Supervised deep learning often suffers from the lack of sufficient training data. Specifically in the context of monocular depth map prediction, it is barely possible to determine dense ground truth depth images in realistic dynamic outdoor environments. When using LiDAR sensors, for instance, noise is present in the distance measurements, the calibration between sensors cannot be perfect, and the measurements are typically much sparser than the camera images. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to depth map prediction from monocular images that learns in a semi-supervised way. While we use sparse ground-truth depth for supervised learning, we also enforce our deep network to produce photoconsistent dense depth maps in a stereo setup using a direct image alignment loss. In experiments we demonstrate superior performance in depth map prediction from single images compared to the state-of-the-art methods.


Abstract : The goal of this Phase I project is to develop an engineering plan and to create a prototype for a mobile, cloud-based expert system to aid in diagnosis, decision support and predictive analytics to improve clinical outcomes for veterans, soldiers, and their families with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Lifecom, Inc. is a health information technology company with over ten years of experience enhancing the quality and safety of health care through improving the accuracy and timeliness of medical diagnosis and management. Lifecom has developed clinical decision support and predictive analytics technology based on its Adaptive Knowledge Engine (AKE), a novel, general-purpose, platform agnostic, and nonlinear decision engine. The AKE, in conjunction with its modular data ontology and industrialized content development process, uniquely positions Lifecom to successfully meet the requirements of this SBIR Phase I project. While initially focused on TBI and PTSD, Lifecom s engineering plan, supporting technology, and underlying clinical ontology will be capable of providing a template for the development and implementation of a range of future expert systems with semantic search capabilities that can serve any commercial or Department of Defense requirements, medical or otherwise.


How does the Taliban wage war? How has its war changed over time? Firstly, the movement's extraordinary military operation relies on financial backing. This volume analyses such funding. The Taliban's external sources of support include foreign governments and non-state groups, both of which have affected the Taliban's military campaigns and internal politics. Secondly, this is the first full-length study of the Taliban to acknowledge and discuss in detail the movement's polycentric character. Here not only the Quetta Shura, but also the Haqqani Network and the Taliban's other centers of power, are afforded the attention they deserve.
The Taliban at War is based on extensive field research, including hundreds of interviews with Taliban members at all levels of the organization, community elders in Taliban-controlled areas, and other sources. It covers the Taliban insurgency from its first manifestations in 2002 up to the end of 2015. The five-month Battle of Kunduz epitomized the ongoing transition of the Taliban from an insurgent group to a more conventional military force, intent on fighting a protracted civil war.
In this latest book, renowned Afghanistan expert Antonio Giustozzi rounds off his twenty years of studying the Taliban with an authoritative sitrep detailing the evolution of its formidable military machine.


The mapping of moisture content, composition, and texture of soils is attracting a growing interest, in particular with the goal of evaluating threats to soil quality, such as soil salinization. Fast noninvasive geophysical surveys are often used in this context. The aim of this work was to study constitutive models that can be used to parameterize electrical conductivity and permittivity starting from a unifying conceptual approach, and to evaluate whether the information carried by one measurement type can be used to identify soil parameters that are then used to predict the other geophysical quantity. To this end, a recently developed constitutive model was extended and modified to consider the grain surface conductivity, a critical component in most natural situations. The extended model was successfully tested against laboratory measurements. In addition, the new model was compared against five other equations that use similar soil parameterizations. It was concluded that only three out of the five selected models yield similar predictions, while the remaining two predict a different geophysical response for the same soil texture. Following this analysis, a methodology was developed to estimate soil salinity starting from the simultaneous measurements of bulk electrical conductivity and permittivity and validating this methodology against laboratory experiments. The method is valid in situations where the conductivity of the pore water remains approximately constant during the measurement period. Key features of the approach proposed to map soil salinization are (1) simplicity, (2) absence of fitting parameters, and (3) the fact that moisture content does not need to be measured or estimated independently. The methodology was tested on a large number of soil samples and proved robust and accurate.


We describe a method of dark field gradient imaging using radial and azimuthally polarized Cylindrical-vector (CV) beams. Experimental data will be compared to a theoretical model based on Rigorous Coupled Wave calculations of periodic features. Particular attention is given to dark field gradient images and its analysis.


The prediction of erosion damage due to sand presence during hydrocarbon production is a major threat to the integrity of the production facilities. Sand production from oil and gas reservoirs can cause a significant damage to different pipeline components, and as a consequence, may lead to unwanted maintenance costs and potential environmental damage. In this work, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was developed to investigate how altering flow conditions, pipe geometry and solid particle variables might affect the sand erosion rates at pipe bends. The model was first validated against particle tracks and erosion profiles presented by a published research with reasonable agreement. Erosion rate was found to decrease as the pipe diameter was increased with significant reductions observed when the pipe diameter was increased by the smallest degree (i.e. from 4 to 6). Increasing the bend radii of 1.5D, 3D and 5D also resulted in a gradual decrease in maximum erosion rate observed in each test case respectively. However, it was observed that the surface area damaged by erosion increased as the bend radius was increased. It was found also that increasing particle size results in significantly larger erosion rates with different erosion scarring associated with each particle size. Moreover, no direct correlation was observed between increasing the carrier fluid density and the erosion rate. . However, much larger magnitudes of erosion were observed when gas (low density) was the carrier fluid when compared to oil and water individually. Besides, as expected, erosion rate was found to increase significantly with increase in flow velocity. The final tests conducted were carried out when the distance between two bends in series was increased from 2.5D to 5D and then to 7.5D. Interestingly, erosion was found to increase as the distance between the bends was increased.


On 31 Januray 2013, ONDRAF/NIRAS, the Belgian Agency for Radioactive Waste and Enriched Fissile Materials, has introduced the construction and operation license application for the surface disposal facility for category A waste at Dessel. The objective of this paper is to present the development of this national programme.First the key milestones and their impact on the development of the project will be highlighted. This includes in particular: 1) the turning point in 1994, when ONDRAF/NIRAS converts its purely techno-scientific work method into an approach of participation that allows for societal aspects to be taken into account and 2) the decision of the government in 2006 in favour of the surface disposal of category A waste in Dessel.Then the paper presents the pillars of the long-term safety of a surface disposal and the principles for site selection and how they were applied to the surface disposal facility for category A waste at Dessel. The pillars of the long-term safety of a surface disposal are: (1) the passive confinement and isolation provided by the Engineering Barrier System, (2) the contribution to this passive isolation and confinement by the site, (3) the limitation of the radioactive source term, and (4) the control and monitoring measures.Copyright © 2013 by ASME


Phytoplankton species composition, dynamics and horizontal distribution have been investigated in relation to key environmental factors in the recently-formed, sulfide-rich Thesaurus reservoir during the period December 1997-January 1999. The periodicity and distribution as well as the ecological role of sulfur bacteria have also been examined. Through our study, the seasonal pattern of nutrients is indicative of a return to a stabilized trophic state after trophic upsurge. However, the concomitant exponential increase in phytoplankton biomass may have caused this nutrient seasonality. Phytoplankton biomass values ranged from 56 to 7322 mg/m 3 . Longitudinal differentiation was observed within the reservoir in regard to seasonal development of phytoplankton originating from the differences in the water column stability. At the shallow, less disturbed part of the reservoir, the organization of phytoplankton community was directed towards increased structural complexity of late-successional stages. At the region of the dam, compositional changes of phytoplankton were primarily generated by strong external disturbances that kept the succession in a rather primitive stage. An upwelling' of sulfur bacteria from the deep sulfide rich water resulted in their temporary dominance in autotrophic plankton and an additional food supply to higher trophic levels in the oxic part of the reservoir.


In 2014, the first dedicated national Māori Suicide prevention approach coupled with a Pasifika programme was launched, profiled as the Waka Hourua National Suicide Prevention Programme 2014 – 2017 funded by the Ministry of Health. Te Rau Matatini, a national Māori non-government organisation and their Pasifika partner organisation Le Va, established and offered the programme.  The "Hoea te waka: Indigenous suicide prevention outcomes framework and evaluation processes" article provides a summation of the outcomes framework and evaluation methodology utilised for the Waka Hourua National Suicide Prevention Programme 2014 - 2017 with particular focus on the 47 Māori community fund projects.


The platinum-group elements (PGE) tend to exist in the metallic state or bond with sulfur or other Group Va and VIa ligands, and often occur as trace accessory minerals in rocks. Combined with three isotopic systems that contain the PGE, these elements afford a unique view of early solar system evolution, planet formation and differentiation, and biogeochemical cycling. Initial purification of the PGE was accomplished in the late 1700s, at which time their unique properties, including high melting point, chemical inertness, and ability to catalyze chemical reactions, became apparent. This led to enormous industrial demand, most notably for fuel production and engine emission control, which combined with scarcity in crustal rocks, has made the PGE a highly valued commodity.


The Programming by Demonstration (PbD) technique aims at teaching a robot to accomplish a task by learning from a human demonstration. In a manipulation context, recognizing the demonstrator's hand gestures, specifically when and how objects are grasped, plays a significant role. Here, a system is presented that uses both hand shape and contact-point information obtained from a data glove and tactile sensors to recognize continuous human-grasp sequences. The sensor fusion, grasp classification, and task segmentation are made by a hidden Markov model recognizer. Twelve different grasp types from a general, task-independent taxonomy are recognized. An accuracy of up to 95% could be achieved for a multiple-user system.


I have been following the United Kingdom reforms with interest, and in particular, the journey Lord Justice Carnwath has been pursuing with the Tribunal community in the United Kingdom (UK). The establishment of a unified Tribunals system arose out of a desire to bring tribunals more expressly under the umbrella of the justice system in order to better serve parties coming before those tribunals. The rationales for the UK reform were set out in a 2001 review conducted by Sir Andrew Leggett -- "Tribunals for Users -- One system One Service."I would like to offer a Canadian perspective on the UK tribunal reform, and to do so in light of new legislation in Ontario, Adjudicative Tribunals Accountability, Governance and Appointments Act, 2009. Until this legislation, and analogous legislative initiatives in Alberta in 2008 and in B.C. in 2004, Canadian administrative tribunals existed largely in isolation from one another. Each was created pursuant to a legislative mandate, housed within a different ministry, and subject to disparate approaches to staffing, budgeting and administration. Some have Chairs who were also CEOs while others had separate Chairs and CEO. Some have full-time members; others part-time members, and some both. The subject matter of these tribunals could not be more disparate -- as LeBel J. famously remarked in Blencoe v. 18 British Columbia (Human Rights Commission).


Despite the low levels of taxation and public good provision in Africa, I provide evidence that a large proportion of Africans prefer lower taxation and fewer public goods. This cannot be explained by standard arguments about problems of accountability, governance or state capacity. Instead, I argue that it reflects deeply seated ideas about the nature of the state and its potential threats to the autonomy of society. I show the historic social contracts in Africa rarely featured taxation and kept the state to limited jurisdictions. These social contracts have in many ways reproduced themselves and influence the way Africa is governed today.


Background Despite the undisputed role of emotions in teamwork, not much is known about the make-up of emotions in online collaboration. Publicly available repositories of collaboration data, such as Wikipedia editor discussions, now enable the large-scale study of affect and dialogue in peer production. Methods We investigate the established Wikipedia community and focus on how emotion and dialogue differ depending on the status, gender, and the communication network of the editors who have written at least 100 comments on the English Wikipedia's article talk pages. Emotions are quantified using a word-based approach comparing the results of two predefined lexicon-based methods: LIWC and SentiStrength. Principal Findings We find that administrators maintain a rather neutral, impersonal tone, while regular editors are more emotional and relationship-oriented, that is, they use language to form and maintain connections to other editors. A persistent gender difference is that female contributors communicate in a manner that promotes social affiliation and emotional connection more than male editors, irrespective of their status in the community. Female regular editors are the most relationship-oriented, whereas male administrators are the least relationship-focused. Finally, emotional and linguistic homophily is prevalent: editors tend to interact with other editors having similar emotional styles (e.g., editors expressing more anger connect more with one another). Conclusions/Significance Emotional expression and linguistic style in online collaboration differ substantially depending on the contributors' gender and status, and on the communication network. This should be taken into account when analyzing collaborative success, and may prove insightful to communities facing gender gap and stagnation in contributor acquisition and participation levels.


The article deals with the improvement of energy integrated farming methods under research at eight locations across the US in 1982. In 1980, the North Dakota State University combined experimentation and demonstration of energy efficient cropping practices, solar energy and the production and usage of methane for the production of the generation of electricity. The U.S, Department of Energy and NDSU set up a demonstration farm consisting of 110 acres of crop lands, 100 milk cows, including calves and bulls, and housing for those animals. They were being used to demonstrate energy-efficient equipment and techniques which were designed for the purpose of the minimization of farmer's dependence upon scarce energy resources. Sugar beets, soybeans, barley, wheat and silage corn were being grown using energy saving yet conventional cropping practices. The goal of the demonstration is to produce crops most efficiently using the least amount of fuel. The article goes on to address other various parts of this project.


Title of dissertation: THE CHEMICAL ECOLOGY OF HYDRASTIS CANADENSIS L. (RANUNCULACEAE):EFFECTS OF ROOT ISOQUINOLINE ALKALOIDS ON THE HYDRASTIS ENDOPHYTE, FUSARIUM OXYSPORUM Michael Curtis Tims, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor George A. Bean Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis L., Ranunculaceae) is a popular medicinal plant and has been listed in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The herbaceous perennial is distributed in North America under deciduous forest canopies throughout much of the south and eastern seaboard north into Canada. The rhizome, rootlets and root hairs produce medicinally active alkaloids. Although berberine, one of the Hydrastis alkaloids, has shown anti-fungal activity, the influence of Hydrastis alkaloids on the plant rhizosphere fungal ecology has not been investigated. While a Fusarium spp. was previously isolated from H. canadensis, this is the first report of a F. oxysporum endophyte isolated from Hydrastis root tissue. Additionally, F. solani was isolated from non-rhizosphere soil surrounding Hydrastis root tissue. A bioassay was developed to study the effect of goldenseal isoquinoline alkaloids on three Fusarium isolates, including the two species isolated from Hydrastis. And, in order to accurately detect the alkaloids, a HPLC-MS method was developed. The whole root extract treatment stimulated macroconidia germination and chlamydospore formation, while inducing mycotoxin production in the Hydrastis endophyte. Chlamydospore formation, macroconidial germination and mycotoxin production of PSU isolate, F. commune, was reduced by the whole root extract. The second Hydrastis isolate, F. solani, responded to the whole root extract by increasing germination rates, but with no other effects. The findings suggest that the Hydrastis root extract appears to provide selective advantage for the endophytic isolate and influences the fungal ecology associated with its root system. The Chemical Ecology of Hydrastis canadensis L. (Ranunculaceae):Effects of Root Isoquinoline Alkaloids on the Hydrastis Endophyte, Fusarium oxysporum


Hematological abnormalities are very common in the course of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Myelofibrosis is a bone marrow disorder in which there is excessive fibrous tissue formation in the bone marrow. Various benign and malignant disorders can cause or be associated with a diffuse increase in the bone marrow reticular tissue. Some diseases such as infections, neoplasms, and autoimmune diseases may also induce bone marrow fibrosis (secondary myelofibrosis). Cytopenia from autoimmune myelofibrosis (AIMF) in SLE is a rare condition. Here we present a case of AIMF associated with SLE and aim to emphasize on the other cause of cytopenia in SLE.


This book is Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013. US National Book Award 5 Under 35. Winner of the Etisalat Prize 2014. Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award 2014. Winner of a Betty Trask Award 2014. 'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?' Darling and her friends live in a shanty called Paradise, which of course is no such thing. It isn't all bad, though. There's mischief and adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices. They dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and Barack Obama and David Beckham live. For Darling, that dream will come true. But, like the thousands of people all over the world trying to forge new lives far from home, Darling finds this new paradise brings its own set of challenges - for her and also for those she's left behind.


The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in the process of defining and documenting the operations concept and architecture for the future Traffic Flow Management (TFM) system. The challenge of future TFM is to organize complex air traffic flows through busy areas in the National Airspace System (NAS), manage the volume of traffic into and out congested airport areas, and minimize delay-related problems in the advent of continued growth of air traffic and its complexity. The goal of this project was simply to determine if artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be applied in a useful way TFM problem resolution. This paper describes a particular class of decision making that relies on past experiences, and how this applies to the TFM domain. We have adopted a casebased reasoning (CBR) approach (Kolodner 1991) recognize "similar" problems and to guide TFM decision making by looking at and reasoning about past situations. This paper describes how the eventual users of such a tool, the TFM specialists, feel about this CBR methodology. Finally, this paper provides a mechanism for documenting the many lessons that we learned over the course of this project.


OBJECTIVE AND IMPORTANCE:Cavernous malformations can present in children with a sporadic course of repeated hemorrhage and enlargement, but they are rarely aggressive, infiltrative, or multilobar. We present the case of a young boy with a complex cavernous malformation that evolved during the course of a decade to encompass the majority of his right cerebral hemisphere. CLINICAL PRESENTATION:A 16-month-old boy presented with seizures, and radiographic studies demonstrated a large cavernous malformation in his right frontal pole. During the next 10 years, his seizures became intractable, and he developed progressive left hand weakness and atrophy. His malformation infiltrated his entire right frontal lobe as well as portions of his right parietal lobe, temporal lobe, and deep gray matter structures. INTERVENTION:The patient underwent right hemicraniotomy and near total resection of the lesion. Pathological analysis revealed dilated, thin-walled vessels separated by small amounts of intervening astrogliotic brain consistent with cavernous malformation. The patient recovered to his baseline neurological condition and has had no seizure or hemorrhage since his operation. Genetic testing did not reveal mutations in either the CCM1 (KRIT1) or CCM2 (malcavernin) genes. CONCLUSION:This case may represent an atypical variant of cavernous malformation best termed giant infiltrative cavernous malformation. Despite its unusual size, multilobar location, and aggressive infiltration, it can be managed effectively with standard surgical resection.


This case note presents the ruling of the Court of Justice in Generics (Paroxetine) and considers its implications for Articles 101 and 102 TFEU. It is submitted, first, that the approach to the assessment of pay-for-delay agreements enshrined in the judgment can effectively minimise the risk of Type I and Type II errors. Second, the Court does not depart from the long-standing principle whereby EU law does not question the existence of intellectual property rights, but only their exercise.

The judgment, together with Budapest Bank, has important implications for the assessment of restrictions by object under Article 101(1) TFEU. Generics (Paroxetine) confirms that the evaluation of the object of an agreement is a case-by-case, context-specific inquiry. In addition, it notes that the pro-competitive aspects of an agreement may, as factors pertaining to the relevant economic and legal context, be considered as part of the said evaluation. In the same vein (and as confirmed in Budapest Bank), the conditions of competition that would have prevailed absent the practice may also play a role.

As far as Article 102 TFEU is concerned, finally, the judgment confirms that anticompetitive effects within the meaning of that provision only exist where a practice has an impact that goes beyond the limitation of the freedom of action of individual undertakings. In this sense, it seems necessary to consider the cumulative effects of individual agreements by reference to the market as a whole. This approach is consistent with Post Danmark II and Intel, both of which signalled the importance of the coverage of the practice.


Despite the claimed benefits of e-voting initiatives, wider adoption of e-voting mechanisms and implementation processes is slower than expected. Several technical, social, and cultural challenges hinder generability and applicability of e-voting. Amongst them, the evaluation and harmonization of e-voting systems, given different legal and statutory frameworks, is still an important challenge to overcome. Yet, only a few works have addressed this topic in the field. This article aims to contribute to further understanding this unexplored topic by applying a practical evaluation framework to Helios Voting, one of the most widely used e-voting tools to date. Our framework, strongly based on the technical and security requirements issued by the Council of Europe in 2017, is a valuable source of information for election officials, researchers and voters to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Helios Voting and, as a result, to improve decision-making processes regarding the type and size of elections that can be securely handled by Helios Voting. The ultimate goal of our paper is to conceptually and practically support the gradual, secure and protocolized expansion of e-voting.


In this paper, we present an AES-based authenticated-encryption with associated-data scheme called Rocca, with the purpose to reach the requirements on the speed and security in 6G systems. To achieve ultra-fast software implementations, the basic design strategy is to take full advantage of the AES-NI and SIMD instructions as that of the AEGIS family and Tiaoxin-346. Although Jean and Nikolić have generalized the way to construct efficient round functions using only one round of AES (aesenc) and 128-bit XOR operation and have found several efficient candidates, there still seems to exist potential to further improve it regarding speed and state size. In order to minimize the critical path of one round, we remove the case of applying both aesenc and XOR in a cascade way for one round. By introducing a cost-free block permutation in the round function, we are able to search for candidates in a larger space without sacrificing the performance. Consequently, we obtain more efficient constructions with a smaller state size than candidates by Jean and Nikolić. Based on the newly-discovered round function, we carefully design the corresponding AEAD scheme with 256-bit security by taking several reported attacks on the AEGIS family and Tiaxion-346 into account. Our AEAD scheme can reach 138Gbps which is 4 times faster than the AEAD scheme of SNOW-V. Rocca is also much faster than other efficient schemes with 256-bit key length, e.g. AEGIS-256 and AES-256-GCM. As far as we know, Rocca is the first dedicated cryptographic algorithm targeting 6 systems, i.e., 256-bit key length and the speed of more than 100 Gbps.


Increasing popularity of the World Wide Web over the past few years has imposed a significant traffic burden upon the internet. The World Wide Web may be considered to be a large distributed information systems providing access to shared data. A mass research has done to improve the response time of web based system as the information is distributed over a geographical location. Web caching and pre-fetching are two important approaches used to reduce the noticeable response time perceived by users. An ideal pre-fetching caching scheme is a system that able to predict the next (number of next) requests and pre-load those into the cache .The pre-fetched objects are stored in a local cache to reduce the latency time. This is paper presents survey of algorithms for handling a web caching and pre-


In this paper, some ratio cum median based modified ratio estimators with known quartiles of the auxiliary variable have been proposed. The performance of the proposed class of estimators is assessed with that of simple random sampling without replacement (SRSWOR) sample mean, ratio estimator and modified ratio estimators in terms of variance/mean squared errors. The performance of proposed class of estimators is illustrated with the help of certain natural population available in the literature. The percentage relative efficiency of the proposed class of estimators with respect to SRSWOR sample mean, ratio estimator and some of the existing modified ratio estimators are also obtained.


This paper describes the lighting design and rationale for the Mardyke Garden project. It is realised through accentuating the historic buildings and integrating the local biodiversity issues such as the park's bat population. Many new modern structures have been added to this historic park such as a pavilion bandstand, called the "Pavilion of Light", with colourchanging luminaries and in-ground, star-scape, fibreoptic lighting in the children's play area. This paper discusses the background behind the final lighting design and how integral elements such as the walkway bollards were designed so that bats would avoid the area involved, thereby sustaining their participation in the local ecology. Furthermore, the bandstand is now used as a reflector that not only changes the colour of the stage but as a projector into the sunken garden, synergising performance with the experience of patrons. Also discussed will be how the lighting designer drew from localised landscaping in maximisinging optimal experience. Lighting controls are also discussed. Cork City Council can now manage this complex lighting design so that patron's experiences can evolve based on multi-faceted elements such as season, event and even occasion.


Labor Pains is an insider's account of the struggle to rebuild a vibrant and powerful trade union movement in the United States. It takes as its starting point the daily experience of a union organizer, and brings that experience to life. It enables us to grasp how the conflicting demands of race, class, and gender are lived in the new union movement. The role of the unions is defined mainly by larger economic and political agendas. While keeping these agendas clearly in sight, Erem focuses primarily on aspects of the life of the union which often remain hidden. The personal crises of union members become entangled in the work of the union. The energies of the union are focused not only on winning gains from bosses but also on maintaining internal cohesion and morale among workers. Barriers of race, age and gender are constantly negotiated and overcome, and conflicts flare up across them at moments of tension. And union life goes on not only when the workers have made their point, or won a victory, but after defeat as well. The personalities and ambitions of union organizers converge at times and become a source of tension at others. Each individual within the larger collective has their own task of finding a viable balance between public and private selves. These intersecting lines of force are imaginatively recreated in this book. Erem writes as a woman in a union movement which is dominated by men; as the child of immigrants in a movement whose members are increasingly immigrants themselves; as one who finds herself in the racial no man's land between black and white. While never underestimating the obstacles in the way of the union movement, she makes a powerful and passionate case for organizing the disorganized and empowering the powerless.


In (Wainwright et al., 2002) a new general class of upper bounds on the log partition function of arbitrary undirected graphical models has been developed. This bound is constructed by taking convex combinations of tractable distributions. The experimental results published so far concentrates on combinations of tree-structured distributions leading to a convexified Bethe free energy, which is minimized by the tree-reweighted belief propagation algorithm. One of the favorable properties of this class of approximations is that increasing the complexity of the approximation is guaranteed to increase the precision. The lack of this guarantee is notorious in standard generalized belief propagation. We increase the complexity of the approximating distributions by taking combinations of junction trees, leading to a convexified Kikuchi free energy, which is minimized by reweighted generalized belief propagation. Experimental results for Ising grids as well as for fully connected Ising models are presented illustrating advantages and disadvantages of the reweighting method in approximate inference.


Canine reduction in hominins is one of the original apomorphies to appear in hominin evolution. Canine crown size is sexually dimorphic in most primates, sexual dimorphism is linked strongly to sexual selection; therefore quantification of canines is necessary to reconstruct social behavior in any fossil taxon. Hominins also appear to reduce their crown size before their root size. This thesis has investigated the potential of predicting maxillary canine crown height from root length and crown and root basal dimensions. Mesiodistal dimensions of the crown and root were the best predictors of crown height. Root length is a very poor predictor. Crown height scales positively allometric in gorillas relative to root length. Chimpanzee canine crowns are taller and thinner compared to those of gorillas. Humans and chimpanzees have similar crown heights relative to root length. My results demonstrate important inter-and intra-specific variation in canine form among hominoids


Embryonic stem cell research is morally and politically controversial because the process of deriving the embryonic stem (ES) cells kills embryos. If embryos are, as some would claim, human beings like you and me, then ES cell research is clearly impermissible. If, on the other hand, the blastocysts from which embryonic stem cells are derived are not yet human beings, but rather microscopic balls of undifferentiated cells, as others maintain, then ES cell research is probably morally permissible. Whether the research can be justified depends on such issues as its cost, chance of success, and numbers likely to benefit. But this is an issue for any research project, not just ES cell research. What makes the debate over ES cell research controversial is that it, like the debate over abortion, raises "questions that politicians cannot settle: when does human life begin, and what is the moral status of the human embryo?" This paper looks at several theories of moral status and their implications for embryo research.


After two phases of AIDS control activities in India, the third phase of the National AIDS Control Programme (NACP III) was launched in July 2007. Our focus here is to predict the number of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA) in India so that the results can assist the NACP III planning team to determine appropriate targets to be activated during the project period (2007-2012). We have constructed a dynamical model that captures the mixing patterns between susceptibles and infectives in both low-risk and high-risk groups in the population. Our aim is to project the HIV estimates by taking into account general interventions for susceptibles and additional interventions, such as targeted interventions among high risk groups, provision of anti-retroviral therapy, and behavior change among HIV-positive individuals. Continuing the current level of interventions in NACP II, the model estimates there will be 5.06 million PLHA by the end of 2011. If 50 percent of the targets in NACP III are achieved by the end of the above period then about 0.8 million new infections will be averted in that year. The current status of the epidemic appears to be less severe compared to the trend observed in the late 1990s. The projections based on the second phase and the third phase of the NACP indicate prevention programmes which are directed towards the general and high-risk populations, and HIV-positive individuals will determine the decline or stabilization of the epidemic. Model based results are derived separately for the revised HIV estimates released in 2007. According to revised projections there will be 2.08 million PLHA by 2012 if 50 percent of the targets in NACP III are reached. We perform a Monte Carlo procedure for sensitivity analysis of parameters and model validation. We also predict a positive role of implementation of anti-retroviral therapy treatment of 90 percent of the eligible people in the country. We present methods for obtaining disease progression parameters using convolution approaches. We also extend our models to age-structured populations.


Contributing an estimated AUD42 billion dollars a year to the Australian economy and US150 billion dollars to the USA, volunteering has become an industry sector of major importance. It has consequently attracted significant attention among researchers of various disciplines, including marketing. Nevertheless, the industry is confronted with ongoing challenges, particularly in the area of recruitment. This article provides a review of prior marketing-related studies and identifies a number of gaps in the research, such as a limitation in the past to a priori approaches to categorising volunteers, which has offered limited insight and conflicting results. The authors recommend a more comprehensive investigation of heterogeneity amongst volunteers through a posteriori segmentation which will allow precise targeting of specific segments. In addition, a more comprehensive investigation of competition and positioning in the industry is recommended which will facilitate an integrated market structure analysis and lead to more efficient and effective marketing strategies for nonprofit organisations. As a specific example, a better understanding of volunteering motivations in multicultural societies is needed to optimise targeted recruitment messages.


In The World's Newest Profession, Christopher McKenna offers a history of management consulting in the twentieth century. Although management consulting may not yet be a recognized profession, the leading consulting firms have been advising and reshaping the largest organizations in the world since the 1920s. This groundbreaking study details how the elite consulting firms, including McKinsey & Company and Booz Allen & Hamilton, expanded after US regulatory changes during the 1930s, how they changed giant corporations, nonprofits, and the state during the 1950s, and why consultants became so influential in the global economy after 1960. As they grew in number, consultants would introduce organizations to 'corporate culture' and 'decentralization' but they faced vilification for their role in the Enron crisis and for legitimating corporate blunders. Through detailed case studies based on unprecedented access to internal files and personal interviews, The World's Newest Profession explores how management consultants came to be so influential within our culture and explains exactly what consultants really do in the global economy....


Mapping the self-regulation in the therapeutic process may be important to characterize the picture better, to contribute to the planning of the therapy and to select strategies for practical guidance of the patient, which will favor positive gains. It is important to know more and more the cognitive responses and behavioral characteristics of patients, such as associative learning, motivation and regulation of emotion, which may be linked to the genesis and maintenance of disease. We high-light self-regulation that is an executive function managed by the prefrontal cortex of the frontal lobe of the brain, essential to keep the individual active in the process to achieve their goals. It is a complex phenomenon that involves behavior (activation, monitoring, inhibition, preservation and adaptation), emotions and cognitive strategies to achieve desired goals. The neurosciences can contribute to the knowledge in emotional self-regulation in children and adolescents to health contexts in CBT.


This paper, the second of two focussed on the libidinal attachments of white children to black domestic workers in narratives contributed to the Apartheid Archive Project (AAP), considers the applicability of the concept of social melancholia in the case of such "inter-racial" attachments. The paper questions both the psychoanalytic accuracy, and the psychic and political legitimacy of such an explanation (i.e. the prospect of an "inter-racial" melancholic attachment of white subjects to black care-takers). By contrast to the political notion of ungrievable melancholic losses popularized by Judith Butler's work, this paper develops a theory of compensatory symbolic identifications. Such a theory explains the apparent refusal of identification which white subjects exhibit towards black caretakers and it throws into perspective an important conceptual distinction regards loss. On the one hand there is the psychotic mechanism of melancholic attachment, which expresses absolute fidelity to a lost object, even to the point of self-destructive suffering. On the other, there is the neurotic mechanism of compensatory identification, in which the original object is jettisoned and a substitution found, such that a broader horizon of symbolic and ideological identification is enabled.


Teaching bahasa to elementary school students has important role in building attitudes, habits, and basic abilities to develop their language skills.  Story telling is a part of it. The story teller must have good performance of voice, intonation, and mimic, so that the listeners can understand and enjoy the performance. The story tellers must be supported by appropriate media; they are hand puppets.  The objective of this study is to know the implementation of hand-puppets as a story telling media to support students' language skills and character building of the second graders of SDN 6 Karangasem Batang.  It is an R and D research. The data were collected by observing, interviewing teacher, giving tests, and taking documentations. Based on the data, hand-puppets can be used to increase students' language skills in retelling story. Those data were shown by students' active participation during the learning process and their interest, enthusiasm, and brave in retelling story in front of their classmates.  There were 10 students who joined in retelling story activity actively in " Pembelajaran I ". The numbers of students were increased in " Pembelajaran II "; there were 17 students. The media can also be used as an alternative teaching media to build students' positive characters that made them easily understand and catch the moral value of each story. The researchers suggest to the teachers to create some more interesting media that make the students more fun and interested in joining the learning process.


BACKGROUND
In this study, we determined the prevalence of unmet need for hospitalization service and the characteristics of the elderly with this unmet need in Zhejiang province, China.

METHODS
Data were collected from a random sample of 4046 Chinese aged 60 years and older in Zhejiang province. Based on the Andersen-Newman service utilization framework, multivariable logistic regression analysis was used to determine independent effects of these variables on the likelihood of having an unmet need for hospitalization service.

RESULTS
Overall, the prevalence of unmet need was 16.2% for hospitalization service. Among predisposing factors, only educational level was statistically significant. Individuals with higher education were less likely to report unmet needs. Among enabling factors, residential area, social support, personal yearly income and personal healthcare expenditure were strongly associated with the presence of unmet need. Those with less enabling resources (e.g. residing in rural areas) were more likely to report unmet need [Odds ratio (OR) = 1.5-6.5]. All the need factors, except for physical function, were strongly associated with the presence of unmet need. Seniors in poorer health (e.g. in fair or poor health) were more likely to report unmet need than their counterparts in better health (OR = 1.5-2.8).

CONCLUSIONS
In spite of relatively high insurance coverage rates, unmet need for hospitalization service remains high among the elderly people of Zhejiang province in China. Application of comprehensive intervention strategies such as conducting health education, creating social support, promoting community participation and promoting inter-sectional cooperation may be more effective in reducing unmet need for hospitalization service.


This paper reconsiders the literature on tax options by examining the ability to defer net capital gains realizations within an equity portfolio whose constituents change over time. Unlike previous studies on the value of tax options, this paper examines after-tax returns to shareholders within an equity mutual fund. The mutual fund context allows certain features of the United States' tax laws -- namely, wash-sale rules and the offsetting of short-term and long-term capital gains and losses -- to be incorporated in assessing the potential improvement in post-tax returns to investors engaging in tax minimization strategies. Specifically, this paper examines the feasibility of managing open-end and closed-end Standard and Poor's 500 index funds which defer net capital gains realizations. A combination of HIFO (highest in, first out) accounting procedures and the systematic booking of significant losses in portfolio constituents would have allowed the open-end fund variant to match the annual pre-tax return of Vanguard's Index 500 Fund while improving annual after-tax performance by as much as ninety-seven basis points through the elimination of all capital gains realizations between 1977 and 1991. Deferring capital gains is shown to be easier for open-end funds relative to closed-end funds while the additional turnover required to implement these strategies is quite modest. The authors name the tax-sensitive funds in this paper 'SURGE (Strategies Using Realized Gains Elimination) funds.'


Objective: To compare our experience of genitourinary injuries during the war against terrorism with the record of those in previous wars of the World. Study Design: Cross sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: Urology department, Combined Military Hospital Peshawar, from Jun 2011 to Aug 2014. Methodology: We treated 89 (5.6%) cases of genitourinary injuries received in our tertiary care hospital in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The hospital was located at a distance of 2-3 hours of evacuation time by helicopter from the forward operational area. Results: The frequency of genitourinary injuries among 1589 war casualties was (5.6%). Out of these 49 (55%) were due to sniper shots and 40 (45%) due to improvised explosive device. Kidney was the most common organ injured 30 (33.7%), followed by bladder 20 (22.5%) and urethra 14 (15.7%). Majority of renal and bladder injuries were afflicted in those soldiers who were not wearing the protective jackets. Associated injuries to other organs were identified in 81% cases. Salvage of all genitourinary organs was the aim; however, nephrectomy and orchiectomy had to be performed in 30% and 50% respectively. Conclusion: Salvage of genitourinary war injuries poses a challenge to the trauma surgeon as lifesaving measures take precedence over organ preservation. Renal trauma in war was found to be the leading critical genitourinary injury.


Narrative methods contribute greatly to the advances made in qualitative research. A narrative style should also be promoted in publications and presentations. A study on older LGBT citizens in rural Britain highlights this by means of a report on one part of that study—a Focus Group. The paper demonstrates two ways of writing Focus Group material for publication. First, "data bits" extracted from the transcript are embedded by interpretive categories. The authors ask, "How did this come about? Isn't it time to shift our approach and report these experiences in a different way? Was this not a story of the interactions of strangers and a growing social group cohesion that was taking place by means of this very research exercise?" Secondly, a large section of the Focus Group transcript is presented, including nuances such as breaks, how one person's thought follows another's, and the energy created when several people talk at once. Doing this without comment or interruption brings the reader closer to the group experience itself. The Focus Group provided a opportunity for participants to share a common history and identify individual experiences. Focus Groups can provide marginalised groups with an opportunity to collectively create new knowledge and understanding about shared cultural and historical experiences. Narrative researchers are natural storytellers and need to foreground this when reporting studies for publication. Qualitative research is always about story reporting and story making, and narrative research (listening to and retelling stories) is a key democratising factor in qualitative social science research.


The article opens with a critical analysis of the dominant business model of for-profit, academic publishing, arguing that the extraordinarily high profits of the big publishers are dependent upon a double appropriation that exploits both academic labour and universities' financial resources. Against this model, we outline four possible responses: the further development of open access repositories, a fair trade model of publishing regulation, a renaissance of the university presses, and, finally, a move away from private, for-profit publishing companies toward autonomous journal publishing by editorial boards and academic associations.


Ungulates are key components in ecosystems and economically important for sport and subsistence harvest. Yet the relative importance of the effects of weather conditions, forage productivity, and carnivores on ungulates are not well understood.We examined changes in elk (Cervus canadensis) recruitment (indexed as age ratios) across 7 states and 3 ecotypes in the northwestern United States during 1989–2010, while considering the effects of predator richness, forage productivity, and precipitation.We found a broad-scale, long-term decrease in elk recruitment of 0.48 juveniles/100 adult females/year. Weather conditions (indexed as summer and winter precipitation) showed small, but measurable, influences on recruitment. Forage productivity on summer and winter ranges (indexed by normalized difference vegetation index [NDVI] metrics) had the strongest effect on elk recruitment relative to other factors. Relationships between forage productivity and recruitment varied seasonally and regionally. The productivity of winter habitat was more important in southern parts of the study area, whereas annual variation in productivity of summer habitat had more influence on recruitment in northern areas. Elk recruitment varied by up to 15 juveniles/100 adult females across the range of variation in forage productivity. Areas with more species of large carnivores had relatively low elk recruitment, presumably because of increased predation. Wolves (Canis lupus) were associated with a decrease of 5 juveniles/100 adult females, whereas grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) were associated with an additional decrease of 7 juveniles/100 adult females. Carnivore species can have a critical influence on ungulate recruitment because their influence rivals large ranges of variation in environmental conditions. A more pressing concern, however, stems from persistent broad-scale decreases in recruitment across the distribution of elk in the northwestern United States, irrespective of carnivore richness. Our results suggest that wildlife managers interested in improving recruitment of elk consider the combined effects of habitat and predators. Efforts to manage summer and winter ranges to increase forage productivity may have a positive effect on recruitment. 2018 The Wildlife Society.


Due to the high level exposure of biomedical image analysis, Medical image mining has become one of the well-established research area(s) of machine learning. AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques have been vastly used to solve the complex classification problems of thyroid cancer. Since the persistence of copycat chromatin properties and unavailability of nuclei measurement techniques, it is really problem for doctors to determine the initial phases of nuclei enlargement and to assess the early changes of chromatin distribution. For example involvement of multiple transparent overlapping of nuclei may become the cause of confusion to infer the growth pattern of nuclei variations. Un-decidable nuclei eccentric properties may become one of the leading causes for misdiagnosis in Anaplast cancers. In-order to mitigate all above stated problems this paper proposes a novel methodology so called "Decision Support System for Anaplast Thyroid Cancer" and it proposes a medical data preparation algorithm AD (Analpast_Cancers) which helps to select the appropriate features of Anaplast cancers such as (1) enlargement of nuclei, (2) persistence of irregularity in nuclei and existence of hyper chromatin. Proposed methodology comprises over four major layers, the first layer deals with the noise reduction, detection of nuclei edges and object clusters. The Second layer selects the features of object of interest such as nuclei enlargement, irregularity and hyper chromatin. The Third layer constructs the decision model to extract the hidden patterns of disease associated variables and the final layer evaluates the performance evaluation by using confusion matrix, precision and recall measures. The overall classification accuracy is measured about 97.2% with 10-k fold cross validation.


This study compares biodiversity indicators based on plant and bird communities in eight mosaic landscapes in Hungary, dominated by a mixture of agro-ecosystems and grasslands. The eight landscapes were selected to represent the diversity of the mixed agricultural landscapes of South-East Europe, where a mosaic pattern of intensively managed farmlands and high nature value semi natural grasslands is still relatively prevalent. Bird communities were described using several assemblage-level (species number, total abundance, and Shannon diversity of the assemblage, based on 15 pre-selected key farmland bird species), as well as species-level (presence/absence of the 15 bird species) indicators, which were checked against a synthetic landscape quality indicator describing the degradation of the local plant communities with respect to an ideal baseline (vegetation-based natural capital index, NCI). The authors were interested if and how the assemblageand species-level bird indicators can describe landscape quality in South-East European agricultural mosaic landscapes. It was found that assemblage-level bird indicators were poorly associated to the landscape quality measured in terms of NCI: only total abundance correlated significantly with NCI. On the other hand, species-level indicators were much more successful in predicting landscape quality. Six (Alauda arvensis, Emberiza calandra, Falco tinnunculus, Motacilla flava, Limosa limosa, Vanellus vanellus) of the 15 farmland bird species studied showed significant positive correlation with NCI, while three species (Emberiza citrinella, Galerida cristata, Sylvia communis) exhibited negative correlations. We also found that it was possible to draw conclusions about the landscape quality in an agricultural landscape based on the bird communities better, than to predict the bird assemblages from vegetation condition. The negative correlations for species that indicate good quality habitats in Western Europe, underline the context specificity of biodiversity indicators: whereas the conditions preferred by these species can be considered relatively natural in Western Europe, they correspond to relatively degraded habitats in South-East Europe. The nine farmland bird species which showed a significant connection to NCI can be seen as potential candidates for a regional Farmland Bird Index customized for agricultural landscapes in South-East Europe, in the Pannonian biogeographic region, or in Hungary. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


What was the role of merchant guilds in the medieval and early modern economy? Does their wide prevalence and long survival mean they were efficient institutions that benefited the whole economy? Or did merchant guilds simply offer an effective way for the rich and powerful to increase their wealth, at the expense of outsiders, customers and society as a whole? These privileged associations of businessmen were key institutions in the European economy from 1000 to 1800. Historians debate merchant guilds' role in the Commercial Revolution, economists use them to support theories about institutions and development, and policymakers view them as prime examples of social capital, with important lessons for modern economies. Sheilagh Ogilvie's magisterial new history of commercial institutions shows how scrutinizing merchant guilds can help us understand which types of institution made trade grow, why institutions exist, and how corporate privileges affect economic efficiency and human well-being.


This article attempts to demonstrate the difference between commercial and standby letters of credit and explain the importance of the autonomy principle to their effectiveness. Fraud, the traditional exception to the autonomy of letters of credit, will be explained as it has been interpreted and applied in the courts of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. The Victorian case of Olex Focas Pty Ltd v Skodaexport Co Ltd will then be critically examined to demonstrate the way in which the autonomy of standby letters of credit in Australia may be jeopardised and address whether the fraud exception to standby letters of credit has been extended in Australia to embrace statutory unconscionability. In outlining how Olex Focas was decided, under the unconscionability provision in the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) (s 51AA), the traditional circumstances in which the equitable principle of unconscionability has developed will be discussed.


The work presented here is a study of human metabolic pathways, as projected in the chemical space of the small molecules they comprise, and it is composed of three parts: a) a study of the extent of clustering and overlap of these pathways in chemical space, b) the development and assessment of a statistical model for estimating the proximity to a given pathway of any small molecule, and c) the use of the above model in estimating the proximity of marketed drugs to human metabolic pathways. The distribution, overlap, and relationships of human metabolic pathways in this space are revealed using both visual and quantitative approaches. A set of selected physicochemical and topological descriptors is used to build a classifier, whose aim is to predict metabolic class and pathway membership of any small molecule. The classifier performs well for tightly clustered, isolated pathways but is, naturally, much less accurate for strongly overlapping pathways. Finally, the extent of overlap of a set of known drugs with the human metabolome is examined, and the classifier is used to predict likely cross-interactions between drugs and the major metabolic pathways in humans.