Textual network embedding leverages rich text information associated with the network to learn low-dimensional vectorial representations of vertices. Rather than using typical natural language processing (NLP) approaches, recent research exploits the relationship of texts on the same edge to graphically embed text. However, these models neglect to measure the complete level of connectivity between any two texts in the graph. We present diffusion maps for textual network embedding (DMTE), integrating global structural information of the graph to capture the semantic relatedness between texts, with a diffusion-convolution operation applied on the text inputs. In addition, a new objective function is designed to efficiently preserve the high-order proximity using the graph diffusion. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the vertex-classification and link-prediction tasks.


In the early 2000s the British academic and expert in the field of populism, Paul Taggart, conceptualised the heartland – which he defined as 'a version of the past that celebrates a hypothetical, uncomplicated and non-political territory of imagination.' The idea is that populists envision this return to an almost utopic, laborious, morally pure, and culturally homogenous 'place' where professional political administration is not completely rejected but certainly kept at a minimum. Applying Taggart's heartland to leaders and parties allows us to build on an efficient comprehension of specific uses of populist dialogue, as well as their general discursive styles and political narratives. Those who have capitalised on the current populist zeitgeist (a term Cas Mudde often uses), such as the American President Donald J. Trump, have mobilised masses by implicitly calling for a return to the heartland with slogans such as 'Make America Great Again'. However, Trump is not the only politician who has discursively framed the concept of heartland in the twenty-first century. Interestingly, the heartland can also be applied to 'right-wing' national- populists and 'left-wing' techno-populists in Italy. The League, believes that with their involvement, their country can return to be a safer, more stable, hard-working, producerist society. Similarly, the Five Star Movement pressures the elites for a more virtuous, honest, and transparent way of doing politics through the digital web and direct democracy practices. Those values are the ones that shape their idea of heartland. This piece untangles the two distinct versions of heartland that exist within the forma mentis of the two Italian populist parties, compares them, and contrasts them in the hope of contributing to the already existing literature that has presented little evidence so far on how Taggart's relevant concept can be identified in populist discourse, monologue, and ideology. Also, some advice is given on how to deal with the new populists worldwide in a way that involves dialogue that is both constructive and inclusive.


Robots with many sensors are capable of generating volumes of high-dimensional perceptual data. Making sense of this data and extracting useful knowledge from it is a difficult problem. For robots lacking proper models, trying to understand a stream of uninterpreted data is an especially acute problem. One critical step in linking raw uninterpreted perceptual data to cognition is dimensionality reduction. Current methods for reducing the dimension of data do not meet the demands of a robot situated in the world, and methods that use only perceptual data do not take full advantage of the interactive experience of an embodied robot agent. This work proposes a new scalable, incremental and active approach to dimensionality reduction suitable for extracting geometric knowledge from uninterpreted sensors and effectors. The proposed method uses distinctive state abstractions to organize early sensorimotor experience and sensorimotor embedding to incrementally learn accurate geometric representations based on experience. This approach is applied to the problem of learning the geometry of sensors, space, and objects. The result is evaluated using techniques from statistical shape analysis.


Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the leading causes of cancer‐related death primarily due to the lack of effective targeted therapies. Despite the distinct morphological and phenotypic patterns of HCC, treatment strategies are restricted to relatively homogeneous therapies, including multitargeted tyrosine kinase inhibitors and immune checkpoint inhibitors. Therefore, more effective therapy options are needed to target dysregulated metabolic and molecular pathways in HCC. Integrative genomic profiling of HCC patients provides insight into the most frequently mutated genes and molecular targets, including telomerase reverse transcriptase, the TP53 gene, and the Wnt/β‐catenin signaling pathway oncogene (CTNNB1). Moreover, emerging techniques, such as genome‐scale metabolic models may elucidate the underlying cancer‐specific metabolism, which allows for the discovery of potential drug targets and identification of biomarkers. De novo lipogenesis has been revealed as consistently upregulated since it is required for cell proliferation in all HCC patients. The metabolic network‐driven stratification of HCC patients in terms of redox responses, utilization of metabolites, and subtype‐specific pathways may have clinical implications to drive the development of personalized medicine. In this review, the current and emerging therapeutic targets in light of molecular approaches and metabolic network‐based strategies are summarized, prompting effective treatment of HCC patients.


Background After traumatic brain injury (TBI), the ability of cerebral vessels to appropriately react to changes in arterial blood pressure (pressure reactivity) is impaired, leaving patients vulnerable to cerebral hypo- or hyperperfusion. Although, the traditional pressure reactivity index (PRx) has demonstrated that impaired pressure reactivity is associated with poor patient outcome, PRx is sometimes erratic and may not be reliable in various clinical circumstances. Here, we introduce a more robust transform-based wavelet pressure reactivity index (wPRx) and compare its performance with the widely used traditional PRx across 3 areas: its stability and reliability in time, its ability to give an optimal cerebral perfusion pressure (CPPopt) recommendation, and its relationship with patient outcome. Methods and findings Five hundred and fifteen patients with TBI admitted in Addenbrooke's Hospital, United Kingdom (March 23rd, 2003 through December 9th, 2014), with continuous monitoring of arterial blood pressure (ABP) and intracranial pressure (ICP), were retrospectively analyzed to calculate the traditional PRx and a novel wavelet transform-based wPRx. wPRx was calculated by taking the cosine of the wavelet transform phase-shift between ABP and ICP. A time trend of CPPopt was calculated using an automated curve-fitting method that determined the cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP) at which the pressure reactivity (PRx or wPRx) was most efficient (CPPopt_PRx and CPPopt_wPRx, respectively). There was a significantly positive relationship between PRx and wPRx (r = 0.73), and wavelet wPRx was more reliable in time (ratio of between-hour variance to total variance, wPRx 0.957 ± 0.0032 versus PRx and 0.949 ± 0.047 for PRx, p = 0.002). The 2-hour interval standard deviation of wPRx (0.19 ± 0.07) was smaller than that of PRx (0.30 ± 0.13, p < 0.001). wPRx performed better in distinguishing between mortality and survival (the area under the receiver operating characteristic [ROC] curve [AUROC] for wPRx was 0.73 versus 0.66 for PRx, p = 0.003). The mean difference between the patients' CPP and their CPPopt was related to outcome for both calculation methods. There was a good relationship between the 2 CPPopts (r = 0.814, p < 0.001). CPPopt_wPRx was more stable than CPPopt_PRx (within patient standard deviation 7.05 ± 3.78 versus 8.45 ± 2.90; p < 0.001). Key limitations include that this study is a retrospective analysis and only compared wPRx with PRx in the cohort of patients with TBI. Prior prospective validation is required to better assess clinical utility of this approach. Conclusions wPRx offers several advantages to the traditional PRx: it is more stable in time, it yields a more consistent CPPopt recommendation, and, importantly, it has a stronger relationship with patient outcome. The clinical utility of wPRx should be explored in prospective studies of critically injured neurological patients.


Abstract According to the creep deformation of oil film bearing Babbitt in operation process, the creep test method of Babbitt was put forward, the factors about influencing the results of creep test were analysed, and the creep test research of Babbitt was carried out. The test data were processed, and the creep characteristics of SnSb11Cu6 and SnSb8Cu4 were acquired based on Graham creep equation and the wheat quarts method and global optimisation algorithm. The relationship between creep coefficients and stress has been obtained, and a group of creep curves under different stress has been speculated through calculating stress related indexes. At the same time, the accuracy and reliability of creep deformation of Babbitt were verified through finite element numerical simulation on the test specimens based on ANSYS. Then the creep characteristics of Babbitt of oil film bearing were carried out by finite element numerical simulation.


A variational data assimilation system has been implemented for the tropical Pacific Ocean using an eddy‐permitting regional implementation of the MITgcm. The adjoint assimilation system was developed by the Estimation of the Circulation and the Climate of the Ocean consortium, and has been extended to deal with open boundaries. This system is used to adjust the model to match observations in the tropical Pacific region using control parameters which include initial conditions, open boundaries and time‐dependent surface fluxes. This paper focuses on problems related to strong adjoint sensitivities that may impede the model fit to the observations. A decomposition of the velocities at the open boundaries into barotropic and baroclinic modes is introduced to deal with very strong sensitivities of the model sea surface height to the barotropic component of the inflow. Increased viscosity and diffusivity terms are used in the adjoint model to reduce exponentially growing sensitivities in the backward run associated with nonlinearity of the forward model. Simplified experiments in which the model was constrained with Levitus temperature and salinity data, Reynolds sea surface temperature data and TOPEX/POSEIDON altimeter data were performed to demonstrate the controllability of this assimilation system and to study its sensitivity to the starting guesses for forcing and initial conditions. Copyright © 2005 Royal Meteorological Society


A method for context-sensitive analysis of binaries that may have obfuscated procedure call and return operations is presented. Such binaries may use operators to directly manipulate stack instead of using native call and ret instructions to achieve equivalent behavior. Since definition of context-sensitivity and algorithms for context-sensitive analysis have thus far been based on the specific semantics associated to procedure call and return operations, classic interprocedural analyses cannot be used reliably for analyzing programs in which these operations cannot be discerned. A new notion of context-sensitivity is introduced that is based on the state of the stack at any instruction. While changes in `calling'-context are associated with transfer of control, and hence can be reasoned in terms of paths in an interprocedural control flow graph (ICFG), the same is not true of changes in 'stack'-context. An abstract interpretation based framework is developed to reason about stack-contexts and to derive analogues of call-strings based methods for the context-sensitive analysis using stack-context. The method presented is used to create a context-sensitive version of Venable et al.'s algorithm for detecting obfuscated calls. Experimental results show that the context-sensitive version of the algorithm generates more precise results and is also computationally more efficient than its context-insensitive counterpart.


In line with recent developments in both language acquisition and text comprehension studies, it is argued that more reliable and valid lexical richness measures can be obtained by including frequency class information. To that end, texts written by 452 elementary school children (L1/L2) in grades 3–6 were investigated. In order to find out whether a frequency class based lexical measure is more valid than type/token based measures, the central question to be answered was whether with increasing vocabulary skills from grades 3 to 6 (measured by standardized vocabulary tests), the number of low frequency words in children's writings increased, and whether L2-children with lower vocabulary skills used relatively more high frequency words than their L1-peers. The results show a gradually growing number of low frequency words: children in grade 3 use more words belonging to the 1,000–5,000 word frequency range; in grades 4/5 more from the 5,000–12,500 range; and in grade 6 more from the 12,500-plus range. L2-children in all grades use relatively more words from the first frequency class (the first 1,000 lemmas) than their L1-peers. The effect sizes, however, with eta2 ranging from .09 to .02 between grades, and from eta2 = .01 to nonsignificant between L1/L2, were lower than those of the standardized productive and receptive vocabulary tests (eta2 = .26-.35 resp. between grades, eta2 = .34-.23 resp. between L1/L2), and also lower than the effect sizes for the number of different types in the texts (eta2 = .23 between grades, and .01 between NT1/NT2). The TTR shows only a significant difference in the wrong direction (grade 6 outperforming grade 5). The frequency class based lexical measure MLR discriminates significantly both between the grades and between L1/L2, but the effect sizes are low (eta2 = .05 between grades, and eta2 = .02 between L1/L2). These outcomes show evidence that a frequency class based lexical measure as the MLR is more valid than a type/token based measure such as the TTR.


This paper focuses on the formation of thin n+p junctions in p-type Silicon Carbide (SiC) epitaxial layers using two kinds of Nitrogen implantations. The standard beam ion implantations and PULSIONTM processes were performed at two distinct energies (700 eV and 7 keV), and the subsequent annealing was held at 1600°C in a resistive furnace specifically adapted to SiC material. No measurable electrical activity was obtained for both implantations performed at 700 eV, due to some outdiffusion of N dopants during the annealing despite a low surface roughness (rms ~ 1.4 nm) and no residual damage detected by RBS/C. A higher sheet resistance was measured in plasma-implanted samples at 7 keV (in comparison with beam-line implanted samples), which is partly related to N outdiffusion. The profiles of N atoms beam-implanted at 7 keV are not affected by the annealing. The corresponding electrical activation is fully completed.


Summary
Riparian forest harvesting impacts streams in many ways, from altering temperature regimes, shifting geomorphic structure, increasing sediment fluxes and affecting fish populations. However, we have noted considerable variation in the results between studies that led us to ask whether the effects of forest harvesting on streams were consistent between studies. We used meta-analysis of 34 replicated studies to address the effects of riparian logging on biological and chemical components of streams in contrast to control sites.
We found that the overall effect sizes of several response variables in replicated studies were significantly higher than zero, especially benthic invertebrates, and nitrogen and potassium concentrations. However, there was a very large amount of variation in the effect sizes between studies, and for many measures, the effect sizes from different studies were positive or negative, indicating site-specific responses.
We explored whether stream size, stream gradient and regional potential evapotranspiration could explain some of the effect size variation between studies. Relations with these environmental variables were weak, but suggestive that some of the context-specific, individual outcomes might be due to underlying environmental differences between sites.
Synthesis and applications. Despite relatively low numbers of replicated studies, we found significant overall effects of riparian forest harvesting although the magnitude and direction of responses within individual studies were site specific. This lack of consistency in the direction of effect sizes suggests we need a more context-dependent approach to the protection of freshwaters from forest management.


Son preference is widespread in a number of developing countries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women may contribute to the persistence of this phenomenon because they derive substantial long-run non-monetary benefits from giving birth to a son in the form of an improvement in their intra-household position. This paper tests this hypothesis in the Indian context. The results suggest that for the most part there is little evidence of substantial female benefits, and any positive impacts of having a son disappear after six months. This implies that the female-specific self-interest in a son is probably much lower than commonly assumed.


The aviation domain provides a better analogy for the "temporary" teams that are found in acute medical specialities than industrial or military teamwork research based on established teams. Crew resource management (CRM) training, which emphasises portable skills (for whatever crew a pilot is rostered to on a given flight), has been recognised to have potential application in medicine, especially for teams in the operating theatre, intensive care unit, and emergency room. Drawing on research from aviation psychology that produced the behavioural marker system NOTECHS for rating European pilots' non-technical skills for teamwork on the flightdeck, this paper outlines the Anaesthetists Non-Technical Skills behavioural rating system for anaesthetists working in operating theatre teams. This taxonomy was used as the design basis for a training course, Crisis Avoidance Resource Management for Anaesthetists used to develop these skills, based in an operating theatre simulator. Further developments of this training programme for teams in emergency medicine are outlined.


The present work focuses on the development of a numerical model which simulates the hydrodynamics of forced and natural circulation boiling water nuclear reactor loops and demonstrates its capability to analyse density wave instability of the reactor undergoing in-phase and out-of-phase modes of oscillations. The numerical algorithm integrates a compressible and distributed fluid flow model used for simulating the two-phase flow phenomenon in the channels of the reactor core with an incompressible lumped parameter model which accounts for sub-cooled water flow in various ex-core and recirculation components of the reactor loop. The algorithm used in the present hybrid model explicitly addresses the uncertainties related to boundary conditions existing in the literature to simulate parallel channel instability analysis for forced and natural circulation boiling reactor loops. Extensive numerical experimentations are performed to search the stability thresholds for both the forced and natural circulation reactor loops undergoing in-phase and out-ofphase instability modes.


The physiological basis of human cerebral asymmetry for language remains mysterious. We have used simultaneous physiological and anatomical measurements to investigate the issue. Concentrating on neural oscillatory activity in speech-specific frequency bands and exploring interactions between gestural (motor) and auditory-evoked activity, we find, in the absence of language-related processing, that left auditory, somatosensory, articulatory motor, and inferior parietal cortices show specific, lateralized, speech-related physiological properties. With the addition of ecologically valid audiovisual stimulation, activity in auditory cortex synchronizes with left-dominant input from the motor cortex at frequencies corresponding to syllabic, but not phonemic, speech rhythms. Our results support theories of language lateralization that posit a major role for intrinsic, hardwired perceptuomotor processing in syllabic parsing and are compatible both with the evolutionary view that speech arose from a combination of syllable-sized vocalizations and meaningful hand gestures and with developmental observations suggesting phonemic analysis is a developmentally acquired process.


The Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become a widely adopted data interchange format. With the rise of Linked Data published using the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a number of tools for transforming XML to RDF have been developed. Specifying XML→RDF mappings for these tools often requires skills in programming languages such as XSLT or XQuery. Moreover, these tools are rarely able to deal with large XML inputs. We introduce an XML to RDF transformation approach, which is based on mappings comprising RDF triple templates that employ simple XPath expressions. Thanks to the restricted XPath expressions, which can be evaluated against a stream of XML data, our implementation can handle extremely large input XML files. To process the XML input efficiently, we employ XML filtering techniques and a strategy for selecting relevant XML nodes to generate RDF triples from. We show that the time complexity of our mapping algorithm is linear in the size of the XML input and also prove its practical efficiency with an evaluation on large real-world data.


Voice conversion is a common speech synthesis task which can be solved in different ways depending on a particular real-world scenario. The most challenging one often referred to as one-shot many-to-many voice conversion consists in copying the target voice from only one reference utterance in the most general case when both source and target speakers do not belong to the training dataset. We present a scalable high-quality solution based on diffusion probabilistic modeling and demonstrate its superior quality compared to state-of-the-art one-shot voice conversion approaches. Moreover, focusing on real-time applications, we investigate general principles which can make diffusion models faster while keeping synthesis quality at a high level. As a result, we develop a novel Stochastic Differential Equations solver suitable for various diffusion model types and generative tasks as shown through empirical studies and justify it by theoretical analysis.


In this article, we extend the literature on merger simulation models by incorporating its potential synergy gains into structural econometric analysis. We present a three-step integrated approach. We estimate a structural demand and supply model, as in Bonnet and Dubois (2010). This model allows us to recover the marginal cost of each differentiated product. Then we estimate potential efficiency gains using the Data Envelopment Analysis approach of Bogetoft and Wang (2005), and some assumptions about exogenous cost shifters. In the last step, we simulate the new price equilibrium post merger taking into account synergy gains, and derive price and welfare effects. We use a homescan dataset of dairy dessert purchases in France, and show that for two of the three mergers considered, synergy gains could offset the upward pressure on prices post. Some mergers could then be considered as not harmful for consumers.


According to the Letter of Intent on Cooperation between the Palace Museum and the German Archaeological Institute from 2015 both institutes intend to cooperate on projects focusing on ancient palace architectures. As the first project of cooperation, the so-called Crystal Palace (Lingzhao Xuan) in the courtyard of the former Palace of Prolonging Happiness (Yanxi Gong) was selected, because it represents a unique example of the influence of western construction methods and architectural elements on Chinese palace architecture. The building, begun in 1909, is most unusual for the architecture of the Forbidden City because of its choice of materials. We are dealing with a stone-iron construction with cast iron and steel supports for floor and ceiling construction, pavilion-like super structures with iron and steel profiles, even steel door casings and window frames. The Summer School comprised mainly the mediation of theoretical principles of building archaeology and early iron construction including its cleaning and structural improvement on the one hand and practical work on the object itself on the other hand. A first round of discussions was added to heritage values and possible forms of presentation of the 'Crystal Palace', which initially was planned to be an aquarium. Looking for architectural examples in Europe it seems plausible that some inspiration from western aquaria helped the vision of the last emperors of China of a modern fish pool with clear water to gain shape. Concerning the question if the iron elements just like the decorated tiles also came from Germany it is suggested that these were enveloped in the context of the contemporary building project of the Tianjin-Pukow Railway for which the major share of orders had gone to German firms.


Many cat retinal ganglion cells (types X, Y, and W) have inputs from three separate cone systems. Those with peak sensitivities at 450 and 555 nanometers have been previously shown. A gamma max cone with a peak sensitivity of 500 nanometers can be differentiated from other cones by spectral sensitivity and from rods by receptive field differences, functioning above rod saturation levels, and by cone-rod breaks in the dark-adaptation curves. The similarity of the three-cone cat retina to the extramacular retina of the rhesus monkeys suggests that the cat may have photopic trichromatic vision.


- This paper presents a new information model for sustainable development of nautical tourism in the Republic of Croatia based on set model variables: modernization, enlargement and building new ports of nautical tourism, construction of nautical fleet, organization of yachting clubs, building shipyards for nautical fleet, building sports, retail, hotel, catering etc. facilities, and building dry berth hangars, motor service stations and vessel maintenance workshops. The information model has given direct growth rates of sustainable development of nautical tourism in the Republic of Croatia with realistic prospects to be achieved. The fundamental scientific hypothesis of this paper is proven by indirect growth rates of above mentioned model variables


Trend The Netherlands does not differ from most other Western countries. An enormous increase of people with chronic conditions is expected in the near future. According to epidemiological estimations, heart failure, COPD, diabetes and obesity will e.g. rise with more than 40% between 2005 and 2025. This trend has huge implications both for the lives of individuals as well as for society as a whole. It will negatively affect social or labour participation, increase the costs of health care and alter the type of health care that is required. National strategic framework For this reason, the Dutch government published a national strategic framework regarding chronic diseases in June 2008. The strategy is based on four ambitions: • Curbing the rise of people with a chronic condition; • Delaying the age at which a chronic condition manifest firstly; • Preventing or delaying the onset of complications; • Enabling patients to cope with their chronic condition to improve their quality of life. To achieve these ambitions a programmatic approach, based on the disease management concept, is needed. This approach should be patient-focused, multi-disciplinary, transparent and cost-efficient. A shift must be made from a strongly fragmentized care delivery towards integrated health care encompassing prevention, early recognition, self management and adequate health and social care. In 2006, the Netherlands introduced a new health care system. This system is an important basis for the necessary reforms. It is essential that all stakeholders—patients, care providers, health insurers and government—take their responsibilities. This requires a balanced set of mechanisms, containing for instance the development of integrated health care standards; transparency and financial incentives (e.g. integrated financing of care providers and risk compensation for health insurers).


BACKGROUND
The burden of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and its treatment may severely limit the ability of children with CKD to do daily tasks and participate in family, school, sporting and recreational activities. Life participation is critically important to affected children and their families; however, the appropriateness and validity of available measures used to assess this outcome are uncertain. The aim of this study was to identify the characteristics, content and psychometric properties of existing measures for life participation used in children with CKD.

METHODS
We searched MEDLINE, Embase, PsychINFO, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature and the Cochrane Kidney and Transplant register to August 2019 for all studies that used a measure to report life participation in children with CKD. For each measure, we extracted and analyzed the characteristics, dimensions of life participation and psychometric properties.

RESULTS
From 128 studies, we identified 63 different measures used to assess life participation in children with CKD. Twenty-five (40%) of the measures were patient reported, 7 (11%) were parent proxy reported and 31 (49%) had both self and parent proxy reports available. Twenty-two were used in one study only. The Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory version 4.0 generic module was used most frequently in 62 (48%) studies. Seven (11%) were designed to assess ability to participate in life, with 56 (89%) designed to assess other constructs (e.g. quality of life) with a subscale or selected questions on life participation. Across all measures, the three most frequent activities specified were social activities with friends and/or family, leisure activities and self-care activities. Validation data in the pediatric CKD population were available for only 19 (30%) measures.

CONCLUSIONS
Life participation is inconsistently measured in children with CKD and the measures used vary in their characteristics, content and validity. Validation data supporting these measures in this population are often incomplete and are sparse. A meaningful and validated measure for life participation in children with CKD is needed.


This article provides a review of ethical food labelling from a consumer perspective and makes recommendations to the food industry and regulators regarding ethical food labelling in order to satisfy consumers' food-labelling needs. Various studies have found that many consumers have negative perceptions regarding food labelling. However, research on consumers' perspectives regarding ethical food labelling has been accorded little attention. This article addresses this topic through a review of the relevant literature of mostly quantitative research, but also includes qualitative and mixed method studies. The article examines such aspects as the trustworthiness of claims on food labels, intelligibility of label information, listing of food additives on labels, and labelling of genetically modified foods. As negative perspectives on food labelling are likely to affect consumers' decision making regarding the purchasing of food products, the food industry must realise their responsibility to provide ethical food labels. The food industry and regulators should aim to provide risk communication and intelligible information through ethical food labels and consumer education programmes on food labelling. Consumers need to be aware of their right to know what they are purchasing through ethical food labels and take a stand in this regard.


In the field of transatlantic history, scholars continue to refine methodological debates and theoretical questions in order for research to move beyond the limitations established by national history.  This volume of Traversea features contributions to these debates from emerging scholars, as they examine and challenge historiographical arguments concerning prominent themes in transatlantic history.  Such themes include the role of diaspora and migration in the formation of transatlantic connections, North-South transatlantic connections, as well as approaches to incorporating Atlantic history into a transatlantic field.  One of the main objectives of transatlantic history is to bring together the historiography of different subfields.  It is interdisciplinary in nature, it reinforces continued work in transnational history, and it depends upon the collaborative efforts of scholars across multiple fields.  In this second volume, Traversea has a twofold mission: to continue to publish the work of new scholars in the field of transatlantic history in the Independent Contributions section, and to operate as a platform for research papers delivered at the annual Transatlantic History Student Organization (THSO) graduate student conference in the Conference Presentations section.


Data availability has increased immensely in the past years, and so has the need for data analysis techniques. A key point of interest is often to use process data to detect changes in the underlying process. This applies to numerous environments, ranging from standard manufacturing processes to intelligence agencies using complex network data to detect possible terrorist cells, or even our own body. Even though many processes may appear constant at first glance, the corresponding process data will vary over time. Certain variations are inherent to the process under consideration, and pinpointing the exact cause of these differences is often very difficult, if not impossible. However, special events or disturbances can change the underlying process, bringing a different source of variation. If no corrective actions are taken, this may lead to undesirable and potentially harmful consequences, depending on the circumstances. The field of statistical process monitoring (SPM) provides tools to detect process changes by monitoring data streams. This dissertation revolves around the design of one of such tools, namely the Shewhart control chart. When constructing a control chart, process parameters have to be estimated. Because different practitioners obtain different samples, their estimates will differ as well. This leads to varying control chart performance across different practitioners. In this dissertation we derive new control chart limits that take this effect into account.


The accuracy of the calibration model for the single and double integrating sphere systems are compared for a white light system. A calibration model is created from a matrix of samples with known absorption and reduced scattering coefficients. In this instance the samples are made using different concentrations of intralipid and black ink. The total and diffuse transmittance and reflectance is measured on both setups and the accuracy of each model compared by evaluating the prediction errors of the calibration model for the different systems. Current results indicate that the single integrating sphere setup is more accurate than the double system method. This is based on the low prediction errors of the model for the single sphere system for a He-Ne laser as well as a white light source. The model still needs to be refined for more absorption factors. Tests on the prediction accuracies were then determined by extracting the optical properties of solid resin based phantoms for each system. When these properties of the phantoms were used as input to the modeling software excellent agreement between measured and simulated data was found for the single sphere systems.


The England and Wales Cricket Board are keen to increase the participation of British Asian groups, including those of British Pakistani Muslim (BPM) backgrounds, at mainstream levels of the game in order to meet their twin strategic aims of raising participation levels and fostering elite development. We argue that the potential to include BPM men in and through cricket is achievable, but strategies to engage them must address their social needs and circumstances rather than be superficial and tokenistic. Cricket agencies and bodies must be willing to adapt and change to become more inclusive, and indeed supportive of real meritocracy. Using research testimonies garnered from interviews with BPM men who play cricket at amateur mainstream and/or alternative formats of the game, we identify and forward strategies that can be activated by cricket development officers in order to create new possibilities for the social inclusion of BPM men.


We present the results of X-ray mapping observations of the western radio lobe of the Fornax A galaxy, using the X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (XIS) onboard the Suzaku satellite with a total exposure time of 327 ks. The purpose of this study is to investigate the nature and spatial extent of the diffuse thermal emission around the lobe by exploiting the low and stable background of the XIS. The diffuse thermal emission had been consistently reported in all previous studies of this region, but its physical nature and relation to the radio lobe had not been examined in detail. Using the data set covering the entire western lobe and the central galaxy NGC 1316, as well as comparison sets in the vicinity, we find convincingly the presence of thermal plasma emission with a temperature of ~1 keV in excess of conceivable background and contaminating emission (cosmic X-ray background, Galactic halo, intra-cluster gas of Fornax, interstellar gas of NGC 1316, and the ensemble of point-like sources). Its surface brightness is consistent with having a spherical distribution peaking at the center of the western lobe with a projected radius of ~12 arcmin. If the volume filling factor of the thermal gas is assumed to be unity, its estimated total mass amounts to ~10^{10} M_sun, which would be ~10^{2} times that of the central black hole and comparable to that of the current gas mass of the host galaxy. Its energy density is comparable to or larger than those in the magnetic field and non-thermal electrons responsible for the observed radio and X-ray emission.


Problem statement: This study reviews the relationships between the elements of the inner and outer text, and their impact on the overall meaning of the architectural work based on the intertextual reading. In this research, after an explanation of the basics of the theory of intertextuality as a tool of criticism, the model of intertextual criticism of architecture has developed. A model has been tested for Valiasr Mosque reading. Research objectives: This research seeks to answer the question: How does the application of the intertextual criticism model provide a context for reading the architecture? In this research, the main hypothesis is that using intertextual relationships in syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes and diachronic and synchronic analysis, will lead to the recognition of deeper text layers and decryption. It seems that using of intertextual reading has prevented superficial reading of architectural works and it investigates the work of architecture as part of a series of works which have been formed over time and its application can lead to better understanding the hidden layers of meaning and it causes more precise interpretation of work in broader paradigms. Research method: This research is qualitative research. In the data-gathering step, the descriptive method been used to describe the subject matter and in the analytical phase of the data used logical reasoning method. This research is based on the theory of intertextuality and has studied the text (here the work of architecture) in various layers. Conclusion: The findings of this research indicate that the text of the architecture formed in several semantic layers from the phenotextto, genotext, and the types of implications are effective in the formation of its layers, by applying the intertextual criticism model the layers of the layout retrieved from the layers of architecture to extra-architectural.


In this paper, we studied the importance of indigenous biodiversity (native bush) on farm properties in the Waikato Region. To do this, we surveyed both real estate agents and farmers. We discovered that opinions of native bush between the two groups were very different. A small percentage of real estate agents believed that indigenous biodiversity on farms mattered; type of farm sold and age of respondent influenced this belief. While approximately half of Waikato farmers believed that native bush was important; this was influenced by age, income, education level, number of farm owners and sex. Farmers suggested that rates rebates, as well as subsidized planting and subsidized fencing would motivate them to plant more native bush on their lands.


This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning, IJCAR 2014, held as part of the Vienna Summer of Logic, VSL 2014, in Vienna, Austria, in July 2014. IJCAR 2014 was a merger of three leading events in automated reasoning, namely CADE (International Conference on Automated Deduction), FroCoS (International Symposium on Frontiers of Combining Systems) and TABLEAUX (International Conference on Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods). The 26 revised full research papers and 11 system descriptions presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. The papers have been organized in topical sections on HOL, SAT and QBF, SMT, equational reasoning, verification, proof theory, modal and temporal reasoning, SMT and SAT, modal logic, complexity, description logics and knowledge representation and reasoning.


INTRODUCTION African Americans have failed miserably at winning high-profile statewide offices. Only U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke III (Mass.), Governor L. Douglas Wilder (VA), U.S. Senators Carol Moseley Braun and Barack Obama of Illinois and the recently elected governor of Massachusetts--Deval Patrick have ever been elected to high-profile statewide office. The reasons for blacks' lack of success run the gamut. Some argue that the race factor has prevented blacks from capturing these offices. In other words, most whites are unwilling to support black high-profile statewide office seekers. Others maintain that blacks have failed to win these offices because they have been poorly qualified. Simply put, whites voted against black high-profile statewide candidates because of weak credentials not because of the candidate's race. This argument is not without merit as a number of less than qualified blacks have indeed run for high-profile statewide office over the years. Alan Keyes is one such example. Although he had no experience in an elected office, Keyes ran for the United States Senate on at least three different occasions in two different states losing each time. Rev. Maurice Dawkins challenged the popular Chuck Robb for the U.S. Senate in the late 1980s losing badly. Like Keyes, Dawkins was also a political neophyte. Additional arguments have been put forth to explain why blacks fail to win high-profile statewide office that include: insufficient party support, the inability to craft a campaign message that appeals to both blacks and whites, and being in the unenviable position of running against a popular incumbent. This article examines the 2002 New York gubernatorial campaign of H. Carl McCall. It explains why McCall failed to win the governorship, and in doing so, serves as a lesson to all black high-profile statewide office seekers. THE McCALL CANDIDACY Herman Carl McCall is one of only four African Americans in the last twenty five years who were widely considered to be viable candidates for a U.S. governorship. Like Tom Bradley (1982) (1), L. Douglas Wilder (1989) (2) and Roland Burris (1994) (3) before him, McCall had a long political career. Formally educated at the prestigious Dartmouth College and Andover-Newton Theological School in Massachusetts, McCall also studied at the University of Edinburgh. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1958, McCall joined the Army to serve his obligatory six months of active duty as part of the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Early into his six month hitch, McCall discovered that black officers were not allowed to have white roommates. The policy was changed when McCall threatened to inform Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the powerful Congressman from Harlem. After his discharge from the Army, McCall went to divinity school and was ordained as a minister in the Congregationalist Church. McCall always had an interest in politics, but this interest piqued in the 1970s when he decided to run for a state Senate seat in the 28th District, which covered the fledging black community of Harlem and some parts of Manhattan. After serving in the state Senate for four years (from 1975 to 1979) President Jimmy Carter appointed him deputy Ambassador to the United Nations--a post he held for two years. During the 1980s, McCall acquired a tremendous amount of business acumen (in both the public and private sector) that would later stand him in good stead as state comptroller. Over the course of ten years McCall served as vice-president of Citicorp/Citibank, executive vice-president of WNET, a public television station in New York, and President of the Board of Education, where he set policy for the second largest school system in the nation. McCall's foray into statewide politics did not begin with his 2002 gubernatorial campaign. Twenty years earlier McCall unsuccessfully sought the lieutenant governorship on Mario Cuomo's ticket. (4) McCall's campaign for lieutenant governor marked the first time an African American had run for statewide office on a major ticket in New York. …


The nineteenth century was a golden age for those people known variously as sodomites, Uranians, monosexuals, and homosexuals. Long before Stonewall and Gay Pride, there was such a thing as gay culture, and it was recognized throughout Europe and America. Graham Robb, brilliant biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, examines how homosexuals were treated by society and finds a tale of surprising tolerance. He describes the lives of gay men and women: how they discovered their sexuality and accepted or disguised it; how they came out; how they made contact with like-minded people. He also includes a fascinating investigation of the encrypted homosexuality of such famous nineteenth-century sleuths as Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes himself (with glances forward in time to Batman and J. Edgar Hoover). Finally, Strangers addresses crucial questions of gay culture, including the riddle of its relationship to religion: Why were homosexuals created with feelings that the Creator supposedly condemns? This is a landmark work, full of tolerant wisdom, fresh research, and surprises.


Background The potential of Mendelian Randomization studies is rapidly expanding due to (i) the growing power of GWAS meta-analyses to detect genetic variants associated with several exposures, and (ii) the increasing availability of these genetic variants in large-scale surveys. However, without a proper biological understanding of the pleiotropic working of genetic variants, a fundamental assumption of Mendelian Randomization (the exclusion restriction) can always be contested. Methods We build upon and synthesize recent advances in the econometric literature on instrumental variables (IV) estimation that test and relax the exclusion restriction. Our Pleiotropy-robust Mendelian Randomization (PRMR) method first estimates the degree of pleiotropy, and in turn corrects for it. If a sample exists for which the genetic variants do not affect the exposure, and pleiotropic effects are homogenous, PRMR obtains unbiased estimates of causal effects in case of pleiotropy. Results Simulations show that existing MR methods produce biased estimators for realistic forms of pleiotropy. Under the aforementioned assumptions, PRMR produces unbiased estimators. We illustrate the practical use of PRMR by estimating the causal effect of (i) cigarettes smoked per day on Body Mass Index (BMI); (ii) prostate cancer on self-reported health, and (iii) educational attainment on BMI in the UK Biobank data. Conclusions PRMR allows for instrumental variables that violate the exclusion restriction due to pleiotropy, and corrects for pleiotropy in the estimation of the causal effect. If the degree of pleiotropy is unknown, PRMR can still be used as a sensitivity analysis. Key messages If genetic variants have pleiotropic effects, causal estimates of Mendelian Randomization studies will be biased. Pleiotropy-robust Mendelian Randomization (PRMR) produces unbiased causal estimates in case (i) a subsample can be identified for which the genetic variants do not affect the exposure, and (ii) pleiotropic effects are homogenous. If such a subsample does not exist, PRMR can still routinely be reported as a sensitivity analysis in any MR analysis. If pleiotropic effects are not homogenous, PRMR can be used as an informal test to gauge the exclusion restriction.


Are the negative thought patterns and self-doubt associated with the Imposter Phenomenon similar to the negative thought patterns and self-doubt that many individuals who have mild depression experience? If so, it is reasonable to believe that a relation between depression and the Imposter Phenomenon (IP) exists. The relation between the IP and depression among college students was examined. Results of a Pearson product-moment correlation yielded a positive correlation between the IP and BDI-II scores. Additionally, a Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) using the IP scores and BDI scores as the dependent variables, with sex serving as the independent variable, revealed that men and women differ significantly on the combined dependent variables of IP and BDI scores. More specifically, the main effect between sex and IP score indicates that women have higher IP scores than men. However, the effect between sex and BDI was not statistically significant. Lastly, the implications of these findings are discussed.


Abstract Xenotime-(Y), (Y,REE)PO4, and thortveitite, (Sc, Y)2Si2O7, in a miarolitic cavity in a niobium, yttrium, fluorine (NYF) granitic pegmatite at Baveno, Verbania, Southern Alps, Italy, were investigated by electron microprobe analysis and single-crystal X-ray diffraction. Fluorine has an important role as a complexing agent for Y and REEs in supercritical pegmatitic fluids; annitesiderophyllite and chamosite are the most likely sources of the Y and REEs. The thortveitite from Baveno contains up to 3.20 wt.% SnO2, an unusually high Sn content. Xenotime-(Y) is enriched in Gd in comparison to other Alpine xenotimes. Quantitative chemical data and measurements of the lattice parameters show that a higher scandium content results in a smaller unit-cell volume in thortveitite. The substitution of REEs for Y up to ∼20 mol.% has little effect on the unit cell of xenotime-(Y). The textures of xenotime-(Y) and thortveitite provide information about the dissolution and crystallization processes in the miarolitic cavity.


This data set describes a harmonized set of soil parameter estimates for Senegal and The Gambia. It was derived from the Soil and Terrain Database for Senegal and The Gambia (SENSOTER ver. 1.0) and the ISRIC-WISE soil profile database, using standardized taxonomy-based pedotransfer (taxotransfer) procedures. The land surface of the study area, covering some 200 800 km2, has been characterized using 149 unique SOTER units. Each SOTER unit consists of up to four different soil components. In so far as possible, each soil component has been characterized by a regionally representative profile, selected and classified by national soil experts. Conversely, in the absence of any measured legacy data, soil components were characterized using synthetic profiles for which only the FAO-Unesco (1988) classification is known. Soil components in SENSOTER have been characterized using 90 profiles of which 34 are synthetic. The latter represent some 37 per cent of the territory. Comprehensive sets of measured attribute data are not available for most of the measured profiles (56) collated in SENSOTER. Consequently, to permit modelling, gaps in the soil analytical data have been filled using consistent taxotransfer procedures. Modal soil parameter estimates necessary to populate the taxotransfer procedure were derived from statistical analyses of soil profiles held in the ISRIC-WISE database. The current procedure only considers profiles in WISE that have FAO soil unit names identical to those mapped for SOTER-Senegal (41) and that originate from the Tropics (n= 4510). Parameter estimates are presented for 18 soil variables by soil unit for fixed depth intervals of 0.2 m to 1 m depth. Thes include: organic carbon, total nitrogen, pH(H2O), CECsoil, CECclay, base saturation, effective CEC, aluminium saturation, CaCO3 content, gypsum content, exchangeable sodium percentage (ESP), electrical conductivity (ECE), bulk density, content of sand, silt and clay, content of coarse fragments (> 2 mm), and available water capacity (-33 kPa to -1.5 MPa). These attributes have been identified as being useful for agro-ecological zoning, land evaluation, crop growth simulation, modelling of soil carbon stocks and change, and analyses of global environmental change. The current parameter estimates should be seen as best estimates based on the current selection of soil profiles and data clustering procedure. Taxotransfer rules have been flagged to provide an indication of the confidence in the derived data. Soil parameter estimates are presented as summary files (in MS-Access format) which can be linked to the SENSOTER map using GIS, through the unique SOTER-unit code (NEWSUID). The derived (secondary) soil data for Senegal and The Gambia are considered appropriate for exploratory studies at national scale (1:1 million); these should consider the full map unit composition.


Corrugated boxes are used extensively for transporting and storing fresh produce in the horticultural industry. These boxes protect their contents from mechanical damage due to drops, impacts, vibration and compression loads. The analysis and prediction of the stacking compression load capacity of corrugated boxes is important to study the response of existing packaging to mechanical stress or to design new boxes to meet postharvest handling conditions. Good design of vented packaging is important in optimising the cooling and ventilation uniformity, minimising quality deterioration of packed produce and maintaining the mechanical integrity of the box. Various experimental and modelling tools are used to investigate the design and mechanical performance of packaging. Experimental studies on mechanical performance of packaging include compression, impact and vibration analysis. Finite element analysis and simulation is useful for study and structural design of ventilated corrugated packaging, considering the shape, location and size of the vent. Advances in information and communication technologies offer new prospects for development of user-friendly software toward integrated design and performance analysis of fresh produce packaging.


Poorly performing enterprise applications are the weakest links in a corporation's management chain, causing delays and disruptions of critical business functions. This groundbreaking book frames enterprise application performance engineering not as an art but as applied science built on model-based methodological foundation. The book introduces queuing models of enterprise application that visualize, demystify, explain, and solve system performance issues. Analysis of these models will help to discover and clarify unapparent connections and correlations among workloads, hardware architecture, and software parameters.


Background: Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) have been a increasing problem worldwide with an estimation of 340 million new cases each year. STDs are one of the top five reasons of seeking health care in the developing countries. Aim: The aim was to investigate the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs regarding STDs among young adults in two vocational schools in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and also compare the genders regarding the issues. Method: A descriptive and comparative study was used. The 455 students between the age of 15 and 24, both male and female, participated voluntarily to answer a questionnaire. Dorothea Orem's self-caring theory was provided as theoretical framework. Results: The students showed a low knowledge regarding STDs. Small differences between the genders could be seen regarding knowledge where the males had a higher knowledge regarding symptoms of STDs. Conclusions: The adolescents had lack of knowledge about STDs and no greater difference between genders have been shown. The traditional attitudes must change and follow the development of Vietnam. Further research should be performed to find out if there is any difference between students in rural and central areas of Vietnam.


This comprehensive guide is a must-have for the legions of fans of the beloved and perennially popular music known as soul and rhythm & blues. A member of the definitive All Music Guide series the EAll Music Guide to SoulE offers nearly 8 500 entertaining and informative reviews that lead readers to the best recordings by more than 1 500 artists and help them find new music to explore. Informative biographies essays and music maps trace R&B's growth from its roots in blues and gospel through its flowering in Memphis and Motown to its many branches today. Complete discographies note bootlegs important out-of-print albums and import-only releases. Extremely valuable and exhaustive. a EThe Christian Science MonitorE


Using PhotoVoice as a tool for participatory action research, 10 Latino high school students, from three different cities of Iowa, Des Moines, Council Bluffs and Ottumwa, completed a project developed by Iowa State University Sociology Extension. The students explored the cultural meanings of food and agriculture within their families and in their communities. Participants were asked to reflect on and describe their pictures, incorporating their points of view on the different elements that integrated local food systems. We coded their final essays in NVIVO using the Community Capital Framework (CCF) to evaluate students' experiences and perceptions of food-value chains in their communities. The results showed cultural capital and bonding social capital to be the dominant themes, followed by health and nutrition (human capital) and natural capital (emphasis on home gardens and fresh vegetables). Financial capital, built and political capital indicators were mentioned incidentally to other capitals. Recommendations in this paper center on improving the use of PhotoVoice among Latino youth.


Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically struggle with achieving effective exploration and are extremely sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters. One reason is that most approaches use a noisy version of their operating policy to explore - thereby limiting the range of exploration. In this paper, we introduce Collaborative Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (CERL), a scalable framework that comprises a portfolio of policies that simultaneously explore and exploit diverse regions of the solution space. A collection of learners - typically proven algorithms like TD3 - optimize over varying time-horizons leading to this diverse portfolio. All learners contribute to and use a shared replay buffer to achieve greater sample efficiency. Computational resources are dynamically distributed to favor the best learners as a form of online algorithm selection. Neuroevolution binds this entire process to generate a single emergent learner that exceeds the capabilities of any individual learner. Experiments in a range of continuous control benchmarks demonstrate that the emergent learner significantly outperforms its composite learners while remaining overall more sample-efficient - notably solving the Mujoco Humanoid benchmark where all of its composite learners (TD3) fail entirely in isolation.


One of the largest consequences of projected climate change is an increased frequency of extreme weather events or conditions. They impact heavily on crops as they are out of the range of variability which crops are adapted to. As an example, air temperature is a driving variable involved in the simulation of plant development, and it is used for estimating both crop development and photosynthesis limitation at any given level of intercepted solar radiation. Although with different algorithms, these processes are basically included in all crop simulation models. The reduction of leaf area index or the possible death of the plant due to frost are usually not included in crop growth models, as well as the yield losses due to pre-flowering cold shocks inducing spikelet sterility, although these processes are driven by the same variable (temperature). Another example is ozone concentration in the air; it has traditionally been ignored in modelling because taken for constant in a given environment, hence assuming crops being adapted to its concentration. However, if ozone concentration changes, and given its toxicity, its impact on crop growth must be included in models used for scenario analysis. The impact of many extreme events or conditions is usually not included in the simulation models used for the analysis of crop response to climate change scenarios. This is a limitation which needs to be overcome because such conditions are key elements characterizing the weather scenarios as estimated by global circulation models. The .NET C# library AbioticDamage implements models to simulate events the plant is not physiologically prepared to deal with. Models for the simulation of the main damages affecting the production of herbaceous crops due to abiotic factors are implemented in an extensible library, to be linked to crop development and growth models. It implements six categories of damages: frost, cold-induced spikelet sterility, lodging, ozone, salinity, and heat-induced spikelet sterility: The modelling solutions are taken from peer reviewed sources. The component encapsulates the ontology of the variables and parameters defined which is also used to implement optional run-time data quality tests following the design-by-contract approach. The architecture allows for alternate models to simulate the impact of abiotic factors, and it permits extension by third parties. The component is provided together with the documentation of all the equations, the documentation of the code, a set of unit tests, where all the sub-models implemented were tested against the numerical results obtained with the same inputs in a different environment. In this paper we present two case studies where the component AbioticDamage was run linked to the component CropML (Crop Model Library). Gridded weather data with coverage of 27 member states of the European Union (EU-27) for the years 2002 - 2008 were used to simulate abiotic stresses: frost and spikelet sterility on winter wheat and rice grain yields, respectively. Results are discussed in terms of deviation of simulated yields from simulations run without accounting for the impact of stresses. Year 2002 is signalled for severe frost damages affecting France and other important winter wheat EU-27 producing countries. For rice, simulations indicate a roughly constant degree of spikelet sterility (about 5%) affecting the cultivations of Eastern Europe countries. For Mediterranean countries, summer temperature falls may cause severe sterility problems in some years (e.g., 2007). The case studies presented are illustrative of the type of output attainable for dedicated tools for simulation of abiotic damages in cultivated plant species, and their usefulness to interpret the impact of climatic alterations that have occurred in Europe in the last years.


Much of what is known about the molecular evolution of vertebrate vision comes from studies of mammals, birds and fish. Reptiles (especially snakes) have barely been sampled in previous studies despite their exceptional diversity of retinal photoreceptor complements. Here, we analyze opsin gene sequences and ocular media transmission for up to 69 species to investigate snake visual evolution. Most snakes express three visual opsin genes (rh1, sws1, and lws). These opsin genes (especially rh1 and sws1) have undergone much evolutionary change, including modifications of amino acid residues at sites of known importance for spectral tuning, with several tuning site combinations unknown elsewhere among vertebrates. These changes are particularly common among dipsadine and colubrine "higher" snakes. All three opsin genes are inferred to be under purifying selection, though dN/dS varies with respect to some lineages, ecologies, and retinal anatomy. Positive selection was inferred at multiple sites in all three opsins, these being concentrated in transmembrane domains and thus likely to have a substantial effect on spectral tuning and other aspects of opsin function. Snake lenses vary substantially in their spectral transmission. Snakes active at night and some of those active by day have very transmissive lenses, whereas some primarily diurnal species cut out shorter wavelengths (including UVA). In terms of retinal anatomy, lens transmission, visual pigment spectral tuning and opsin gene evolution the visual system of snakes is exceptionally diverse compared with all other extant tetrapod orders.


The proliferation in the use of referendums in processes of accession to and ratification of European Union treaties is part of a growing trend towards direct democracy in constitutional decision-making. This article addresses the challenge which this important and under-theorized feature of contemporary politics poses for constitutionalism, many of the empirical and indeed normative precepts of which are built upon the implicit presupposition of an exclusively representative model of government and law-making. An important question, made more pressing by this development, is whether constitutional referendums can be truly democratic as an instrument of republican government. The article seeks to explore how referendums on EU integration complicate the democratic issue. This occurs partly by the ways in which referendums cast light on the democratic defects of the EU constitution-making process itself and partly by how they raise the thorny issue of the demos by bringing back the people in direct and vernacular contributions to what is otherwise supposed to be a post-national constitution-building project.


In this paper, we propose a new constrained interpolation profile (CIP) method that is stable and accurate but requires less amount of computation compared to existing CIP‐based solvers. CIP is a high‐order fluid advection solver that can reproduce rich details of fluids. It has third‐order accuracy but its computation is performed over a compact stencil. These advantageous features of CIP are, however, diluted by the following two shortcomings: (1) CIP contains a defect in the utilization of the grid data, which makes the method suitable only for simulations with a tight CFL restriction; and (2) CIP does not guarantee unconditional stability. There have been several attempts to fix these problems in CIP, but they have been only partially successful. The solutions that fixed both problems ended up introducing other undesirable features, namely increased computation time and/or reduced accuracy. This paper proposes a novel modification of the original CIP method that fixes all of the above problems without increasing the computational load or reducing the accuracy. Both quantitative and visual experiments were performed to test the performance of the new CIP in comparison to existing fluid solvers. The results show that the proposed method brings significant improvements in both accuracy and speed.


This paper is a review and critique, in dialogue form, of Fairness versus Welfare, by Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell. It raises a number of concerns about the book. Kaplow and Shavell argue that all normative legal policymaking arguments should be grounded in a welfarist approach, that is, they should focus only on how different policies will affect human welfare. They produce a formal argument that any fairness theory (which they define as a theory which does not rely exclusively on welfare) will under some circumstances prefer a policy which makes everyone worse off, and hence we should reject all fairness theories. The book's argument is tautological and convincing only to those whose intuitions already favor welfare over fairness; indeed, Kaplow and Shavell's formal proof of the inconsistency between fairness and welfare can equally validly be used to argue that one should follow a fairness approach rather than the welfarist approach which Kaplow and Shavell prefer. Kaplow and Shavell argue that consistency requires that if one rejects fairness in favor of welfare in the examples they present, then one is committed to rejecting fairness in favor of welfare in all instances. However, there are other, well-known examples where utilitarian and welfarist approaches lead to objectionable results - Kaplow and Shavell's notion of consistency suggests that we should therefore reject welfarism in all instances. Kaplow and Shavell try to explain away intuitions favoring fairness as having an evolutionary origin - in most instances, fairness intuitions and norms advance efficiency. Kaplow and Shavell suggest that therefore when the fairness norms and efficiency conflict, efficiency should triumph. The paper argues that such evolutionary explanations are not always right, and even when they are, we may have other reasons to follow fairness norms anyway. Moreover, the link between fairness norms and efficiency suggests reasons why universal adoption of a welfare approach may reduce welfare.


The treatment of raw water by hybrid coagulation-ultrafiltration was investigated. Coagulation-ultrafiltration removed high molecular weight organics, preferentially humics. Adsorption of the trace compound cis-1,2-dichloroethene, present in raw water, on granular activated carbon was improved considerably as compounds competing for adsorption space had been removed. This was shown in isotherms and breakthrough curves. Aeration during filtration did not affect membrane performance as expressed in permeability. However, aeration in the submerged membrane container resulted in a release of organic matter from the flocs, which resulted in higher concentrations of dissolved organic carbon in the filtrate.


Nowadays, children of very young ages and teenagers use the Internet extensively for entertainment and educational purposes. The number of active young users in the Internet is increasing everyday as the Internet is more accessible at home, schools and even on a mobile basis through cellphones and tablets. The most popular search engines are designed for adults and they do not provide customize tools for young users. Given that young and adult users have different interests and search strategies, research aimed at understanding the activities that young users carried out on the Internet, the way the search for information, and the difficulties that they encounter with state-of-the-art search engines, are urgently needed. The first contribution of this thesis addresses these research aims by providing a characterization, on a large scale, of the search behavior of young users. The problems they face when they search for information on the web, the topics they searched and the online activities that motivate search were explored in detail and contrasted against the search behavior of adult users. The results presented in this thesis have important implications for the development of search tools for young users and for the design of educational literacy.

Two central problems were identified in the search process of young users: (1) difficulty representing the information needs with keyword queries, and (2) difficulty exploring the list of results. We found that focused queries are often required to access high quality content for young user with modern search engines. However, young users were found to submit queries that lack the specificity needed to retrieve content that is suitable for them, which leads to frustration during the search process. This observation motivates the second contribution of this thesis. We propose novel query recommendation methods to improve the chances of young users to find content that is suitable and on topic. Concretely, we present an effective biased random walk based on information gain metrics. This method is combined with topical and specialized features designed for the information domain of young users. We show that our query suggestions outperform by a larger margin not only related query recommendation methods but also the query suggestions offered by the search services available today. In respect to the second difficulty, it was found that young users have a strong click bias, in which results ranked at the bottom of the result list are rarely clicked. This behavior greatly hampers their navigational skills and exploration of results. It also reduces the chances of young users to find suitable information, since appropriate content for this audience is ranked, on average, at lower positions in the result list in comparison to the content aimed at the average web user. The third contribution of this thesis aims at helping young users to improve their chances to find appropriate content and to ease the exploration of results. For this purpose, we envisage an aggregated search system in which parents, teachers and young users add search services with content of interests for young audiences. We propose a test collection with a wide number of verticals with moderated content, a carefully selected set of search queries and vertical relevant judgments. We also provide novel methods of vertical selection in this information domain based on social media and based on the estimation of the amount of content that is appropriate for young users in each vertical. We show that our methods outperform state-of-the-art vertical selection methods in this information domain. We also show in a case study with children aged 9 to 10 years old that result pages derived from the collection proposed are preferred over the result pages provided by modern search engines. We provide evidence showing that the interaction and exploration of results are improved with result pages built using this collection, even if the users of this case study were unaware between the differences between the types of pages displayed to them. This thesis is concluded by providing concrete follow-up research directions and by suggesting other information domains that can potentially benefit from the methods proposed in the thesis.


Objective: Over the last 50 years, there has been a surge of interest by both the public and medical practitioners in therapies and disciplines that are not considered part of mainstream medical care. The title given to these is complementary and alternative medicine. Of all these branches, our interest is the increasing use of herbal medicines, traditional medicines (such as Chinese or Indian), homeopathy and "dietary supplements," and the influence they may have on our practice. Our objective was to examine the prevalence and reasons for use of complementary and alternative medicines, the current regulations, and proposed policy changes affecting the licensing of these products. In addition, we highlight some of the problems that have been experienced with herbal and traditional medicines. Methods: A prospective analysis of herbal and over the counter medicines used by elective plastic surgery patients. Results: Of 100 elective plastic surgery patients undergoing procedures at St Andrew's Centre for Burns and Plastic Surgery, 44% of patients were taking a dietary supplement, herbal, or homeopathic remedy. In none of the patients was this documented in the notes by either the surgeon or anesthetist. Conclusions: We recommend that clear documentation of the use of nonprescribed medicines becomes part of standard practice and, furthermore, that patients stop all such medications 2 weeks prior to surgery until the efficacy, interactions, and safety profiles are clearly established.


Respiration of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in streams contributes to the global CO2 efflux, yet this efflux has not been linked to specific DOM sources and their respective uptake rates. Further, removal of DOM inferred from longitudinal concentration gradients in river networks has been insufficient to account for observed CO2 outgassing. We hypothesize that understanding in‐stream dynamics of DOM, which is a heterogeneous mixture spanning a wide range of biological labilities, requires considering that DOM lability decreases during downstream transport. To test this hypothesis, we paired seasonal bioreactor measurements of DOM biological lability with whole‐stream tracer data from White Clay Creek, Pennsylvania, USA, and used a particle‐tracking model to predict in‐stream DOM dynamics. The model simulates continuous inputs of DOM and uses storage time in the stream bioactive regions plus kinetic parameters from bioreactors to assess differential uptake of DOM fractions (i.e., fractionation) in the stream. We compared predictions for in‐stream dynamics of bulk DOM concentration (quantified as dissolved organic carbon) and fluorescent DOM components. Our model‐data synthesis approach demonstrates that more labile fractions of DOM in stream water preferentially originate and are consumed within short travel distances, causing spiraling metrics to change with downstream distance. Our model can account for local sources of rapidly cycled labile DOM, providing a basis for improved interpretation of DOM dynamics in streams that can reconcile apparent discrepancies between respiratory outgassing of CO2 and longitudinal DOM concentration gradients within river networks.


Background: Histamine is a food-borne chemical hazard which causes scombroid poisoning. The efficiency of histamine recovery from fish is greatly influenced by selection of an appropriate extraction solvent. Hence, in this study the efficiency of different extraction solvents on recovery of histamine from fresh, frozen and canned fish was evaluated. Methods: Fresh, frozen and canned rainbow trout samples were homogenized in six different extraction solvents including 0.1 N hydrochloric acid, 5% trichloroacetic acid, 75% methanol, 75% ethanol, 75% methanol-0.4 N hydrochloric acid and 75% ethanol-0.4 N hydrochloric acid. Samples were evaluated for recovery of known quantities of histamine added to fish tissue prior to extraction. The percent values of the recoveries were compared using ANOVA (SPSS 16.0). Results: Findings of this experiment indicated that different extraction solvents provided different overall mean recoveries for histamine in fish tissue. Using a combination of acid and organic solvents provided a more efficient extraction solvent for histamine from fish tissue than acid or organic solvents alone. In addition, among the solvents used in this study, 75% ethanol-0.4 N HCl resulted in a more complete recovery of added histamine from fresh, frozen and canned fish tissue. Conclusion: In order to obtain a more accurate measure of histamine in fish tissue, 75% ethanol-0.4 N hydrochloric acid appears to be a good choice for extraction.


The automotive chassis serves as a frame work for supporting the body and different parts of the automobile. Also, it has to withstand the shock, twist, vibration and other stresses caused due to sudden braking, acceleration, shocking road condition, centrifugal force while cornering and forces induced by its components. The chassis acts as the backbone of a heavy vehicle which carries the maximum load for all designed operating conditions. This paper describes design and analysis of heavy vehicle chassis as the prime objective of any automobile industries in today's fast changing world considering weight reduction. In the present paper, the pertinent information of an existing heavy vehicle chassis of EICHER is considered for modeling and analysis for polymer composite materials namely, Carbon/Epoxy, and cross-sections like C, I and Box type subjected to the identical load as that of a steel chassis. The numerical results are validated with analytical calculation considering the stress distribution and deformation.


The modern Amazon trunk stream and tributaries contain substantial amounts of sediments that were formerly stored for 1–3 m.y. in floodplains. By reworking of floodplain deposits, this sediment is being incorporated into Amazonian streams. We conclude this from using the ratio of in situ−produced cosmogenic 26 Al to 10 Be in detrital sediment from rivers draining the sediment-producing Andean, Guyana, and Brazilian shield areas, as well as the largest Amazonian lowland rivers. Samples from the modern Amazon River yield 26 Al/ 10 Be ratios between ∼3.8 and 5.5, and thus represent mixing between a non-buried sediment end member and a formerly buried sediment end member. The non-buried end member is sourced in the Andes with a ratio of ∼6.5, reflecting recent erosion of hillslopes exposed to cosmic rays, and the buried end member is potentially represented by deeply stored floodplain sediment as old as Miocene age, with a ratio of ∼3, that was partially shielded from cosmic rays. This simple picture of binary mixing is complicated by grain-size effects. Coarser-grained sediment from non-Andean settings (lowlands, cratonic shields) contains slightly more formerly buried material, whereas finer-grained lowland sediment mostly records non-buried 26 Al/ 10 Be ratios and nuclide concentrations that are indicative of an Andean source. Our assessment shows an incorporation of formerly buried, old sediment of central Amazonian floodplains to the fresh, Andean-derived sediment mainly carried in the Amazon trunk stream. We interpret our results to mean that the Amazon regularly avulses into these old deposits that crop out in more distal vicinities to the main river and temporarily leaves its current Holocene channel.


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In the last five years, social media has become a dominant force on the Internet. Social networking websites, the most popular of which is Facebook, accounted for 20 percent of all time spent on the Internet in 2010. However, it is not clear that so far this extraordinary growth has created an antitrust issue. There are two reasons for this. First, consumers do not pay for using these services on most social networking sites. Second, firms are not spending large amounts of money trying to access consumers using these new channels. This is despite the fact that there are obvious marketing applications for a form of media that allows companies to ob-serve potential consumers' social interactions. The reason that firms have not spent much money is not because they think that social media is not important. Instead, it is because most firms' commercial strategies for social media have emphasized the success of "earned reach," a strategy by which a brand develops its pool of subscribers organically and also aims to expand that pool by seeing existing subscribers share links with their social networks. Recent academic research, however, has called into question this non-commercial strategy. Eytan Bakshy et al. emphasize that the kind of organic sharing that is presupposed by a noncommercial strategy is far more uncommon than previously supposed, and that only rarely are commercial messages reliably conveyed via social networks. A recent study shows that to attain the goal of virality, an advertiser may be forced to forfeit its message's commercial usefulness. Similarly, another study shows that when firms try to establish an organic social media presence, they are more often successful at engaging their own employees rather than their client base. Consequently, advertisers may be required to communicate their commercial message on social networks through the medium of paid advertising. A new type of advertising, called "social advertising," has recently appeared on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. "A social ad is an online ad that 'incorporates user interactions that the consumer has agreed to display and be shared. The resulting ad displays these interactions along with the user's persona (picture and/or name) within the ad content.'" The development of the social ad represents a profound technological advancement for advertisers. Advertisers now have the ability to harness the force of an individual's social network to target advertising and attract their audience. Other work has shown that such "social advertising" can double the effectiveness of an advertiser's ad. This increase in efficacy bears significance because, in recent years, advertisers have often dismissed social networking websites as simply sites hosting "paid media" — in other words, paid advertising. The popular and marketing press have contributed to this with headlines like "Online Social Networks and Advertising Don't Mix" and "Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful." The results of one study suggest, however, that "as social advertising develops this will change swiftly." Specifically, social networks will have the ability to use their access to unique social network data to enlarge their share of advertising dollars. This Article asks whether a rapid expansion of social advertising will have potential antitrust implications. Part I of this Article presents definitions of social network websites and of the relevant market definition for advertising on social networking websites. Part II discusses network effects in social media advertising. Finally, Part III addresses the issue of antitrust and privacy in social networks.


Both the State of Oregon and its largest city, Portland, believe environmental stewardship is a top priority. Through fiscal and other economic instruments, they have undertaken a cooperative effort to environmentally redevelop the state. This article examines the environmental initiatives implemented by Oregon and Portland and considers their impact. In determining whether these efforts are effective, a number of measures are considered. The cost of the initiatives is weighed against environmental improvements, economic impacts and equity considerations. The article first describes financial and other incentives offered by Portland and Oregon to it residents in exchange for "green" behavior. Because fiscal instruments have been implemented at different levels of government, the article discusses how issues that are under shared jurisdiction have been addressed. Based on available studies and other information, the article then considers whether or not these incentives have been successful and to what extent. Most studies do not address how fiscal instruments designed for environmental objectives impact different segments of society. This article considers issues of equity in analyzing the impact of both environmental degradation and its remediation through fiscal instruments. Finally, the analysis concludes with several observations regarding existing and future use of economic instruments for environmental reform.


Dynamic deployment is an important feature of an aspectoriented language design that has many applications, e.g. in runtime monitoring, runtime adaptation to fix bugs or add features to long running applications, runtime update of dynamic policy changes, etc. Many recently proposed language designs support these use cases. In previous work, researchers have demonstrated that the ability to support unanticipated deployment enables simpler and often more efficient implementations. These works have addressed an important subset of aspect-oriented features namely those that can be represented as the pointcut-advice model. In this work, we describe the design, formal semantics, and implementation of our strategy for efficiently supporting dynamic deployment of inter-type declarations, which is another important aspect-oriented feature. Additional contributions of this work are: a detailed real world case study that demonstrates the need for supporting dynamic deployment of intertype declaration for online update of long running applications, and a prototype based on the Jikes Research Virtual Machine that supports these features. We evaluate our prototype via a rigorous performance analysis, which shows that flexible, dynamic deployment of inter-type declarations can be efficiently supported in a Java virtual machine.


The rate at which articles gets published grows exponentially and the possibility to access texts in machine-readable formats is also increasing. The need of an automated system to gather relevant information from text, text mining, is thus growing. The goal of this thesis is to find a biologically relevant gene network for atherosclerosis, themain cause of cardiovascular disease, by inspecting gene cooccurrences in abstracts from PubMed. In addition to this gene nets for yeast was generated to evaluate the validity of using text mining as a method. The nets found were validated in many ways, they were for example found to have the well known power law link distribution. They were also compared to other gene nets generated by other, often microbiological, methods from different sources. In addition to classic measurements of similarity like overlap, precision, recall and f-score a new way to measure similarity between nets are proposed and used. The method uses an urn approximation and measures the distance from comparing two unrelated nets in standard deviations. The validity of this approximation is supported both analytically and with simulations for both Erd¨os-R´enyi nets and nets having a power law link distribution. The new method explains that very poor overlap, precision, recall and f-score can still be very far from random and also how much overlap one could expect at random. The cutoff was also investigated. Results are typically in the order of only 1% overlap but with the remarkable distance of 100 standard deviations from what one could have expected at random. Of particular interest is that one can only expect an overlap of 2 edges with a variance of 2 when comparing two trees with the same set of nodes. The use of a cutoff at one for cooccurrence graphs is discussed and motivated by for example the observation that this eliminates about 60-70% of the false positives but only 20-30% of the overlapping edges. This thesis shows that text mining of PubMed can be used to generate a biologically relevant gene subnet of the human gene net. A reasonable extension of this work is to combine the nets with gene expression data to find a more reliable gene net.


In "World War One: A Short History", Norman Stone provides a terse, opinionated and wry short history of the First World War. In 1914 a new kind of war, and a new kind of world, came about. Fourteen million combatants died, a further twenty million were wounded, four empires were destroyed and even the victors' empires were fatally damaged. The First World War marked a revolution in the technology of slaughter as trench warfare, artillery barrages, tanks and chemical warfare made their mark on the battlefield for the first time. The sheer complexity and scale of the war have encouraged historians to write books on a similar scale. But in only 140 pages, Norman Stone distils a lifetime of teaching, arguing and thinking to reframe the overwhelming disaster whose aftershocks shaped the rest of the twentieth century. "Bold, provocative and witty ...one of the outstanding historians of our age". ("Spectator"). "Do we need another history of the First World War? The answer in the case of Norman Stone's short book is, yes - because of its opinionated freshness and the unusual, sharp facts that fly about like shrapnel". ("Literary Review"). "Exhilarating ...scintillating ...a heady cocktail". ("Observer"). "Entertaining and insightful ...one of the handful of living historians who can write with style and wit". (Tibor Fischer, "Sunday Telegraph", Books of the Year). Norman Stone is one of Britain's most celebrated historians. He is the author of "The Eastern Front, 1914-1917", "Hitler: An Introduction", "Europe Transformed" and "The Atlantic and its Enemies". He has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bilkent, where he is now Director of the Turkish-Russian Centre.


ABSTRACT Six different isogenic Δcya Δcrp derivatives of a strain of Salmonella choleraesuis var. kunzendorf-χ3246 virulent for pigs were constructed by transposon-mediated deletion mutagenesis. These strains were evaluated for virulence and ability to elicit a protective immune response in young weaned pigs after oral administration and were compared to a commercially available vaccine which lacks the 50-kb virulence plasmid (vpl−). These derivatives were Δcya Δcrp vpl+,Δcya Δcrp vpl−, Δcya Δ(crp-cdt) vpl+, Δcya Δ(crp-cdt) vpl−, Δcya Δcrp pmi-3834 vpl+, and Δcya Δ(crp-cdt) pmi-3834. In experiments to evaluate safety, no significant adverse effects of any of the vaccine constructs were observed, except that two of the strains which carried the virulence plasmid (vpl+) caused a small, short-term elevation in maximum temperature compared to pretreatment temperature values. Orally immunized animals, except for those vaccinated with theΔcya Δcrp pmi-3834 vpl+ strain or SC-54, developed significant serum antibody responses 21 days postvaccination as measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. No cell-mediated immune responses to heat-killed S. choleraesuis were noted at the same time point as measured with heat-killed bacteria as antigen in a lymphocyte proliferation assay. In an oral challenge exposure model with a highly virulent heterologous strain of S. choleraesuis, the Δcya Δcrp strains with deletions in pmi were not protective. As measured by morbidity scores, the responses to challenge of the pigs vaccinated with the other four Δcya Δcrpderivatives were significantly better than those of the nonvaccinated, challenged group. With the exception of temperature elevation and slight differences in diarrhea scores postchallenge, none of these strains differed significantly from each other in the other clinical parameters analyzed. While the commercial vaccine was protective by most of the parameters measured, it was not fully protective against challenge with virulent S. choleraesuisas judged by diarrhea scores and temperature elevation. Collectively, these data demonstrate that Δcya Δcrpderivatives, with or without the virulence plasmid but not with deletions in the pmi gene, are candidates for vaccines for protection against salmonellosis in pigs.


In this Article, I endeavor to show that because Americans value homeownership so much — in fact, more than we should — we have placed ourselves in an untenable position as a country and now find ourselves in the midst of a well-documented housing crisis. In addition, we have used the primacy of homeownership as an excuse not to fulfill our country's commitment to provide housing assistance to those persons who need it most. We have done this in part by undervaluing quality, affordable rental property (and quality renters) just as we have overvalued homeownership (and homeowners). Some have used the word "myth" in talking about the American view of homeownership; however, the word I prefer is "illusion," which I intend to be less pejorative while still acknowledging that homeownership does not always deliver the benefits it promises, particularly for lower income homeowners. This Article is not particularly concerned with the question of who is to blame for the current housing crisis, because I believe fault in this context is too complicated to be laid at the feet of just one party or another. Part II of this Article examines the median American household, mortgage, and house, concluding that many Americans cannot afford the homes they have purchased. Next, Part III addresses the question of why our country overvalues homeownership to such an extent that it now finds itself in this position. In doing so, Part III examines the many benefits that homeownership supposedly provides to both individuals and society. Part IV contrasts society's customary treatment of homeownership as a virtue with its stigmatization of renters, concluding that the latter is unfounded. Part IV also explores how the very interests that have promoted homeownership have also benefited most from its growth. Part V considers several factors that contributed to the real estate boom that culminated in the mid-2000s, including homeowners' treatment of mortgage debt as wealth, financing options such as no-down-payment and interest-only loans, increased utilization of home equity loans, and certain features of subprime lending. Part VI concludes by suggesting that universal homeownership does not provide the benefits Americans have come to expect from it and proposing four steps policymakers should follow in creating healthier, more sustainable housing policy.