Background
Cape Verde has produced migrants over the centuries. Its history and geography have compelled males and females to leave their homeland in search of resources to invest in their family s survival and development.
Literature on parental investment has evidenced the association between investment in embodied capital during infancy and early childhood and its outcomes at later stages. However, these studies seldom address migrant population.
Aim
This study aims to gain a better understanding of the relationship in a migratory context between parental investment in infancy and its outcomes in prepuberty embodied capital, among Cape Verdean children living in Cova da Moura, a deprived neighbourhood in Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Portugal.
Methods
A mixed method s approach combining quantitative with qualitative studies - is used. The prepubertal capital of the 221 schoolchildren attending the basic school located in Cova da Moura is assessed through Anthropometry and educational records analysis. The parental investment in infancy of 75 is analysed through interviews with parents and combined documentation (e.g. health booklets, reports, legislation).
Results
The key findings are:
1)Children are born and raised between 1997 and 2002, a time characterized by a favourable socioeconomic development in Portugal in general and Cova da Moura in particular.
2)In spite of living in a so called deprived neighbourhood , the school children linear growth falls into the healthy range of the III NHANES growth reference, and it is slightly better than the linear growth of other groups of children measured in Portugal in late 1980s and early 2000. School-oriented cognitive development is not adequate, however. A third of the students have not a regular school performance.
3)Parental investment in infancy is significantly associated to prepubertal physical growth and school-oriented cognitive development. The size effect is, however, small.


Since the early 1990s the world has seen an explosion of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) between North and South. Mark Manger argues that current North-South PTAs are not primarily about liberalizing exports as is usually assumed. Rather, they are driven by the needs of foreign direct investment. The interests of multinational firms in investing in developing countries converge with the desires of the host countries to attract foreign capital. Yet to be politically feasible in the developed country, North-South PTAs must discriminate against third countries. PTAs thus create a competitive dynamic between countries, as excluded firms lobby their governments to restore access to important investment locations, leading to yet more preferential agreements. Based on extensive research in Europe, Japan, and the Americas and interviews with decision-makers in governments and the private sector, this book offers a new perspective on the roles of the state and corporations in international trade.


This study, using statistical data published by the Turkish Electricity
 Transmission Company, analyzes key parameters such as installed capacity and
 energy demand growth rates, investment plans and emission rates, taking into
 consideration the expected increase in use through the year 2023. The results
 of the analyses were compared to relevant data from around the world. The
 weight of domestic - and especially renewable - resources in investment plans
 for the next 10 years was discussed. Recommendations for an investment plan
 to support sustainable development in Turkey are listed. Consequently, the
 lack of investment in domestic and renewable energy projects decreases the
 competitive power of Turkey vis-a-vis Organisation for Economic Co-Operation
 and Development countries in terms of many parameters. For a sustainable
 development, the country must make significant changes in its
 foreign-dependent energy production policies. Any future policies must
 encourage supplying local resources to meet the continuously increasing
 demand. Qualifications for incentive mechanisms applied to investments in
 renewable energy should be developed. The impact of the private sector on the
 installation of new plants must also be increased by quickly completing the
 privatization process.


Quantum mechanics may loose its weirdness if systematically geometric algebra methods would be used more. Crucial aspect is to find laws of quantum mechanics be present in macroworld in the form of description of motions rather than objects. To help to reach this goal we suggest to use double rotation as one of the basic invariants in quantum mechanics. We suggest to consider geometric algebra as algebra of motion and double rotation specifically.


This paper analyses the level of relative specialisation in terms of gross fixed capital formation in EU regions for the period between 1985 and 1994. Controlling for heteroscedasticity and potential endogeneity problems, we get consistent econometric results. Larger market and regional sizes diminish relative investment specialisation while a higher unemployment rate, population density, the fact of being a central region, the distance to the economic centre, and economic liberalisation increase its level. The variation of the specialisation level of one region over time, however, cannot be explained econometrically, it thus might underlie random disturbances.


The pelagic zone of large, deep freshwater lakes features pronounced horizontal and vertical gradients of physicochemical parameters, which in turn might allow for a nonuniform occurrence of specifically adapted bacterial taxa. We, therefore, studied the spatial distribution patterns of different heterotrophic bacteria, picocyanobacteria, and the dominant primary producer, the filamentous cyanobacterium Planktothrix rubescens, in a large, canyon‐shaped, prealpine lake (Lake Zurich, Switzerland), in six vertical profiles along a 21.7‐km longitudinal transect. Highest total densities and proportions of cells with high nucleic acid content were in the warm epilimnion and the hypoxic zone of the hypolimnion. P. rubescens formed a dense layer in the metalimnion throughout the lake, whereas picocyanobacteria populated the water layers above. The epilimnion was mainly inhabited by ultramicrobacteria related to the LD12‐lineage of Alphaproteobacteria and to Actinobacteria; the latter group preferred the shallow regions. Cytophaga‐Flavobacteria, in particular a population related to Fluviicola sp. were more frequent in and below the layer of maximal P. rubescens abundances. Betaproteobacteria, on the other hand, were highly abundant in the epi‐ and hypolimnion, but not in the P. rubescens layer. Four betaproteobacterial subpopulations with contrasting longitudinal and/or vertical habitat preferences were distinguished: putatively methylotrophic bacteria of the LD28 lineage (beta IV) preferentially inhabited the hypolimnion, Polynucleobacter acidiphobus was found throughout the epilimnion, Limnohabitans (R‐BT065) more in the shallow regions of the lake, and Polynucleobacter necessarius ssp. asymbioticus only in hypoxic waters. Our results stress the potential importance of spatial niche differentiation in freshwater bacterioplankton.


International comparative research has found that strike incidence is higher where two or more unions bargain with an employer ("multi-unionism"), as is common in most European countries, than where only one union does, all else equal. Two proposed explanations for this relationship, both invoking inter-union rivalry as the main dynamic, are that under multi-unionism, unions (a) make propagandistic use of strikes to attract members, or (b) compete with each other by bidding up bargaining demands. To date, the evidence bearing on these hypotheses has been equivocal because, the author argues, researchers have focused on activity at the national level rather than at the lower levels that are more commonly the nexus for strike formation. The author performs empirical tests using industry-sector-level data for seven European countries for the years 1990–2006, and finds evidence clearly favoring the competitive bargaining hypothesis over the propaganda hypothesis.


Here we show by western blotting that transcriptionally active isoforms of p63 (p63α and p63γ) induce the phosphorylation of human 2N4R tau at the tau-1/AT8 epitope in HEK293a cells; a phospho-epitope increased in Alzheimer's disease. Confocal microscopy shows that tau and p63α are spatially separated intracellularly. Tau was found in the cytoskeletal compartment, whilst p63α was located in the nucleus, indicating that the effects of p63 on tau phosphorylation are indirectly mediated. Tau phosphorylation occurred independently of the known tau kinases, protein kinase C delta (PKCδ), c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK), extracellular-signal-regulated kinase (ERK), p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (p38), glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3), v-akt murine thymoma viral oncogene homolog (AKT) and cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) and the tau protein phosphatases (PP), PP1 and PP2A-Aα/β. Considering that p63 and tau are both associated with developmental processes, these findings have ramifications for neuronal development and synaptic plasticity and also neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and other tauopathies.


Five species of freshwater fishes (Cirrhinus mrigala, Catla catla, Puntius sophore, Glossogobius giuris and Labeo rohita) were affected by the epizootic ulcerative syndrome (EUS) in the Bangladesh Agricultural University campus. A monthly sampling was carried out from October 1997 to March 1998. Clinically and histologically C. mrigala was severely affected by EUS, followed by C. catla, P. sophore and G. giuris. L. rohita was the least affected species. Large, deep and whitish ulcers were recorded in the lateral region (near the dorsal fin) and caudal region where parts of fins, scales and muscle were lost in most of the EUS affected fish. Massive necrosis of the epithelium and muscle tissue was observed in the affected tissue surrounding the granuloma. The granuloma due to fungal infection consisted of mononuclear epithelloid cells and fibrillar structures. Fungal granulomas were also found in the liver of C. mrigala and C. calla and in the kidney of C. mrigala only. However, the liver and kidney of other species had necrotic hepatocytes, renal tubules and glomeruli associated with many inflammatory cells. Water temperature, alkalinity and hardness were reduced in the months of December, January and February in comparison with other months. Clinically and histologically, in the colder months (December, January and February), all fish specimens were more affected by EUS in comparison with other months. The clinical signs, infection mode and histopathology of the disease observed in the present study resemble mycotic granulomatosis. Thus, the consistent involvement of fungus and its similarity in pathology to EUS in other countries, indicate that fungus is one of the pathological agents of EUS.


One of the major problems in texture analysis is segmenting images into different regions based on textures. In this paper, we present a new approach of texture segmentation, which is based on both Kohonen maps and mathematical morphology, using three different texture features, namely, Haralick features based on gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), fractal features based on fractal dimension using the differential box counting method, and wavelet features based on wavelet transform. These features are used to train the Kohonen Network, which will be represented by the underlying probability density function (PDF). The segmentation of this map's representation is made by morphological watershed transformation. In the final part of our algorithm, this will help on the segmentation of the textural image, by assigning each pixel to a modal region extracted from the map. Our work covers the results obtained by the three extraction methods taking into consideration the execution time and the error rate.


A new method is presented for obtaining the velocity potential of the flow about a body of revolution moving uniformly in the direction of its axis of symmetry in a fluid otherwise at rest. This method is based essentially on the fact that the form of the differential equation for the velocity potential is invariant with regard to conformal transformation of the meridian plane. By means of the conformal transformation of the meridian profile into a circle a system of orthogonal curvilinear coordinates is obtained, the main feature of which is that one of the coordinate lines is the meridian profile itself. The use of this type of coordinate system yields a simple expression of the boundary condition at the surface of the solid and leads to a rational process of iteration for the solution of the differential equation for the velocity potential. It is shown that the velocity potential for an arbitrary body of revolution may be expressed in terms of universal functions which, although not normal, are obtainable by means of simple quadratures. The general results are applied to a body of revolution obtained by revolving a symmetrical Joukowski profile about its axis of symmetry. A numerical example further serves to illustrate the theory.


Yolanda Garcia is taking a trip to the Dominican Republic to revisit the country where she was born, and which her family was forced to flee for New York when she was a child. Previously privileged and wealthy, the family finds it hard to adjust to immigrant life in the Bronx, particularly their tough old-world father, Papi. As they try immerse themselves in the American way of life, Yolanda and her three sisters begin to rebel against Papi's traditions and values, each in their own way. But, however the girls may iron the curls from their hair and blend their Hispanic accents to fit in, they will always see the world through Dominican eyes. Now Yolanda needs to return one more time, to recover forgotten memories and remember that part of her she lost.


fl-Lactam antibiotics and the crude enzyme were mixed in deuterium oxide and placed in a nuclear magnetic resonance tube. The change of the nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum during the enzymatic reaction was then analyzed to deter- mine 8i-lactamase activity. By using fl-lactam antibiotics such as penicillins, cephalosporins, and cephamycins as substrates, a comparison of the fl-lactamase activities was made between the nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometric assay and the iodometric assay. There was a close correlation between these two methods.


This article is interested in the formation of war legacies and how they interact with social identities. It suggests a bottom-up approach towards examining the societal processes in which individuals create a legacy of war. It posits that through their narratives of conflict, by remembering what happened to them as a group, they mould the meaning and boundaries of how the group will be membered post-conflict. The validity of the theorised link between war memory and group membership is then tested in the case of Syria. In 200 interviews, Syrians provided their narratives of the conflict and their vision of a future Syrian state and society. The findings show that most respondents' narratives follow a civic rationale, forming a society around civil rights and political ideas rather than around ethnic/sectarian divides. With this, the article contributes a new route for international relations scholars to understand the formation of war legacies through individuals' narratives of conflict and explains their effects on ties of group belonging while also offering a glimpse into the Syrian 'we' amid the ongoing war in Syria.


A fundamental step in decision analysis is the elicitation of the decision maker's information about the uncertainties of the decision situation in the form of a joint probability distribution. This paper presents a method based on the maximum entropy principle to obtain a joint probability distribution using lower order joint probability assessments. The approach reduces the number of assessments significantly and also reduces the number of conditioning variables in these assessments. We discuss the order of the approximation provided by the maximum entropy distribution with each lower order assessment using a Monte Carlo simulation and discuss the implications of using the maximum entropy distribution in Bayesian inference. We present an application to a practical decision situation faced by a semiconductor testing company in the Silicon Valley.


Requirements of emerging applications together with rapid changes in networking technology towards gigabit speeds require new adequate transport systems. Integrated designs of transport services, protocol architecture, and implementation platforms are needed for the requirements of forthcoming applications in high-speed network environments. The transport subsystem PATROCLOS (Parallel Transport subsystem for cell based high speed networks) is designed with special emphasis on a high degree of inherent parallelism to allow efficient implementations on multiprocessor architectures combined with specialised hardware for very time critical functions. The paper presents transport system design guidelines based on experiences gained with parallel implementations of transport and network layer protocols on transputer networks, an implementation architecture for PATROCLOS based on transputer networks and results of a performance evaluation, which indicate promising throughput values.<<ETX>>


Apparent competition is a form of indirect interaction among species that can potentially structure biological communities. In insect communities, parasitoid-mediated apparent competition has been proposed as a particularly important structuring force. We argue that short-term apparent competition may be less important in structuring insect communities in tropical regions, compared with temperate regions. This prediction arises because, compared with temperate insects, tropical insects that share natural enemies are more likely to be isolated in both space and time.


The Kalman Filter is a robust tool often employed as a plant observer in control systems. However, in the general case the high computational cost, especially for large system models or fast sample rates, makes it an impractical choice for typical low-power microcontrollers. Industry trends towards tighter integration and subsystem consolidation point to the use of powerful high-end SoCs, but this complicates the ability for a controls engineer to verify correct behavior of the system under all conditions, which is important in safety-critical systems. Dedicated FPGA hardware can provide computational speedup, in addition to firmer design partitioning in mixed-criticality systems and fully deterministic timing, which helps ensure a control system behaves as close as possible to offline simulations. We introduce and compare two variants of a software-configurable FPGA-based implementation of a Kalman Filter. The first is an implementation of an Extended Kalman Filter, while the second is a novel approach -- the Piecewise-Affine Kalman Filter - which may offer significant advantages for certain types of applications. The state estimate update time and resource requirements are analyzed for plant models up to 28 states. For large models, the designs provide a speedup of 7-12x compared to reference ARM9020T software implementations. An application-agnostic performance analysis demonstrates how the Piecewise-Affine Kalman Filter reduces the software workload and the communication overhead compared to the standard mixed hardware-software Extended Kalman Filter approach.


Abstract: To define the clinical and immunologic pattern of expression of Sjögren syndrome (SS) associated with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, we conducted a multicenter study aiming to collect a large number of patients with SS and HCV infection. Inclusion criteria were the fulfillment of at least 4 of the classification criteria for SS proposed by the European Community Study Group and repeated positive HCV serology, confirmed by recombinant immunoblot assay and/or detection of serum HCV-RNA by polymerase chain reaction. One hundred thirty-seven patients were included (104 female and 33 male; mean age, 65 yr). Seventy-nine (58%) patients presented a systemic process with diverse extraglandular manifestations, with articular involvement (44%), vasculitis (20%), and neuropathy (16%) being the most frequent features observed. The main immunologic features were antinuclear antibodies (65%), hypocomplementemia (51%), and cryoglobulinemia (50%). Cryoglobulins were associated with a higher frequency of cutaneous vasculitis, rheumatoid factor, and hypocomplementemia. Thirty-two (23%) patients had positive anti-Ro/SS-A and/or anti-La/SS-B antibodies; these patients were predominantly women and had a higher prevalence of some extraglandular features and a lower frequency of liver involvement. Nineteen (14%) patients developed neoplasia, with hematologic neoplasia (8 cases) and hepatocellular carcinoma (6 cases) being the most frequent types. Eighty-five percent of SS-HCV patients also fulfilled the recently proposed 2002 classification criteria for SS. In conclusion, HCV-associated SS is indistinguishable in most cases from the primary form using the most recent set of classification criteria. Chronic HCV infection should be considered an exclusion criterion for the classification of primary SS, not because it mimics primary SS, but because the virus may be implicated in the development of SS in a specific subset of patients. We propose the term "SS secondary to HCV" when these patients fulfill the 2002 classification criteria for SS. Abbreviations: ALT = alanine transaminase, ANA = antinuclear antibodies, AST = aspartate transaminase, GGT = g-glutamyltranspeptidase, HCV = hepatitis C virus, RF = rheumatoid factor, SS = Sjögren syndrome.


Parasitic worms (helminths) can cause infections in humans and are among the most common human infections in many
parts of the world, especially in warm climates like South Africa. They can affect people of all ages, but disadvantaged
children in South Africa carry a large burden of these infections. Children who live in densely populated and underserviced urban informal settlements, as well as some rural areas are especially affected.


A flexible method to calibrate the retardation amplitude of a photoelastic modulator (PEM) with surface reflection is proposed. A laser beam is split by a polarizing beam splitter to generate a calibration light beam. The calibration beam firstly passes through a PEM and then is reflected by the rear surface of the PEM. The reflected light beam is analysed by the polarizing beam splitter and detected by a photodetector. The second harmonic component of the detected signal is extracted and used to calibrate the retardation amplitude at 2.568000 radians. Because the second Bessel function J(2)(5.136) of the detected signal is zero, the calibration process is immune to the light intensity fluctuation which may be caused by laser source or ambient light. A PEM has been successfully calibrated with an uncertainty of 0.006280 radians (0.0001 of the wavelength,lambda) by the proposed method. The calibration light passes through the PEM twice, so the calibration accuracy is two times higher than the typical second Bessel function zero method. It is a big advantage that this calibration method is independent of the light intensity fluctuation.


Since the U.N.'s founding, its need for immunity from the jurisdiction of member states courts has been understood as necessary to achieve its purposes. Immunities, however, conflict with an individual's right to a remedy and the law's ordinary principles of responsibility for causing harm. This inherent conflict at the center of the immunity doctrine has evolved into a very public rift in the Haiti Cholera, Kosovo Lead Poisoning, and Mothers of Srebrenica cases against the U.N.In these three cases alleging mass torts by the U.N., the independence of the organization is perceived by some to have trumped the dignity of affected individuals. Due to a combination of factors, including the U.N.'s broad immunities, the limited jurisdiction rationae personae of courts over international organizations (IOs), and the nascent state of the U.N.'s own internal review mechanisms, not to mention continuing debate over whether human rights obligations bind the U.N. directly under international law, these cases of human tragedy have resulted in neither compensation by the U.N. to the victims nor access to domestic courts.This article argues that the threshold problem with the position that the U.N. is absolutely immune is that it severs ordinary legal principles: an organization is responsible for the harm it causes by its negligence. Absolute immunity also stands in contrast to the U.N.'s programmatic promotion of the Rule of Law and to the standards expected of member states. While partial immunity is justified under certain circumstances, the categorical assertion of absolute U.N. immunity does not survive an assessment of accountability, distributive justice, or economics. U.N. Member States should join the conversation about what immunities mean to the U.N. today given its contemporary mandate and impact on individuals. If they do not, there may be consequences for the U.N. that are disadvantageous for its future work.


Approaches for estimating liquid flux in the shallow (0–2 m) vadose zone are hindered by the high degree of spatial and temporal variability present near the land surface. It is hypothesized that high‐frequency variations in flux will be damped with depth. This study was conducted to estimate deep liquid flux using the Darcian approach at a waste disposal site in south‐central Idaho that is underlain by a complex sequence of unsaturated basalt flows intercalated with thin sedimentary layers. Flux is estimated by combining in situ water potential measurements from sedimentary interbeds located at depths of 34 and 73 m below land surface (bls) with laboratory estimates for the unsaturated hydraulic conductivity. Tensiometer data at seven locations indicated nearly constant conditions for 30 mo, while nine of the other 10 sites showed small gradual trends. Assumption of a unit hydraulic gradient led to flux estimates ranging from 0.2 to 10000 cm yr−1 Estimates in the 34‐m interbed ranged across four orders of magnitude while flux estimates for the 73‐m interbed ranged three orders of magnitude. While the tensiometer data appear to reflect in situ conditions and are a sensitive indicator of hydrologic conditions in the deep vadose zone, the laboratory‐developed hydraulic properties introduce a high degree of uncertainty, potentially affecting predictions by orders of magnitude. There is a need to develop techniques for assessing flux rates for the range of applicable field conditions to improve the confidence in deep flux estimates.


[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] On Tuesday, March 28, 1961, the overcast clouds above Jackson, Mississippi, parted just around ten o'clock in the morning. Shortly after, drummers took to their instruments to send off the color guard at the beginning of the parade. Behind them, stretching for six miles, were three thousand men dressed as Confederate soldiers, collectively known as the "Mississippi Greys." Cheers rang out when the Jackson Central High School Junior ROTC unfurled the largest Confederate battle flag in the world, owned by the University of Mississippi. After the two-hour parade, Governor Ross Barnett, clad as a Confederate officer, performed as his 1861 counterpart in a dramatized reenactment of Mississippi's secession convention. As five thousand Mississippians watched in the halls of the Old Capitol, Mississippi symbolically left the Union once again. Mississippi's official commemoration of the centennial of the Civil War had begun. (1) The United States had been preparing for the Civil War centennial since 1957, when Congress authorized a commission, appropriately titled the Civil War Centennial Commission (CWCC) to plan events and steer state and local organizations towards commemorating the war and especially the men involved. Mississippi quickly organized a state commission to plan and encourage events within the state, due to its importance as the home state of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and as the site of one of the most important Confederate defeats, Vicksburg. From the outset, Mississippi's commission had a clear goal, evinced by its name. The Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States (MCWBS) was unapologetically pro-Confederate, though willing to acknowledge, however begrudgingly, the Union victory. But the commissioners did not wish to fight the war again; rather, the commissioners urged Mississippians to "honor dedication and devotion, courage and honor, integrity and faith" of the men who fought in the previous century. The MCWBS focused on the fighting generation's character as necessary lessons for children and adults alike. The Civil War centennial was more than just recognition of a central event in American history. It was more than simple nostalgia for an imagined Old South. The numerous parades, the pageants and balls, and the multitude of reenactments and commemorations around the state collectively reinforced ideas of a moral fiber that would save the South from a host of "-isms": liberalism, communism, socialism, pacifism, and atheism. The story of the Civil War centennial commemoration has been a subject of recent inquiry by historians Robert J. Cook and David Blight. Cook studied the commemoration from a national standpoint in light of the Cold War; Blight examined the works of four prominent historians of the day. Jon Wiener analyzed the centennial events in the context of the Civil Rights Movement in addition to the Cold War. The national scope of these works causes them to miss a dominant theme from the Centennial that is best seen at the state and local level, particularly in Mississippi. The events from 1961 to 1963 in the Magnolia State shed light on how one generation of men, born before 1920, and who benefited from the rabid white supremacist rhetoric and policies of men like Governor James K. Vardaman, used the anniversary to impart similar anti-Civil Rights (and, by their own extension, anti-communist) values onto the next generation of Mississippians. (2) The Civil War Centennial did not create a new spirit of resistance for southerners, but it arrived at a critical moment. As returning veterans, often young, arrived home from Europe and the Pacific, they began making inroads in their communities as business leaders and politicians. Yet the four men who defined Mississippi's Centennial period--Commission director Sidney Roebuck, professor Louis Dollarhide, Governor Ross Barnett, and Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) leader William D. …


The design of modern operating systems is based around the concept of memory as a cache for data that flows between applications, storage, and I/O devices. With the increasing disparity between I/O bandwidth and CPU performance, this architecture exposes the processor and memory subsystems as the bottlenecks to system performance. Furthermore, this design does not easily lend itself to exploitation of new capabilities in peripheral devices, such as programmable network cards or special-purpose hardware accelerators, capable of card-to-card data transfers.We propose a new operating system architecture that removes the memory and CPU from the data path. The role of the operating system becomes that of data-flow management, while applications operate purely at the signaling level. This design parallels the evolution of modern network routers, and has the potential to enable high-performance I/O for end-systems, as well as fully exploit recent trends in programmability of peripheral (I/O) devices.


Large paleolakes (∼33,000–60,000 km2) that once occupied the high-altitude Poopo, Coipasa, and Uyuni Basins in southern Bolivia (18–22°S) provide evidence of major changes in low-latitude moisture. In these now-dry or oligosaline basins, extensive natural exposure reveals evidence for two deep-lake and several minor-lake cycles over the past 120 k.y. Fifty-three new U-Th and 87 new 14C dates provide a chronologic framework for changes in lake level. Deposits from the "Ouki" deep-lake cycle are extensively exposed in the Poopo Basin, but no deep lakes are apparent in the record between 98 and 18.1 ka. The Ouki lake cycle was ∼80 m deep, and nineteen U-Th dates place this deep-lake cycle between 120 and 98 ka. Shallow lakes were present in the terminal Uyuni Basin between 95 and 80 ka (Salinas lake cycle), at ca. 46 (Inca Huasi lake cycle), and between 24 and 20.5 ka (Sajsi lake cycle). The Tauca deep-lake cycle occurred between 18.1 and 14.1 ka, resulting in the deepest (∼140 m) and largest lake in the basin over the past 120 ka. Multiple 14C and U-Th dates constrain the highest stand of Lake Tauca along a topographically conspicuous shoreline between 16.4 and 14.1 ka. A probable post-Tauca lake cycle (the Coipasa) produced a ≤55-m-deep lake that is tentatively dated between 13 and 11 ka.

We suggest that paleolakes on the Bolivian Altiplano expanded in response to increased moisture in the Amazon and enhanced transport of that moisture onto the Altiplano by strengthened trade winds or southward displacement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Pole-to-equator sea-surface temperature (SST) and atmospheric gradients may have influenced the position of the ITCZ, affecting moisture balance over the Altiplano and at other locations in the Amazon Basin. Links between the position of the ITCZ and the ca. 23 ka precessional solar cycle have been postulated. March insolation over the Altiplano is a relatively good fit to our lake record, but no single season or latitude of solar cycling has yet to emerge as the primary driver of climate over the entire Amazon Basin. Temperature may influence Altiplano lake levels indirectly, as potentially dry glacial periods in the Amazon Basin are linked to dry conditions on the Altiplano. Intensification of the trade winds associated with La Nina–like conditions currently brings increased precipitation on the Altiplano, and deep-lake development during the Tauca lake cycle coincided with apparently intense and persistent La Nina–like conditions in the central Pacific. This suggests that SST gradients in the Pacific are also a major influence on deep-lake development on the Altiplano.


This paper presents a new face detection method. We train a model that predicts the Jaccard distance between a sample sub-window and the ground truth face location. This model produces continuous outputs as opposite to the binary output produced by the widely used boosted cascade classifiers. To train this model we introduce a generalization of the binary classification boosting algorithms in which arbitrary smooth loss functions can be optimized. This way single output regression and binary classification models can be trained with the same procedure. Our method presents several significant advantages. First, it circumvents the need for a specific discretization of the location and scale during testing. Second, it provides an approximation of the search direction (in location and scale) towards the nearest ground truth location. And finally, the training set consists of more diverse samples (e.g. samples covering portions of the faces) that cannot be used to train a classifier. We provide experimental results on BioID face dataset to compare our method with the sliding-windows approach.


PhosphorylationPhosphorylation is a ubiquitous means of changing a protein's behavior. Adding a phosphate group to a serine, threonine, or tyrosine amino acid alters the shape and charge of the protein, a change that may activate an enzyme, promote membrane translocation, or trigger binding to DNA. Protein kinases—enzymes that add phosphates to other proteins—are so important to eukaryotic cell function that they account for about 2% of all human genes, and act on almost a third of all human proteins. Aberrant protein kinase activity drives a myriad of diseases, and, not surprisingly, these protein kinases are central targets for a wide variety of medications, including drugs for cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

Eukaryotic protein kinase regulation. Structural motifs in eukaryotic protein kinases adopt specific conformations indicative of whether the kinase is in an active or inactive state; knowledge of these conformations may aid in identifying specific kinase ...

The requirements of rational drug design, as well as pure human curiosity, have led researchers to try to understand the structural features of protein kinases that contribute to their regulation. In this issue of PLOS Biology, Hiruy Meharena, Alexandr Kornev, and colleagues demonstrate the central importance of one structural element common to all protein kinases, and identify key amino acids that contribute to the stability of the catalytic core.

The structural core of eukaryotic protein kinases is highly conserved, and consists of two lobes, called the N-terminal and C-terminal lobes (N-lobe and C-lobe). The cleft between them forms the active site. The core is further characterized by a functional element called the catalytic spine (C-spine) formed from several structurally distinct parts of the two lobes. The unusual characteristic of the C-spine is that the adenine ring of ATP (the source of phosphate) is a part of the hydrophobic stack formed by the amino acid side chains.

In work predating the discovery of the C-spine, the authors suggested that several other noncontiguous sections of the two lobes created a separate motif, parallel to the C-spine, that was also essential for catalysis, which they termed the regulatory spine (R-spine). Unlike the C-spine, the R-spine is highly regulated, which typically involves phosphorylation of a portion of the R-spine called the activation loop. Here, they rigorously tested the importance of the R-spine by systematically mutating multiple key residues within it to determine the effect on catalytic activity, using as a model cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase.

The researchers began by aligning sequences of more than 13,000 eukaryotic protein kinases, to determine which amino acid residues of the R-spine were conserved. They focused on four in particular, termed RS1, RS2, RS3, and RS4. RS1 was an aromatic amino acid, either histidine or tyrosine in virtually all protein kinases, while RS2 was typically also an aromatic residue, usually phenylalanine. RS3 and RS4 were almost always hydrophobic. When the normal amino acids at RS1 or RS2 were replaced with hydrophilic amino acids, catalytic activity was abolished. Switching RS3 or RS4 to hydrophilic amino acids had much less of an effect. They saw the same pattern of high sensitivity of RS1 and RS2, low sensitivity of RS3 and RS4, when testing the importance of the specific hydrophobic side chain atoms. Replacing the normal, more elaborate side chains with smaller hydrophobic groups drastically reduced catalytic activity in the first pair, but not the second pair.

The reason for that difference in response, they suspected, lay in the local environment. RS1 and RS2 are part of the C-lobe, while RS3 and RS4 are part of the N-lobe. Of 14 amino acids nearby RS3 and RS4, only three are highly conserved, all of them hydrophobic. Because they seemed to be supporting the N-lobe region of the R-spine, the authors dubbed these three the Shell (Sh). They found, for instance, that mutation of RS3 to alanine had little effect unless Sh2 was also changed, from methionine to glycine. Replacement of the bulky methionine side chain with the small methyl side chain of alanine almost completely eliminated catalytic activity.

Finally, the authors examined 172 publicly available structures of protein kinases, and found four different conformations in which the R-spine was disassembled, corresponding to inactive states of the respective enzymes, strengthening the evidence that the R-spine is central for catalytic activity, and broadening the understanding of protein kinase activity regulation.

These results will likely have large and almost immediate practical implications. There are currently two dozen protein kinase inhibitors approved for clinical use, and many more in various stages of development. The confirmation that the R-spine is critical for catalytic activity, and the identification of the most sensitive residues within it, is likely to expand the array of targets for the development of new inhibitors. In addition, mutations in these same kinases are responsible for multiple human diseases, and better understanding of the pathogenic consequences of those mutations may lead to a more rational approach to therapies designed to restore the function of the mutant proteins.

Meharena HS, Chang P, Keshwani MM, Oruganty K, Nene AK, et al. (2013) Deciphering the Structural Basis of Eukaryotic Protein Kinase Regulation. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001680


The significance of the threat of bioterrorism lies in the fear that it generates, `threat' in this context constituting not just a physical manifestation of impending danger but also a reflection of a subjective vulnerability derived from a fear of an eventuality that cannot be predicted, identified or controlled. It is a threat that plays upon our perceived biological vulnerabilities in a contemporary environment where biotechnological innovation has reconfigured European relations to biological threat and where security is increasingly informed by risk. Confronting the threat of bioterrorism in Europe, then, necessarily requires engaging with the fear associated with it. This article argues that it is by conceptualizing bioterrorism through the notion of `dread risk' that this can best be accomplished. In so doing, it elucidates the manners in which perceptions of threat interact with articulations of security to inform a cyclical threat—defence dynamic, enabling a more explicit engagement with the ways in which Europe is not only subject to biological insecurity but also a facilitator of it.


Brain magnetic resonance images from 42 dogs imaged between 2002 and 2007 were reviewed retrospectively to establish the incidence of trigeminal nerve contrast enhancement. These dogs had otherwise normal MR images and no clinical evidence of trigeminal nerve disease. Contrast enhancement of the entire trigeminal nerve was seen in 39 dogs and in the region of the trigeminal ganglion in all 42 dogs. When contrast enhancement of the trigeminal nerve was observed, the intensity was subjectively less than or equal to that of the pituitary gland. Contrast enhancement of the trigeminal nerve was seen in 42 dogs with no clinical evidence of trigeminal nerve pathology.


The gut microbiome of animals is emerging as an important factor influencing ecological and evolutionary processes. A major bottleneck in obtaining microbiome data from large numbers of samples is the time-consuming laboratory procedures, specifically the isolation of DNA and generation of amplicon libraries. Recently, direct PCR kits have been developed that circumvent conventional DNA extraction steps, thereby streamlining the laboratory process by reducing preparation time and costs. However, the reliability and efficacy of the direct PCR method for measuring host microbiomes has not yet been investigated other than in humans with 454-sequencing. Here, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the microbial communities obtained with direct PCR and the widely used MoBio PowerSoil DNA extraction kit in five distinct gut sample types (ileum – caecum – colon – faeces – cloaca) from 20 juvenile ostriches, using 16S rRNA Illumina MiSeq sequencing. We found that direct PCR was highly comparable over a range of measures to the DNA extraction method in caecal, colon, and faecal samples. However, the two methods recovered significantly different microbiomes in cloacal, and especially ileal samples. We also sequenced 100 replicate sample pairs to evaluate repeatability during both extraction and PCR stages, and found that both methods were highly consistent for caecal, colon, and faecal samples (rs > 0.7), but had low repeatability for cloacal (rs = 0.39) and ileal (rs = −0.24) samples. This study indicates that direct PCR provides a fast, cheap, and reliable alternative to conventional DNA extraction methods for retrieving 16S data, which will aid future gut microbiome studies of animals.


'Nervous breakdown' returns over nine million results on an internet search while a search of the academic literature returns as few as twenty-two. It has never been an official psycho-medical diagnosis but has tended to function as such, for variable purposes. This piece of work aims to explore contemporary popular constructions of 'nervous breakdown' and what the term accomplishes for those who use it.

The exploration is in two parts: (i) a mapping of the contemporary discursive terrain of 'nervous breakdown' through a media analysis and (ii) an exploration of subjective constructions of 'nervous breakdown' through participant interviews. These two sites of analysis allowed for exploration of how the discursive terrain positions the subject of 'nervous breakdown,' and how he/she resists these positions. In order to explore this interface, a synthesis of Foucauldian and discursive psychological discourse analytic approaches was used.

What emerged from the study was that the discursive terrain tends to position the subject of 'nervous breakdown' as not coping or as mentally ill, whereas those who employ the label do so to carve out a space in between these positions, avoiding their associated stigmas. This liminal position of 'nervous breakdown' and its consequences are discussed.


Self-assembled structures of discrete metal complexes have attracted considerable attention for many decades due to their exceptional optical, photophysical, electronic and magnetic properties and their great potential in various research fields such as biomedicine and optoelectronics. Although the field of metallosupramolecular soft materials has experienced a particularly relevant development in the past decade, detailed investigations of the self-assembly pathways and intermolecular forces occurring in these systems have remained until very recently elusive. In this highlight, we have collected recent examples of self-associating discrete metal complexes that have been primarily focused on understanding the hierarchy levels and thermodynamic/kinetic aspects involved in their self-assembly in solution. These studies will represent a sound basis for the rational design of novel functional metallosupramolecular materials in the near future.


Strategies for environmental sustainability and global food security must account for dietary change. Using a biophysical simulation model we calculated human carrying capacity under ten diet scenarios. The scenarios included two reference diets based on actual consumption and eight "Healthy Diet" scenarios that complied with nutritional recommendations but varied in the level of meat content. We considered the U.S. agricultural land base and accounted for losses, processing conversions, livestock feed needs, suitability of land for crops or grazing, and land productivity. Annual per capita land requirements ranged from 0.13 to 1.08 ha person-1 year-1 across the ten diet scenarios. Carrying capacity varied from 402 to 807 million persons; 1.3 to 2.6 times the 2010 U.S. population. Carrying capacity was generally higher for scenarios with less meat and highest for the lacto-vegetarian diet. However, the carrying capacity of the vegan diet was lower than two of the healthy omnivore diet scenarios. Sensitivity analysis showed that carrying capacity estimates were highly influenced by starting assumptions about the proportion of cropland available for cultivated cropping. Population level dietary change can contribute substantially to meeting future food needs, though ongoing agricultural research and sustainable management practices are still needed to assure sufficient production levels.


A noninvasive detection system for cerebrovascular disease such as aneurysms, stenosis, and occlusions has been developed by using a specially designed PVDF‐film sensor and signal analysis based on FFT and the Wigner distribution. About 90 patients with cerebrovascular diseases and 30 normal persons were measured at the Department of Neurosurgery, Ube Industries Central Hospital. FFT spectral differences between patients and normal persons exist over the frequency range from 0.5 to 1.2 kHz. In particular, the differences in spectral components between 750 Hz and 1.5 kHz could be the possible index for diagnosis of the existence of cerebrovascular disease. The FFT spectral pattern showed some differences between stenosis and aneurysms. In stenosis, it seemed that there existed a flat level from 0.4 to 2.2 kHz, while in aneurysms the power decreases smoothly from the peak around 0.7 kHz. Time variance of the blood flow noise according to the cardiac cycle could be seen in the stenosis from 30% to 50%, but n...


Pneumatic transport of solids is widely used due to many of its advantages. Many studies have been carried out to explore the details of the transport of solids with pneumatic conveying with the aim to develop enhanced operations. The flow pattern seen in pneumatic conveying can vary widely depending on the gas velocity, the solid feed rate and the characteristics of the solid. In this study a deeper understanding of the interactions of the parameters has been explored using classical signal analysis of pressure fluctuations.Experiments on dilute phase pneumatic transport were performed using polyester, polystyrene, and polyolefin pellets. Material properties such as mean diameter of polymer pellets and density of each polymer have been determined. The parameters of gas velocity and the solid loading ratio were varied producing the distinct pressure gradients which were measured at three different locations: vertical, lower and upper horizontal sections of the piping arrangement. Using these data, a phase space analysis, a power spectral density (PSD) analysis, a fractal dimension analysis, and a rescaled range analysis with Hursti¯s exponents were carried out to try to develop means to identify the flow conditions using simple pressure transducers. By taking a high speed video of the flow process through the transparent section in the pipe, the flow pattern was visually observed and unique dynamics were seen for the polyolefin particles. Furthermore, by using a wavelet analysis to decompose the original signal, noting the contributions due to the blower and feeder, the flow - pressure fluctuation yielded information about details of the particle-gas interaction.


Cracking in continuous casting has always been one of the main problems of steel mills. Many cracks that occur during solidification are difficult to observe from outside the industrial mold. In order to better understand the formation of this defect, compared with the large-scale simulation used in the entire industrial process, microsimulation is also essential. A comprehensive study of using phase field method to simulate microstructure evolution has been conducted. A variety of two-dimensional models based on phase-filed method has been developed in order to simulate dendrites growth in continuous casting process. The basic concepts of phase-field method are presented. Among those models, Kobayashi model was first introduced to describe the morphology of pure material solidification, in this article, which are pure water and pure iron. In order to get closer to the actual situation of continuous casting, a multi-component model was introduced to solve the problem. To go a step further, by introducing a series of temperature parameters and modifications to a series of terms, the binary alloy directional solidification model was used to simulate the process of dendrite growth in continuous casting. Furthermore, the detailed derivation of the binary alloy solidification model and how to apply the model in open source software will also be introduced in this article. The effects of physical parameters such as anisotropic strength, temperature gradient and cooling rate on the growth and evolution of the dendrite interface were quantitatively analyzed. Finally, potential improvement of this model, optimization to primary cooling section in continuous casting process and various applications of the simulation were discussed.


Vascular remodeling or arterial remodeling is a process of adaptive alteration of vascular wall architecture and leads to the endothelial cell (EC) dysfunction and synthetic or contractile phenotypic change of VSMCs, and the infiltration of mono‐ cytes and Macrophages that promotes vascular diseases including atherosclerosis. Recent findings have demonstrated that microRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in regulating gene expression at posttranscriptional level and disease pathogenesis. A change of miRNA expression profiles plays key roles in the gene expressions and the regulation of cellular functions. In this chapter, we summarize the vascular remodel‐ ing-related miRNAs and their functions in vascular biology.


This study is designed to investigate the present situations of Kuwaiti undergraduate students of English, and their attitudes towards the writing process. Specifically, the study aimed to address the following research questions: (1) What are the characteristics of the texts produced by Kuwaiti undergraduate students in terms of cohesion and quality? (2) Is there a relationship between cohesive devices? measures and text evaluation scores? The main objective of the researcher was to concentrate on dealing with the macro level cohesive devices in students? descriptive English writing. The participants in this study were 128 Kuwaiti college students of English in the first and second year of study at Kuwait University, College of Arts. A mixed methods design of both qualitative and quantitative research methodology was utilized to analyze the participants? written texts. In addition, the framework of Halliday and Hasan?s (1976) theory of cohesion was used to analyze the written products of the participants. The findings revealed that there was a notable difference in the students? use of cohesive devices in terms of frequency. Students overused certain types of cohesive devices (reference, conjunction, and lexical) while neglecting to use the others (substitution and ellipsis). The analysis also revealed that the correlation coefficient between writing scores and reference cohesive device is positive and statistically significant, since only the reference cohesive device was highly correlated with score.


A major aspect of lead hazard control is the evaluation of soil lead hazards around housing coated with lead-based paint. The use of field-portable X-ray fluorescence (FPXRF) to do detailed surveying, with limited laboratory confirmation, can provide lead measurements in soil (especially for planning abatement activities) in a far more cost-efficient and timely manner than laboratory analysis. To date, one obstacle to the acceptance of FPXRF as an approved method of measuring lead in soil has been a lack of correspondence between field and laboratory results. In order to minimize the differences between field and laboratory results, RTI International (RTI) has developed a new protocol for field drying and sieving soil samples for field measurement by FPXRF. To evaluate this new protocol, composite samples were collected in the field following both U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) guidelines and ASTM International (ASTM) protocols, measured after drying by FPXRF, and returned to the laboratory for confirmatory inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES) analysis. Evaluation of study data from several diverse sites revealed no statistical difference between paired FPXRF and ICP-AES measurements using the new method. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


A decrease in life cycle cost is a key issue for testing of mobile communication systems. The rapid development and edge technology requires high performance instruments and state of the art measurement technology. It is desired to use virtual/synthetic instruments and put the measurement technology in software independent of hardware, i.e. software driven measurements. Increased flexibility and modularization, both in hardware and software, are requirements to support the cost decrease. The hardware basis is signal generation and signal analysis. In this paper state of the art signal generation and signal analysis capabilities are demonstrated in a modular and flexible architecture. A direct IF synthesis is used to generate 1 WideBand Code-Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) carrier with more than 72 dB Adjacent Carrier Leakage Ratio (ACLR) 2 carrier with more than 68 dBc ACLR over a total bandwidth of 100 MHz. The signal analysis capabilities, ACLR performance, for a WCDMA carrier is better than -70 dBc and for a continuous wave better than -85 dBc over a bandwidth of 42.5 MHz. The critical down converter in the set up doesn't degrade the performance.


This paper discusses climate governance policies in Bangladesh and investigates to what extent are those policies contributing to increasing resilience among cyclone Sidr and Aila affected coastal people of Bangladesh. Climate governance has emerged in recent years in order to address the governance challenges within climate change programmes and policies and to reduce the vulnerability of disaster victims by engaging with multiple stakeholders from both government and non-government institutions with specific objectives to ensure governance issues and ensure use of funds for most vulnerable communities. In other words, it is the rule making decision, making mechanisms and modes within a given system or society that determine how institutions' interest are articulated, coordinated and negotiated; how power and authority are distributed, controlled and exercised and how resources are accessed, allocated, used and exchanged; and how conflicts are mitigated or resolved to enable and sustain effective climate change mitigation and adaptive response. This study draws on structured interviews of 285 affected villagers and data were collected using questionnaire survey and data were analysed by using frequency distribution, confidence interval test, cross tabulation and chi-square tests. The results show that climate governance does not have much contribution in increasing resilience among the cyclone Sidr and Aila affected vulnerable of Bangladesh. More specifically, the results show that only about 12% houses are pucca in Sidr affected areas and 16% houses are pucca in Aila affected areas. Likewise, the cross tabulation results show that more than 77% of respondents have very low level of resilience to cyclone and more than 95% of respondents have vulnerability between very low to moderate level. About 79% of respondents have a very low level of resilience in terms of cyclones and more than 71% in terms of building capacity to resilience. This study makes significant contribution to the body of knowledge by investigating the impact of climate governance policies in increasing resilience among post-cyclone Sidr and Aila affected people of Bangladesh.


In this paper we study the singular set of Dirichlet-minimizing $Q$-valued maps from $\mathbb{R}^m$ into a smooth compact manifold $\mathcal{N}$ without boundary. Similarly to what happens in the case of single valued minimizing harmonic maps, we show that this set is always $(m-3)$-rectifiable with uniform Minkowski bounds. Moreover, as opposed to the single valued case, we prove that the target $\mathcal{N}$ being non-positively curved but not simply connected does not imply continuity of the map.


This article suggests that while anthropologists have developed a highly nuanced analysis of kinship and friendship under a more general comparative study of relationality, this emphasis upon practice needs to be complemented by an alternative focus on the use of these terms as ideology, where we find a more simplistic and dualistic usage. The rise of new social media and the verb friending highlights a more general shift from the idea of fictive kinship to that of fictive friendship, where it is the ideals represented by the supposed voluntarism and authenticity of friendship that has now come to dominate the way people view kin relations. Evidence is provided from ethnographies in the Philippines, Trinidad, and England that illustrate the prevalence of a practice where kin relations reposition themselves under the idiom of friendship with both negative and positive consequences. This incorporation of kinship within friendship can also bring back a sense of rule and obligation, which has led to a decline in the use of Facebook by the young.


This paper reports analysis obtained from 200 implant cases retrieved from humans and submitted to the American Academy of Implant Dentistry Research Foundation, Medical College of Georgia implant retrieval center. The samples that were not decalcified were embedded in polymethylmethacrylate and examined with scanning electron microscopy and routine light, polarized, or Nomarski microscopy. Cases included both orthopedic and dental implants, as well as entire mandibles and portions of maxillae obtained at autopsy. A significant number of submitted implants had substantial amounts of adhered bone, which permitted evaluation of human bone remodeling to osseointegrated implants. These implants failed because of implant fracture. As was observed with animal studies, healthy bone supported these implants, with the bone containing an interdigitating canaliculi network that provided communication between interfacial osteocytes and osteocytes deeper within the remodeled osteonal and trabecular bone. Early dental implants containing a coating of beads showed a connective tissue interface, which corresponded to the bead surface of specific orthopedic implants that underwent some degree of micromovement. This is in contrast with the excellent response reported for successful contemporary beaded implants. Significant numbers of osseointegrated fractured hydroxyapatite (HA)-coated dental implants demonstrated the adequate serviceability of these implants before biomaterial fracture. In contrast, the HA coating was dissociated from retrieved orthopedic implants, leading to extensive cup loosening and case failure. This study, therefore, underscores the need for evaluation of failed human dental and orthopedic implants. Correlations can be drawn between human retrieval and experimental animal studies.


Comparative law is a research methodology which has been increasingly fashionable in recent decades, as comparisons between common law and civil law have dominated the law studies landscape. There are many methods of comparative law in use, including comparison of legal rules, comparison of cases, and comparison of legal theories. Each of these methods has strong proponents and opponents. Dogmatic comparisons of rules are criticized for not giving the whole picture of law in action, but praised for being the first and the only truly legal step in comparative research. Case-based comparisons are praised for enabling us to compare the true understanding of rules by courts, yet the critics of this method point out that only the higher courts' decisions are subject to comparison, and most cases do not reach this stage. Finally, comparisons of legal theories are praised for enabling us to know the spirit of the laws, yet opponents would argue that many countries sharing the same theory would draw opposite conclusions from it. This book is a result of the attempted (and successful) introduction of comparative law into the region of Eastern and Central Europe. The subject has induced interest beyond expectations. This volume opens with a chapter on the unification of law, both from the perspective of institutional unification by such supra-state organizations, spontaneous and institutionalized unifications between two or more legal systems, and the methods of choosing the right rules in the unification process. Chapters two and three follow the classical division of private and public law, as proposed by the brilliant Roman lawyer Ulpian. Overall, the chapters in this book offer an interesting and engaging commentary on the current topics discussed by academics in Eastern and Central Europe.


The discretized Schrödinger equation is most often used to solve one-dimensional quantum mechanics problems numerically. While it has been recognized for some time that this equation is equivalent to a simple tight-binding model and that the discretization imposes an underlying bandstructure unlike free-space quantum mechanics on the problem, the physical implications of this equivalence largely have been unappreciated and the pedagogical advantages accruing from presenting the problem as one of solid-state physics (and not numerics) remain generally unexplored. This is especially true for the analytically solvable discretized finite square well presented here. There are profound differences in the physics of this model and its continuous-space counterpart which are direct consequences of the imposed bandstructure. For example, in the discrete model the number of bound states plus transmission resonances equals the number of atoms in the quantum well.


Nd-Fe-B alloy powder was granulated by spray drying method using organic binder consisted of polyvinylalcohol (PVA) or carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) with different tensile strength, in order to improve the powder flowability during feeding and compacting. The relationships between binder composition, polymer/plasticizer ratio and content of binder, and granulated powder characteristics or magnetic characteristics were investigated. By using a polymer with high tensile strength, the bonding strength between alloy powders increased, so that the powder flowability of granulated powders was improved. After compacting these powders in a magnetic field, compacted bodies were heated at 673K in H2. About 96% of carbon in binder was removed, although the oxygen in binder remained. In the case of high tensile strength polymer, remanences (Br) of sintered magnets decreased by about 20%, as compared with those of low tensile strength one. However, by increasing the plasticizer content in organic binder both of Br and maximum energy product (BH)max were improved remarkably.


Many decentralized, inter-organizational environments such as supply chains are characterized by high transactional uncertainty and risk. At the same time, blockchain technology promises to mitigate these issues by introducing certainty into economic transactions. This paper discusses the findings of a Design Science Research project involving the construction and evaluation of an information technology artifact in collaboration with Maersk, a leading international shipping company, where central documents in shipping, such as the Bill of Lading, are turned into a smart contract on blockchain. Based on our insights from the project, we provide first evidence for preliminary design principles for applications that aim to mitigate the transactional risk and uncertainty in decentralized environments using blockchain. Both the artifact and the first evidence for emerging design principles are novel, contributing to the discourse on the implications that the advent of blockchain technology poses for governing economic activity.


The early classifications of the computational complexity of planning under various restrictions in STRIPS (Bylander) and SAS+ (Bäckström and Nebel) have influenced following research in planning in many ways. We go back and reanalyse their subclasses, but this time using the more modern tool of parameterized complexity analysis. This provides new results that together with the old results give a more detailed picture of the complexity landscape. We demonstrate separation results not possible with standard complexity theory, which contributes to explaining why certain cases of planning have seemed simpler in practice than theory has predicted. In particular, we show that certain restrictions of practical interest are tractable in the parameterized sense of the term, and that a simple heuristic is sufficient to make a well-known partial-order planner exploit this fact.


Introduction Mental health has been included in the Sustainable Development Goals and quality assurance is needed to ensure its achievement. To date, more than 140 people with severe mental illness have died in the Life Esidimeni tragedy. The tragedy highlights the ineffectiveness of quality assurance in South Africa. The aim of this case study was to identify possible measures which may be used for future monitoring of mental health by analysing the quality deficits evident in the Life Esidimeni tragedy. Methods A framework for the analysis was devised using South African legislation and policy as well as international literature on quality assurance in mental health. Categories of quality care for macro-, meso- and micro-levels of analysis were developed. The Health Ombud's report into the 'Circumstances surrounding the deaths of mentally ill patients: Gauteng Province' was examined for phrases which reflected quality care. These were allocated to the different categories and clustered into common themes which could be reflected as 'quality measures'. Results Measures identified at macro-level included basic human rights, mortality, financial protection and stakeholder consultation. Most quality deficits evident in the report were at meso-level and included adherence to legislation, access to health care and equitable financial distribution. At micro-level, transparent communication, treatment of medical conditions, relapse and readmission for mental illness, and caregiver and family satisfaction were identified. There were no references to user-reported quality measures in the report. Conclusion In the context of South African legislation and policy, quality deficits at each level of analysis were exposed by the Life Esidimeni tragedy. These could be translated into health indicators or survey requirements for future quality assurance.


The Barker and Addicks Reservoirs, located about 16 miles west of Houston, Texas, provide flood-detention storage for storm runoff. Of interest are the water-quality characteristics in the study area and changes in water quality during detention. Study area sampling sites were selected upstream along Buffalo Bayou for Barker Reservoir and on Bear Creek and Langham Creek for Addicks Reservoir, within the reservoirs, near the reservoir outflows, and below the confluence of each reservoir outflow at the streamflow station Buffalo Bayou near Addicks. Flow data were available at all sites except in the reservoirs. Analyses of samples collected during both low flow and storm runoff show that, in general, the waters of the study area were low in mineralization, but the aesthetics of the water was a problem. The inorganic constituents, trace metals, and pesticides rarely exceeded maximum contaminant levels recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for public supply using 1976 and 1977 criteria for primary and secondary standards. All species of nutrients, except ammonia nitrogen and phosphorus, almost always were below the recommended maximum contaminant levels. Phosphorus almost always exceeded these levels. Aesthetic problems are evident. Large values of suspended solids, turbidity, and color were common. Small dissolved-oxygen values commonly occurred in the reservoirs. Possible bacterial problems are indicated because coliformbacteria densities exceeded recommended levels in about 25 percent of the samples. The effects of the reservoirs on the water-quality characteristics of storm runoff were analyzed using three approaches. The first approach was a comparison of the discharge-weighted average values of nine selected constituents at each streamflow-gaging station during four storms. Reservoir effects on the quality of runoff detained 1 to 4 days in the two reservoirs were inconsistent. However, the reservoirs consistently had an effect on the water quality of runoff that was detained the longest (more than 8 days). Biochemical oxygen demand, suspended solids, turbidity, color, total nitrogen, and total organic carbon discharge-weighted average values were consistently smaller after flowing through the reservoirs. Dissolved solids and total phosphorus values were consistently larger after flowing through the reservoirs. The second approach was an analysis of the means of the discharge-weighted average values computed for the four hydrologic events using the Student t-test. Statistical results Indicate that reservoir detention significantly reduced suspended solids (the mean decreased from 178 milligrams per liter at the Inflows to 105 milligrams per liter at the outflows) and turbidity (the mean decreased from 119 nephelometrlc turbidity units at the inflows to 66 nephelometric turbidity units at the outflows). The third approach was a comparison at each site of the mean, maximum, and minimum values computed for seven constituents that did not correlate with discharge. These constituents or properties of water were temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, dissolved oxygen percent saturation, total-coliform bacteria, fecal-conform bacteria, and fecal-streptococci bacteria. The only consistent water-quality changes observed were with the three bacteria groups, which were decreased by flood-water detention.


The authors investigated diurnal convection peak characteristics over the eastern Indian Ocean off the island of Sumatra during different phases of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO). During MJO phases 2 to 3 (P2 and P3) defined by Wheeler and Hendon (2004), prominent diurnal variation in convection was observed by satellites when moderate low-level westerly winds were dominant over the eastern Indian Ocean. The diurnal convection peaks were prominent over the island of Sumatra in the evening, while migrations of the convection toward the Indian Ocean were observed in the early morning. By using the Global Positioning System around the western region offshore of Sumatra, a significant reduction in water vapor was observed from evening until midnight, compensating for the upward motion over the island. During midnight to early morning, the water vapor in-creased in the western offshore region as the convections migrated from the island. This prominent diurnal varia-tion confirmed the result from a numerical experiment by Miura et al. (2007) using the Nonhydrostatic ICosahe-dral Atmospheric Model (NICAM).During P2 to P3, the atmosphere over the eastern Indian Ocean contains abundant water vapor, while the Maritime Continent is fairly well heated by solar radiation under calm conditions. This situation should be favor-able for the development of two diurnal convection peaks: the evening convection over the land induced by solar radiative heating and the midnight convection over the ocean triggered by convergence of the low-level westerly wind and the land breeze.


This volume is a collection of papers given at a seminar on trade issues in Africa, conducted by the IMF and the African Economic Research Consortium. It represents the views of government officials, academics, and representatives from multilateral and regional agencies on issues relating to trade reform and regionalism in Africa. Issues include the role of trade liberalization in promoting sustained growth, interdependence of trade and macroeconomic policies, impediments to effective trade reforms, the steps needed to accelerate trade reform, and the importance of regional interaction.


Despite the long-running HIV/AIDS campaigns by the Singapore Mini~tr y of Health, every year, more
Singaporeans are infected with HN, and each year, the greatest number of infections occurs among the
middle-aged, heterosexual men - the very primary target of the Ministry's campaign efforts. In this
research, I will therefore carry out a critical re-examination of the Singapore Ministry of Health's
HIV/AIDS campaigns targeted at the so-called 'general' population. Quantitative evaluations have been
conducted in the past, producing quantifiable, 'scientific' measurements regarding the 'quality' and
'effectiveness' of these campaigns. It has also been the results of these evaluations that have been used to
justify the Ministry's policies.
However, in this research, I wish to argue that HN/AIDS campaigns are not neutral and value-free 'facts'
but that these should be seen as 'scientific activities', which are socially and materialistically constructed,
and which are consciously undertaken by specific actors. I argue that by 'evaluating' the methodologies
and techniques used in these campaigns using conventional public health tools such as' KAP
(Knowledge-Attitude and Practice) surveys, one remains trapped inside the particular social and material
construction. I believe that a more productive approach is needed to examine the way that health education
campaigns are socially and materially produced, and that this can be achieved by taking a more holistic and
a critical approach that can capture the dynamics and processes involved in their construction.
Using the theoretical approaches suggested by Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and Science and
Technology Studies (STS), I will argue that these HIV/AIDS campaigns are intended to produce a network
of a certain set of knowledge about HIV/AIDS in Singapore, and further t hat this network is in fact a product
of an on-going heterogeneous engineering undertaken by a particular actor, namely the Singapore Ministry
of Health. I wiII also discuss some of the possible reasons why the particular set of knowledge is being
produced in Singapore, and whether or not the knowledge can remain durable, intact from the effects of
globalisation in which the movem9't of all sorts of social and non -social entities (e.g. information,
technology, discourses and materials) are becoming increas ingly boundless. I however neither intend my
research to give a definitive solution nor pose as a grand meta-theory. Rather, what I seek to do is to
produce a local and a contingent study of a specific network, and hope, theoretically, to contribute to a
critical assessment of the current thinking about health education/promotion, and practically, contnbute to
halting the mY/AIDS epidemic in Singapore.


RTCA DO-333, Formal Methods Supplement to DO-178C and DO-278A provides guidance for software developers wishing to use formal methods in the certification of airborne systems and air traffic management systems. The supplement identifies the modifications and additions to DO-178C and DO-278A objectives, activities, and software life cycle data that should be addressed when formal methods are used as part of the software development process. This report presents three case studies describing the use of different classes of formal methods to satisfy certification objectives for a common avionics example - a dual-channel Flight Guidance System. The three case studies illustrate the use of theorem proving, model checking, and abstract interpretation. The material presented is not intended to represent a complete certification effort. Rather, the purpose is to illustrate how formal methods can be used in a realistic avionics software development project, with a focus on the evidence produced that could be used to satisfy the verification objectives found in Section 6 of DO-178C.


Though the concept of Institutional repositories was developed as a part of personal pages or on departmental sites in the institutes but it is getting also attention of librarians. However, it is in its early stages in the field of library and information centers, it has emerged as an effective means for providing access to scholarly contents to its users. This paper explores the possibility of uses of institutional repositories in e-learning, particularly through the library and information centers.


Abstract Kaolinite-rich rocks are widespread in Chinese coal-bearing strata. Three main types of deposits are recognized. Those deposits identified as flint clays are several metres thick and show lateral variations in bed composition. The kaolinite is thought to have formed mainly on the adjacent landmass, but some crystallization of gels within the basin is not ruled out. Tonsteins, which formed from the in situ alteration of airfall volcanic ashes, are very common in the coal measures and are up to 0.5 m thick. Finally, kaolinite deposits are described where the development of kaolin is related to weathering of coals either close to or at the present land surface.


Teacher evaluation systems that use in-class observations, particularly in high-stakes settings, are frequently understood as accountability systems intended as nonintrusive measures of teacher quality. Presumably, the evaluation system motivates teachers to improve their practice—an accountability mechanism—and provides actionable feedback for improvement—an information mechanism. No evidence exists, however, establishing the causal link between an evaluation program and daily teacher practices. Importantly, it is unknown how teachers may modify their practice in the time leading up to an unannounced in-class observation, or how they integrate feedback into their practice post-evaluation, a question that fundamentally changes the design and philosophy of teacher evaluation programs. We disentangle these two effects with a unique empirical strategy that exploits random variation in the timing of in-class observations in the Washington, DC, teacher evaluation program IMPACT. Our key finding is that teachers work to improve during periods in which they are more likely to be observed, and they improve with subsequent evaluations. We interpret this as evidence that both mechanisms are at work, and as a result, policy makers should seriously consider both when designing teacher evaluation systems.


Corporate Governance, Employee Voice, and Work Organization explores the dynamic relations between corporate governance, employee voice, and the organization of work in the automotive supply industry. It reports on research undertaken in three countries--Germany, Sweden, and the United States--that has sought to explore and compare historical patterns of the relationships between changing governance regimes, voice, and work at plant level in an era of financialization. It also explores the prospects for high-road, sustainable jobs in the sector. Three detailed case histories from each of the countries are presented which contrast companies facing three different levels of exposure to capital markets: companies relatively sheltered from stock markets; companies that are highly exposed to them; and thirdly companies owned by private equity firms. This design allows for analysis not just across different national contexts but also within them, and questions the usefulness of the 'varieties of capitalism' appraoch in understanding these differences. The cases show that governance compromises matter, that is, that recognising the role of employee voice in corporate governance regimes is essential in any comparative analysis and understanding of corporate governance.


Rift Valley fever (RVF) is an arthropod-borne viral disease repeatedly reported in many African countries and, more recently, in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. RVF virus (RVFV) primarily infects domesticated ruminants, resulting in miscarriage in pregnant females and death for newborns and young animals. It also has the ability to infect humans, causing a feverish syndrome, meningoencephalitis, or hemorrhagic fever. The various outcomes of RVFV infection in animals and humans argue for the existence of host genetic determinants controlling the disease. We investigated the susceptibility of inbred mouse strains to infection with the virulent RVFV ZH548 strain. Compared with classical BALB/cByJ mice, wild-derived Mus m. musculus MBT/Pas mice exhibited earlier and greater viremia and died sooner, a result in sharp contrast with their resistance to infection with West Nile virus and influenza A. Infection of mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) from MBT/Pas mice with RVFV also resulted in higher viral production. Microarray and quantitative RT-PCR experiments showed that BALB/cByJ MEFs displayed a significant activation of the type I IFN pathway. In contrast, MBT/Pas MEFs elicited a delayed and partial type I IFN response to RVFV infection. RNA interference-mediated inhibition of genes that were not induced by RVFV in MBT/Pas MEFs increased viral production in BALB/cByJ MEFs, thus demonstrating their functional importance in limiting viral replication. We conclude that the failure of MBT/Pas murine strain to induce, in due course, a complete innate immune response is instrumental in the selective susceptibility to RVF.


Light-emitting diode (LED) video displays enclose thousands of LEDs which create the resulting image. LED intensity is regulated using pulse width modulation (PWM). Though the individual LED current is small, the total current consumed is large. Simultaneous switching of a large number of LEDs dimmed by PWM can cause serious electromagnetic interference (EMI). Three LED PWM dimming techniques have been studied for potential EMI. Techniques represent different current pulse positioning in time: the aim of study was to compare the spectrum of current produced in LED video display power supply circuits when discussed techniques are used for pixel intensity control. It was assumed that the produced EMI is proportional to the power supply current. The power supply filter and transient load decoupling capacitors were not taken into account. The uniform and nonuniform pixels' intensities distribution within an image were assumed. Spectrum has been studied on a single pixel and the video display tile containing 16 × 32 LEDs. Resulting time diagrams and frequency responses are presented. The results indicate that, despite expected significant advantage of binary PWM methods, in realistic case all methods' performance is similar.


This study examines the growth of alcohol and marijuana use during early adolescence among a sample of 746 Indigenous youth (aged 10 – 12 years at wave 1; 50.3% female) of the upper Midwest and Canada, with a special focus on potential gender differences in these patterns. Research documenting the disproportionately high rates of Indigenous substance use, coupled by our lack of understanding of gender patterns among this group—especially in very early adolescence—highlight the need for this culturally specific work. Results of latent growth curve analyses from three waves of annual data collection indicate that the females in our sample engage in alcohol and marijuana use at rates similar to or greater than their male peers. This finding counters conventional ideas of gender and substance use that place young males at elevated rates of use compared to females, and also adds to our understanding of gendered substance use patterns among Indigenous youth.


We conduct a real-effort experiment to test whether workers reciprocate generous wages by managers when workers are tempted to surf the internet. Further, we investigate how an active policy of restricting the usage of the internet affects the workers' motivation. We observe that the temptation of the internet hampers workers' willingness to reciprocate fair wages. Yet, when the manager makes an active choice not to deny internet access, workers perceive the "freedom from control" as a gift which they reciprocate with high effort. Whether the positive "freedom from control" aspect or the negative temptation aspect dominates depends on the worker's reciprocity: for highly reciprocal workers the control aspect dominates; for non-reciprocal workers the temptation aspect dominates.


Digital data capture is a key component of Industry 4.0 practices. In the past few decades Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have entered the construction industry to capture site data and to cover topographic as well as different types of inspection matters. Photographs, live video, photogrammetric digital elevation models and 3D point clouds can be generated using different photogrammetry facilities, cameras and lasers attached to either a fixed wing or rotorcraft UAVs. UAVs have the ability to deliver information by monitoring, 3Dmaping, measuring, analysing, as well as recording on-site activities. This paper presents the state of art of UAVs usage in construction and building industry and evaluates their applications by experimental case studies. The challenges of using UAVs and their links to BIM will be also discussed. This study found that visual imaging is currently the most popular use of UAVs on construction sites to ensure integrity of structural inspection, however, 3D models derived from LiDAR and photogrammetry techniques are surpassing more traditional methods as they are still significantly cheaper and faster to use. UAVs is also used to monitor workers on site to identify what resources they need in order to carry out their tasks more efficiently and also for the purposes of their health and safety. Despite the approved efficiency of using UAVs on sites to provide better visualization of the working environment, there are still key issues to be tackled such as: the limited flight time of UAVs and its weight. Structural/site investigations have shown that there are some defects on the use of aerial vehicles, with the most important to be the cost along with the precision of the results which may vary depending on the technologies used. There is further study required into the combination of UAVs derived data and its inclusion into BIM, as barriers remain regarding translatable data platforms. There are also some ethical concerns of surveying workers on site and how to protect their privacy.


Reliability of machine learning (ML) systems is crucial in safety-critical applications such as healthcare, and uncertainty estimation is a widely researched method to highlight the confidence of ML systems in deployment. Sequential and parallel ensemble techniques have shown improved performance of ML systems in multi-modal settings by leveraging the feature sets together. We propose an uncertainty-aware boosting technique for multi-modal ensembling in order to focus on the data points with higher associated uncertainty estimates, rather than the ones with higher loss values. We evaluate this method on healthcare tasks related to Dementia and Parkinson's disease which involve real-world multi-modal speech and text data, wherein our method shows an improved performance. Additional analysis suggests that introducing uncertainty-awareness into the boosted ensembles decreases the overall entropy of the system, making it more robust to heteroscedasticity in the data, as well as better calibrating each of the modalities along with high quality prediction intervals. We open-source our entire codebase at https://github.com/usarawgi911//Uncertainty-aware-boosting.


This study aimed to identify work-related language competencies required in the manufacturing industry and to provide guidelines for designing English programs that have groups with widely differing language levels and wide-ranging job experience. For this purpose, a questionnaire comprising 65 job-related tasks was used. 2,360 Japanese employees in manufacturing companies were asked to self-rate their abilities to perform the specified tasks in English on a 5-point scale and to indicate whether they had ever performed such tasks before. The data was analyzed according to English proficiency 1) to identify the types of tasks performed at each score level and 2) to examine whether the experience of performing the tasks would affect their self-ratings. Results indicated that the higher the subjects' language proficiency, the more tasks they had performed. Moreover, the subjects with task experience assessed their abilities more highly than those without experience. Further analysis revealed that the tasks requiring productive skills exerted a greater influence on the subjects' self-ratings. Based on the results, a list of tasks was compiled so that educators and trainers can refer to it when designing an English program that meets the specific needs of existing and new company employees in the manufacturing industry.


Being one of the leading polar research organizations in Europe, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) acts as a motor for the development of polar research technologies. A couple of scheduled Arctic projects has been selected out of a large variety of future activities to be presented here:1) Subsequent to the AMORE expedition to the Gakkel Ridge jointly performed in 2001 by the two research icebreakers USCGC ?Healy? and RV ?Polarstern? a further two ship mission is scheduled for 2004. AWI will participate again with RV ?Polarstern? and will host the remotely operating vessel (ROV) ?Victor6000?. The main focus will be laid on a detailed sampling of the Gakkel Ridge system by means of the ROV which is well appropriate for visual and experimental investigations of ridge structures. The vehicle will take samples at sites surveyed and pre-investigated by geophysical techniques in 2001. Besides, it is also envisaged to conduct ROV-based experiments and sampling on the Siberian Shelf. Based on the results of the joint Russian-German project on "Siberian River Run-off (SIRRO) the river fans of Ob and Yenesei are targeted. Geological, geochemical and biological processes relevant for the understanding of the input of fresh water, sediments, and organic matter from the rivers to the Kara Sea and the adjacent Arctic Ocean will be subject to ROV investigations.2) AWI is currently purchasing an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) for under-ice research, seafloor and water column surveys. Equipped with acoustic tools like side scan sonar, sub-bottom profiler, swath bathymetry as well as with visual imaging systems the vessel shall perform e.g. autonomous pre-site surveys for future Arctic drill campaigns and further seismic investigations at Arctic ridge systems. Moreover, the AUV is planned to be used for surveying arctic sediment and fauna distribution and tracks of grounded icebergs. In addition, special payload modules capable to trace geochemical parameters in the water column will be developed for the AUV in order to quantify submarine fluid discharge plumes etc.3) The ARGO system of vertically profiling floats is expected to become the backbone of a global ocean observing system. However, their use under Arctic conditions remains difficult, since the floats have to get to the sea surface to be located and to transmit the measured data via satellite. Instead, AWI promotes a Hybrid Arctic/Antarctic Float Observation System (HAFOS) which shall combine different technologies. It comprises ice resistant profiling subsurface floats, surface drifters on the ice and moored stations. The envisaged system consists of RAFOS (ranging and fixing of sound) type subsurface profiling floats which obtain their position by ranging of sound sources on moored stations. The floats measure vertical profiles of temperature and conductivity/salinity, but do not surface while floating under the ice. As a first stage of development, data will be stored until the floats reach ice-free waters. Later, the floats will be able to communicate with receivers installed on moorings and ice drifters allowing fast satellite data transmission.4) The central Arctic Ocean has hitherto not been visited by a deep-drilling research vessel (DSDP/ODP) and therefore its long-term environmental history as well as the tectonic structure are poorly known. A European contribution to IODP is needed. A newly designed research ice breaker with a deep ocean drilling capability would provide the opportunity to conduct international, interdisciplinary expeditions during all seasons of the year and to penetrate into permanently ice-covered basins of the central Arctic Ocean. AWI promotes a European consortium of interested institutes/countries to share responsibilities for the planning and construction of a multi-purpose Arctic ice breaker and to coordinate scientific programs.


Architect Goodwin Steinberg presents an insider's view of the development of Silicon Valley-what went right, what went wrong, and how conditions conspired to create the high technology capital of the world. Enlivened by anecdotal brushes with Silicon Valley's influential and famous, this is the richly illustrated (including 69 color illustrations) personal story of a man whose fifty-year career-and thousands of architectural projects-helped transform an area of farms and ranches known as The Valley of Heart's Delight to the economic engine named Silicon Valley. The range of Steinberg's buildings is remarkable: public buildings, business parks, churches, hotels, community centers, libraries, museums, courthouses, homes for Silicon Valley titans, senior housing, and high-density housing developments. Enchanted by the San Francisco Bay Area's physical beauty, Steinberg early made a conscious choice to build community, and his creativity and talent, combined with good timing, put him at the heart of a regional metamorphosis. But his story is more than buildings and money and their interplay. As a citizen he has been deeply involved in regional planning, measures to minimize urban sprawl, and ordinances to limit development in the hills above the Valley. As impressive as his work on buildings, one of his proudest achievements was serving as citizen advisor to the creation of Guadalupe River Park, a long ribbon of watery green, with walks and public spaces, in the heart of San Jose, a project as challenging as it is spectacular. With Steinberg as your guide, this behind-the-scenes look at the politics and personalities of the development of a region is as entertaining as it is informative. His contributions are inseparable from the community, from the mango-colored Tech Museum of Innovation and the Santa Clara County Courthouse, restored to its 1890 historic grandeur, to the hard-won Children's Shelter and many parts of the campus of Stanford University. All Steinberg's work testifies to his interest in and talent for beautiful lines and public spaces, allowing people to explore and enjoy their surroundings.