Public goods and monopolistic competition have traditionally been separate fields of study in microeconomics, each field having its own array of models. In this book, Stephen Shmanske builds a theoretical bridge between these two areas, suggesting that public goods and monopolistic competition are different dimensional simplifications of the same general model. The author argues first that the generic model for public goods has two dimensions of consumption but that public goods models have usually ignored or simplified the utilization dimension. Furthermore, private goods models in the monopolistic competition vein also have two implicit dimensions of consumption, but again, one of the dimensions is treated in a very constrained fashion. As it turns out, between public goods and monopolistic competition, each model emphasizes the dimension that is ignored or simplified in the other. Thus, the general, mixed goods model draws from both traditions, using the results of one model to generalize and extend the other. An immediate implication of the analysis is that the traditional models of public goods and monopolistic competition have focused on special cases and thus have provided misleading conclusions. Specifically, monopolistic competition and other models of differentiated oligopoly have reached conclusions in settings that emphasize uniform pricing despite the facts that (1) discriminatory pricing has been studied in competitive situations in public goods models, (2) discriminatory pricing is the more usual pricing method, and (3) the results obtained using uniform pricing do not generalize to more sophisticated pricing regimes. Meanwhile, public goods models have focused on special cases like national defense, where the results obtained do not generally apply in other public or mixed goods settings. Shmanske's conclusions have great relevance to policy formation on public goods provision. Public goods and mixed goods are not curious anomalies; they are all around us, and in most cases competitive private sector agents can and have been providing public goods with no market failure. Professionals and scholars in the areas of public finance and industrial organization will appreciate Shmanske's careful critique of existing models and his rigorous conceptualizing and modeling of public goods in private markets characterized by monopolistic competition.


This document complements the Diffserv-aware MPLS Traffic Engineering
(DS-TE) requirements document by giving a functional specification for
the Maximum Allocation with Reservation (MAR) Bandwidth Constraints
Model. Assumptions, applicability, and examples of the operation of
the MAR Bandwidth Constraints Model are presented. MAR performance is
analyzed relative to the criteria for selecting a Bandwidth
Constraints Model, in order to provide guidance to user implementation
of the model in their networks. This memo defines an Experimental
Protocol for the Internet community.


The popularity of emotional intelligence in service marketing is on the ascendency. Its popularity could also be attributed to its potential for business growth. This study seeks to analyse and verify the impact of emotional intelligence on organisational growth in the banking sector of Ghana. The study adopts a quantitative research technique in which hypotheses are tested to verify the relationship between emotional intelligence and organisational growth in terms of return on investment. The study is based on 20 banks in Ghana. Pearson's correlation test, partial correlation test and ordinary least squares regression analysis were used in testing hypotheses. Findings of this study indicate that emotional intelligence is positively related to organisational performance (p < .05). Emotional intelligence also significantly predicts organisational performance (p < .05) with a variability of 30.6%, while it has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between customer satisfaction and business performance (p < .05). It is recommended that banks formalise and regularise their investments in the acquisition of emotional intelligence skills for maximum organisational performance.


Artificial lighting is strongly associated with urbanisation and is increasing in its extent, brightness and spectral range. Changes in urban lighting have both positive and negative effects on city performance, yet little is known about how its character and magnitude vary across the urban landscape. A major barrier to related research, planning and governance has been the lack of lighting data at the city extent, particularly at a fine spatial resolution. Our aims were therefore to capture such data using aerial night photography and to undertake a case study of urban lighting. We present the finest scale multi-spectral lighting dataset available for an entire city and explore how lighting metrics vary with built density and land-use. We found positive relationships between artificial lighting indicators and built density at coarse spatial scales, whilst at a local level lighting varied with land-use. Manufacturing and housing are the primary land-use zones responsible for the city's brightly lit areas, yet manufacturing sites are relatively rare within the city. Our data suggests that efforts to address light pollution should broaden their focus from residential street lighting to include security lighting within manufacturing areas.


Although white women have only recently entered the work force, their black counterparts have participated throughout American history. Differences between their rates of participation have been recorded only for the post-1890 period and analyzed only for the post-1940 period due to a lack of available data. To remedy this deficiency my work explores female labor supply at the dawn of emanicipation, 1870 and 1880, in seven southern cities, using data drawn from the manuscripts of the population census. Probit regression techniques demonstrate that economic and demographic variables explain only part of the difference between black and white women and, as in the findings of contemporary research, race is shown to be an important factor. Several explanations are discussed, in particular one relying on socialization differences which are termed a "legacy of slavery."


This essay explores the nineteenth-century traffic and exchange of fossils and natural-historical objects between province and metropolis as represented by two very different geological writers of the period, the fossil collector Gideon Mantell and the novelist Thomas Hardy. The men are connected through Mantell's The Wonders of Geology , the sixth edition of which (1848) Hardy read and utilised for his descriptions of the geological past in his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). These two texts demonstrate a powerful investment in determining the meaning of the geological object according to the social and geographical spaces in which it is discovered, displayed, and discussed, so that the scientific object becomes the site around which complex cultural politics coalesce and sit in tension. In its consideration of the relationship between place and meaning in science, and in its focus on scientific material culture, this essay attempts to disrupt the current spotlight on the interrelationships between scientific law and narrative pattern in Victorian literary studies. Instead, it hopes to contribute to a discussion of the ways in which the novel's attention to scientific objects rather than narratives made it an important site of epistemological enquiry into the basis of scientific knowledge and the inseparability of that knowledge from the discourses and spaces which produced it.


We studied the effect of supplementary food on time allocation, breeding success and parental body condition in Black Redstarts Phoenicurus ochruros in the Alps, NW. Italy. Time budgets of both cJ' cJ' and 9 9 were significantly affected: individuals provided with supplementary food spent less time foraging and more time preening and vigilant. In accordance with predictions on the difference between sexes in parental investment, cJ' cJ' increased the time spent singing by 5 to 26% and reduced the number of feeds to nestlings from 5.4 to 2.0 h-l. Females showed a higher rate of nestling feeding wich offset reduced provisioning of nestlings by the cJ' cJ' . The breeding success of control and supplemented pairs was similar. The mass of adults was monitored using electronic balances placed near the nest cavity. Control pairs decreased in mass while adults given supplementary food showed an increase. The difference between control and fed adults was greater in cJ' cJ' than 9 9. The hypothesis of an adaptive reduction in mass by all individuals due to programmed anorexia is not supported. We discuss the alternative hypothesis of a cost of reproduction utilizing estimates of energy expenditure from time budgets.


The discussion between the automotive industry, governments, ethicists, policy makers and general public about autonomous cars' moral agency is widening, and therefore we see the need to bring more insight into what meta-factors might actually influence the outcomes of such discussions, surveys and plebiscites. In our study, we focus on the psychological (personality traits), practical (active driving experience), gender and rhetoric/framing factors that might impact and even determine respondents' a priori preferences of autonomous cars' operation. We conducted an online survey (N=430) to collect data that show that the third person scenario is less biased than the first person scenario when presenting ethical dilemma related to autonomous cars. According to our analysis, gender bias should be explored in more extensive future studies as well. We recommend any participatory technology assessment discourse to use the third person scenario and to direct attention to the way any autonomous car related debate is introduced, especially in terms of linguistic and communication aspects and gender.


Segment routing has recently been proposed in the IETF toward making IP/MPLS networks service oriented while simplifying network operations. Segment routing computes paths at the source node using node identifiers and adjacency identifiers conjoined together to create a source-routed path. We propose a scalable transport paradigm as an enabler toward implementing segment routing in provider networks. We propose omnipresent Ethernet, our modification of carrier Ethernet (which is based on source-routed, binary-routed labels embedded in an Ethernet frame), to implement segment routing. We identify some of the scalability issues of the segment routing proposal in the context of source-routing overhead. To absolve scalability issues of segment routing, two routing schemes that implement multidomain source-routing techniques are proposed. The hierarchical segment-routing (H-SR) scheme is proposed, which deploys a limited number of special nodes called swap nodes that are capable of label swapping to implement routing. The swap-node placement problem is formulated as an integer linear program to minimize the total routing distance within a network. Three heuristic techniques for swap-node selection based on centrality paradigms are presented. The H-SR scheme is further improved by a proposed multisegment-routing (M-SR) scheme that assumes all nodes in the network to be capable of label swapping. The H-SR and M-SR schemes are shown to significantly enhance the scalability of segment routing. A test-bed is built using carrier Ethernet hardware to support segment routing that validates the implementation of the proposed schemes. A simulation model to evaluate the schemes from a scalability perspective and their associated trade-offs is presented.


The application of open-lung biopsy to a patient with diffuse pulmonary infiltrate is dependent on whether it affords to a specific information and leads to a change in therapy. To evaluate the impact of open-lung biopsy on diagnosis and treatment of diffuse pulmonary infiltrates, we conducted a retrospective review of 37 patients undergoing this procedure during a 8-year period. There were 26 males and 11 females, at an average age of 53 years (ranging from 3 months to 79 years). Diagnostic yield was 97.2%, and biopsy yielded a specific diagnosis in 25(67.6%) patients and a change in therapy in 19 (51.4%) patients. Complications developed in 4 (11%) patients and the rate was higher under local anesthesia (3/4). Seven patients died, but no one was related to biopsy procedure. A specific diagnosis was obtained in 4 (50%) of the 8 immunocompromised patients, and a change in therapy occurred in 2 (25%) of these patients after biopsy, but these findings could not affect the survival rates. A specific diagnosis was obtained in 21 (72.4%) of the 29 nonimmunocompromised patients and a change in therapy occurred in 17 (58.6%) patients in this group. Five (83%) of 6 patients, who lacked definite tissue diagnosis by transbronchial biopsy, achieved confirmed diagnosis by open-lung biopsy. Open-lung biopsy in patients with a diffuse pulmonary infiltrate is an accurate diagnostic tool and frequently leads to a change in treatment. The procedure can be performed with acceptable morbidity and mortality in nonimmunocompromised patients, but should be used conservatively in immunocompromised patients.


This study sought to understand how to best move and deliver goods in compact urban centers while maintaining the other functions of a vibrant, healthy center for social and commercial exchange. The research approach utilized focus groups of unionized truck drivers who work in urban and suburban centers in metropolitan Seattle. The objective of this qualitative research was to gain participants' insights and perspectives about the design, regulatory, enforcement, and management factors that facilitate or impede their ability to carry out their jobs. This study represents the only documented case in which truck drivers themselves were asked about issues affecting freight movement and compact urban form, issues of increasing importance in metropolitan areas seeking to reinforce existing urban centers and create new ones out of low density suburban areas. Drivers provided specific observations and suggestions in the categories of curb space and alley management, pedestrian interaction, building entrances, loading docks and signage, zoning and design, and technology and equipment.


We propose a novel structure for a gain-flattening filter, in which a conventional long-period fiber grating (LPFG) and a phase-shifted LPFG are written closely. The transmission characteristics are investigated in the case of a closely arranged configuration. For the fabrication of a phase-shifted LPFG, a UV-trimming method to control the amount of the phase shift is examined theoretically and experimentally. Finally, a 67-mm-long LPFG gain-flattening filter designed for an erbium-doped fiber amplifier is fabricated and the measured spectrum is shown.


SUMMARY In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), rainfed agriculture is the dominant source of food production. Over the past 50 years much agronomic crop research has been undertaken, and the results of such work are used in formulating recommendations for farmers. However, since rainfall is highly variable across seasons the outcomes of such research will depend upon the rainfall characteristics of the seasons during which the work was undertaken. A major constraint that is faced by such research is the length of time for which studies could be continued, typically ranging between three and five years. This begs the question as to what extent the research was able to 'sample' the natural longer-term season-to-season rainfall variability. Without knowledge of the full implications of weather variability on the performance of innovations being recommended, farmers cannot be properly advised about the possible weather-induced risks that they may face over time. To overcome this constraint, crop growth simulation models such as the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM) can be used as an integral part of field-based agronomic studies. When driven by long-term daily weather data (30+ years), such models can provide weather-induced risk estimates for a wide range of crop, soil and water management innovations for the major rainfed crops of SSA. Where access to long-term weather data is not possible, weather generators such as MarkSim can be used. This study demonstrates the value of such tools in climate risk analyses and assesses the value of the outputs in the context of a high potential maize production area in Kenya. MarkSim generated weather data is shown to provide a satisfactory approximation of recorded weather data at hand, and the output of 50 years of APSIM simulations demonstrate maize yield responses to plant population, weed control and nitrogen (N) fertilizer use that correspond well with results reported in the literature. Weather-induced risk is shown to have important effects on the rates of return ($ per $ invested) to N-fertilizer use which, across seasons and rates of N-application, ranged from 1.1 to 6.2. Similarly, rates of return to weed control and to planting at contrasting populations were also affected by seasonal variations in weather, but were always so high as to not constitute a risk for small-scale farmers. An analysis investigating the relative importance of temperature, radiation and water availability in contributing to weather-induced risk at different maize growth stages corresponded well with crop physiological studies reported in the literature.


The cost effective monitoring of habitats and their biodiversity remains a challenge to date. Earth Observation (EO) has a key role to play in mapping habitat and biodiversity in general, providing tools for the systematic collection of environmental data. The recent GEO-BON European Biodiversity Observation Network project (EBONE) established a framework for an integrated biodiversity monitoring system. Underlying this framework is the idea of integrating in situ with EO and a habitat classification scheme based on General Habitat Categories (GHC), designed with an Earth Observation-perspective. Here we report on EBONE work that explored the use of NDVI-derived phenology metrics for the identification and mapping of Forest GHCs. Thirty-one phenology metrics were extracted from MODIS NDVI time series for Europe. Classifications to discriminate forest types were performed based on a Random Forests™ classifier in selected regions. Results indicate that date phenology metrics are generally more significant for forest type discrimination. The achieved class accuracies are generally not satisfactory, except for coniferous forests in homogeneous stands (77-82%). The main causes of low classification accuracies were identified as (i) the spatial resolution of the imagery (250 m) which led to mixed phenology signals; (ii) the GHC scheme classification design, which allows for parcels of heterogeneous covers, and (iii) the low number of the training samples available from field surveys. A mapping strategy integrating EO-based phenology with vegetation height information is expected to be more effective than a purely phenology-based approach.


This work presents a new theoretical framework and prediction tool for multipactor in multi-carrier systems. This is of capital importance for satellite communication applications, which demand for higher number of channels operating at high power levels. Such a tool may help to reduce, or completely avoid, the risk of having an RF breakdown in operation, with the subsequent loss of signal quality or even completely damage of the device. Currently not much is known about multipactor for multi-carrier signals. This Thesis throws light on some basic multipactor mechanisms such as the electronic discharge build-up or its connection with signal distortion. A new non-stationary multi-carrier theory, based on current statistical multipactor studies, is presented. Unlike existing ones, this theory is able, for the first time, to model both electron creation and absorption processes. It constitutes the first multipactor theory for multi-carrier signals which is able to fully characterize the electron dynamics, such as the time evolution of the electronic density, as well as creation and absorption rates. A prediction method, the quasi-stationary method, is proposed for the automatic searching of the combination of carrier phases which yields the lowest breakdown level. It is based on the non-stationary theory for singlecarrier signals together with a genetic global optimizer. The quasi-stationary prediction method returns the worst-case phase combination plus a breakdown level for arbitrary multi-carrier signals with any number of carriers. The quasi-statinary method has been assessed with experimental tests on ad-hoc Ku-band rectangular waveguide samples with different multi-carrier signals. Additionally, the results have been contrasted with the popular 20-gap-crossing rule. The quasi-stationary method yields much better prediction accuracy than the 20-gap-crossing rule. Prediction errors for both techniques have been found to be 1 dB and 4 dB, respectively. The non-stationary theory is formulated for one-dimensional parallelplate case, but in principle can be adapted to other geometries and signals, which opens a future research line for extending it to more complex applications.


The objective of this study was to relate the spread of the human population of Sydney to the natural history of the koala population in Campbelltown on its south-western edge. The first ever report of a koala by Europeans was near Bargo, just south of Campbelltown in 1798, making this population of great historical interest. In 1986, a housing development was approved in the Campbelltown suburb of Wedderburn, which threw the local koala population into the public and political spotlight. This peri-urban koala population is under threat from traffic from the Appin Road, potential construction of the Georges River Parkway and increasing urbanisation. Retaining a connection to other koala populations to the south is also important to conserving Campbelltown koalas. State Environmental Planning Policy Number 44 i.e. SEPP 44 (Koala Habitat Protection) requires two independent data sources to map koala habitat in a Local Government Area. Our study examined the value of using multiple independent data sets, generated from different methods, to establish the location of koalas in the Campbelltown area, and beyond, and derive a more reliable distribution map than those currently available. This provided a test of the value of independent data sets to establish the location of a population of a species that has had such an impact on the planning system. Further, this study gave us the ability to utilise modelled koala habitat from the local area, employ information from long-term population studies, particularly home range studies, enlist community data to support koala conservation, and assess the effectiveness of koala habitat conservation efforts in the area. The long-term future of this koala population depends on maintaining the integrity of koala habitat throughout the region, as well as in the Campbelltown LGA. Only a long-term commitment to koalas and their habitat will prevent the natural history of Campbelltown's koalas transforming into an unnatural future over the next 210 years.


Adapting technological environments to users is a concern since Mark Weiser launched the concept of ubiquitous computing and, in order to do that, is necessary to understand users' characteristics. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to present a study about students' mobility habits within a university campus, having the intention of getting insights towards the best place to set an interactive public display and of predicting the main characteristics of the audience that will be present on that spot in forthcoming periods. Thus, the envisioned results of this work will allow the adaptation of the contents exhibited on the device to the audience. To perform the study, a set of logs of accesses to the university's Wi-Fi was used, data mining techniques were implemented and forecasting models were built, using the line of work suggested by the CRISP-DM methodology. As result, students profile were built based on past wireless accesses and on their scholar schedules, and three time series models were used (Holt-Winters, Seasonal Naive and Simple Exponential Smoothing) to predict the presence of students on the envisioned spot in future periods.


Concentration is one of the important operations in food industry with applications
ranging from the production of condensed milk, paste and purees from fruits. Using
an agitated thin film evaporator allows for the concentration to be undertaken at low
temperature and short residence time with reduced heat loss for heat sensitive
material.
The parameters that influence an agitated thin film evaporator process are steam
temperature; product feed rate, vacuum pressure, rotor speed, physical and thermal
properties of the product and the overall heat transfer coefficient. These indicate that
the process is a very complex heat and mass transfer an operation that requires
optimization in order to reduce the cost and maintain the product quality
The overall heat transfer coefficients (U,) of pineapple juices (fresh juice of 11.3,
14.4, 19.9. and 27.3 "Brix) were determined using a laboratory scale agitated thin
film evaporator (ATFE) under different rotational speeds (200, 400, and 600 rpm),liquid flow rates (25, 35, and 45 Ilh), and at constant steam and vacuum pressure.
The Experiments were conducted with water and (U,) for water determined under the
different parameters.
S ~ meq uations to predict the Thermophysical properties of the pineapple juices at
different concentrations were derived from the experimental data (density and
viscosity) and others taken from the literature.
The overall heat transfer coefficients (U,) were determined based on inner heat
surface area. The magnitude of (U,) ranged from 390 to 2700 W / m" CTh. e
performance of the evaporator was evaluated and determined .Some of the pineapple
juices quality parameters before and after concentration were studied for effects of
concentration by ATFE .The juice color was very little changed based on the
Hunter lab values measurements, while the vitamin C contents were decreased by
10.1 %, and 23.13% for the 16.8 and 40.3 "Brix ,respectively


Branded pharmaceutical manufacturers frequently offer "copay coupons'" that insulate consumers from cost-sharing, thereby undermining insurers' ability to influence drug utilization. We study the impact of copay coupons on branded drugs first facing generic entry between 2007 and 2010. To overcome endogeneity concerns, we exploit cross-state and cross-consumer variation in coupon legality. We find that coupons increase branded sales by 60+ percent, entirely by reducing the sales of bioequivalent generics. During the five years following generic entry, we estimate that coupons increase total spending by $30 to $120 million per drug, or $700 million to $2.7 billion for our sample alone.


Background DMARDs are the most important medicine in treatment of autoimmune disease. However, excessive using DMARDs lead to decrease immune-function, which increasing opportunistic infection, such as EBV, CMV viremia. Recent study show the imbalance between T help cell 17 (Th17) and regulatory T cell (Treg cell) is a pivotal cause of autoimmune disease and correction of this imbalance to be a potential therapy. So whether low dose IL-2 restores the balance of Th17/Treg and improve immune function? Objectives To investigate the effect of low-dose IL-2 on Treg and effector lymphocyte subsets in patients with connective tissue disease (CTD) combined EBV or CMV viremia. Methods Clinical records of 70 CTD patients combined EBV or CMV viremia, hospitalized from May 2012 to January 2017 in the second Hospital of ShanXi medical university (Group infection), were analyzed. The group includes 21 patients who received rhIL-2 after infected CMV or EBV, and 12 continue receiving DMARDs. As control, we selected 70 health persons (Group health) whose age matched with group infection, 70 naïve CTD patients with no treatment (Group treatment-naïve), and 70 CTD without viremia patients having glucocorticoid and DMARDS medical history (Group Treatment-DMARDS). The two groups' underlying diseases are matched with the Group infection. The absolute numbers and proportions of peripheral lymphocytes (T cells, B cells, NK cells, the total number of the three cells, CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells), and CD4+ T cell subsets (Th1, Th2, Th17, Treg cells and Th1/Th2, Th17/Treg) were examined by flow cytometry. Results 1. The absolute count of Treg cells in the Group treatment-naïve was significantly low and Th17/Treg was notable increase compared with the Group health (P<0.05). The peripheral lymphocytes and Treg cells are notable low (P<0.05) and Th17/Treg was significantly increase (P<0.05) in the Group treatment-DMARDs compared with the Group treatment-naïve. 2. The peripheral lymphocytes, CD4+T cells subsets except Treg cells and Th1/Th2, Th17/Treg are significantly decrease in the Group infection compared with the Group treatment-DMARDs (P<0.05). While the absolute count of Treg cell was no different between the two groups. 3. After the course of rhIL-2 treatment, there were significantly increase of the peripheral lymphocytes and CD4+T cells subsets (P<0.01). Th17/Treg was significantly low after treatment. Compared with the patients who continue receiving DMARDs, all lymphocytes subsets had a rising trend in patients receiving rhIL-2 treatment. Conclusions The decrease of Treg cell number and imbalance of Th17/Treg may contribute to the pathogenesis of CTD. Excessive using glucocorticoid and DMARDs may augment this imbalance. On the other hand, these medicines decrease immune function, which leads to EBV and CMV viremia. Over the treatment of rhIL-2, immune function was improved and there was a more significant increase in the absolute count of Treg cells than Th17, and a consequently restore the balance of Th17/Treg. References Miyara M, Ito Y, Sakaguchi S. TREG-cell therapies for autoimmune rheumatic diseases. Nature reviews Rheumatology 2014;10:543–51. Klatzmann D, Abbas AK. The promise of low-dose interleukin-2 therapy for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Nature reviews Immunology 2015;15:283–94. Disclosure of Interest None declared


Personality characterizes an individual through a set of traits that influence his or her behavior. We propose a model of personality that can be used by intelligent, automated actors able to improvise their behavior and to interact with users in a multimedia environment. Users themselves become actors by exercising high-level control over their own intelligent agents. We propose different dimensions of personality that are based on the processes that intelligent agents usually perform. These dimensions are rich enough to allow the specification of an interesting number of characters able to improvise and react differently although they are put in the same context. We show the influence that the personality traits have on an actor's behavior, moods and relationships. An application of the Computer Virtual Theater, the Cyberoaft, is used to test our model.


To the Editor: Myiasis remains prevalent worldwide (1,2) and is infestation by larvae from fly species of live or dead tissues from vertebrate hosts (1,3,4). In humans, myiasis most frequently causes infection of exposed ulcers or traumatic wounds (1). In industrialized countries, most cases occur in tourists returning from tropical and subtropical areas (5,6), but autochthonous cases still exist. Several bacterial species have been associated with fly larvae, including species of the family Enterobacteriaceae and, more recently, Schineria larvae (7,8). S. larvae, a gram-negative bacterium, has been grown from larvae of Wohlfahrtia magnifica, a fly species responsible for myiasis (7,8). Its 16S rRNA gene has been amplified from a bacterial community of species involved in aerobic thermophilic bioprocesses (9). We report a case of S. larvae bacteremia in a man with wound myiasis.

On June 12, 2006, a 76-year-old man who had type 2 diabetes mellitus was examined at the emergency department of Drome North Hospitals, Romans, France, for inflammation of chronic cutaneous ulcers of both legs and intermittent fever. The patient lived alone in a rural, crowded area and had received no medical care. He reported owning sheep and denied any recent travel outside France. At the time of admission, his body temperature was 37.8°C, he was malodorous, and he had swelling and painful wounds on both legs. Maggots were found in the leg wounds, scrotum ulcers, and at the anal margin. A radiographic examination of both legs did not show any osteolytic lesion. Laboratory data were as follows: C-reactive protein 71 mg/L (reference value, <5 mg/L), leukocyte count 18.2 × 109/L (81% granulocytes), platelet and erythrocyte counts within normal limits, glucose 200 mg/dL, hemoglobin A1c level 13.8%. Serum protein electrophoresis showed hypoalbuminemia (20 g/L) and hypergammaglobulinemia (16.9 g/L) but no monoclonal gammopathy. Two blood samples and exudate from the leg wounds were collected for microbial cultures.

The patient was given a combination of amoxicillin-clavulanate and ofloxacin, and his cutaneous wounds were cleaned. After 24 h of incubation, leg wound cultures grew methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus, and the 2 blood cultures yielded the same S. aureus strain and an oxidative gram-negative bacterium (Romans strain). The Romans strain was found to be highly susceptible to β-lactams, aminoglycosides, chloramphenicol, cotrimoxazole, fluoroquinolones, and colistin. The antimicrobial drug therapy was changed to oxacillin and ofloxacin. The patient's condition improved rapidly, and his leg wounds healed progressively during hospitalization. He was discharged 27 days after initiation of antimicrobial therapy, which he continued for 7 more days. The patient was reexamined 1 month later and was considered cured.

The Romans strain was sent to the bacteriology laboratory at Grenoble University Hospital for identification. Using the API 20NE and Vitek II ID-GNB systems (bioMerieux, Marcy L'Etoile, France), we obtained, respectively, a "good" identification of Psychrobacter phenylpyruvicus and a "very good" identification of Oligella ureolytica. The nearly complete 16S rRNA gene of the Romans strain was amplified and sequenced; primers were Fd1 and rp2 (10) (GenBank accession no. {"type":"entrez-nucleotide","attrs":{"text":"EF120377","term_id":"119029908","term_text":"EF120377"}}EF120377). A BLAST search that used the network service of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) showed 99.6% identity between the determined gene sequence of 16S rRNA and that of S. larvae type strain L1/68T (accession no. {"type":"entrez-nucleotide","attrs":{"text":"AJ252143","term_id":"6689335","term_text":"AJ252143"}}AJ252143). The 16S rRNA gene sequences from several species belonging to the Gamma Proteobacteria order were aligned by using the ClustalW package (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). A consensus phylogenetic tree was constructed from Jukes-Cantor evolutionary distances based on the neighbor-joining method using Bacillus subtilis as the root. The Romans strain clustered with previously characterized S. larvae strains (Figure).

Figure

Phylogenetic position of the Romans strain within the Gamma Proteobacteria, determined by using Jukes-Cantor evolutionary distance calculation and neighbor-joining tree method. Bootstrap values (based on 500 steps) are indicated. GenBank accession no. ...

Our report demonstrates that S. larvae can induce bacteremia in humans. Because S. larvae has been associated with only fly larvae, we can speculate that bacteremia originated from maggots infesting the patient's wounds. We cannot affirm that W. magnifica was the fly species involved because maggots were not saved for identification. Phenotypic identification of S. larvae is tedious (7). Because it is an asaccharolytic species, erroneous identification may occur. We can speculate that difficulties in phenotypic identification of this species may explain why it has not been previously reported as a potential human or animal pathogen.

In conclusion, myiasis remains an unresolved problem in animals and humans worldwide. Physicians and microbiologists should be aware of the possibility of S. larvae bacteremia and should specifically search for S. larvae infection in myiasis patients. Also, animal myiasis is still responsible for severe economic losses to the livestock industry worldwide. The occurrence of S. larvae bacteremia in animals with myiasis may explain the evolution from disease to death, especially in chronically infected animals.


This essay explores the significance of literary representations of African American hair as a marker of identity and cultural legacy. By situating an examination of hair within a long-ranging tradition of children's literature from Jessie Fauset and W. E. B. Du Bois's magazine, The Brownies' Book, to more recent children's books, Camille Yarbrough's Cornrows (1979), Simi Bedford's Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991), and Carolivia Herron's Nappy Hair (1997), among others, the essay demonstrates how descriptions of hair embrace racial pride and, at times, enforce perceived standards of racial inferiority. It argues that African American characters relations with their hair illustrates a dynamic of acceptance and rejection of external, white understandings of beauty, which is also associated with belonging to more than one culture, African and Western. The essay further argues that more recent depictions of black hair in children's literature have directly challenged the negative, or conflicted, perceptions of African American beauty by celebrating its difference.


Since the 1960s revisionist Australian histories have sought to redress the perceived imbalance of earlier accounts. These histories have predominantly argued that invasion and dispossession typify contact between Aborigines and settler Australians. Concerning contact between missionaries and Aborigines, missionaries are held to be largely responsible not only for the dispossession of Aboriginal spirituality, but for the current dysfunction at many former mission sites. Furthermore, much scholarly work and commentary over the last three decades assumes a crude binarism in respect to Aboriginal religious beliefs and Christianity. Traditional, or classical Aboriginal belief systems and adherence to the Christian faith are held to be antithetical. Implicitly more than explicitly, but apparent nevertheless, is the accompanying understanding that Christian beliefs displace Aboriginality. Aborigines, therefore, are either spiritually traditional or Christian, not both. That is, to be authentically Aboriginal one cannot be Christian and vice versa. While revisionist studies have been useful in contesting earlier assessments of the mission era, they have become established as yet another orthodoxy.
Much evidence suggests that the interface between missions, Christianity and Aborigines is more nuanced than this new orthodoxy permits. Taking its cue from this evidence, this thesis investigates the premise that many Aboriginal people find Christianity important and that their belief in Christianity is a legitimate expression of Aboriginality. This thesis challenges the dominant reading of missionary impact through a case study of the contact between Presbyterian missionaries and Pitjantjatjara people at Ernabella Mission (1937 to 1974) in the far north-west of South Australia. A close reading of archival material from Ernabella and recollections of Pitjantjatjara people who associated with the mission reveal that missionaries at Ernabella attempted to preserve tribal life through a policy of minimal intervention, that the presence of the mission and its policy allowed Pitjantjatjara people to remain connected to their country, and that Pitjantjatjara people exercised agency in their relationships with missionaries and in their engagement with Christianity. This research found that at Ernabella (and elsewhere) those who are Elders of the church are most often those also responsible for upholding traditional Law. The alleged boundaries, therefore, and dislocation between Aborigines and Christianity, are not so clearly defined. Throughout the mission era Aboriginal people expressed Christianity in myriad and innovative ways and have continued to do so in the post-mission era. Recognising this, studies of other missions may also find histories which contest the established position.


Over 3000 pesticides are registered for use in South Africa. Many studies have highlighted the movement of pesticides to agricultural crops from the point of application into non-target environments, particularly surface and groundwater resources. Exposure to pesticides can lead to serious human health and environmental effects. It is therefore important to identify critical areas where specific pesticides may result in a high risk of exposure to humans or the environment. Crop specific pesticide use data were obtained from a market research company and integrated into a geographical information system detailing the distribution of agricultural crops in South Africa as determined by an agricultural census performed in 2002. By estimating the total application of a specific pesticide to all crops produced in a magisterial district, it was possible to generate maps which provide an estimate of the application rate of over 200 pesticides per magisterial district. These maps were intersected with an agricultural land-cover map to provide a refined map giving details of the spatial distribution of pesticide use across the country. These maps are the first of their kind in South Africa and provide a spatial overview of the likely distribution of specific active ingredients based on the distribution of crops throughout the country. While there are a number of limitations and uncertainties associated with the data used to produce these maps, these are not unique to South Africa, and similar methodologies have been applied in more developed countries.Supplementary files: Dabrowski Supplementary Tables


Detecting whether a talker is speaking his native language is useful for speaker recognition, speech recognition, and intelligence applications. We study the problem of detecting nonnative speakers of American English, using two standard speech corpora. We apply approaches effective in speaker verification to this task, including systems based on MLLR, phone N-gram, prosodic, and word Ngram features. Results show equal error rates between 12% and 20%, depending on the system, test data, and choice of training data. Asymmetries in performance are most likely explained by differences in native language distributions in the corpora. Model combination yields substantial improvements over individual models, with the best result being around 8.6% EER. While phone Ngrams are widely used in related tasks (e.g., language and dialect ID), we find that it is the least effective model in combination; MLLR, prosody, and word N-gram systems play stronger roles. Overall, results suggest that individual systems and system combinations found useful for speaker ID also offer promise for nonnativeness detection, and that further efforts are warranted in this area.


The preface, " Performing Brain Surgery: The Problematic Nature of Endings in Short Fiction," deals with the many and varied difficulties short story writers encounter when attempting to craft endings. Beginning with Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor and moving to my own work, I discuss some of the obscure criteria used to designate a successful ending, as well as the more concrete idea of the ending as a unifying element. Five short stories make up the remainder of this thesis: "In-between Girls," "Crocodile Man," "Surprising Things, Sometimes Amusing," "Good Jewelry," and "The Angular Degrees of Freedom."


Abstract. We demonstrate a record bandwidth high energy supercontinuum source suitable for multispectral photoacoustic microscopy. The source has more than 150  nJ/10  nm bandwidth over a spectral range of 500 to 1600 nm. This performance is achieved using a carefully designed fiber taper with large-core input for improved power handling and small-core output that provides the desired spectral range of the supercontinuum source.


"This study evaluates the potential impact of the recent rise in world food prices on the Moroccan economy and possible policy options to respond to it. The study focuses mainly on the poverty effects of such an external shock and the possible policy responses to it. A new social accounting matrix (SAM) and a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model have been developed for this study based on micro-level data in combination with sectoral and economywide data. The CGE model simulations show that while increased world food prices hurt poor consumers, the general equilibrium effect of welfare loss is modest. Agricultural producers gain, and benefits to small farmers are especially large. The simulation of import subsidies shows that while such policy options can temporarily stabilize domestic prices, the benefits to consumers are at the expense of producers. However, the model results indicate that there are win-win options for Morocco if policies are based on a longer-term objective. Direct transfers to poor consumers, combined with increased public investment in agriculture to improve agricultural productivity, is a win-win strategy that the government should consider. Low productivity in staple crop production is the dominant reason for poverty among Moroccan farmers. Improving this productivity can also benefit poor consumers by lowering domestic food prices." from authors' abstract


This article considers the value and implications of inquiry-driven learning for secondary and postsecondary education. In response to ongoing interest in and the need to foster inquiry in English education, we share the course model of "Ethnography of the University." This writing-intensive course asks students to become authors of their own educations; to identify problems facing the campus community; to conduct semester-long, original research projects; and to make proposals for change. Through conducting inquiry projects, students come to see themselves as writers with real audiences, to personalize an often-impersonal education, and to connect academic with everyday concerns. Two undergraduate researchers describe their projects on student life—projects that emerged from and have continued beyond the course. By describing "Ethnography of the University" and sharing undergraduate research projects, we argue that inquiry helps students see themselves as agents over their own writing and learning. When students become agents, they can more easily write their way beyond a semester, course, or educational experience—and into the stance of writers.


It may be asked whether and how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them. There is no reason, as it seems to me, why the emotional factor of conviction should enter into this question at all. It is surely possible to throw oneself into a line of thought and to follow it wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity, or, if the reader prefers, as an advocatus diaboli, who is not on that account himself sold to the devil. —Freud


We present a new algorithm to mesh an arbitrary piecewise linear complex in three dimensions. The algorithm achieves an O(n log∆ + m) runtime where n, m, and ∆ are the input size, the output size, and spread respectively. This represents the first non-trivial runtime guarantee for this class of input. The new algorithm extends prior work on runtime-efficient meshing by allowing the input to have acute input angles (called creases). Features meeting at creases are handled with protective collars. A new procedure is given for creating these collars in an unstructured fashion, without the need for expensive sizing precomputation as in prior work. The collar surface dividing these two regions is represented implicitly using surface reconstruction techniques. This new approach allows the collar to be dynamically generated , allowing the whole algorithm to run in a single pass. For inputs with∆ bounded by a polynomial in n, this runtime is optimal.


Scour at the foot of the seawalls (toe-scour) is one of the major causes of structural damage to sea-walls, involved in 12% of directly-observed damages. For engineering purposes, simple empirical approaches are often used to predict toe-scour but these are often limited. And whilst data from field observations and experimental studies are both very valuable, they both suffer from practical limitations. Experimental work for example is limited by similarity constraints and full scale experiments are expensive, without allowing detailed control of individual parameters. Numerical simulations therefore offer an interesting alternative but they are not without challenges. The first problem is the correct modelling of free surface dynamics including wave breaking processes. The second is modelling the scour development process and its feedback on the flow pattern. Finally, to be practically useful, the method should be robust and use reasonably affordable computational resources for full-scale simulation.This thesis describes the development of an integrated numerical model is based on OpenFOAM – an open source CFD platform – which includes free surface dynamics, sediment transport and bed deformation processes. The free surface dynamics are modeled using the Volume of Fluid (VOF) method with wave generation and absorption capabilities based on the use of a relaxation zone. The sediment transport process is calculated based on the bed load and suspended load approach and solved in the bed boundary using the Finite Area Method. The bed deformation is calculated using the sediment continuity equation, and the mesh is updated to take account the bed change.Several calibration tests have been performed to determine the model capabilities. Firstly, a sensitivity analysis was performed to characterize the influence of mesh size and numerical schemes on wave propagation. Secondly, several methods were compared for eliminating unwanted wave reflection. The model was then used to compute the wave-induced mass transport velocity in a closed flume, and the results compared with the theoretical solution and experimental data. It is shown that the failure to model correctly the pressure condition at the free surface leads to an overestimate of the drift close to the surface, which has to be compensated by an excessive negative drift in the body of the fluid. Fourth, the bed shear stress calculation is tested by studying the case of an oscillatory flow boundary layer. Two methods for computing the bed shear stress have been devised and tested with different mesh sizes. Finally, a simulation is carried out using all of these developments, to simulate the problem of erosion induced by the unsteady flow resulting from a dam-break, and the results are compared with an experimental test case. The sediment transport occurs mainly in the form of sheet flow, and a new method of simulating sheet flow has been devised, based on an analogy with dispersion in a fluidized bed. This approach has the advantage over previous models that it does not require any ad-hoc modification of existing sediment transport models. Finally, the complete model is applied to the case of waves impacting on a sea wall, first for horizontal bed case and second for the case of a sloped beach. The hydrodynamic properties of the flow are analyzed for both cases without using the bed deformation module. Then the scour model with movable bed is included in the simulation, for both cases.


Paths lead us down different ways. The decisions we make when choosing a path are responsible for getting us to where we had planned. Over the past three decades, higher education in Mexico has gone through several paths of academic and organizational reconfiguration and restructuring. These paths have been the product of exogenous and endogenous factors linked to policies and politics, which have led to the creation of groups and complex structures in universities. The path through which Mexican higher education now moves is restrictive, and demands changes and results in order to maintain state funding and support. This research consists of the analytical description of some processes of change in the structures of public universities following reforms introduced in the 1990s towards better quality and evaluation. From a perspective of institutional change and public policy analysis, I have taken international change policies as a guide to understand the patterns and processes observed in higher education in Mexico in recent years. I describe the processes of change towards quality, evaluation and diversification of higher education institutions and the paths taken by Mexican universities. In closing, I enumerate the determining factors in this series of changes that allow us to take a look at the current state of higher education in Mexico and possible guidelines for its analysis.


Robo advice, the automated provision of financial advice without human intervention, holds the promise of cheap, convenient and fast investment services for consumers – freed from human error or bias. However, retail investors have limited capacity to assess the soundness of the advice, and are prone to make hasty, unverified investment decisions. Moreover, financial advice based on rough and broad classifications may fail to take into account the individual preferences and needs of the investor. On a more general scale, robo advice may be a source of new systemic risk. At this stage, the existing EU regulatory framework is of little help. Instead, this paper proposes a regulatory "sandbox" – an experimentation space – as a step towards a regulatory environment where such new business models can thrive. A sandbox would allow market participants to test robo advice services in the real market, with real consumers, but under close scrutiny of the supervisor. The benefit of such an approach is that it fuels the development of new business practices and reduces the "time to market" cycle of financial innovation while simultaneously safeguarding consumer protection. At the same time, a sandbox allows for mutual learning in a field concerning a little-known phenomenon, both for firms and for the regulator. This would help reducing the prevalent regulatory uncertainty for all market participants. In the particular EU legal framework with various layers of legal instruments, the implementation of such a sandbox is not straightforward. In this paper, we propose a "guided sandbox", operated by the EU Member States, but with endorsement, support, and monitoring by EU institutions. This innovative approach would be somewhat unchartered territory for the EU, and thereby also contribute to the future development of EU financial market governance.


Eurostat data shows that children and elderly are especially at risk of being in poverty. In 2004 the average rates of poverty risk in the European Union for these groups were about 19%. In Poland, the rate was 29% for children and only 7% for the elderly. We examine the role of the tax-benefit system in explaining this situation and analyse how much child poverty figures could change under several reform scenarios. In 2005, families with children were mainly supported by a means-tested family allowance and some supplements. This was extended in 2007 with the introduction of a non-refundable child tax credit. Making use of the European tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD, this paper assesses the consequences of the recent reform in Poland. We examine theoutcome in comparison to child policies in three other European systems and show that poverty reduction would have been more pronounced, if child policies were changed along the lines of the system in France or the United Kingdom. The Austrian system - relying primarily on universal benefits - would bring about a similar reduction in the poverty rate but with much greater reduction in the poverty gap. The paper presents detailed distributional analysis under the different systems assuming the cost of "importing†each of them to be the same as that of introducing the 2007 reform.


Non-enzymatic oxidative damage of DNA in the male germ cell line is believed to be one of the key mechanisms of premature apoptosis of spermatozoa and in pathogenesis of male subfertility. High motility of sperm cells requires high activity of energetic metabolism and mitochondrial functioning that makes them subject to excessive influence of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Low volume of cytoplasm, where antioxidative enzymes, such as glutathione peroxidase (GPx), catalase and superoxide dismutase work, complicates the delivery of antioxidants into different compartments of a spermatozoon. Hence, the protection of sperm against oxidative stress is provided mostly by antioxidants produced by male reproductive tract and antioxidative machinery of the oocyte. The lifespan of sperm cells is to a significant degree regulated by Ras dependent cell signaling pathways, such as phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt. Factors, inducing oxidative stress in human spermatozoa and their regulation mechanisms are discussed.


Clinical bottom line: Currently available literature on canine pyothorax management is low quality, so it is difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from it. With this in mind, however, the literature does suggest that invasive medical management (thoracic drainage and lavage via in-dwelling thoracostomy tubes, and antimicrobial therapy) and surgical management (in conjunction with antimicrobial therapy) of canine pyothorax provide better long-term survival rates compared to non-invasive medical management (antimicrobial therapy, with or without thoracocentesis) alone. More definitive conclusions cannot be made until higher quality evidence (prospective, randomised, blinded) is available on the topic.


Thank you very much for the generous introduction, and I am delighted to be here in Albany. I have to tell you that I accepted this invitation by e-mail from Mr. Skinner, and I do think it is the first invitation I have ever accepted via e-mail, so there is always a first in life, and I am delighted to be here. I come from Rhode Island, our own state in the Union, and we bring with us a very unique history. In 1663, the State of Rhode Island was granted a charter by King Charles II, (1) and as a result of that we had tremendous independence from the British Crown right up to and through the American Revolution. We were not satisfied with that, however. Rhode Island declared its independence from Britain on May 4, 1776, two months before the remaining colonies. (2) We have two signors of the Declaration of Independence (3)--a number that will not match the fellow to the left of me, I believe. (4) However, Rhode Island also refused to participate in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia or provide a signatory for the United States Constitution (5) unless and until the Bill of Rights was made a part of that Constitution. So we're a tough little bunch down there. (Laughter) The colony was so impressed with its charter from King Charles II that we did not adopt a state constitution until 1842. (6) We remained a parliamentary form of government in which the legislature held all of the power. (7) It appointed the governor at one point in time, it certainly elected the judges in all of the courts, it exercised plenary power, and it exercised judicial power at times. (8) And there was a clause when we finally adopted the constitution, the clause that good old King Charles included in his charter, that all powers that were not specifically assigned remained with the General Assembly. (9) In 1841 and 1842, an Irishman by the name of Thomas Wilson Dorr led the Dorr Rebellion, in which those who were not granted the franchise, could not participate in the government, and had no constitution, rebelled. (10) It was not successful except that it did lead within two years to the adoption of the first constitution in Rhode Island, which became effective in May 1843. (11) Again, as I indicated, however, the General Assembly, the legislature, had the ultimate authority over all things in our state, and that remained in force until 2005. (12) One of the cases that we decided as a court in 1999 reaffirmed all of what I have just explained to you, (13) and it was not a popular decision, I can tell you. The Supreme Court of Rhode Island is a constitutional court. (14) We consist of five members, the chief justice and four associate justices. (15) One of our responsibilities under the constitution is to issue advisory opinions. The constitution provides that the justices will render their opinion on a question of law whenever propounded by the governor or either chamber of the legislature. (16) That is a concept that certainly flies in the face of the case or controversy doctrine, (17) a concept all of you hopefully have learned while you are here in Albany, and I am sure you have. It is not a case or controversy; it is an advisory opinion. It is a signed opinion; each of us signs our names to it. It is not supposed to have any precedential value, but let me tell you, you know it does. It certainly does. And we have been required I think ten times since I joined the court in 1997, eight or nine times I guess, to render advisory opinions to either the governor or either house of the General Assembly. These, in my opinion, relate to the structure of our government, to the very organic foundations of Rhode Island and its thirty-nine cities and towns. And they are the tough calls. In 1999, we were asked whether the Ethics Commission--we didn't have an ethics commission until the constitution was amended in 1986 (18)--could promulgate a regulation that basically altered the constitution. …


Airborne high spectral resolution lidar observations over Europe during the EUCAARI-LONGREX field experiment in May 2008 are analysed with respect to the optical properties of continental pollution aerosol. Continental pollution aerosol is characterized by its depolarisation and lidar ratio. Over all, the measurements of the lidar ratio and the particle linear depolarization ratio of pollution aerosols provide a narrow range of values. Therefore, this data set allows for a distinct characterization of the aerosol type "pollution aerosol" and thus is valuable both to distinguish continental pollution aerosol from other aerosol types and to determine mixtures with other types of aerosols.


Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning systems in museums are called to properly control important microclimate parameters, not only for visitors' wellbeing, but mostly for the preservation of works of art. Accordingly, in case of interruptions to Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning systems, due to maintenance interventions or drawbacks, it is essential to guarantee the acceptable break from service to which possible damages for the works of art are related. In this regard, the aim of this work is to introduce a simple indicator to support curators in regulating the stipulation of contracts with external companies, a more effective management and maintenance of the Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning systems will thus be achieved in order to preserve the works of art, by integrating into the contracts economic penalties related to the system's service break period. The feasibility of this new procedure has been checked by means of a case study involving the "Museo Regionale" of Palermo (Italy).


A brilliant guide to fostering creativity and business innovation, The Ten Faces of Innovation shows how any individual can become an experienced architect, storyteller, caregiver or cross-pollinator...just four of the ten characters that can be adopted in different situations to create a broader range of solutions to business problems. At the start of the creative process you might be the 'anthropologist', going into the field to see how customers use and respond to products; later you might be the 'hurdler', who overcomes obstacles on the way to the finished product. The book explains with examples from business how adopting these characters can beat nay-sayers who stifle innovation.


This paper examines an experimental study of optimal nozzle design for a dissolved air flotation system. The term optimal is in reference to field studies of bubble-floc agglomeration in an actual DAF tank. The primary mechanism of floc removal has been identified as bubble clustering. By understanding the significance of bubble clustering it was possible to design a nozzle that could be successfully operated at reduced saturation pressures while still achieving improved levels of turbidity in the post-DAF water.


Contemporary sport policy in Sweden is the result of a century-long relationship between national and local governments and voluntary, non-profit and membership-based club sport which has resulted in extensive financial support to organised sport. The relationship is defined by an 'implicit contract' in which the government decides on the extent and the purpose of the funding, and the recipient, the Swedish Sports Confederation, determines the details of the distribution and administration. These funds are distributed to 20,164 sport clubs and their 3,147,000 members in exchange for the realisation of social policies on public health and the fostering of democratic citizens. While an important cornerstone of the relationship has been the autonomy and self-determination of the recipient of the funds in their capacities as civil society organisations, recent decades have witnessed an increase in demands on performance outputs. These demands have explicated a wider social responsibility for organised sport and entailed a system for follow-up and control of the results of the government support via key performance indicators. In these ways, the corporatist agreement and consensus traditionally characterising the public–civil society interaction has been accompanied by governing mechanisms associated with neo-liberal ideologies which in turn are putting the sustainability of the implicit contract to the test.


Ventilation systems often host bacteria and fungi that may be dangerous for the health of exposed people. Essential oils are one means among others to prevent microbial development. Used as a basis for many traditional therapies, these odorant plant extracts have been studied extensively in the medical domain and their effectiveness in the treatment of numerous pathologies has been demonstrated. As opposed to most antimicrobial agents currently used for air disinfection, essential oils are not toxic. With a view to proposing an indoor air purification method based on the germicidal and odorant properties of essential oils, we selected: the pathogenic test strains : Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa the Afnor NF T72-281 protocol for the disinfection of surfaces through the air, which showed the germicidal activity of antimicrobial agents used in gaseous phase a specific experimental apparatus some of the most active essential oils : mountain savory, thyme thymol, oregano (vulgare) as well as cinnamon bark. The protocol was applied to a chemical reference compound of hospitals, the formaldehyde as well as to phenol rich essential oils. We demonstrated that the tested essential oils in gaseous phase do have a lethal effect on all bacteria that have been exposed to them, even in small doses. In buildings, controlled diffusion of rigorously selected essential oils in volatile form would validly contribute to: occupant comfort, through improvement of the perception of indoor air quality, the prevention of microbial contamination, microbiological purification of air and sanitation of ventilation systems.


This paper contains the presentation of a virtual environment which allows rapid design and verification of human prostheses. Initially the platform was created for inferior limb prostheses, but it is usable for any kind of prostheses. The system enables a virtual testing of the prosthetic models, control systems, sensors and a comparison between the real prosthesis and the virtual one. In a virtual environment, we can perform tests on larger sets of configurations, in a very short time and at a very low cost.


Geochemical fractionation of the larger rare earth elements tends to follow simple trends, and, as a result, the relative abundance of these ele ments in the majority of rocks and minerals can be plotted as a smooth curve. An exception to this general rule is predictable in the case of the mineral cerianite, which can be expected to contain anomalously high concentrations of cerium (present in the quadrivalent state). The present paper demonstrates that this expected anomaly does not occur in the cerianite found in an Iveland pegmatite, and the significance of this fact is discussed.


This study aims to determine the level of burnout feelings of supervisors working in GAP region. The population of the research composed of elementary school supervisors who were serving in the cities of the Southeastern Anatolia Region. Since the research was done on the entire population, no sampling was needed to be applied. The Maslach Burnout Inventory developed by Maslach and Jackson (1981) was used to collect data about the level of burnout experienced by the elementary school supervisors. Results showed that in general the elementary school supervisors experienced a medium level of burnout. The results also show that the elementary school supervisors experience a medium level of burnout in the dimension of "emotional exhaustion", a low level of burnout in "depersonalization" accomplishment" they experienced a burnout somewhere around the border


The article examines how courts in different jurisdictions have addressed restrictive employment covenants for physicians and proposes a new approach drawn from the third-party beneficiary analysis in contract law. Physicians hired into existing practices often must sign substantial non-compete agreements. In evaluating the enforceability of any restrictive covenant, courts consider, among other factors, the agreement's effect on the public. Surprisingly, the vast majority of jurisdictions treat the "public interest" analysis vis-a-vis physician restrictive covenants no differently than any other commercial restrictive covenant; this approach neglects the impact that such agreements can have on a physician's existing patients. Although at first glance physician restrictive covenants may seem like a somewhat insular area of the law, it is an area that is reflective of some of the primary forces acting on the perceived health care "crisis" in this country - the often contradictory pressures of serving patients and running a profitable business. This article suggests courts should consider a physician's incumbent patients as quasi third-party beneficiaries to the physician's employment agreement when deciding whether to enforce the physician restrictive covenant. This more nuanced approach will allow courts a finer balance of the business interests of physicians against the often weighty public interest in protecting physicians' relationships with their patients.


Muscle wasting is a serious complication of several human diseases, including diabetes, cancer, sepsis, and AIDS. Previous work implicated activation of the transcription factor nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) in protein loss in cultured myotubes. Cai et al. created transgenic mice in which NF-κB was excessively activated [MIKK (muscle-specific expression of IKK, which is the kinase that phosphorylates the inhibitor, IκB, thus allowing activation of NF-κB) mice] or repressed [MISR (muscle-specific expression of IκB superrepressor) mice], specifically in skeletal muscle. The MIKK mice exhibited profound muscle loss, and crossing the MIKK mice to the MISR mice reversed this phenotype. Several parameters indicated that muscle loss in the MIKK mice was due to increased catabolism of muscle proteins: high circulating and excreted amounts of protein breakdown products, high oxygen consumption and heat production, and high protein turnover in ex vivo assays. Furthermore, gene microarray analysis indicated that the MIKK mice had increased expression of genes encoding proteins implicated in protein ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation, including the muscle-specific ubiquitin ligase MuRF1. Crossing the MIKK mice to MuRF—/— mice showed partial rescue of the muscle-wasting phenotype of the MIKK mice. MISR mice showed resistance to muscle loss caused by either denervation or injection of Lewis lung carcinoma cells. Neither the MISR nor the MIKK mice exhibited any changes compared with wild-type mice in insulin sensitivity when fed a normal or high-fat diet. These mice reveal that the NF-κB is clearly responsible for at least one pathway that leads to muscle wasting but does not appear to be a central regulator of insulin sensitivity in muscle. D. Cai, J. D. Frantz, N. E. Tawa Jr., P. A. Melendez, B.-C. Oh, H. G. W. Lidov, P.-O. Hasselgren, W. R. Frontera, J. Lee, D. J. Glass, S. E. Shoelson, IKKβ/NF-κB activation causes severe muscle wasting in mice. Cell 119, 285-298 (2004). [Online Journal]


Condensation of a vapor to a liquid on a cold surface that is not wet completely by this liquid leads to the formation of an array of droplets. If the surface is heterogeneous in its physical properties (especially its interfacial free energy), the patterns of these arrays reflect this heterogeneity. The distribution of droplets of water (condensation figures or CFs) observed by optical microscopy on a surface can be correlated with the molecular structure of that surface. The substrates used to investigate the formation and morphology of the CFs were patterned, self-assembled monolayers of different alkanethiolates on gold and of alkyl siloxanes on glass. Analysis of CFs is a valuable nondestructive technique for characterizing heterogeneities in surfaces.


In recent years, policy makers worldwide have begun to acknowledge the potential value of insights from psychology and behavioral economics into how people make decisions. These insights can inform the design of nonregulatory and nonmonetary policy interventions—as well as more traditional fiscal and coercive measures. To date, much of the discussion of behaviorally informed approaches has emphasized "nudges," that is, interventions designed to steer people in a particular direction while preserving their freedom of choice. Yet behavioral science also provides support for a distinct kind of nonfiscal and noncoercive intervention, namely, "boosts." The objective of boosts is to foster people's competence to make their own choices—that is, to exercise their own agency. Building on this distinction, we further elaborate on how boosts are conceptually distinct from nudges: The two kinds of interventions differ with respect to (a) their immediate intervention targets, (b) their roots in different research programs, (c) the causal pathways through which they affect behavior, (d) their assumptions about human cognitive architecture, (e) the reversibility of their effects, (f) their programmatic ambitions, and (g) their normative implications. We discuss each of these dimensions, provide an initial taxonomy of boosts, and address some possible misconceptions.


Programmers spend a significant part of their time debugging, yet most of them simply add print statements and avoid debugging tools. Although the user interface of debuggers has improved significantly in the past decade, their basic debugging methodologies have changed little. This thesis examines single-process sequential debuggers and attempts to elucidate their weaknesses. Target-state exploration and conditional program execution are essential idioms that cannot be practiced effectively with existing debuggers. State exploration seeks answers to queries such as detecting a linked list containing a negative element and finding where that element was added. Previous work has focussed on the use of source-language interpreters and graphical interactive exploration as solutions to the state-exploration problem, but these cannot effectively search for a negative element in a linked list, specify a search for it, etc. This thesis describes Duel, a very high-level language designed specifically for state exploration in a debugger. Duel allows complex state queries to be expressed succinctly and it produces meaningful output. The traditional C operators are extended to process sequences of values, and special operators manipulate these sequences in novel ways. Over a hundred programmers have used Duel and their experience substantiates the importance of state exploration and of the inadequacies in previous approaches. Conditional execution that detects state changes in complex data structures is at the crux of advanced debugging, and it is useful to specify such conditions in Duel. Such use of Duel raises important semantic and implementation problems. These problems, possible solutions, and Duel extensions are discussed.


Romance causative verbs like Italian fare are not morphological affixes, but they exhibit several properties that suggest that they are not always 'main' verbs. Indeed, recent analyses of fare have relied on treating it as a sort of affixal causative, exploiting incorporation to capture some of the clause-union effects with respect to case and thematic roles (Guasti 1996). In this paper, causativizing fare is treated as the (non-affixal) realization of a causative little v° head. We argue that a refinement of the little v° approach, involving two distinct external-argument selecting v° heads, permits a fine-grained analysis from which many of the subtle properties originally identified in Kayne (1975) and subsequent work simply fall out. In particular, a minor enrichment of the inventory of v° heads allows us to account for a broad range of syntactic and semantic facts without recourse to any lexicon-internal operations on argument structure, which have been a mainstay of previous analyses. Most importantly, the different properties of the two distinct v° heads proposed here predict certain interactions between fare and its complements, and this leads to an account of a previously unnoticed constellation of facts about the interaction of fare with unaccusative and unergative verbs.


Exceptionally preserved organic fossils are commonly associated with clay-rich horizons or directly with clay minerals. It has been posited that interactions between clay minerals and organic tissues inhibit enzymatic reactions or protect carcasses in such a way that decay is impeded. However, interactions between clay minerals and the biological agents of decay, especially bacteria, may be at least as important to preservation potential. Here we show that clays of particle size <2 μm in suspensions exceeding 10 mg/ml in concentration inhibit the growth of Pseudoalteromonas luteoviolacea , a marine heterotrophic bacterium involved in the decay of marine animals. Such clay-microbe interactions can contribute to exceptional preservation, and specific examples may play a role in shaping the distribution of Konservat-Lagerstatten through time.


ABSTRACT Seawater greenhouses (SWGH) utilize seawater or saline/brackish groundwater for cooling the microclimate and providing freshwater for irrigation through a humidification–dehumidification desalination process. The overall effectiveness of the SWGH greatly depends on the effectiveness of its condenser. The present study provides a good review on the available simulation models of the SWGH condenser and proposes a multiple linear regression model to predict the dehumidification rate of the condenser in the Oman SWGH. Four climatic and operational input variables were considered, including solar irradiance, inlet moist air temperature, inlet humidity ratio, and inlet air mass flow rate. The results showed that the model accurately predicts the dehumidification rate when compared against experimental values [a mean predictive error (PE) = −0.127 kg/h and root mean square error (RMSE) = 4.691 kg/h]. The model also outperformed some other model in several accuracy indicators such as PE, mean absolute predictive error, RMSE, R2, index of agreement and fractional variance.


This thesis examines the responses of the educational system of Cyprus to increasing student diversity. The study it reports was set in a sensitive socio-political context, within which the previously homogenous Greek-Cypriot society faced an unprecedented and unanticipated rise in net migration rates from the mid-1990s. The need to respond effectively to the challenge of increasing population diversity and to issues of ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural diversification was evident within the wider Cypriot society, and was reflected within the educational system. Despite this, there is an identified gap in knowledge and research on the topic of increasing student diversity in Cyprus.With these concerns in mind, the research focused on exploring the experiences of secondary school students of ages 11-14, who had recently arrived in Cyprus and were categorised as foreign-speaking. The aim was to explore factors hindering and promoting these students? inclusion in schools through identifying barriers and resources to their presence, participation, achievement and socialisation. The study used a qualitative exploratory case study design. Data were collected in three secondary schools through a multi-method approach that considered the views of various school stakeholders, particularly the ?voices? of foreign-speaking students regarding their school experiences. Data analysis involved the constant comparative method which allowed the consistent scrutiny of findings from various research methods using a theoretical framework based on the idea of inclusive education. A model was developed and used to discuss the perceived barriers and resources to foreign-speaking students? inclusion. Barriers and resources were identified as stemming from educational policy, educational practice in schools and classrooms, students? traits and characteristics, and finally students? home and community environments. The barriers created a context of inequality of opportunities for foreign-speaking students? school experiences and future life achievement in comparison to their other classmates.The findings of the study provide a basis for evaluating exclusionary pressures that prevent foreign-speaking students from engaging meaningfully with their school lives equally to other classmates, and propose that inclusive education within the Cypriot educational context can have a wider scope that does not rest only with traditional research on special needs education. It also confirms the importance of conducting contextualised educational research on issues of inclusion, as relevant literature presents inclusive schools as organisations that should address challenges in reflection to their own cultural and political context. The thesis also suggests that the identified barriers and resources have implications for policy and practice that need to be addressed in order to adopt more inclusive educational pedagogies for foreign-speaking students, and considers it important that the formulation of any response should be informed in reflection to similar international studies. Its implication lies with identifying unused resources that could otherwise be mobilised to enhance schools? response to increasing diversity. Finally, it makes recommendations for future research on the identified resources for promoting inclusion. Such research should be directed at further exploring the factors contributing to providing equal educational opportunities for all learners within an approach that promotes respect for diversity and considers diversity as a source of inspiration and learning.


This article is a survey of clause linking strategies in the South Arawakan language Baure. Since both coordinate and subordinate adjoined clauses are similar to main clauses, the major focus of the paper is on embedded clauses. Embedded clauses, which are formed by means of nominalization of the predicate, include relative clauses and complement clauses. The specific embedding strategies are contrasted structurally and semantically, which reveals how similar relative and complement clauses are in Baure.


A novel folded monopole antenna is investigated numerically and experimentally. The proposed antenna comprises a short folded monopole suitably shaped at the base with two vertical grounding probes. This small antenna is shown to have a fractional impedance bandwidth up to 125% (1.6 GHz to 7.5 GHz) for a 10 dB return loss. An interesting compromise between impedance bandwidth and pattern control is found by tuning a double side bevel at the base of the monopole, the position of the feeding point and its distance from the ground plane. Measurements and simulations are in good agreement and show a dramatic improvement in terms of impedance bandwidth compared with planar and L-shaped monopole antennas. Impedance and radiation characteristics make this novel folded monopole antenna a remarkable candidate for indoor applications where the wideband coverage of different systems is required. The working bandwidth covers a large number of wireless communication systems including GSM 1800, Personal Communication System (PCS1900), Universal Mobile Communications System (UMTS), the 2.4 GHz (2400–2484 MHz) and 5.2/5.8 GHz (5185–5350/5725–5875 MHz) bands for WLAN communication, Wireless Local Loop (3.4–3.6 GHz), the US-NII bands and the lower bands allocated to ultra-wideband communications.


Climate engineering (CE) is increasingly becoming an area of broad public policy interest within international and domestic climate policy discussions. In addition to receiving greater attention within regulatory contexts, there is a gradual shift toward greater support for nationally supported research programs on CE technologies and assessments. Despite the increased salience of CE, the issue has been largely absent from the Canadian public policy agenda. This paper argues that a national strategy for CE research ought to be developed as part of Canada's broader climate strategy. At the centre of this strategy must be a commitment to ensuring a high level of public trust in the underlying science and a policy process that is open and responsive to public views.
The development of a national CE research strategy is necessary because governance of CE cannot be undertaken in the absence of greater knowledge of CE technologies and their potential impacts. In addition, development of other climate responses, such as mitigation and adaption strategies, will need to be understood in light of the risks of CE, but also the risks associated with forgoing these technologies. As CE technologies become subject to increasing international oversight, the Canadian government needs to develop a greater understanding of these technologies as part of a coherent national position on CE.


Introduction.

The author having collected a very large number of specimens of these fishes from the Yorkshire Coal Measures, many being nearly perfect, whilst several of the species are new to science, he thought that it might be of interest to place on record the result of his finds, especially as they have enabled him to complete a restoration of the fish, showing nearly the whole of its anatomy; and it is further worthy of note that one of his specimens shows the internal skeleton of the lobe of the pectoral fin,* and enables him to confirm Dr. A. Smith Woodward's † description of the anatomy of this fin, and this is of particular interest, as, besides the author's, there is only one other specimen from the Talbragar Beds (Jurrassic ?), New South Wales, which throws any light on this interesting and important point.

General Anatomy of the Fish.

Form and Proportions.

In form the fish is deeply and irregularly fusiform. Of the total length the head occupies one-fourth, the body two-fourths, and the tail the remaining fourth. The greatest depth of the body is at a point immediately posterior to the first dorsal fin, the depth here being about one-fourth the total length of the fish.

Head.—External Anatomy.

The head is peculiarly characteristic in form, one of the chief peculiarities being the slope of the cranial roof bones. The cranial roof is divided into a posterior or parieto-occipital (Pa.) and an anterior or frontal (Fr.) portion. These meet ...


This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study exploring how mental models of a mechanoid robot using dog-inspired affective cues behaviour emerges and impacts the evaluation of the robot after the viewing of a video of an assistive robotics scenario interaction with the robot. It discusses this using contrasting case studies based on the analysis of explicitation interviews with three participants. The analysis suggests that while for some users zoomorphic cues may aid in initial interactions, they need to be framed in an authentic interaction, highlighting the actual capabilities of the robot as a technological artifact, and how these impact the everyday life and interests of the potential user.


For the first time, GSK's solvent selection guide (SSG) has been explored for leather making from the view of sustainable manufacturing. A novel "Solvent Selection Tool" has been developed to identify sustainable non-aqueous media for leather making from the solvents listed in GSK's SSG. The developed solvent selection tool has been structured into four segments and each one has a particular screening criterion. Preliminary screening-I, based on the cumulative score of GSK's SSG, enabled the shortlisting of 41 solvents from 110. Screening-II, based on toxicity (LD50 value >5000 mg kg−1 of rat), has filtered the number of solvents down to 16 from 41. The effect of the selected 16 solvents on the hydrothermal stability of the skin matrix (screening-III) shows that 9 solvents, namely propylene carbonate, 1,2-propane diol, 2-butanol, ethyl lactate, tetraethylene glycol, ethyl acetate, ethanol and dimethyl carbonate, have no negative impact, whereas the other 7, namely glycerol, DMGMBE, diethylene glycol, propyl acetate, 1,3-propane diol, 1,4-butane diol and 2-propanol, have a negative impact on thermal stability. Propylene carbonate, dimethyl carbonate, ethanol and 2-butanol show superior tanning performance (screening-IV) in terms of mass transfer efficiency (>99% w/w), hydrothermal resistance (104 °C) and leather quality compared to the other selected solvents. The internal comparison results show that propylene carbonate is an ideal medium for a sustainable tanning process. The propylene carbonate based tanning process enjoys zero discharge of water/chromium(III), avoids the usage of fungicides in the tanning process and is ecologically acceptable.


A lipid signaling enzyme promotes the growth, vascularization, and metastasis of tumors in mice. This is an interview with Michael Frohman, senior author of a Research Article that appears in this issue of Science Signaling. Frohman's group has investigated the role of the enzyme phospholipase D1 (PLD1) in the tumor microenvironment. PLD1 produces the lipid phosphatidic acid, which acts as a second messenger in many signaling pathways and promotes proliferation, survival, and metastasis of cancer cells. When tumor cells were implanted into mice lacking PLD1, the resulting tumors were smaller and less vascularized than those that developed in wild-type mice and produced fewer lung metastases. Treating wild-type mice with a PLD1 inhibitor also inhibited tumor growth and metastasis, suggesting that inhibiting the activity of PLD1 might be a useful approach for treating human cancers.


The numbers of learners studying Arabic in the U.S. have increased more than any other language over the last ten years. As a critical language, important for strategic political and economic reasons, Arabic has received considerable support from the Departments of State and Education (Jackson & Malone, 2009; Wiley, 2007). However, Arabic is also a prominent heritage language, important for cultural and interpersonal reasons to the families and communities who speak it and for whom it is a binding force (Fishman, 2001; Van Deusen-Scholl, 2003). Nevertheless, research on learners of Arabic and their learning processes is still very limited. Existing studies have compared Arabic heritage learners' motivation and the structure of their language knowledge with that of non-HLLs (Husseinali, 2006; Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky, 2010), but HLL research has hardly addressed the complex social and cultural influences on their learning processes (He, 2010; Montrul, 2010). Drawing on investment in language learning (Norton Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2000) as a theoretical lens, this study asks how learners and their families construct Arabic as heritage and its implications for their beliefs and practices. Focusing on students in a public charter middle school in the southeast U.S. who are studying Arabic as a foreign language, this study seeks to bring together language learning, identity construction, and the challenges and implications of biliteracy for Arabic learners from a range of backgrounds in an effort to understand the complexity of the Arabic learning process. To that end, it uses ethnographic methods including interviews with five focal families, class observations, and surveys and strives for grounded theory. In constructing heritage, each learner and family, from a range of national and cultural backgrounds, must balance priorities regarding the multiple varieties of Arabic, religious literacy, and the role of Arabic in local and global contexts. Results should shed light on the role of social context in language and literacy development for Arabic and comparable LCTLs, contribute to theory regarding the relationship between identity construction and language learning for heritage learners, and suggest approaches to supporting young learners of critical and heritage languages to promote a more multilingual society. INDEX WORDS: Language learning, Identity, Identity construction, Investment, Motivation, Second language literacy, Heritage languages, Heritage language learners, Critical languages, Foreign languages, Cultural capital, Arabic, Religious identity, Islam, Literacy, Biliteracy, Religious literacy CONSTRUCTING ARABIC AS HERITAGE: INVESTMENT IN LANGUAGE, LITERACY, AND IDENTITY AMONG YOUNG U.S. LEARNERS


Water under glaciers and ice streams often flows under pressure over an erodible substrate. Do the channel patterns produced by such flows resemble those of their free-surface counterparts? We studied pressure-driven water flow over an erodible, noncohesive bed using a physical model with a transparent, rigid lid. The dominant channel pattern produced in the model is a widely distributed, braided network of broad, shallow channels. Relative to braided networks formed under equivalent free-surface conditions, those formed under pressure show higher braiding intensity, greater channel curvature and variability of flow direction, and more sharply defined channel margins. Increasing discharge increases braiding intensity, maximum channel size, and variability of flow direction. Downstream pressure gradients are insensitive to changes in discharge, which may in part reflect a tendency to maintain constant shear stress in the channels, as observed in rivers. Lateral pressure gradients measured in the pressurized model indicate that pressure surfaces are highly variable in both magnitude and direction over time and space. When converted to equivalent topographic slope, these pressure gradients represent much larger lateral slopes than are typically produced in rivers, accounting for the wider range of channel directions in the pressurized-flow experiments.


Spectroscopic studies of high-redshift objects and increasingly precise data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are beginning to independently place strong complementary bounds on the epoch of hydrogen reionization. Parameter estimation from current CMB data continues, however, to be subject to several degeneracies. Here, we focus on those degeneracies in CMB parameter forecasts related to the optical depth to reionization. We extend earlier work on the mutual constraints that such analyses of CMB data and a reionization model may place on each other to a more general parameter set and to the case of data anticipated from the MAP satellite. We focus in particular on a semianalytic model of reionization by the first stars, although the methods here are easily extended to other reionization scenarios. A reionization model can provide useful complementary information for cosmological parameter extraction from the CMB, particularly for the degeneracies between the optical depth and either of the amplitude and index of the primordial scalar power spectrum, which are still present in the most recent data. Alternatively, by using a reionization model, known limits on astrophysical quantities can reduce the forecasted errors on cosmological parameters. Forthcoming CMB data also have the potential to constrain the sites of early star formation, as well as the fraction of baryons that participate in it, if reionization were caused by stellar activity at high redshifts. Finally, we examine the implications of an independent, e.g., spectroscopic, determination of the epoch of reionization for the determination of cosmological parameters from the CMB. This has the potential to significantly strengthen limits from the CMB on parameters such as the index of the power spectrum, while having the considerable advantage of being free of the choice of the reionization model.