTS and RIPE, that allows to model hardware (computation time, power consumption, network latency, caching effect, etc.) and software (application partition and mapping, operating system scheduling, interrupt handling, etc.) aspects from system-level to cycle-true abstraction. Thereby, we can realistically model the application executing on the architecture. This includes e.g. accurate modeling of synchronization, cache refills, context switching effects, so on, which are critically dependent on the architecture and the performance of the NoC. The foundation of the ARTS model is abstract tasks, while the foundation of the RIPE model is cycle-count. For ARTS, using different case-studies with over one hundred tasks (five applications) from the mobile multimedia domain, we show the potential of the framework under real-time constraints. For RIPE, first using six applications we derive the requirements to model the application and the architecture properties independent of the NoC, and then use these applications to successfully validate the approach against a reference cycle-true system. The presence of a standard socket at the intellectual property (IP) and the NoC interface in both the ARTS and the RIPE frameworks allows easy incorporation of IP cores from either frameworks, into a new instance of the design. This could pave the way for seamless design evaluation from system-level to cycletrue abstraction in future component-based MpSoC design practice.


A straightforward approach to provide protection against packet losses
due to network outages with a longest duration of T time units is to
duplicate the original packets and send each copy separated in time by
at least T time units. This approach is commonly referred to as "time-
shifted redundancy", "temporal redundancy", or simply "delayed
duplication". This document defines an attribute to indicate the
presence of temporally redundant media streams and the duplication
delay in the Session Description Protocol.


IN THE SOUTH, A REGION WHERE CULTURAL AND RACIAL CONSERVATISM coexisted with loyalty to the Democratic Party and wide support for liberal economic policies, Jesse Helms became a pivotal figure in constructing the new conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s. Before his thirty-second birthday, Helms, a native of North Carolina, was an award-winning newspaper reporter, city editor of the Raleigh Times, news director for Raleigh radio station WRAL, administrative assistant to Senator Willis Smith, and campaign worker for conservative candidates, including media adviser to Senator Richard B. Russell Jr.'s run for the 1952 Democratic presidential nomination. In 1953 Helms left Washington, D.C., to serve as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association (NCBA) and edit its magazine, the Tarheel Banker. Helms differed from typical southern conservatives of the fifties. Out of his Washington experience a young Helms developed a national vision for conservative power. He not only recognized that southern Democrats had more in common with western and midwestern Republicans--like Richard M. Nixon or Joseph R. McCarthy--than with liberal Democrats, but he also wanted to build a national conservative party. Although Helms's critics have often painted him as a fringe figure, such depictions represent wishful thinking rather than a serious appraisal of his influence. True, Helms--a polished, well-connected extremist in a banker's suit--expressed views labeled fringe during the postwar decades. He believed the liberal consensus was shallow, mainly an elite phenomenon. Many average voters shared his views. The problem was to determine how, with a moderate to liberal media, conservatives could reach these voters. He found solutions. By the 1970s, no one could doubt Helms's centrality to the conservative movement. He signed a fund-raising letter for the Moral Majority, and the money streamed in. His North Carolina Congressional Club (later renamed the National Congressional Club) supplied Ronald Reagan with money and ideas during his 1976 and 1980 campaigns. In My Life, Bill Clinton charged that Helms was behind Kenneth Starr's appointment as a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton's activities. (1) Helms's influence in recent decades had deep roots. During the riffles, Helms began the work that made the fringe mainstream. He altered southern conservatism to make it acceptable outside the South, pushed for a national conservative party, and developed ways of communicating with common people--not only rural voters but also new suburbanites. Most of all, Helms nurtured the issues like opposition to desegregation that pushed southern whites toward the GOP. Since President Ronald Reagan's victories in the 1980s, historians have investigated the rise of the New Right. Dan T. Carter and Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall posit a top-down model with presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Alabama governor George C. Wallace leading the way. In Carter's view, Wallace's national campaigns exported Deep South politics to the rest of the country; Nixon's southern strategy simply stole the Alabama governor's fire. Carter depicts Wallace as a rock-star politician whose tour forged a new conservative majority. (2) In this standard narrative, the Wallace and Nixon campaigns molded a cross-class white constituency for conservatism that depended on racial anxiety, hostility to the cultural elite, anticommunism, and rejection of big government. This meant not only a new conservatism but also a southernization of American public life. More recently, Matthew D. Lassiter's The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South and Kevin M. Kruse's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism have challenged this top-down, out-of-the-Deep-South version of southernization. Lassiter and Kruse also complicate southern class relationships, demonstrating that rather than unifying whites, integration debates exacerbated class conflict. …


Abstract. The Alno complex in central Sweden is one of the largest alkaline and carbonatite ring-shaped intrusions in the world. Presented here is the 3D inversion of ground gravity and aeromagnetic data that confirms some of the previous ideas about the 3D geometry of the complex but also suggests that the complex may continue laterally further to north than earlier expected. The gravity and aeromagnetic data show the complex as (i) a strong positiver Bouguer anomaly, around 20 mGal, one of the strongest gravity gradients observed in Sweden, and (ii) a strong positive magnetic anomaly, exceeding 2000 nT. Magnetic structures are clearly discernible within the complex and surrounding area. Petrophysical measurements (density, bulk magnetic susceptibility, and magnetic remanence) were used to constrain the 3D inversion. Both gravity and magnetic inversion models suggest that dense (> 2850 kg/m3) and magnetic (> 0.05 SI) rocks extend down to about 3.5–4 km depth. Previous studies have suggested a solidified magma reservoir at this approximate depth. The inversion models further suggest that two apparently separate regions within the intrusion with gravity and magnetic highs are likely connected at depth, starting from 800–1000 m, implying a common source for the rocks observed in these two regions. The modelling of the aeromagnetic data indicates that a more than 3 km wide ring-shaped magnetic high in the bay that can be a hidden part of the complex, linking a satellite intrusion in Soraker on the northern side of the bay to the main intrusion on the Alno Island. While the rim of the ring must consist of highly susceptible rocks to support the magnetic anomaly, the centre has a relatively low magnetisation and is probably made up of low-susceptible wall-rocks or metasomatised wall-rocks down to about 2 km. Below this depth the 3D susceptibility model shows higher magnetic susceptibility values. From these observations the solidified magma chamber is interpreted to extend further to north than has previously been suggested.


In this sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, historians John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov boldly trace the evolution of a modern social order. Combining a mastery of historical and political detail with a sophisticated theoretical frame, Jentz and Schneirov examine the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class. Jentz and Schneirov demonstrate how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The city's leading business interests were unable to stabilize their new system without the participation of the new working class, a German and Irish ethnic mix that included radical ideas transplanted from Europe. Jentz and Schneirov examine how debates over slave labor were transformed into debates over free labor as the city's wage-earning working class developed a distinctive culture and politics. The new social movements that arose in this era--labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women's activism--constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and '70s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago's new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, Chicago in the Age of Capital vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.


Relative to other industries in South Africa and construction industries worldwide, the construction process generates a disproportionate number of fatalities, injuries. Further, the industry is associated with disease, the direct and indirect cost of which contributes to the cumulative cost of construction. Designers influence construction ergonomics directly and indirectly. The direct influence is as a result of design, details and method of fixing, and depending upon the type of procurement system, supervisory and administrative interventions. The indirect influence is as a result of the type of procurement system used, pre-qualification, project time, partnering and the facilitating of pre-planning. The purpose of the paper was to present the results of studies conducted among architectural practices and architectural technologists in South Africa to determine their perceptions and practices relative to construction ergonomics. The following constitute the salient findings: Cost, quality, and time are more important to architectural practices and architectural technologists than construction ergonomics and project health and safety (H&S). Ergonomics during the use phase is more important to architectural practices and architectural technologists than the other phases. A range of design related aspects impact on construction ergonomics. Construction ergonomics is considered / referred to more by architectural practices than architectural technologists relative to most design, procurement and construction occasions and relative to most design related aspects. Experience predominates in terms of the means by which ergonomics knowledge was acquired. A range of aspects have the potential to contribute to an improvement in knowledge and the application of construction ergonomics. The paper concludes that architects and architectural technologists contribute to construction ergonomics, but there is potential for, and a clear need for, enhanced contributions. Recommendations include the inclusion of construction ergonomics in architectural and architectural technologist tertiary education and continuing professional development (CPD).


Salmon are inherently resilient species. However, this resiliency has been undermined in British Columbia by a century of centralized, command-and-control management focused initially on maximizing yield and, more recently, on economic efficiency. Community and cultural resiliency have also been undermined, especially by the recent emphasis on economic efficiency, which has concentrated access in the hands of a few and has disenfranchised fishery-dependent communities. Recent declines in both salmon stocks and salmon prices have revealed the systemic failure of the current management system. If salmon and their fisheries are to become viable again, radically new management policies are needed. For the salmon species, the emphasis must shift from maximizing yield to restoring resilience; for salmon fisheries, the emphasis must shift from maximizing economic efficiency to maximizing community and cultural resilience. For the species, an approach is needed that integrates harvest management, habitat management, and habitat enhancement to sustain and enhance resilience. This is best achieved by giving fishing and aboriginal communities greater responsibility and authority to manage the fisheries on which they depend. Co-management arrangements that involve cooperative ownership of major multistock resources like the Fraser River and Skeena River fisheries and community-based quota management of smaller fisheries provide ways to put species conservation much more directly in the hands of the communities most dependent on the well-being and resilience of these fisheries.


Analytic philosophy is roughly a hundred years old, and it is now the dominant force within Western philosophy. Interest in its historical development is increasing, but there has hitherto been no sustained attempt to elucidate what it currently amounts to, and how it differs from so-called 'continental' philosophy. In this rich and wide-ranging book, Hans Johann Glock argues that analytic philosophy is a loose movement held together both by ties of influence and by various 'family resemblances'. He considers the pros and cons of various definitions of analytic philosophy, and tackles the methodological, historiographical and philosophical issues raised by such definitions. Finally, he explores the wider intellectual and cultural implications of the notorious divide between analytic and continental philosophy. His book is an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to understand analytic philosophy and how it is practised.


In this article we argue that, almost unnoticed, teachers are dealing with the consequences of HIV/AIDS in their schools and classrooms. By focusing on the pastoral care of teachers work with learners, we explore the ways that teachers understand the care component of their school work, and descriptionbe what they actually do for learners who are either infected or affected by AIDS. Many teachers are in some or other way involved in care work, but the conditions of schools determine the nature and extent of the care work that teachers are called to deliver. In most schools there are no staff employed specifically to provide counselling though well resourced schools often are able to employ counsellors to assist learners. Teachers in the schools with the least resources are frequently those required to provide the most demanding forms of support and care to learners. This article is based on interviews with secondary school teachers in the greater Durban area who are responsible for the delivery of the life orientation curriculum in their schools. It is these teachers who are in the frontline of pastoral work although other teachers perform pastoral work too. Teachers in under resourced schools, located in areas characterised by poverty, do a huge amount of work with learners. This work does not fall within the curriculum and cannot easily be measured. It does not count towards promotion nor is it noticed in any public way by the teacher hierarchy. But, we argue, it is this work that is cushioning learners from the trauma of loss that many are confronting. It is thus vital for the well-being of schools, even as it is hidden from public recognition.


BIOMEDICAL RESEARCHThe National Institutes of Health (NIH) is in the midst of a major drive to refurbish its peer-review system--updating it to fit today's biomedical science, setting standards of behavior to improve peer reviewers' manners and methods, and creating a mechanism to ensure that peer review will adapt as science evolves in the future. In the most dramatic reform proposal so far, a blue-ribbon panel headed by National Academy of Sciences president Bruce Alberts wants to completely restructure the array of study sections operated by NIH's Center for Scientific Review, which pass judgment on about three-quarters of NIH grant applications. But the changes that will finally emerge, after they are refined and tested over the next 2 or 3 years, may be considerably less sweeping than the Alberts panel blueprint.


Abstract Melanoplus packardii Scudder was described in 1897. Three additional closely-related species were later described and their status as species has been questioned on numerous occasions. We examined morphology from specimens collected in Nebraska which fit descriptions of three of the four forms and specimens that appeared to be hybrids. We found distinct morphological characters suggesting species status for M. foedus and M. packardii, but not for M. foedus fluviatilis. Examination of aedeagi of these three forms suggests that M. foedus and M. packardii are each distinct, but that the aedeagi of M. f. fluviatilis and M. f. foedus cannot be distinguished. Molecular analyses of the three groups did not produce clear separations and suggest gene exchange between these three forms may be ongoing. Together, these data suggest that M. foedus and M. packardii should be recognized as sibling species, but M. foedus fluviatilis is best considered a form of M. foedus, typically found in low lying areas.


Mobile communication technologies have penetrated consumer markets throughout the world. Mobile commerce is likely to make a strong influence on business activities, consumer behavior, as well as national and global markets. Thus the identification of factors that influence mobile commerce adoption has significant value. In a global context, this study identified nine factors affecting mobile commerce adoption based on published research in MIS. These factors were investigated in China and the United States, and a comparative examination was conducted. A survey was conducted on 190 individual mobile commerce users in China and USA. Results show that there are several significant differences among the antecedents and their impacts on consumer intention to use mobile commerce in the two cultural settings. The study provides a number of practical insights and informs vendors seeking to enter the Chinese and the US marketplace with specific information on user perspectives.


A hydrogeological study of a sequenced permeable reactive barrier (PRB) was undertaken by environmental engineering student, Daniel Kirby, in fulfilment of the final year engineering thesis unit, ENG460 - Engineering Thesis, at Murdoch University, Perth, WA. The project was conducted in collaboration with Golder Associate. The study was conducted at contaminated site located in Bellevue, WA. In 2001 a large explosion and chemical fire occurred at a liquid waste treatment and recycling facility located at the site, in response to this contamination Golder Associates designed and installed a PRB treatment system in 2010. A permeable reactive barrier is a groundwater treatment design, which makes use of the natural groundwater flow to channel contaminants through an engineered in-situ treatment area. This treatment system was designed to consist of two different and separate barriers filled with two different reactive material. The first contains sawdust used to treat nitrates through the microbial process of denitrification. The second contains Zero Valent Iron (ZVI), a non-toxic granular material used to treat chlorinated solvents in the groundwater. The objective of this project was to study flow paths of the PRB at the contaminated site and identify potential for flow to bypass the PRB treatment system. Achieving this objective involved analysing groundwater level data from pressure transducers and previous historical monitoring rounds. In addition to the water level analysis, two tracer studies were conducted at two different locations at the site. The tracer studies involved using the organic dye fluorescein to further understand the flow paths of the site and to validate suspected flows that may bypass the PRB treatment system. The two tracer studies developed for use in this thesis were designed based on a literature review on relevant topics, and through liaising with academic staff at Murdoch University and the project manager at Golder Associates. The first tracer study aimed to validate contaminated flow that directly bypasses the ZVI barrier. The second tracer study, conducted at the centre of the PRB system, aimed to provide information on the lateral water movement and dispersivities through the PRB treatment system. The results of the groundwater level assessment identified areas that potential flow bypassing the treatment system could be present, the area of concern was identified to be the south-western portion of the PRB treatment system. The tracer study that was conducted within this area failed to validate the bypass, the source of this failure has been attributed to an error in the selection of the injection and monitoring wells. The second tracer study which was conducted at the centre of the PRB treatment system. The data obtained from the second study did not provide the ideal result as no significant tracer concentration was detection in the monitoring wells. A number of reasons for the lack of tracer detection have been discussed, including a lack of connectivity between injection and monitoring wells due to the presence of impermeable clay layers. It has been acknowledged that there is insufficient data collected during the study to accurately conclude on whether contaminated flow is bypassing the PRB treatment system.


A typical computer user's desktop contains large amount of formal data, such as addresses, events or bibliopraphies. Especially within a corporate or organizational environment, it is often important to exchange this data between employees. However, state-of-the-art communication technologies such as email or bulletin boards don't allow to easily integrate desktop data in the communication process, with the effect that the data remains locked within a user's computer. In this paper, we propose that the recent phenomenon of blogging, combined with a tool to easily generate Semantic Web (SW) data from existing formal desktop data, can result in a form of semantic blogging which would help to overcome the aforementioned problem. We discuss a number of preconditions which must be met in order to allow semantic blogging and encourage users to author a semantic blog, and we present a prototype of the semiBlog editor, which was created with the purpose of user-friendly semantic blogging in mind. We argue that such a semantic blog editor should integrate tightly with a user's desktop environment, as this would make integration of existing data into the blog as easy as possible.


Purpose To assess the outcomes of pars plana vitrectomy for the treatment of malignant glaucoma in patients with and without previous filtration surgery. Patients and methods Data of 15 patients developing malignant glaucoma after trabeculectomy (60%) or following ophthalmic interventions other than filtration surgery (40%) were recorded retrospectively. Pars plana vitrectomy was performed in case of failed medical or laser treatment recreating the normal pathway of aqueous humor. The main outcome measures were the postoperative intraocular pressure (IOP), the frequency of complications, and success rate based on the following criteria: IOP reduction by ≥20% and to ≤21 mmHg (definition one) or an IOP < 18 mmHg (definition two) with (qualified success) and without (complete success) glaucoma medication. Results Vitrectomy reduced IOP from baseline in eyes with and without previous trabeculectomy during a median follow-up of 16.4 months (range 7 days to 58 months); although the majority of patients required glaucoma medication to reach desired IOP. The complete success rates were 11% (both definitions) for patients with filtering blebs and none of the patients without previous trabeculectomy had complete success at the 12-month visit. Complications were few and included transient shallowing of the anterior chamber, choroidal detachment, corneal decompensation, filtering bleb failure, and need for further IOP-lowering procedures. Conclusion Pars plana vitrectomy is equally effective for malignant glaucoma caused by trabeculectomy or interventions other than filtration surgery, although IOP-lowering medication is necessary in nearly all cases to maintain target IOP.


Multiple cognitive functions can be modulated by acute bouts of aerobic physical exercise (Chang et al. 2012). Behavioral changes during exercise are likely accompanied by fluctuations in patterns of neural activity, but a comprehensive understanding of these effects remains elusive. For example, it is unclear whether exercise induced changes in cognition reflect non-specific effects on task performance, or whether they are specific to the task that is being performed while engaged in physical activity. We investigated this issue by testing whether acute exercise causes an additive, non-specific shift in feature-based attentional selectivity, or if it causes a multiplicative gain in selectivity. We used electroencephalography (EEG, 64 electrodes) and a gaze-contingent task that enabled orientation-selective profiles to be estimated from steady-state evoked potential (SSVEP) responses (Garcia, Srinivasan & Serences, 2013). For each trial, participants (n=3) fixated at the center of a flickering (15 Hz) circular grating presented at one of nine different orientations and monitored for a brief duration clockwise or counter-clockwise shift, and then indicated the direction of the shift at the end of the trial. Participants completed the task at rest while seated on a stationary exercise bike (mean heart rate (HR) = 68 BPM), during low intensity cycling exercise (mean HR = 103.3 BPM, mean rating of perceived exertion (RPE) = 8) and during high intensity cycling exercise (mean HR = 151.7, mean RPE = 13). The feature-selective response functions estimated from the EEG data revealed enhanced peak amplitude during low intensity (mean = .41 μV, SEM = .04 μV), and high intensity exercise (mean = .42, SEM = .05 μV) when compared to rest (mean = .29 μV, SEM = .04 μV). These findings suggest that acute bouts of aerobic exercise modulate visual cortical responses and that these modulations can be manifested as a multiplicative gain on estimated feature-selective response profiles. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


The wetting and capillarity of carbon nanotubes were studied in detail here. Nanotubes are not "super-straws," although they can be wet and filled by substances having low surface tension, such as sulfur, selenium, and cesium, with an upper limit to this tension less than 200 millinewtons per meter. This limit implies that typical pure metals will not be drawn into the inner cavity of nanotubes through capillarity, whereas water and organic solvents will. These results have important implications for the further use of carbon nanotubes in experiments on a nanometer scale.


In maintaining consistencies, such as GAC*, FDGAC* and weak EDGAC*, for global cost functions, Weighted CSP (WCSP) solvers rely on the projection and extension operations, which entail the computation of the cost functions' minima.  Tractability of this minimum computation is essential for efficient execution. Since projections/extensions modify the cost functions, an important issue is tractable projection-safety, concerning whether minimum cost computation remains tractable after projections/extensions. In this paper, we prove that tractable projection-safety is always possible for projections/extensions to/from the nullary cost function (W0), and always impossible for projections/extensions to/from n-ary cost functions for n > = 2.  When n = 1, the answer is indefinite.  We give a simple negative example, while Lee and Leung's flow-based projection-safe cost functions are also tractable projection-safe. We propose polynomially decomposable cost functions, which are amenable to tractable minimum computation.  We further prove that the polynomial decomposability property is unaffected by projections/extensionsto/from unary cost functions.  Thus, polynomially decomposable cost functions are tractable projection-safe.  We show that the SOFT_AMONG, SOFT_REGULAR, SOFT_GRAMMAR and MAX_WEIGHT/MIN_WEIGHT are polynomially decomposable.  They are embedded in a WCSP solver for extensive experiments to confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our proposal.


This study has as its primary aim the robust resolution of higher‐level relationships within the lepidopteran superfamily Bombycoidea. Our study builds on an earlier analysis of five genes (∼6.6 kbp) sequenced for 50 taxa from Bombycoidea and its sister group Lasiocampidae, plus representatives of other macrolepidoteran superfamilies. The earlier study failed to yield strong support for the monophyly of and basal splits within Bombycoidea, among others. Therefore, in an effort to increase support specifically for higher‐level nodes, we generated 11.7 kbp of additional data from 20 genes for 24 of 50 bombycoid and lasiocampid taxa. The data from the genes are all derived from protein‐coding nuclear genes previously used to resolve other lepidopteran relationships. With these additional data, all but a few higher‐level nodes are strongly supported. Given our decision to minimize project costs by augmenting genes for only 24 of the 50 taxa, we explored whether the resulting pattern of missing data in the combined‐gene matrix introduced a nonphylogenetic bias, a possibility reported by others. This was achieved by comparing node support values (i.e. nonparametric bootstrap values) based on likelihood and parsimony analyses of three datasets that differ in their number of taxa and level of missing data: 50 taxa/5 genes (dataset A), 50 taxa/25 genes (dataset B) and 24 taxa/25 genes (dataset C). Whereas datasets B and C provided similar results for common nodes, both frequently yielded higher node support relative to dataset A, arguing that: (i) more data yield increased node support and (ii) partial gene augmentation does not introduce an obvious nonphylogenetic bias. A comparison of single‐gene bootstrap analyses identified four nodes for which one or two of the 25 genes provided modest to strong support for a grouping not recovered by the combined‐gene result. As a summary proposal, two of these four groupings (one each within Bombycoidea and Lasiocampidae) were deemed sufficiently problematic to regard them as unresolved trichotomies. Since the alternative groupings were always highly localized on the tree, we did not judge a combined‐gene analysis to present a problem outside those regions. Based on our robustly resolved results, we have revised the classification of Bombycoidea: the family Bombycidae is restricted to its nominate subfamily, and its tribe Epiini is elevated to subfamily rank (Epiinae stat.rev.), whereas the bombycid subfamily Phiditiinae is reinstated as a separate family (Phiditiidae stat.rev.). The bombycid subfamilies Oberthueriinae Kuznetzov & Stekolnikov, 1985, syn.nov. and Prismostictinae Forbes, 1955, syn.nov., and the family Mirinidae Kozlov, 1985, syn.nov. are established as subjective junior synonyms of Endromidae Boisduval, 1828. The family Anthelidae (Lasiocampoidea) is reincluded in the superfamily Bombycoidea.


As in adults, functional complaints of the gastrointestinal system in children and adolescents are common and are a cause of great anxiety, morbidity and significant healthcare costs.
As far back as the 1960's, attempts were made to classify functional complaints leading to the first diagnostic criteria for adult irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), the "Manning Criteria", in 1978. By the late 1980's and early 1990's it became clear that there was a need to standardise criteria for the diagnosis, treatment and study of functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs).


Do International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions initiated during ongoing conflict prevent, exacerbate, or have no effect on atrocities? I address this question in the context of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by developing a case study of the impact of ICC action vis-a-vis the RCD-Goma (Nkunda faction)/CNDP/M23, a major rebel group active in DRC from 2004 through 2013. Specifically, I analyze the effects of ICC actions, including the unsealing of an ICC arrest warrant for Bosco Ntaganda, at the time a senior commander in the CDNP, in April 2008, the ICC's first conviction in March 2013, and Ntaganda's surrender to the ICC in March 2013, on atrocities committed by this group. I employ both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative component involves interrupted time series analysis of data from the GED and ACLED conflict events databases on attacks against civilians (which I use to proxy atrocities) attributable to the RCD-Goma (Nkunda faction)/CNDP/M23. The qualitative component employs process tracing to test my quantitative findings for spuriousness and identify causal mechanisms linking ICC actions to observed outcomes; the primary data source for this analysis is interviews conducted with former members of the RCD-Goma (Nkunda faction)/CNDP/M23, current and former members of other belligerent groups, civil society activists, and local and international media. My analysis yields three main findings. First, the publication of the arrest warrant for Bosco Ntaganda had no significant effect on violence against civilians, mostly because Ntaganda and other CNDP leaders perceived a low probability of arrest and other future legal sanctions resulting from the warrant. Second, the ICC's first conviction, for Thomas Lubanga on charges of conscripting child soldiers, was associated with higher levels of violence against civilians, as renewed calls for Ntaganda's arrest after the Lubganga verdict contributed to the outbreak of the M23 rebellion and increased violence against civilians. Finally, Ntaganda's voluntary surrender to the ICC was associated with lower levels of violence against civilians, mostly because it significantly weakened the M23. Based on these findings, I suggest a reframing of the debate over the impact of prosecutions to focus on identifying and explaining variation in their impact across stages of the legal process and other relevant categories, rather than whether or if prosecutions generate effects.


This paper examines the changing uses of literacy in fishing communities in Bangladesh and Ghana. Poverty and illiteracy are common features in representations of fishing communities. Some have argued that formal schooling does not prepare children for a future in fishing, and that formal educational qualifications are rarely required to enter the labour market. These views have sustained a discourse on educational deficit and marginality. However, as documented in this paper's cases from Bangladesh and Ghana, there is evidence that vernacular and official literacy practices, and ict, are becoming central to the lives and livelihoods of fishing communities. It is argued that the use of mobile phone technology, and practices of marketing, governance and environmental protection have created new opportunities and demands for literacy use and for technical knowledge. The observation of 'new literacies' in fishing livelihoods challenges the conventional view of a simple 'trade-off' between fishing livelihoods and schooling.


Attempting to satisfy their political masters in a target-driven culture, Soviet managers had to optimize on many margins simultaneously. One of these was the margin of truthfulness. False accounting for the value of production appears to have been widespread in some branches of the economy and some periods of time. A feature of cases of false accounting was that they commonly involved the aggravating element of conspiracy. The paper provides new evidence on the nature and extent of false accounting; the scale and optimal size of underlying conspiracies ; the authorities' difficulty in committing to penalize it and the importance of political connections in securing leniency ; and the importance of herd effects, leading to correlated risk taking and periodic asset price bubbles in the socialist market where interpersonal trust was traded.


Naturally occurring hydrocarbon fluids and ground water are two major geological resources essential for both energy and domestic driven civilizations at all levels of human activities. These two resources are hosted by subsurface geologic media commonly called reservoirs or aquifers. The development and supply of these resources in a systematic and guaranteed manner requires knowledge of their subsurface environments of flow. In both ground water and petroleum engineering communities, the same diffusion type equation describes subsurface fluid flow and most importantly, the analytical solutions of these equations have been greatly exploited for both formation and resource evaluation purposes. This study uses a newly installed ground water flow unit at the Chemical Engineering Laboratory of Dalhousie University (Halifax- Nova Scotia Canada) to obtain the first ever laboratory-scaledrawdown testing data for the determination of the hydraulic conductivity of a model sand pack aquifer.Conventional plots of experimental data in this study have been found to be perfectly similar to those obtained using actual field data from field-scale drawdown testing. Accordingly, absolute permeabilities, hydraulic conductivities, skin factors and other theoretically deduced parameters based on rigorous mathematical analysis of drawdown test data have been found to be physically realistic.


While many countries in the euro area are deep in recession due to a debt and structural crisis, the German economy appears to have excelled compared to many other euro area countries. Unemployment has fallen to the lowest level since German reunification, economic output has grown by over eight percent since 2009, and public budgets have been consolidated, generating a surplus in 2012. But this is no cause for euphoria. On the contrary, if one looks at Germany's economic development from a more long-term perspective, we can see that the country is lagging behind in many areas compared to most EU member states and most euro area countries. Since 1999, the euro area countries have on average achieved more economic growth than Germany and this increase in competitiveness can be largely attributed to wage moderation rather than productivity growth. The rate of investment has been falling for a long time and is very low by international standards. The estimations in this study indicate that Germany has had an annual investment gap of three percent of GDP, on average, since 1999. This means that Germany needs to invest substantially more in order to reduce the investment backlog accumulated in recent years and also to ensure higher potential growth and prosperity in the long term.


The environment in early life elicits profound effects on fetal brain development that can extend into adulthood. However, the long-lasting impact of maternal stress on emotional learning remains largely unknown. Here, we focus on amygdala-related learning processes in maternally stressed mice. In these mice, fear memory consolidation and certain related signaling cascades were significantly impaired, though innate fear, fear memory acquisition, and synaptic NMDA receptor expression in the amygdala were unaltered. In accordance with these findings, maintenance of long-term potentiation (LTP) at amygdala synapses, but not its induction, was significantly impaired in the maternally stressed animals. Interestingly, amygdala glucocorticoid receptor expression was reduced in the maternally stressed mice, and administration of glucocorticoids (GCs) immediately after fear conditioning and LTP induction restored memory consolidation and LTP maintenance, respectively, suggesting that a weakening of GC signaling was responsible for the observed impairment. Furthermore, microinfusion of a membrane-impermeable form of GC (BSA-conjugated GC) into the amygdala mimicked the restorative effects of GC, indicating that a nongenomic activity of GC mediates the restorative effect. Together, these findings suggest that prenatal stress induces long-term dysregulation of nongenomic GC action in the amygdala of adult offspring, resulting in the impairment of fear memory consolidation. Since modulation of amygdala activity is known to alter the consolidation of emotionally influenced memories allocated in other brain regions, the nongenomic action of GC on the amygdala shown herein may also participate in the amygdala-dependent modulation of memory consolidation.


Solid particle ingestion is one of the principal degradation mechanisms in the compressor section of heavy-duty gas turbines. Usually, foulants in the ppm range not captured by the air filtration system cause deposits on blading and result in a severe performance drop of the compressor. It is of great interest to the manufacturer and industry to determine which areas of the compressor airfoils are affected by these contaminants as a function of the location of the power unit. The aim of this work is the estimation of the actual deposits on the blade surface in terms of location and quantity. Particle trajectory simulations use a stochastic Lagrangian tracking method which solves the equations of motion separately from the continuous phase. Then, a transonic rotor and subsonic rotor are considered as a case study for the numerical investigation. The compressor rotor numerical model and the discrete phase treatment have been validated against the experimental and numerical data available in literature. The size of the particles, their concentrations and the filtration efficiency are specified in order to perform a realistic quantitative analysis of the fouling phenomena in an axial compressor. This study combines the impact/adhesion characteristic of the particles obtained through a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) numerical simulation and the real size distribution of the contaminants in the air swallowed by the compressor. The kinematic characteristics (velocity and angle) of the impact of micrometric and sub-micrometric particles with the blade surface of an axial transonic and subsonic rotor are shown. The blade zones affected by particle impact are extensively analyzed. This work has the goal of combining the kinematic characteristics of particle impact on the blade with fouling phenomenon through the use of a quantity called 'sticking probability' adopted from literature. The analysis shows that particular fluid-dynamic phenomena such as separation, shock waves and tip leakage vortex strongly influence pattern deposition. The combination of the smaller particles (0.15 ― 0.25) μm and the larger ones (1.00 ― 1.50) μm determines the highest amounts of deposits on the leading edge of the compressor airfoil. The blade zones affected by deposits are clearly reported by using easy-to-use contaminant maps realized on the blade surface in terms of contaminant mass per unit of time. From these analyses, some guidelines for proper installation and management of the power plant (in terms of filtration systems and washing strategies) can be drawn.


The EXA2CT project brings together experts at the cutting edge of the development of solvers, related algorithmic techniques, and HPC software architects for programming models and communication. We will produce modular open source proto-applications that demonstrate the algorithms and programming techniques developed in the project, to help boot-strap the creation of genuine exascale codes. Numerical simulation is a crucial part of science and industry in Europe. The advancement of simulation as a discipline relies on increasingly compute intensive models that require more computational resources to run. This is the driver for the evolution to exascale. Due to limits in the increase in single processor performance, exascale machines will rely on massive parallelism on and off chip, with a complex hierarchy of resources. The large number of components and the machine complexity introduce severe problems for reliability and programmability. 9.4. International Initiatives We are involved in the Inria@SiliconValley initiative through the associate team FASTLA described below. 9.4.1. Inria Associate Teams not involved in an Inria International Labs


Medium voltage converters are becoming more relevant in future grid applications. Especially more wind and PV generation systems will be have to added and integrated into the grid in order to achieve the required reduction in CO2 emissions. High power generation units will be integrated into the grid at medium voltage level. Furthermore meshed MV grids will require interties based on MV converter technology. Today's standard medium voltage converters are either based on the MMC technology or us 3L/5L approaches operated at low switching frequencies and containing bulky filters. Both concepts still lead to relatively high costs and low efficiencies which are major reasons for the slow spread of power converters in medium voltage grid applications.. Future grid applications demand less distortion, higher reliability and lower costs for converter systems at each voltage level. The Quasi-Two-Level operation of the flying capacitor multilevel converter with silicone-carbide (SiC) based semiconductors is a method for achieving these requirements for medium voltage converters. This paper presents a new concept for minimizing capacitance and balancing the capacitors with fast switching semiconductors. Moreover, a novel approach for limiting the overvoltage stress caused by the Quasi-Two-Level modulation of a flying capacitor converter is presented.


Dementia is a life-altering diagnosis for patients and loved-ones alike. The progressive disease causes cognitive, emotional, and behavioural changes that can frustrate the efforts of even the most dedicated caregivers. Given the uniquely personal nature of dementia symptoms, treatment can be a supremely challenging experience, even for seasoned health care professionals. In this book, authors Susan McCurry and Claudia Drossel present a clear and practical blueprint for psychologists, physicians, nurses, social workers, and other health care professionals who work with dementia patients and their families. Their evidence-based contextual model of dementia care lays out broad intervention strategies, and encourages readers to use their own creativity and inner resources to develop appropriate solutions for each unique situation and individual. The chapters present a rich variety of vignettes that illustrate common quality-of-life concerns in dementia patients, including medical co-morbidities, patient/caregiver relationships, caregiver burnout, and interactions with health care professionals. Throughout, the authors combine a comprehensive knowledge of the literature with their own extensive clinical experience in advocating a compassionate and open-minded stance that respects the individuality, preferences, and dignity of dementia patients. Health care professionals at all levels of experience, from outpatient to assisted living to residential care settings, will find Treating Dementia in Context an inspirational resource for clinical practice.


The past decade has witnessed discussions on various options to overcome groundwater depletion, such as rainwater harvesting (RWH) and 'artificial recharge' methods. This paper addresses law and policy issues relating to managed aquifer recharge (MAR). Based on an analysis of the National Water Policy of India and water polices and laws of the Indian states, a concrete case study, namely Chennai metropolitan area, has been studied in detail. The city of Chennai and the State of Tamil Nadu provide a favorable atmosphere for groundwater recharge, making, e.g. RWH mandatory. However, the legal framework does not support more systematic approaches towards MAR and the administrative praxis does not ensure that groundwater recharge is offset by an increase of illegal groundwater extraction.


This first of two volumes documents the history of the Roman Catholic Church in Indonesia from 1808, when, after two centuries, priests were again allowed in the Dutch colony, until 1903, when the the number of Catholics, only 27,000 at the time, started to grow spectacularly. The story of slow growth among the indigenous population, with many setbacks, is illustrated by 98 documents, which are included in their complete format and original language (mostly Dutch). Half of the book contains a lenghty introduction in which the history of Catholic missionary effort is spelled out, with, of course, a lot of attention for the islands where the Catholic clergy was actively engaged in proselytizing. This introduction is the first survey in English on the subject.


Read-through transcripts result from the continuous transcription of adjacent, similarly oriented genes, with the splicing out of the intergenic region. They have been found in several neoplastic and normal tissues, but their pathophysiological significance is unclear. We used high-throughput sequencing of cDNA fragments (RNA-Seq) to identify read-through transcripts in the non-involved lung tissue of 64 surgically treated lung adenocarcinoma patients. A total of 52 distinct read-through species was identified, with 24 patients having at least one read-through event, up to a maximum of 17 such transcripts in one patient. Sanger sequencing validated 28 of these transcripts and identified an additional 15, for a total of 43 distinct read-through events involving 35 gene pairs. Expression levels of 10 validated read-through transcripts were measured by quantitative PCR in pairs of matched non-involved lung tissue and lung adenocarcinoma tissue from 45 patients. Higher expression levels were observed in normal lung tissue than in the tumor counterpart, with median relative quantification ratios between normal and tumor varying from 1.90 to 7.78; the difference was statistically significant (P < 0.001, Wilcoxon's signed-rank test for paired samples) for eight transcripts: ELAVL1–TIMM44, FAM162B–ZUFSP, IFNAR2–IL10RB, INMT–FAM188B, KIAA1841–C2orf74, NFATC3–PLA2G15, SIRPB1–SIRPD, and SHANK3–ACR. This report documents the presence of read-through transcripts in apparently normal lung tissue, with inter-individual differences in patterns and abundance. It also shows their down-regulation in tumors, suggesting that these chimeric transcripts may function as tumor suppressors in lung tissue.


Abstract Despite being relatively well studied from a botanical, chemical, and (acute) pharmacological perspective, little is known about the possible toxic effects of ayahuasca (an hallucinogenic brew used for magico-ritual purposes) in pregnant women and in their children, and the potential toxicity of long-term ayahuasca consumption. It is the main objective of the present text to do an overview of the risks and possible toxic effects of ayahuasca in humans, reviewing studies on the acute ayahuasca administration to humans, on the possible risks associated with long-term consumption by adults and adolescents, and on the possible toxic effects on pregnant animals and in their offspring. Acute ayahuasca administration, as well as long-term consumption of this beverage, does not seem to be seriously toxic to humans. Although some nonhuman developmental studies suggested possible toxic effects of ayahuasca or of some of its alkaloids, the limited human literature on adolescents exposed to ayahuasca as earl...


Prescribing errors are one of the leading causes of diminished therapeutic outcomes even resulting in treatment failures. The Present study is a comparative evaluation of prescribing errors in non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs containing prescriptions in four different health care facilities of District Khairpur, Sindh, Pakistan, since these drugs are among the widely-misused drugs. A total of 479 prescriptions, which were written in the primary health care facilities, public hospitals, university hospital and private hospitals were collected, compared and analyzed for common omission and commission prescribing errors as per prescription writing guidelines/parameters established by the World Health Organization, The drug information book and the British national formulary. Only 21 (4.4%) prescriptions consisting of 9 prescriptions of the university hospital and 12 prescriptions of the private hospitals were found error free and the rest 458 (95.6 %) prescriptions from different health care facilities contained different types of omission and commission errors. In omission errors, patient diagnosis, registration number of the prescriber and duration of therapy was missing in 84, 88.9 and 82.8 % prescriptions, respectively. Among commission errors, 85.2% of prescriptions were ambiguously written. A significant percentage of these errors were found in routine practice. As compared to all health care facilities, it was alarmingly found that, more number of prescribing errors were found in prescriptions of primary healthcare facilities followed by public hospitals followed by the university hospital and least number of prescribing errors were found in prescriptions of private hospitals. Computerized physician order entry and continuous educational training programs for prescribers to be executed in order to decrease these vital prescribing errors, besides that evaluation of prescriptions by pharmacists for prescribing errors can diminish the magnitude of these grave and life threatening errors.


To achieve an optimal outcome in many situations, agents need to choose distinct actions from one another. This is the case notably in many resource allocation problems, where a single resource can only be used by one agent at a time. How shall a designer of a multi-agent system program its identical agents to behave each in a different way?

From a game theoretic perspective, such situations lead to undesirable Nash equilibria. For example consider a resource allocation game in that two players compete for an exclusive access to a single resource. It has three Nash equilibria. The two pure-strategy NE are efficient, but not fair. The one mixed-strategy NE is fair, but not efficient. Aumann's notion of correlated equilibrium fixes this problem: It assumes a correlation device that suggests each agent an action to take.

However, such a "smart" coordination device might not be available. We propose using a randomly chosen, "stupid" integer coordination signal. "Smart" agents learn which action they should use for each value of the coordination signal.

We present a multi-agent learning algorithm that converges in polynomial number of steps to a correlated equilibrium of a channel allocation game, a variant of the resource allocation game. We show that the agents learn to play for each coordination signal value a randomly chosen pure-strategy Nash equilibrium of the game. Therefore, the outcome is an efficient correlated equilibrium. This CE becomes more fair as the number of the available coordination signal values increases.


This article describes the evolution of political conditions for accession to the European Community from 1957 to 1973 on the basis of the responses of the Community and national parliaments to applications for association (Article 238 EC Treaty) and membership (Article 237 EC Treaty) and to a US foreign policy initiative. It challenges the thesis that the European Community was originally uninterested in the political nature of its members as long as they were non‐communist and that the Community made a volte face in 1962 in reaction to a request for an association agreement by Franco's Spain. It argues that the Copenhagen political criteria, except minority protection, were firmly established by 1973 after a series of pronouncements and decisions by the European Parliament, national parliaments (both 1962), the Commission (1967) and the Council (1973). The article aims to contribute to the early history of the constitutionalization of the Union and discusses how demands from outsiders prompted the Six to define the constitutional requirements for (candidate) members. It is partly based on new archival research.


PURPOSE
The summary presented herein represents Part II of the two-part series dedicated to Advanced Prostate Cancer: AUA/ASTRO/SUO Guideline discussing prognostic and treatment recommendations for patients with castration-resistant disease. Please refer to Part I for discussion of the management of patients with biochemical recurrence without metastatic disease after exhaustion of local treatment options as well as those with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer.

RESULTS
The Advanced Prostate Cancer Panel created evidence- and consensus-based guideline statements to aid clinicians in the management of patients with advanced prostate cancer. Such statements are summarized in figure 1 and detailed herein.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The systematic review utilized to inform this guideline was conducted by an independent methodological consultant. A research librarian conducted searches in Ovid MEDLINE (1998 to January Week 5 2019), Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (through December 2018), and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2005 through February 6, 2019). An updated search was conducted prior to publication through January 20, 2020. The methodology team supplemented searches of electronic databases with the studies included in the prior AUA review and by reviewing reference lists of relevant articles.

CONCLUSIONS
This guideline attempts to improve a clinician's ability to treat patients diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. Continued research and publication of high-quality evidence from future trials will be essential to improve the level of care for these patients.


Families exposed to urban poverty face a disproportionate risk of exposure to repeated trauma. Repeated exposures can lead to severe and chronic reactions in multiple family members with effects that ripple throughout the family system. Interventions for distressed families residing in traumatic contexts, such as low-income, urban settings are desperately needed. This report presents preliminary data in support of Strengthening Family Coping Resources, a trauma-focused, multifamily, skill-building intervention. Strengthening Family Coping Resources is designed for families living in traumatic contexts with the goal of reducing symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in children and caregivers. Results from open trials suggest Strengthening Family Coping Resources is a feasible intervention with positive effects on children's symptoms of trauma-related distress.


The paper considers 'Counterterrorism in the United Kingdom' with reference to events in 2017. While exit from Europe dominated British politics during 2017, the UK's terrorism landscape grew closer to that of continental Europe because of several mass-casualty terrorist attacks that were very similar to earlier events in France and Germany. However, if 2017 was the 'Year of Steel' (reflecting the weaponisation of vehicles and kitchen knives), it was also a year of steely resolve in the response to terrorism. There were no dramatic declarations of emergency, emergency legislation, round-ups of suspects or closed borders. In consequence, there were more continuities than discontinuities in the counterterrorism (CT) context and background in 2017. The main threat remained international Islamist terrorism. The threat level became Critical (an attack is imminent) for a few days after the Manchester attack in May 2017 and again in the aftermath of an attempted bombing on a tube train at Parson's Green in September. Otherwise, the level has remained at Severe (an attack is highly likely) since August 2014. Despite the shocks of 2017, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson declared that Islamist terrorism isn't 'an existential threat'. Even more constant is the threat of Northern Ireland (mainly dissident Republican) terrorism (Severe in Northern Ireland and Substantial—attack being a strong possibility—in Britain, which are unchanged since they were first published in 2010). Outside Northern Ireland, any nexus with organised crime remains tenuous. CT policy and legislation also remained steady in 2017.


Stick-slip vibrations modeling is an important topic within drillstring dynamics. Thus, a number of mathematical models has been suggested to describe behavior of drillstrings under torsional. Most of the models take similar approach with regard to, for instance, drillstring discretization, definition of external forces and velocity-weakening effect.
 Commonly, research papers focus on the models' core — mathematical expressions that describe stick-slip oscillations and inherent to it negative damping. The results are usually presented in terms of downhole rotational velocity or displacement and reaction forces at various surface rotational velocities and applied external forces. However, little attention is paid to discussion and justification of selected model configuration, which includes definition of the following 1) total simulation time, time step, number of masses/elements, etc., 2) initial conditions and boundary conditions, and 3) numerical solver to obtain solution in time. This paper reviews commonly used configurations for stick-slip vibrations modeling and discusses selection criteria provided in the references. It also presents case studies to evaluate effect of the above-mentioned configuration properties on simulations outcome. A simple in-house 1DOF torsional dynamics model was used for that purpose, where one explicit and one implicit numerical solvers were applied to obtain solution in time.
 Three case studies are presented, which compare performance of two numerical solvers with respect to convergence and stability. The results from the case studies show, for example, that applied explicit numerical solver (Central Difference Method) introduces numerical damping, while implicit solver (Newton-Raphson Method) does not. Central Difference Method provides convergence when initial force is applied, while damping function has to be defined in case of Newmark-Raphson method to obtain convergence. Stability of the explicit numerical solver is determined by the time step, while selected implicit solver is unconditionally stable. A reasonably small time step has to be selected though to improve the accuracy of the results.
 Presented literature review and outcome from the case studies can be used by researchers within this area to select suitable configuration parameters for their models and critically evaluate the outputs. In addition, presented results have application in automated drilling where configuration parameters and calibration factors are updated in real time by control algorithms for continuous modeling of drillstring state with regard to stickslip. Understanding the effects of mentioned properties on system dynamics helps to select suitable combination of operational parameters to stabilize the drillstring.


Major Ernest Pettigrew is perfectly content to lead a quiet life in the sleepy village of Edgecombe St Mary, away from the meddling of the locals and his overbearing son. But when his brother dies, the Major finds himself seeking companionship with the village shopkeeper, Mrs Ali. Drawn together by a love of books and the loss of their partners, they are soon forced to contend with irate relatives and gossiping villagers. The perfect gentleman, but the most unlikely hero, the Major must ask himself what matters most: family obligation, tradition or love? Funny, comforting and heart-warming, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand proves that sometimes, against all odds, life does give you a second chance.


Self-healing adhesives (SHAs) are derivatives of self-healing materials with remarkable practical potential for re-bondable, adjustable and long-term adhesion. However, reports of SHAs are extremely limited because it is difficult to meet both of the two requirements, high strength and efficient self-healing properties, which may greatly limit their application. In this study, the bottleneck is overcome by introducing alternating rigid and flexible segments in the dynamic quaternization cross-links of poly(1,2,3-triazolium) vitrimer (VPTA) adhesives. In consequence, the VPTA adhesive demonstrates a particularly high adhesive strength of 23.7 MPa, compared to the reported SHAs (≤7.5 MPa). The adhesive joints of VPTA can self-heal after it is completely broken 20 times, while maintaining strengths all above 10 MPa, which is rarely reported. Furthermore, this adhesive also exhibits excellent solvent resistance, high durability, and good creep resistance. The structural design strategy may serve as a versatile method for polymers to prepare strong and efficient SHAs.