Andesitic tuffites of Upper Triassic age (Rhaetian) are reported from carbonate platforms exposed in tectonic windows along the "Catena Costiera", west of Cosenza. These tuffites, described here for the first time, are interbedded in an evaporitic sequence and represent a distinctive character, relative to the other platforms of the "Appennino Calcareo" (African continental margin) to which they have been associated so far. REE and other immobile elements and their primary mineralogy indicate that the investigated tuffites are of andesitic composition and calcalkaline affinity. The geodynamic significance of these orogenic volcanics is discussed in the geotectonic environment and in the magmatic context of the "Neo-Tethys", generally accepted as an anorogenic setting. A possible hypothesis, needing more geological data, is that a subduction margin of the Palaeo-Tethys is considerably more displaced to the South-West and also a more westerly prolongation of the Palaeo-Tethys areas than so far reported for the Upper Trias.


This article begins with a discussion of how judgment-sharing agreements function generally and with examples drawn from antitrust cases. The article describes how sharing percentages constitute extra-judicial attempts to fix liability among defendants. It also discusses provisions in some judgment-sharing agreements that limit or even cut off signatories' ability come to individual settlements with plaintiffs. Next, the article treats plaintiffs' arguments that judgment-sharing agreements allow defendants guilty of profiting from an agreement in restraint of trade to benefit from a further agreement restraining settlement. The article examines the argument that judgment-sharing agreements remove any incentive that defendants have to cooperate with plaintiffs in exchange for favorable settlement terms. On the defendants' side, the article examines the contention that antitrust penalties create a coercive settlement environment where plaintiffs are able to poach defendants from the herd with less oppressive settlement offers in order to secure evidence against the remainder. The article examines the notion that such agreements further the public policy favoring settlements by ensuring all parties have a chance to settle and by eliminating the "game theory" aspect of the settlement process. Finally, the article distills what aspects of judgment-sharing agreements tend to be least controversial and lays out a framework for developing an agreement that is most likely to survive review in an antitrust proceeding.


Background The size distribution of urban locations has been a significant question in urban science. Walter Christaller, a German geographer, originally proposed the Central Place Theory (CPT) in 1933 (trans. 1966). Christaller was studying the urban settlements in Southern Germany and advanced this theory as a means of understanding how urban settlements evolve and are spaced out in relation to each other. The question Christaller posed in his landmark book was "Are there rules that determine the size, number and distribution of towns?" He attempted to answer this question through a theory of central places that incorporated nodes and links in an idealistic situation.


Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction examines the representation of selfhood in adolescent and children's fiction, using a Bakhtinian approach to subjectivity, language, and narrative. The ideological frames within which identities are formed are inextricably bound up with ideas about subjectivity, ideas which pervade and underpin adolescent fictions. Although the humanist subject has been systematically interrogated by recent philosophy and criticism, the question which lies at the heart of fiction for young people is not whether a coherent self exists but what kind of self it is and what are the conditions of its coming into being. Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction has a double focus: first, the images of selfhood that the fictions offer their readers, especially the interactions between selfhood, social and cultural forces, ideologies, and other selves; and second, the strategies used to structure narrative and to represent subjectivity and intersubjectivity.


The author discusses the origins of the street children in Lusaka, Zambia. Poverty is a necessary, but not sufficient' 'condition for children moving to the streets. Through an examination of published statistics and through qualitative analysis of questionnaire and interview data obtained from street children between the ages of four and eight, the author presents several reasons for the children being on the streets. Derived from the children's narratives, these include physical and or mental abuse such as being denied food, being forced 'to carry out heavy tasks or menial household duties, or ironically the desire to enjoy freedom with their friends on the streets. The author also discusses the survival strategies adopted by these street children, extending the causes to the extended family and society and their role in child development.


The public sphere is a social entity with an important function and powerful effects in modern, democratic societies. The idea of the public sphere rests on the conviction that people living in a society, regardless of their age, gender, religion, economic or social status, professional position, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, or nationality, should be able to publicly express their thoughts, ideas, and opinions about issues that matter to them and impact their lives. This expression should be as free as possible in form and function and should operate through means and methods that people themselves deem suitable, so not via channels that are official or state-sanctioned. The classic Habermasian idea of the public sphere is that it is used by private individuals (not officials or politicians) who should be able to converse with each other in a public-spirited way to develop opinions that impact state or public-body decisions and policies. Also contained within this classic idea is the conviction that public sphere conversations should be rational (i.e., logical, evidence-based, and properly motivated and argued using an acceptable set of rhetorical devices) in order to convince others of the usefulness of a position, statement, or opinion. In commonsensical, political, and journalistic understandings, the public sphere is a critical component of a democracy that enables ordinary citizens to act as interlocutors to those who hold power and thereby hold them to account. As such it is one of the elements whereby democracy as a system is able to claim legitimacy as the "rule of the people."
 Journalism's imbrication in the social imaginary of the public sphere dates back to 17th- and 18th-century Europe when venues like coffee houses, clubs, and private homes, and media like newspapers and newsletters were being used by a mixture of gentry, nobility, and an emerging middle class of traders and merchants and other educated thinkers to disseminate information and express ideas. The conviction that journalism was the key vehicle for the conveyance of information and ideas of public import was then imbedded in the foundations of the practice of modern journalism and in the form exported from Western Europe to the rest of the world. Journalism's role as a key institution within and vehicle of the public sphere was thus born. Allied to this was the conviction that journalism, via this public sphere role and working on behalf of the public interest (roughly understood as the consensus of opinions formed in the public sphere), should hold political, social, and economic powers to account. Journalists are therefore understood to be crucial proxies for the millions of people in a democracy who cannot easily wield on their own the collective voices that journalism with its institutional bases can produce.


With the release of Adobe Creative Suite CS6, Dreamweaver solidifies its role as the de facto tool of choice for anyone designing for the Web. Adobe Dreamweaver CS6: Visual QuickStart Guide uses a combination of task-based instruction and strong visuals to teach beginning and intermediate users how to create, design, and publish powerful, innovative Web sites with Dreamweaver. Leading technology authors Tom Negrino and Dori Smith take you step-by-step through the new features in Adobe Dreamweaver CS6, with completely revised sections on critical tools like styling pages with CSS and adding user interactivity with JavaScript dynamic elements. You'll also learn to take advantage of Dreamweaver's new ability to simultaneously design sites for a variety of screen sizes, including desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. If you're new to Dreamweaver and web design, you'll learn to create your first Web site, add text, style and lay out page content, manage styles, work with links, incorporate images, media, tables, forms, design site navigation, and so much more. If you're an experienced user, you'll find this a convenient reference to the new features of Dreamweaver CS6. Includes Free eBook and Video Access In addition to concise, step-by-step explanations of core tools and tasks, with plenty of helpful screen shots to keep you on track as you work, Adobe Dreamweaver CS6: Visual QuickStart Guide includes an hour-long HD video and eBook. In addition to reading about how to use the tool, you can watch it in action. You can also download digital versions of this book to load on the mobile device of your choice so that you can continue learning whenever and wherever you are. We provide you with both the ePub and PDF to ensure that you get the experience that best suits your viewing needs.


Background: Like any other drug abuse, opium use is known to have detrimental effects on oral health. Oral hygiene neglect in opium users can lead to tooth loss resulting in further functional, esthetic, and dieting problems. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess the association between tooth loss and opium addiction in a large-scale population. Materials and Methods: This study was part of an extensive study related to the risk factors of cardiovascular disease and conducted by the center for physiological research during 2012–2015 in Kerman. A total of 5900, 15–75-year-old individuals, were recruited by a single-stage random cluster sampling method. Factors including opium and smoking consumption, factors related to oral health, hygiene, and the number of missing teeth were examined. Data were collected through questionnaires, interviews, and physical examination. Results: Of 5900 individuals, 2662 (45.1%) were men and the rest were women, which 1011 individuals (17.1%) consumed opium. The prevalence of opium abuse was significantly higher in men. Regarding the oral dental indicators, the numbers of missing teeth (P < 0.001), decayed (P = 0.01), and the total index of decayed, missing, and filled teeth (P < 0.001) were significantly higher in addicts as compared to nonaddicts. The gingival index and community periodontal index scores were significantly lower in addicts. Addicted women had a higher prevalence of tooth loss. Conclusions: Opium addiction is associated with higher tooth loss, especially, in women opium users. Dental practitioners and health politicians should pay special attention to the oral health of addicts before tooth loss occurs.


A molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) monolith was initially prepared in a silica capillary mold by microwave irradiation. After the silica wall was etched away after polymerization, the resulting monolithic bar was embedded in a porous hollow fiber membrane tube (HFMT), in which a thin supported liquid membrane (SLM) was formed in the pores and an acceptor solution was filled in its lumen. It can be used to overcome the common water-compatibility problem in the MIP application by the developed hollow fiber–liquid–solid microextraction (HFLSME) system. The main factors affecting the selective extraction including extraction and desorption time, extraction solvent in the hollow fiber (HF) lumen, off-line desorption solvent, stirring rate and pH of the sample solution were investigated for HFLSME procedures in detail. Selectivity was also evaluated using the atrazine template molecule, its analogues and non-analogue. The extraction amount for each structurally-related pesticide including atrazine, 2-amino-4-methoxy-6-methyl-1,3,5-triazine, terbutylazine and ametryn was obtained about 10 times using atrazine-imprinted hollow fiber than that using non-imprinted hollow fiber, whilst no obvious difference was found for its non-analogues of metribuzin. The resulted hollow fibers were successfully applied to detect atrazine and its analogues in lake water coupled to high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and resulted in recoveries in the range of 72.8–113.2%, respectively.


Simulations have long been a part of the engineering process in both the professional and academic domain. From a pedagogic standpoint, simulations allow students to explore the dynamics of engineering scenarios by controlling variables, taking measurements, and observing behavior which would be difficult or impossible without simulation. One such tool is a CPU simulator used in Cal Poly's Computer Architecture classes; this software simulates an instruction accurate operation of a computer processor and reports statistics regarding the execution of the supplied compiled machine code. For the last several years Cal Poly's computer architecture classes have used a previous version of the CPU simulator that simulated the MIPS architecture. Although the previous system was a functional and useful tool, it had significant room for improvement. Although it was once common, the MIPS architecture is much relevant in industry today, especially in the face of its current competitors. From a technical standpoint the MIPS architecture is very similar to other common RISC architectures, but as current technology evolves the usefulness of a MIPS simulator in helping students understand the operation of modern CPUs will continue to diminish. Another place for improvement was in the design of the simulator itself. Since class assignments involving the CPU simulator often require the students to modify an intentionally incomplete version of the simulator, students must also understand the design of the simulator software itself. Though it is functional, the design of the MIPS simulator was minimally documented and the logical organization of the code obfuscates the system being simulated. This has been a source of frustration for not only students, but also for the professors who teach the courses in which the simulator is used. I sought to address these problems in 2 fundamental ways: first, by migrating the simulation to the ARMv7-A architecture and secondly, by doing a complete structural redesign of the simulator as to make the simulation architecture as transparent as possible vis-àvis the architecture being simulated.


Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.


Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are implicated in originating multiple deleterious processes, including inflammation of the airways, heart diseases, carcinogenesis, age-related neurodegenerative conditions, etc. Less commonly discussed are the beneficial and/or inevitable effects associated with their normal production in healthy cells and tissues. Lipid oxidation by ROS can be viewed as playing a dual role, including upregulation of certain proteins required for the protection of cells and tissues against abnormally high ROS concentrations, thereby constituting a negative feedback loop required for dynamic stability of homeostasis. Analysis of recent publications and the original experimental results provide convincing, if circumstantial, evidence in support of this hypothesis. Gradual decrease of membrane rigidity (bending modulus) accompanied by the change of other mechanical parameters was observed in a model system based on lipid membrane nanotubes (LNT) pulled out of planar lipid bilayers. The experimental system was optimized for real-time measurements of membrane mechanical parameters. The obtained results offer credible explanation to the seemingly paradoxical behavior of certain membrane proteins, such as intracellular divalent cation transporters, ryanodine receptors, or endosomal ion channels in response to oxidative stress; they also suggest novel treatment strategies involving combined use of rare lipid species and photosensitizers, e.g., in order to minimize collateral damage inflicted by phototherapy.


In the summer of 2010, the Federal Reserve's and the Swedish Riksbank's inflation forecasts were below the former's mandate-consistent rate and the latter's target, respectively, and their unemployment forecasts were above sustainable rates. Conditions in both countries clearly called for policy easing. The Federal Reserve maintained a minimum policy rate, soon started to communicate possible future easing, and in the fall launched QE2. In contrast, the Riksbank started a period of rapid tightening. I find the arguments against the Federal Reserve's easing and the arguments for the Riksbank's tightening unconvincing. Although the Swedish economy subsequently performed better than expected, probably an important reason was that the market implemented much easier financial conditions than were consistent with the Riksbank's policy rate path. Without the policy tightening, performance would have been even better. The U.S. economy meanwhile performed worse than expected because of factors other than monetary policy. Without the policy easing, performance would have been even worse. In short, the Riksbank did the wrong thing but was lucky, whereas the Federal Reserve did the right thing but was unlucky.


Semaphorins, originally discovered as guidance cues for developing axons, are involved in many processes that shape the nervous system during development, from neuronal proliferation and migration to neuritogenesis and synapse formation. Interestingly, the expression of many Semaphorins persists after development. For instance, Semaphorin 3A is a component of perineuronal nets, the extracellular matrix structures enwrapping certain types of neurons in the adult CNS, which contribute to the closure of the critical period for plasticity. Semaphorin 3G and 4C play a crucial role in the control of adult hippocampal connectivity and memory processes, and Semaphorin 5A and 7A regulate adult neurogenesis. This evidence points to a role of Semaphorins in the regulation of adult neuronal plasticity. In this review, we address the distribution of Semaphorins in the adult nervous system and we discuss their function in physiological and pathological processes.


Cluster of Pb and/or Zn deposits of the well-known Tri-State and Northern Arkansas Mississippi Valley Type (MVT) districts located north of the Arkoma basin and the Ouachita fold-thrust belt in north America are genetically connected to the Pennsylvanian-Permian Ouachita orogeny which triggered a South-North topographic gradient flow of basinal brines, leaching metal rich sediments en route. The objective of the research is twofold. First, to ascertain whether the organic-rich shales and sandstones from the study area provided metals during the mineralization event, which was coeval with the Ouachita orogeny. Second, to assess the depositional environment of the potential source rocks, which will shed light on their ability to sequester metals. The Pb isotope compositions of the ores (sphalerite) have been compared to their associated sedimentary rocks (Collier, Mazarn, and Polk Creek, Womble, Fayetteville, Stanley and Chattanooga shales and Jackfork Sandstone) and metal sources have been evaluated. In addition, the role of depositional redox of sedimentary rocks to sequester adequate amounts of metals has been appraised using redox sensitive trace elements (U, V, Mo, Cr, etc.). The Pb isotope compositions of the ores (sphalerite) have been compared to those of the sedimentary rocks of the Ouachita Mountains (Cambrian Collier Shale, Early Ordovician Mazarn Shale, Middle Ordovician Womble Shale, Late Ordovician Polk Creek Shale, Mississippian Stanley Shale, and Pennsylvanian Jackfork Sandstone) and the Ozark Plateau (Devonian/Mississippian Chattanooga Shale and Mississippian Fayetteville Shale).Metal sources evaluation indicate a mixing model of fluids sourced from high and less radiogenic rocks shown by a broad and linear trend of Pb isotope composition, with the Chattanooga rock and the Jackfork sandstone samples being the most prominent source rocks. Paleoredox proxies indicate deposition under anoxic and Euxinic conditions, which are favorable for metal enrichment. However, oxic-suboxic conditions are also indicated by other geochemical proxies, suggesting the possible first order control of primary production that has resulted in increased flux of organic matter. Additional factors such as the basin geometry, the rates of sediment accumulation, the post depositional alteration processes associated with diagenesis and low-grade metamorphism during the Ouachita orogeny might have overprinted the depositional signatures.


Physical analgesia has been used for the treatment of sports injuries. We previously developed a special patch (bumpy patch, BP) that adds pressure to the pain area, demonstrating its analgesic effects in various sports injuries. In this study, we further veri ed acute and chronic analgesic effects of the BP in 28 subjects (14–44 years of age, 15 males and 13 females) with various pain sites and histories of pain (knee, shoulder, low back, elbow and other joints; 6 months to 3 days). First, the trigger area with muscle induration or tenderness was identi ed in each subject by palpation, and each subject evaluated the degree of pain using the numerical rating scale (NRS). Then the BPs were applied to completely cover the pain area. The BP treatment was repeated at 2 to 3-day interval until all subjects reported no pain (NRS =  0), and the differences between preand post-treatment NRS values were compared for each treatment as the measure of the analgesic effect. Signi cant analgesic effects were observed in the rst and second BP treatments (P =  0.000774 and 0.00149, respectively). The third BP treatment also reduced the pain intensity, but the difference was not statistically signi cant (P =  0.3734). Some subjects reported mobilization of the pain area after the BP treatment, which was discussed in relation to the potential analgesic mechanism of the BP. These results indicate that the BP has acute and chronic analgesic effects and can be used for the treatment of sports injuries.


Interest is growing for graphene as a nanomaterial for electronic and composite applications. Increased production and use of graphene warrants development of strategies to detect and monitor its effect on human health and the environment. A quantification method using programmed thermal analysis (PTA) was developed for few-layer graphene (FLG) and graphene oxide (GO). FLG exhibited strong thermal stability, which allowed for easy detection in matrices consisting of thermally weaker background organic carbon. GO (50% oxygen content) exhibited a weaker thermal stability than FLG, making quantification more challenging in the presence of thermally similar background organic carbon. To resolve this, an in situ reduction method using a reducing agent (sodium borohydride) was developed to remove surface-bound oxygen from GO. This was used in combination with a digestate (SolvableTM) to create an optimized extraction method for recovering FLG and GO from complex organic matrices. FLG and GO will enter sewer systems due to their use by industry and in consumer products. We investigated the applicability of this method for quantifying FLG and GO in wastewater biomass because they are likely to accumulate in wastewater biosolids, as these are commonly the first exposure route for novel materials in the environment. Spiking 20 μg of FLG and GO into a 200 mg dried biomass L−1 wastewater solution resulted in recoveries of 52 ± 8% and 80 ± 6%, respectively. Results from this study can be applied to the development of extraction methods for graphene from similar complex organic matrices (e.g., lung tissue, in vitro/in vivo studies, algae, daphnia) to support a range of human and ecotoxicological studies.


Open source is one of the more interesting trends in software engineering today. The goal of the software engineering discipline is to increase efficiency in the development process, and maximize quality of the product. Open source development processes offer the potential for reducing costs for commercial enterprises. This master's thesis addresses how open source documents architecture, and how it uses documentation in general. Open source has a reputation of creating high quality software, but documentation of process and product is weak. This may be a hurdle for wider adoption of open source processes, as a thorough understanding of a product's qualities is central to its success. The goal is to better understand documentation requirements in open source. The study is based on participation to the Apache Derby open source project. Action research is the research method. The findings show that the Apache Derby documents its artifacts in a number of ways, but fails to aggregate it in a meaningful way. A rich set of written communication mediums compensate for this by giving developers the ability to understand the product over time. The study suggests the popularity and diffusion of an open source project may affect requirements for documentation.


Microbial photoautotrophs on glaciers engineer the formation of granular microbial-mineral aggregates termed cryoconite which accelerate ice melt, creating quasi-cylindrical pits called 'cryoconite holes'. These act as biogeochemical reactors on the ice surface and provide habitats for remarkably active and diverse microbiota. Evolution of cryoconite holes towards an equilibrium depth is well known, yet interactions between microbial activity and hole morphology are currently weakly addressed. Here, we experimentally perturbed the depths and diameters of cryoconite holes on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Cryoconite holes responded by sensitively adjusting their shapes in three dimensions ('biocryomorphic evolution') thus maintaining favourable conditions for net autotrophy at the hole floors. Non-targeted metabolomics reveals concomitant shifts in cyclic AMP and fucose metabolism consistent with phototaxis and extracellular polymer synthesis indicating metabolomic-level granular changes in response to perturbation. We present a conceptual model explaining this process and suggest that it results in remarkably robust net autotrophy on the Greenland Ice Sheet. We also describe observations of cryoconite migrating away from shade, implying a degree of self-regulation of carbon budgets over mesoscales. Since cryoconite is a microbe-mineral aggregate, it appears that microbial processes themselves form and maintain stable autotrophic habitats on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet.


Enzymatic hydrolysis of sludge from a bleached tissue mill generates glucose that can be sold as a product or sent to an ethanol plant. Hydrolysis rates using enzymes from two sources are reported, and a configuration for the industrial conversion of sludge to glucose is proposed. The system combines a set of stirred tank reactors with ash removal and membrane filtration to give a glucose concentrate. The economics of the conversion are attractive.


This paper investigates whether ownership structures, earnings management, growth opportunities, free cash flow hyphotesis are related to firm performance, as measured by economic value added. This paper use sample nonregulated companies during crisis period, 1998-2001. We find that during this period the management creates value. Our result also suggest that blockholders and free cash flow hyphotesis have indirect effects to economic value added through corporation policy, such as investing and financing. Interestingly, earnings management have direct effect to economic value added. These results imply that separation of management group ownership and control has significantly more negative relation to creating value in countries with low shareholders protection, as in emerging markets, whereas large blockholders have significantly more positive relation. Keywords: Ownership Structures, Earnings Management, Free Cash Flow Hyphotesis, Economic Value Added


Though recently they have fallen into some disrepute, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been formulated and applied to understanding essential hypertension. The principal goal here is to use data gathered in a GWAS to gauge the extent to which SNPs and their interactions with other features can be combined to predict mean arterial blood pressure (MAP) in 3138 pre-menopausal and naturally post-menopausal white women. More precisely, we quantify the extent to which data as described permit prediction of MAP beyond what is possible from traditional risk factors such as blood cholesterol levels and glucose levels. Of course, these traditional risk factors are genetic, though typically not explicitly so. In all, there were 44 such risk factors/clinical variables measured and 377,790 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped. Data for women we studied are from first visit measurements taken as part of the Atherosclerotic Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. We begin by assessing non-SNP features in their abilities to predict MAP, employing a novel regression technique with two stages, first the discovery of main effects and next discovery of their interactions. The long list of SNPs genotyped is reduced to a manageable list for combining with non-SNP features in prediction. We adapted Efron's local false discovery rate to produce this reduced list. Selected non-SNP and SNP features and their interactions are used to predict MAP using adaptive linear regression. We quantify quality of prediction by an estimated coefficient of determination (R 2). We compare the accuracy of prediction with and without information from SNPs.


GRB 080913 and GRB 090423 are the most distant gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) known to date, with spectroscopically determined redshifts of z = 6.7 and z = 8.1, respectively. The detection of bursts at this early epoch of the universe significantly constrains the nature of GRBs and their progenitors. We perform population synthesis studies of the formation and evolution of early stars, and calculate the resulting formation rates of short- and long-duration GRBs at high redshift. The peak of the GRB rate from Population II stars occurs at z ∼ 7 for a model with efficient/fast mixing of metals, while it is found at z ∼ 3 for an inefficient/slow metallicity evolution model. We show that in the redshift range 6 ≲ z ≲ 10, essentially all GRBs originate from Population II stars, regardless of the metallicity evolution model. These stars (having small, but non-zero metallicity) are the most likely progenitors for both long GRBs (collapsars) and short GRBs (neutron star–neutron star or blackhole–neutron star mergers) at this epoch. Although the predicted intrinsic rates of long and short GRBs are similar at these high redshifts, observational selection effects lead to higher (a factor of ∼10) observed rates for long GRBs. We conclude that the two recently observed high-z GRB events are most likely long GRBs originating from Population II collapsars.


BACKGROUND
Workplace computer use has increased dramatically in recent years and has been linked to musculoskeletal disorders, a leading cause of work disability and productivity losses in industrialized nations. Tai Chi is a simple, convenient workplace intervention that may promote musculoskeletal health without special equipment or showering, yet no study has investigated Tai Chi as a workplace physical exercise for health promotion.

OBJECTIVE
To examine the effects of a workplace Tai Chi (TC) intervention on musculoskeletal fitness and psychological well-being among female university employees who are computer users.

METHODS
The exercise program consisted of two 50 minute TC classes per week for 12 consecutive weeks during the months of May-August 2007. Fifty-two participants were enrolled in a class conducted on campus by a professional TC practitioner during the lunch hour. Socio-demographic characteristics, including information on age, marital status, ethnicity, job category and perceived overall health were collected from all participants. Fitness testing conducted by qualified personnel was assessed pre- and post-program. The tests included resting heart rate, resting blood pressure, anthropometric measures, musculoskeletal fitness and back fitness. Psychological well-being was assessed by the Perceived Stress Scale pre- and post-program.

RESULTS
There were significant positive results in several areas including resting heart rate, waist circumference and hand grip strength. Results showed that the TC program was effective in improving musculoskeletal fitness and psychological well-being.

CONCLUSIONS
Significant improvements in physiological and psychological measures were observed, even at the large class sizes tested here, suggesting that TC has considerable potential as an economic, effective and convenient workplace intervention.


The Vigna is one of the most important genus in the Fabaceae. Among many species of this genus, nine are domesticated as food crops. The average yields of these crops are very low due to inherently low yield potential of the present cultivars and their susceptibility to diseases like Mungbean Yellow Mosaic Virus (MYMV), powdery mildew and cercospora leaf spots. Various genomic resources have been dev.eloped for mungbean, urdbean, azuki bean and cowpea for accelerating the breeding efforts in these crops. The utility of marker assisted selections in improvement of Vigna species is limited largely due to limited marker polymorphism within the species. Efforts are being made to develop high-throughput markers with greater resolution. Different types of molecular markers such as RAPDs, RFLPs, AFLPs and SSRs have been developed and mapped onto chromosomes. These markers have been used for identification and mapping of genes and QTLs for important traits like seed weight, resistance against MYMV and powdery mildew and tolerance against bruchids. Eleven genetic linkage maps were developed so far but very few contained enough markers to condense into putative 11 linkage groups. Comparative genome mapping between mungbean and several other legumes including azuki bean, common bean, cowpea and lablab bean revealed various levels of macrosynteny. Comparison between urdbean and azuki bean maps revealed high degree of genomic colinearity. Modest beginning has been made in developing RAC libraries to facilitate map-based cloning of genes and QTLs. Advances in developing genomic resources such as linkage maps, high-throughput markers and RAC libraries will be helpful to accelerate genetic improvement of Vigna species.


Purpose

Networking is a key element of entrepreneurial and SME activity. The skills required to network share similarities to those of a marketer and can be associated with feminine traits, such as relationship building. Yet, little is known about how female SME marketers engage in networking. This study aims to address this gap by exploring how self-employed female services marketers build, use and value networks over the lifetime of their business.

Design/methodology/approach

In-depth narrative interviews were conducted with 26 self-employed women working in the UK marketing services sector. Template analysis was used to analyse the materials.

Findings

A model encapsulates the fluid nature of the networking activity throughout the lifetime of the participants' businesses by illustrating which networks the women used and their perceived value. Networking led to multi-directional outsourcing opportunities and philanthropic marketing activity, all of which supported the success of the SME. Despite support from family, friends and the community, these were not regarded as networks by the women.

Practical implications

At the individual level, insights are offered into which networking activity is more valuable for female entrepreneurs working in the sector. For policymakers, the study indicates that participants did not see value in the formal, government networks and the women did not engage with professional bodies. More creative solutions to supporting female marketing entrepreneurs are required.

Originality/value

The study is original, in that it offers qualitative insights into how self-employed female marketers use and value networks throughout the lifetime of their business. It concentrates on one sector (marketing services) and so answers criticisms that studies in entrepreneurship do not consider specific sectors. In contrast to studies which focus on one stage of the business lifecycle, this research contributes to a holistic, longitudinal understanding of entrepreneurial female networking activity in marketing. More generally, it contributes to the paucity of literature which explores the reality of working in the marketing services sector.


Background In high resource settings, 1 in 10 newborn babies require admission to a neonatal unit. Research evaluating neonatal care involves recording and reporting many different outcomes and outcome measures. Such variation limits the usefulness of research as studies cannot be compared or combined. To address these limitations, we aim to develop, disseminate and implement a core outcome set for neonatal medicine. Methods A steering group that includes parents and former patients, healthcare professionals and researchers has been formed to guide the development of the core outcome set. We will review neonatal trials systematically to identify previously reported outcomes. Additionally, we will specifically identify outcomes of importance to parents, former patients and healthcare professionals through a systematic review of qualitative studies. Outcomes identified will be entered into an international, multi-perspective eDelphi survey. All key stakeholders will be invited to participate. The Delphi method will encourage individual and group stakeholder consensus to identify a core outcome set. The core outcome set will be mapped to existing, routinely recorded data where these exist. Discussion Use of a core set will ensure outcomes of importance to key stakeholders, including former patients and parents, are recorded and reported in a standard fashion in future research. Embedding the core outcome set within future clinical studies will extend the usefulness of research to inform practice, enhance patient care and ultimately improve outcomes. Using routinely recorded electronic data will facilitate implementation with minimal addition burden. Trial registration number Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials (COMET) database: 842 (www.comet-initiative.org/studies/details/842).


The Ph.D. project is basically an investigation and development concerning kinetic architecture design software support that will be used to simulate the behavior of shape memory materials (SMM-- specifically Nickel-Titanium --Ni-Ti-- alloys, Linear -LCP- and multi-block co-polymers -MBCP-) and which will work as either a plug-in, an add-on or a script in an already existing design platform (like Rhino/Grasshopper or Processing) preferably (but not limited to) Open Source that can give architects and engineers the ability to design and test-run kinetic components and, hopefully someday, entire buildings in a digital work space, before having to do so in a laboratory environment. The project's theoretical framework is based on William Zuk's and Michael Fox's kinetic architecture concepts, Dan Raviv and Skylar Tibbits's work on programmable matter within the Self Assembly Lab at MIT while it also touches some of Dennis Dollens ideas about utilizing generative software tools and methods to address architectural design (specifically, a paper called The Cathedral Is Alive: Animating Biomimetic Architecture). Its most important theoretical objective is to find ways in which to utilize these materials within the conception and development of passive kitnetic architecture systems (K. A. which is, as of today, mostly computer controlled --therefore, electricity consuming). The material science aspect of the project is being informed by Otsuka & Wayman's research about Nickel-Titanium1 (Ni-Ti) alloys, Lendelein & Kelch's research about shape-memory polymers, Rottiers et al.'s research about SMM and their applications3. To test and develop the software functionality it is needed to analyze certain examples of kinetic architecture (as case studies) and to understand how to mathematically model (and subsequently code in the program's application programming interface -API- and/or user interface -UI-) the material's properties in order to compute and simulate their behavior in the program's work space (in relation to their stimulus/form/movement). This thesis will carry out experiments in that direction and arrive at conclusions about the subject matter.


One hundred and sixty specimens of Ammolagena clavata (Jones and Parker), encrusted on various bioclastic substrates, were collected from recent foredeep sediments of the Pontine Archipelago (Tyrrhenian Sea). Numerous specimens were measured, photographed, and analyzed, using energy dispersive spectrometry (EDS). The wall of A. clavata is composed of an agglutinated layer between two organic films. An EDS analysis showed high concentrations of Si and, subordinately, Al, both in the agglutinated and organic layers; the latter also contain high amounts of Fe. The presence of an incipient lip (pseudoseptum) at the beginning of the tubular chamber confirms the pseudo-bichambered architecture of the test. Its most problematic morphological feature is a second aperture at the base of the first chamber (proloculus). The variable morphology of the second pseudochamber is interpreted to be an adaptive behavior for avoiding occlusion of its aperture by the sediment. The presence of coccoliths and coccospheres within the chambers suggests that A. clavata is a suspension feeder. The upper limit of its bathymetric range in the Mediterranean Sea coincides with the upper limit of Mediterranean Levantine Intermediate Water.


ABSTRACT Election on 2014 was a battle between politicians. Almost every politicians campaigning for themselves or their party to gain people's vote. On the campaign period, we see a lot of political party's campaign on television. Analysis shows that 62.3% beginner voters frequently exposed by political party commercial on television, but not all of them watch the whole commercial. 40.8% of the respondent did not watch the whole commercial from start to end. Even though the PDI Perjuangan commercial was the most viewed and interesting, it doesn't make it the most remembered and liked commercial. Gerindra's commercial was the most remembered and liked by the viewers. It was because of the commercial presents a politician with high popularity, it was PrabowoSubianto. Even though beginner voters' perception to political commercial is on positive state and the exposure intensity is high, it doesn't make voters choose those political party. Beginner voters tend to see more of the politician figure to choose. Keyword: commercial Exposure, beginner voters, political party commercial


Plant genetic engineering offers unique opportunities to a) overcome compatibility barriers, exploit the expression potential of genes from unrelated genetic resource materials and also avoid the problems associated with transfer of large blocks of DNA between the donor and the recipient plants. The first successful plant genetic transformation was achieved only two decades ago and during the intervening period. significant progress has been made. As consequence hundreds of plant species have been genetically transformed. with a variety of different genes possessing novel traits. Most notable of these novels genetic traits is insect resistance, herbicide tolerance and nutritional improvement.

Two main methodologies employed to achieve stable expression of an unrelated novel gene in any crop plant are predominantly though not exclusively to yield stable transformation. Both methodologies, namely biolistic transformation and Agrobacterium mediated transformation, employ an appropriate tissue ex-plants as the starting material, which after the introduction of exogenous DNA, are allowed to regenerate into fertile plants. Evidently, therefore, regeneration response of a target crop is of critical importance. Succes3ful regeneration of any tissue ex-plant into a fertile plant depends upon the genetic make-up of the target crop, the nature of the ex-plant chosen, in vitro growth medium used, growth conditions including light, temperature etc. Tissue explants d certain crops such as cotton, secrete toxic metabolites such as phenolic compounds into the medium, which must be removed to allow sustained, in vitro development into a fertile plant.

Previous studies in CEMB laboratories had demonstrated that cotton and chickpea are recalcitrant crops and different cultivars of cotton exhibit extremely varied regeneration response. Whereas Upland cotton, Coker has proved to be the most successful in regeneration response while in Pakistan (Gossypium hirsutum) is one of the most difficult crops to regenerate.

In a background of the foregoing, different ex-plants of various Pakistani cotton cultivars including elite varieties were studied for their ability to regenerate into fertile plants. The effects of different growth hormones in the growth media, temperature of incubation, intensity of incident light and nature of the ex-plant were investigated to establish parameters from that would be used in the research project on transformation of elite varieties of Pakistani cotton with exogenous genes to breed novel traits.

As part of these studies eighteen local cultivars, were studied among them CIM 482, FH 901, CIM 443, CIM 448, BH 36 and FH 900 were selected on the basis of germination response somatic embryogenesis and multiple shoot formation was observed only in variety CIM 482. During these studies, two phenomenan namely. recurrent somatic embryogenesis and twin embryo production were observed for the first time in cotton. When germinating embryos were transferred to MSO medium. growth and production of new somatic embryo from old somatic embryos (Recurrent) was observed Twins and multiple embryos were also formed.

In another part of these studies different ex-plants of various local varieties were tested for their ability to form multiple shoots. Induction of multiple shoots was achieved in CIM 482 and CIM 443 with meristem and cotyledonary nodes. Among the entire tested media, maximum shoot multiplication response 6.'72 and 4.92 per meristum and cotyledon ex-plants was observed in MS medium where SAP 1.0 mg /L and NAA 0.05 mg /L were used.

Conditions for biolistic transformation were optimized, 46.7% GUS expression was observed. Selection of transforl1ants was found optimal at 100ug/ml of the Kanamycin for cotton ex-plants. Using optimal selection and biolistic transformation conditions, Pakistani cotton cultivars CIM 482, was genetically transformed with Cry/Ac under wound inducible promoter (MPI) and constitutive promoter (CaMV 35S) and the comparative strengths of the two promoters were studied. The results of these studies showed the maximum transformation efficiency 4.0 % was observed in case of bombarded embryos in horizontal orientations while a transformation efficiency 3.2% was observed where the embryos were bombarded in vertical orientation.

Moreover studies on Biosafety aspect of transgenic crops was also carried out. Because transgenic cotton plants were not available at large numbers therefore these studies were done on transgenic rice transformed in CEMB.

The developmental and spatial expression of Bt genes was studied and it was found out, the toxin titer declined substantially with increasing age of the plant. The cry protein was detected 15 days after harvesting of plants and none of Bt proteins were found in rice straw.

The plants containing two cry genes were used for these studies. Both gene(s) showed expression in all the parts of plants studied like roots, stem, panicle, straw husk and seed. It was also determined that transgenic rice has no allelopathic effect on wheat. A laboratory study was also done on spider survival after feeding on Rice-leaf folder and yellow stem borer. These insects fed on transgenic rice has no effect on predators. The effect on non-target insects of rice like Hemiptera, Homoptera and Orthoptera was also studied. Damage was compared with target and non-target insects. This indirectly proves that transgenic rice has no effect on non-target insects. In other experiments, it was also determined that proteins were secreted from transgenic plants to liquid and solid media as well as in the soil. The secreted protein is taken up by non-tr8nsgenic plants.

These studies describe the optirnization of tissue culture conditions like media composition effect of phytohormones, effect of ex-plant and effect of genotype on the regeneration of local varieties. Subsequently somatic embryogenesis and multiple shoot formation was observed in local cotton variety CIM 482 and complete plant formation was observed in American Upland cotton variety. This variety CIM 482 was used for transformation with vector containing MPI, promoters and plant developed showed the expression of cry gene as detected by ELISA and bioassay of transgenic plants. The integration of gene was determined by PCR amplification of cry gene in the genome of cotton. Biosafety studies were done that concern about gene flow, effect on non-target insects and allelopathy. These studies showed that cotton is recalcitrant plant however, conditions can be developed where mature embryos can be used to transform the cotton plant and transgenic plant has no or insignificant effect on environment, in the experiments designed for this purpose.


We follow 822 applicants through the process of obtaining a driver's license in New Delhi, India. To understand how the bureaucracy responds to individual and social needs, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: bonus, lesson, and comparison groups. Participants in the bonus group were offered a financial reward if they could obtain their license fast; participants in the lesson group were offered free driving lessons. To gauge driving skills, we performed a surprise driving test after participants had obtained their licenses. Several interesting facts regarding corruption emerge. First, the bureaucracy responds to individual needs. Those who want their license faster (e.g., the bonus group), get it 40% faster and at a 20% higher rate. Second, the bureaucracy is insensitive to social needs. The bonus group does not learn to drive safely in order to obtain their license: in fact, 69% of them were rated as "failures" on the independent driving test. Those in the lesson group, despite superior driving skills, are only slightly more likely to obtain a license than the comparison group and far less likely (by 29 percentage points) than the bonus group. Detailed surveys allow us to document the mechanisms of corruption. We find that bureaucrats arbitrarily fail drivers at a high rate during the driving exam, irrespective of their ability to drive. To overcome this, individuals pay informal "agents" to bribe the bureaucrat and avoid taking the exam altogether. An audit study of agents further highlights the insensitivity of agents' pricing to driving skills. Together, these results suggest that bureaucrats raise red tape to extract bribes and that this corruption undermines the very purpose of regulation.


Many manufacturing organizations while doing business either directly or indirectly with other industrial sectors often encounter interoperability problems among software systems. This increases the business cost and reduces the efficiency. Research communities are exploring ways to reduce this cost. Incompatibility amongst the syntaxes and the semantics of the languages of application systems is the most common cause to this problem. The process specification language (PSL), an ISO standard (18629), has the potential to overcome some of these difficulties by acting as a neutral communication language. The current paper has therefore focused on exploring this aspect of the PSL within a cross-disciplinary supply chain environment.  The paper explores a specific cross-disciplinary supply chain scenario in order to understand the mechanisms of communications within the system. Interoperability of processes supporting those communications are analysed against PSL. A strategy is proposed for sharing process information amongst the supply chain nodes using the 'PSL 20 questions wizard and it is concluded that, although there is a need to develop more effective methods for mapping systems to PSL, it can still be seen as a powerful tool to aid the communications between processes in the supply chain. The paper uses a supply chain scenario that cuts across the construction and manufacturing business sectors in order to provide a breadth to the types of disciplines involved in communication.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the profile of the main caregiver (MC) and the factors associated with her/his care burden, in a multi-centre cohort of patients with multiple pathologies (PMP).

DESIGN
Multi-centre cross-sectional study.

SETTING
Four health districts in the Virgen del Rocío University Hospitals Health Area, Seville, Spain.

PARTICIPANTS
The PMP cohort was created by checking all the patients who satisfied the health department criteria for PMP (2002): patients suffering from chronic diseases in 2 or more of the 7 clinical categories defined.

MAIN MEASUREMENTS
The profile of PMP caregiver was determined for all patients. The caregiver strain index (CSI) was determined by the index of care stress (ICS). Predictive factors were analysed by the Student t, ANOVA, and Pearson's tests. Multivariate analysis was performed by a forward stepwise linear regression model.

RESULTS
The interview was attended by 461 (69%) out of 662 eligible PMP. Of these, 293 (63.6%) had an MC whose mean age was 62 (15) years; 80% of them were women. First-degree relatives made up 88% of caregivers, with spouses 49.7% of them (n=146). In 41.5%, the CSI was >7 points (mean CSI was 5.35 [3.5]). This was higher in those caring for PMP with neurological illnesses (7 [3.2 vs 4.5 [3.3]; P=.0001). The CSI was compared directly with the medical vulnerability of the PMP (R=0.37; P=.001), cognitive deterioration on the Pfeiffer scale (PS) (R=0.4; P=.0001), and inversely with functional status on Barthel's scale (BS) (R=-0.67; P=.0001). Patient's age (P=.03), his/her medical vulnerability (P=.016) and functional (P< .0001) and cognitive (P=.019) deterioration were independently associated with the CSI.

CONCLUSIONS
The profile of the MC of the PMP cohort corresponded mainly to first-degree female relatives around sixty years old. The burden of care was high in more than a third of them. Predictive factors were age, medical vulnerability, and the functional and cognitive deterioration of the PMP.


Multiple approaches to generate a smooth, powerful, and stable supercontinuum in cobweb photonic-crystal fibers were undertaken by use of 18-fs pulses. These approaches include utilization of incident pulses with various chirp, power, and polarization states, as well as fibers with different lengths and core sizes. For long fibers (tens of centimeters) the supercontinuum contains a finely modulated structure that can be smoothed when the oscillator is in a regime of relaxation oscillations. Short fibers provide a supercontinuum free of gaps. By optimization of these parameters supercontinua exceeding one octave with modulations of less than 10 dB have been generated.


Julien Levy (1906-1981) was one of the most influential art dealers of the twentieth century. The Julien Levy Gallery, which opened in New York in 1931 and closed in 1949, played an essential role in the shift of the cultural avant-garde from Paris to New York. It was the first American gallery to sponsor a show on Surrealism and to champion Neoromanticism, Magic Realism, and Machine Abstraction. Luis Bunuel's film Un Chien Andalou and Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart were first screened in the gallery. Among the artists Levy exhibited were Eugene Atget, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Leonor Fini, Naum Gabo, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Frida Kahlo, Fernand Leger, Rene Magritte, Lee Miller, Man Ray, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Tanning. Levy also initiated the cocktail opening.This book, which accompanies a retrospective exhibition on the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, includes reproductions of paintings, photographs, and film stills from museum and private collections, as well as of art and ephemera from Levy's own collection. The book offers recollections of Levy and his gallery from several angles. Dorothea Tanning reminisces about her lifelong friendship with her first dealer. Ingrid Schaffner surveys the evolution of Levy's enterprise from combination curiosity shop, exhibition space, and performance site into a model for the contemporary art gallery. Steven Watson discusses Levy's personal and professional affiliations with the "Harvard Moderns"--Alfred Barr, Jr., and A. Everett Austin among them. Carolyn Burke looks at Levy's complex relationship with his mother-in-law, poet and painter Mina Loy, who acted as his agent and mentor in Paris. Finally, Lisa Jacobs provides a chronology of the events of the gallery and of Levy's life.Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Equitable Gallery, New York.


Cardiovascular disease (CAD) screening in asymptomatic patients with diabetes mellitus is controversial. An exercise stress test is a safe and effective initial testing for Ischemic Heart Disease (IHD) screening. Treadmill stress test is not the best screening method for a particular patient who is not able to exercise, abnormal electrocardiogram (ECG) or positive exercise treadmill test (ETT) and other anatomical or functional studies are recommended to evaluate for the myocardial ischemia. This concept is supported by the high rate prevalence of silent myocardial ischemia, CAD and cardiovascular events rate. Coronary angiography is an expensive and invasive test which is considered as gold standard for diagnosis obstructive CAD and not be used for screening. In this review article we discussed about anatomical modalities (Coronary Artery Calcium Score (CACS)) and nuclear imaging (SPECT) for evaluation of silent ischemia.


ASSESSING THE LEVEL OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT CYBERCRIMES AMONG YOUNG ADULTS WITHIN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Dr. Fatme Al Anouti Assistant Professor, Health Sciences Alumnae & Internship Coordinator Zayed University Tel 02-5993810 Mob. 0503019807 email@example.com Background: Our lives have tremendously changed because of technological innovations. Over the last few decades, there has been a remarkable increase in the use and reliance on internet and digital technology for research, education, healthcare, business and even fun. Despite the valuable convenience and benefits technology has added to our life styles, there is a serious risk associated with the reliance on such digital technology. Sometimes confidential and private information becomes accessible for hackers who launch unexpected attacks and as a result many individuals might fall victims for cybercrime attacks. The incidence of such cybercrime attacks has increased drastically over the last few years in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which enjoys an advanced telecommunication network coverage. According to police reports, most cybercrime victims are young adults because they heavily use the internet for their day to day activities. Aim: The purpose of the study is to assess the level of knowledge about cybercrimes among a representative sample of young adult Emiratis. Design: This study uses a cross-sectional study design. Methodology: The participants were 130 students (113 females and 17 males) from two different universities namely Zayed University and Abu Dhabi university both in the capital city of the UAE. All participants completed an online questionnaire that was adapted from the Cybercrime Knowledge Questionnaire; developed by Katz, 2005. The online version of the questionnaire was sent to all students through campus announcement and twitter. It was utilized to calculate the cybercrime awareness index (CAI) which reflected the level of knowledge about cybercrimes by university students. Results: The mean value for CAI indicated a medium level of knowledge about cybercrimes by students. Only 32% of the participants had a high or adequate level of knowledge while the rest had low to medium levels of knowledge. There was a statistically significant difference in the level of knowledge in terms of student major but not gender. Students specializing in Computer Information Technology (accounting for 21.5% of the participants) had the highest levels of knowledge as compared to all other students from other majors. This was in concordance with another finding in the study which revealed a strong correlation between the level of knowledge and the use of the internet/digital technology. Participants with heavy use of internet technology had a high level of knowledge about cybercrimes. Conclusions: In conclusion, the findings of this study demonstrated that the level of knowledge about cybercrimes among university students is not adequate. These young adults should be more educated about the risks of technology use in terms of cybercrime attacks. Future research could focus on developing strategies to raise awareness and alert students to the risks of being victims of cybercrimes.


Purpose To develop entrustable professional activities (EPAs) for psychiatry and to demonstrate an innovative, validity-enhancing methodology that may be relevant to other specialties. Method A national task force employed a three-stage process from May 2014 to February 2017 to develop EPAs for psychiatry. In stage 1, the task force used an iterative consensus-driven process to construct proposed EPAs. Each included a title, full description, and relevant competencies. In stage 2, the task force interviewed four nonpsychiatric experts in EPAs and further revised the EPAs. In stage 3, the task force performed a Delphi study of national experts in psychiatric education and assessment. All survey participants completed a brief training program on EPAs. Quantitative and qualitative analysis led to further modifications. Essentialness was measured on a five-point scale. EPAs were included if the content validity index was at least 0.8 and the lower end of the asymmetric confidence interval was not lower than 4.0. Results Stages 1 and 2 yielded 24 and 14 EPAs, respectively. In stage 3, 31 of the 39 invited experts participated in both rounds of the Delphi study. Round 1 reduced the proposed EPAs to 13. Ten EPAs met the inclusion criteria in Round 2. Conclusions The final EPAs provide a strong foundation for competency-based assessment in psychiatry. Methodological features such as critique by nonpsychiatry experts, a national Delphi study with frame-of-reference training, and stringent inclusion criteria strengthen the content validity of the findings and may serve as a model for future efforts in other specialties.


Studies of ordinary (as distinct from spectacular) forms of consumption have generated new questions and new ways of thinking about mechanisms and processes of change and about the conceptual status of consumer goods. No longer exclusively framed as semiotic resources deployed in the expression and reproduction of identities and social relations, products are increasingly viewed as essential ingredients in the effective accomplishment of everyday life. In this article, we examine the recursive relation between products, projects and practices with reference to do-it-yourself (DIY) and home improvement — an important area of craft consumption and a field in which consumers are actively and creatively engaged in integrating and transforming complex arrays of material goods. Interviews with DIY practitioners and retailers point to a circuit of interdependent relations between the hardware of consumption (tools, materials, etc.); distributions of competence (between humans and non-humans); the emergence of consumer projects and, with them, new patterns of demand. In elaborating on these practical and theoretical linkages we develop an analysis of the material dynamics of craft consumption that bridges approaches rooted in science studies, material culture and consumption.


If only indirectly and by comparison with other, supposedly more consequential, social undertakings, sport and athletic commitment continue to be denounced as trivial in contemporary society. Against the backdrop of this abiding trivialization, this paper explores the value found in committing to athletic excellence or, using the terminology of the 2019 National Academy of Kinesiology's annual conference, in pursuing optimal athletic performance. The author introduces and explains 6 kinds of value found in this commitment and pursuit. While these values can be conceptualized independently, they need not be thought of as mutually exclusive. Not only are the values comparably significant, but they might also overlap and combine in various forms and to different degrees. In some cases, they might develop concurrently. Before introducing the values, the author briefly conceptualizes both optimal performance and sport, because sound analysis depends on conceptual clarity.


Overlay routing has emerged as a promising approach to improving performance and reliability of Internet paths. To fully realize the potential of overlay routing under the constraints of deployment costs in terms of hardware, network connectivity and human effort, it is critical to carefully place infrastructure overlay nodes to balance the trade-off between performance and resource constraints. In this paper, we investigate approaches to perform intelligent placement of overlay nodes to facilitate (i) resilient routing and (ii) TCP performance improvement. We formulate objective functions to accurately capture application behavior: reliability and TCP performance, and develop several placement algorithms, which offer a wide range of trade-offs in complexity and required knowledge of the client- server location and traffic load. Using simulations on synthetic and real Internet topologies, and PlanetLab experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the placement algorithms and objective functions developed, respectively. We conclude that an approach, hybrid of random and greedy approaches, provides the best tradeoff between computational efficiency and accuracy. We also uncover the fundamental challenge in simultaneously optimizing for reliability and TCP performance, and propose a simple unified algorithm to achieve the same.


In this work, we show how the use of flickering in Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) content can not only guide the user's attention, but also significantly improve recall of details. The findings are particularly useful for practitioners who generate educational and corporate training content, as well as for directors of CVR videos who want to draw the user's attention to certain details in movies or virtual tours. We report on a between-subjects user study, in which we experimented with flickering methods to increase user's recall of certain details in CVR videos. Participants had to report details of objects on which the method was applied. In our experiments, the intensive flicker improved the recall of details significantly. We discuss how the studied methods can improve recall of details in different use cases.


Recent interest in inclusive innovation to serve base-of-the-pyramid markets has so far produced relatively little evidence about the role of policy. Drawing on cases from Kenya's mobile phone sector that have successfully scaled innovations to poor consumers, we suggest that policy-making is not only present, but can also have a significant role in shaping and supporting inclusive innovation systems. In these cases, inclusive innovation has been built upon a reinforcing circle of adaptive innovation, dynamic competition, and presence of innovation intermediaries within poor communities. Following regulatory interventions that helped initiate markets, policy has supported these facilitators of inclusive innovation in various ways. But implementation gaps can dampen innovation or allow it to proceed in directions that undermine quality. Overall, this paper offers a systematic approach for analyzing the role of policy in inclusive innovation, an example of the multiple domains that must be integrated if inclusive innovation is to be purposely supported, and evidence that the implementation of such policies matters as much as their content.


Financial market frictions distort the allocation of resources among productive units?all else equal, firms whose financing choices are affected by financial frictions face higher borrowing costs than firms with ready access to capital markets. As a result, input choices may differ systematically across firms in ways that are unrelated to their productive efficiency. We propose a simple accounting framework that allows us to assess the empirical magnitude of the loss in aggregate resources due to such misallocation. To a second-order approximation, our accounting framework requires only information on the dispersion in borrowing costs across firms. We measure firm-specific borrowing costs for a subset of U.S. manufacturing firms directly from the interest rate spreads on their outstanding publicly-traded debt. Given the observed variation in borrowing costs, our approximation method implies a relatively modest loss in efficiency due to resource misallocation?on the order of 1 to 2 percent of measured total factor productivity (TFP). According to our accounting framework, the correlation between firm size and borrowing costs is irrelevant under the assumption that financial distortions and firm-level efficiency are jointly log-normally distributed. To take into account the effect of covariation between firm size and borrowing costs, we also consider a more general framework that dispenses with the assumption of log-normality and which yields somewhat higher estimates of the resource losses?about 3.5 percent of measured TFP. Counterfactual experiments indicate that dispersion in borrowing costs must be an order of magnitude higher than that observed in the U.S. financial data, in order for misallocation?arising from financial distortion?to account for a significant fraction of measured TFP differentials across countries.


In recent work (Seljak, Hamaus, and Desjacques 2009) it was found that weighting central halo galaxies by halo mass can significantly suppress their stochasticity relative to the dark matter, well below the Poisson model expectation. This is useful for constraining relations between galaxies and the dark matter, such as the galaxy bias, especially in situations where sampling variance errors can be eliminated. In this paper we extend this study with the goal of finding the optimal mass-dependent halo weighting. We use N-body simulations to perform a general analysis of halo stochasticity and its dependence on halo mass. We investigate the stochasticity matrix, defined as C{sub ij{identical_to}} , where {delta}{sub m} is the dark matter overdensity in Fourier space, {delta}{sub i} the halo overdensity of the i-th halo mass bin, and b{sub i} the corresponding halo bias. In contrast to the Poisson model predictions we detect nonvanishing correlations between different mass bins. We also find the diagonal terms to be sub-Poissonian for the highest-mass halos. The diagonalization of this matrix results in one large and one low eigenvalue, with the remaining eigenvalues close to the Poisson prediction 1/n, where n is the mean halo number density. The eigenmodemore » with the lowest eigenvalue contains most of the information and the corresponding eigenvector provides an optimal weighting function to minimize the stochasticity between halos and dark matter. We find this optimal weighting function to match linear mass weighting at high masses, while at the low-mass end the weights approach a constant whose value depends on the low-mass cut in the halo mass function. This weighting further suppresses the stochasticity as compared to the previously explored mass weighting. Finally, we employ the halo model to derive the stochasticity matrix and the scale-dependent bias from an analytical perspective. It is remarkably successful in reproducing our numerical results and predicts that the stochasticity between halos and the dark matter can be reduced further when going to halo masses lower than we can resolve in current simulations.« less


In this work we present the results of a basic experimental research effort to detect local damage over a spectrum of natural space and time scales of impulsebased interrogation free waves-and-vibrations in a physical aluminum alloy beam structure with a damaged bolts-based local joint. The joint is considered healthy if all its bolts are tightened to the level of the design recommended torque load. We use three mono-axial sensors in a local three dimensional arrangement and a modal hammer to mine rich information on the dynamics in the form of collocated axial, lateral and transverse acceleration signals. The mutually perpendicular collocated databases are analyzed in terms of their proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) modes. We find that the dominant POD modal shape-in all three directions-of the healthy structure changes when one of the bolts is left loose. This change is quantified as a distributed damage index which turns out to possess localized behavior near the loose bolt and the nodal points of the POD modal shape. It is found that the lateral collocated acceleration database is much more sensitive to the loose bolt kind of damage than the axial and the transverse collocated databases are. doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/65


Clinical investigators frequently study individuals who are in less than ideal circumstances. Oncologists study individuals with brain tumours; psychiatrists study individuals who have undergone traumatic experiences. There is little these investigators can do to improve the circumstances of their subjects, short of finding new treatments for the conditions that affect them. In other cases, investigators study individuals who are in less than ideal, but remediable circumstances. These studies press the question of when it is acceptable for investigators to study, rather than assist individuals.

The literature on this question has focused on clinical trials in which patients who do not have access to the best treatments are given placebos, or a second-best treatment.1 Research on the effects of secondhand smoke (SHS) similarly involves individuals who are in less than ideal, but potentially remediable circumstances. To assess the impact of SHS on sleep bruxism in children, Montaldo et al randomised parents who were known to smoke in the presence of their children into two groups. Parents in Group 1 were instructed to stop smoking in the presence of their children, whereas parents in Group 2 were instructed to not change their smoking habits.2

One might assume that clinical investigators may collect data only when doing so is consistent with protecting research subjects and promoting their clinical interests. This view suggests that research on individuals who are in less than ideal, but remediable circumstances, violates investigators' obligations. Rather than conduct a study in which patients who lack access to the best treatments are given placebos, researchers should give their subjects the best treatments available. Rather than study the effects of SHS, researchers should protect individuals from SHS. …


Previous studies have confirmed that some diseases are influenced by stress. Such diseases are diseases in which inflammations are the main aspects of them. One of the most common diseases that can be affected by stress is cold. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between stress, anxiety and depression and the peoples' cold over the years among women heads of households covered by Tehran Welfare. This study is a descriptive and correlational. The sample in this study included all female-headed family covered by Tehran Welfare, which is approximately 500 people according to the Welfare Organization statistics. According to Moran Table, 267 women heads of household were selected as research sample. The DASS-42 questionnaire was used to collect research data. The results showed that stress, depression and anxiety are positively associated with the common cold (P<0.01).Anxiety has also the ability to predict various colds. Results of the present study in line with foreign studies show that stress, depression and anxiety can lead to frequent colds and anxiety can predict recurrent colds in female-headed households covered by Tehran Welfare.


Today's organizations require techniques for automated transformation of their large data volumes into operational knowledge. This requirement may be addressed by using event recognition systems that detect events/activities of special significance within an organization, given streams of 'low-level' information that is very difficult to be utilized by humans. Consider, for example, the recognition of attacks on nodes of a computer network given the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol messages, the recognition of suspicious trader behaviour given the transactions in a financial market and the recognition of whale songs given a symbolic representation of whale sounds. Various event recognition systems have been proposed in the literature. Recognition systems with a logic-based representation of event structures, in particular, have been attracting considerable attention, because, among others, they exhibit a formal, declarative semantics, they have proven to be efficient and scalable and they are supported by machine learning tools automating the construction and refinement of event structures. In this paper, we review representative approaches of logic-based event recognition and discuss open research issues of this field. We illustrate the reviewed approaches with the use of a real-world case study: event recognition for city transport management.


Spectral analysis of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is widely used for the assessment of cardiovascular autonomic control. Several studies have shown the effect of anaesthetic agents on HRV parameters. In this study a systematic approach of HRV analysis has been employed. The effect caused by the ectopic beats on the spectral measurements has been investigated and results are presented. A detrending method using Wavelet Packets has been developed which was able to remove slow varying trend from HRV signals without causing significant changes in the low frequency (LF) and high frequency (HF) component of the HRV signal. Using this methodology Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from 14 patients undergoing local anaesthesia (brachial plexus block) were analysed with non-parametric (Welch's periodogram) method. The results show that the LF/HF ratio values calculated from the HRV signal decreases within an hour of the application of the brachial plexus block compared to the values at the start of the procedure. This change was noticed in approximately 80% of the patients.


Digital evidence is becoming more and more frequent and important in investigations carried out by the police. To make the correct judgements, the police force needs to know what one can do with ICQ and in what ways it can be exploited. This thesis aims to point out weaknesses in ICQ that can aid the police in their work. But these weaknesses can not only be used by the police, also crackers can perform malicious acts with them. Therefore, I investigated if the use of ICQ resulted in non-secure sessions. To investigate ICQ's security, I divided a session into an authentication phase, sending of messages, and the protection of stored messages in a history file. While investigating ICQ, I sniffed its Internet traffic and monitored files on the computer's hard drive with MD5 checksums. I have investigated the following three ICQ applications: ICQ Pro 2003a, ICQ2Go and the Linux clone Licq. The result of the entire investigation showed that ICQ had a non-secured authentication phase, non-secured messages and no protection for stored messages. From these results the main conclusion was derived: The use of ICQ resulted in non-secure instant messaging sessions. Your ICQ account can be hijacked and another person can impersonate you and send messages that you dislike. Also, your messages can be intercepted on the Internet and their content can be read. If your computer is compromised, all your previous messages on ICQ Pro 2003a and Licq can be read.


Investigations of the Dry Snow Zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet Using QuikSCAT Kevin R. Moon Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Master of Science The Greenland ice sheet is an area of great interest to the scientific community due to its role as an important bellwether for the global climate. Satellite-borne scatterometers are particularly well-suited to studying temporal changes in the Greenland ice sheet because of their high spatial coverage, frequent sampling, and sensitivity to the presence of liquid water. The dry snow zone is the largest component of the Greenland ice sheet and is identified as the region that experiences negligible annual melt. Due to the lack of melt in the dry snow zone, backscatter was previously assumed to be relatively constant over time in this region. However, this thesis shows that a small seasonal variation in backscatter is present in QuikSCAT data in the dry snow zone. Understanding the cause of this seasonal variability is important to verify the accuracy of QuikSCAT measurements, to better understand the ice sheet conditions, and to improve future scatterometer calibration efforts that may use ice sheets as calibration targets. This thesis provides a study of the temporal behavior of backscatter in the dry snow zone of the Greenland ice sheet focusing on seasonal variation. Spatial averaging of backscatter and the Karhunen-Loève transform are used to identify and study the dominant patterns in annual backscatter behavior. Several QuikSCAT instrumental parameters are tested as possible causes of seasonal variation in backscatter in the dry snow zone to verify the accuracy of QuikSCAT products. None of the tested parameters are found to be related to seasonal variation. Further evidence is given that suggests that the cause of the seasonal variation is geophysical and several geophysical factors are tested. Temperature is found to be highly related to dry snow backscatter and therefore may be driving the seasonal variation in backscatter in the dry snow zone.


With consumer electronics becoming numerous, various and complex, the idea of a single, shared, general and flexible interfacing agent to interface human users with the multitude of task-oriented systems or devices seems appealing. Such a universal interfacing agent has to understand user instructions and issue commands to control the task-oriented system to which it is connected, in a manner that the given user desires.
Two important issues that such an agent has to deal with are: (i) how to represent and reason about the tasks that a given device can perform and the results that a given device can produce and (ii) how to represent and reason about when different tasks are to be performed and whether the tasks have been successful. The dissertation explores these issues in detail and provides a solution to deal with these issues within a contradiction-tolerant and time-sensitive framework called Active logic.
The solution involves explicitly representing the beliefs, desires, intentions, expectations, observations and achievements of the interfacing agent and reasoning based on these attitudes; the dissertation provides a theory (ALFA) that agents can use in order to perform this reasoning. The theory specifies the interactions between beliefs, observations, desires, intentions, expectations and achievements for a universal interfacing agent, while taking into consideration issues associated with concurrent execution of actions as well as perturbation tolerance. The main characteristics of the theory are: representing and reasoning about concurrent actions and results, dealing with interactions of preconditions of actions or results, dynamic reconsideration of intentions and reasoning using expectations and achievements.
The dissertation also provides an architecture (DIRECTOR) for implementing agents based on the theory. In this architecture, a meta-cognitive process controls the cognitive activities of the agent. The rudimentary results of implementing the architecture to create a natural language based interfacing agent (ALFRED) are also discussed in the dissertation.
This work also discusses how the agent's underlying Active logic knowledge base evolves during reasoning and provides proofs for properties that the knowledge base exhibits, using a meta-theory that specifies how the knowledge base evolves.


In immediate serial recall, high‐frequency words are better recalled than low‐frequency words. A prevalent interpretation of this effect suggests that, at the point of recall, degraded representations undergo a reconstruction process calling upon long‐term knowledge of the to‐be‐remembered items. Recently, Stuart and Hulme (2000) following Deese (1960), suggested that high‐frequency items are better recalled due to their better long‐term associative links. Their results revealed that a familiarisation procedure involving repeated presentations of the to‐be‐remembered items in pairs abolished the usual frequency effect. In the experiment reported here, an alternative interpretation of this result is examined. Prior to the memory task, subjects received either no familiarisation, item familiarisation, or pair familiarisation. Both item and pair familiarisation improved the item recall of low‐frequency items to the same extent, suggesting that increased familiarity can account for the co‐occurrence effect.


In the American world, the presence of African culture is sometimes fully embodied and sometimes leaves only a trace. Africa in the American Imagination: Popular Culture, Racialized Identities, and African Visual Culture explores this presence, examining Mattel's world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Disney World, each of which repackages African visual culture for consumers. Because these cultural icons permeate American life, they represent the broader U.S. culture and its relationship to African culture. This study integrates approaches from art history and visual culture studies with those from culture, race, and popular culture studies to analyze this interchange. Two major threads weave throughout. One analyzes how the presentation of African visual culture in these popular culture forms conceptualizes Africa for the American public. The other investigates the way the uses of African visual culture focus America's own self-awareness, particularly around black and white racialized identities. In exploring the multiple meanings that "Africa" has in American popular culture, Africa in the American Imagination argues that these cultural products embody multiple perspectives and speak to various sociopolitical contexts: the Cold War, civil rights, and contemporary eras of the United States; the apartheid and postapartheid eras of South Africa; the colonial and postcolonial eras of Ghana; and the European era of African colonization.


In this paper, we study the problem of imitation learning of hierarchical policies from demonstrations. The main difficulty in learning hierarchical policies by imitation is that the high level intention structure of the policy, which is often critical for understanding the demonstration, is unobserved. We formulate this problem as active learning of Probabilistic State-Dependent Grammars (PSDGs) from demonstrations. Given a set of expert demonstrations, our approach learns a hierarchical policy by actively selecting demonstrations and using queries to explicate their intentional structure at selected points. Our contributions include a new algorithm for imitation learning of hierarchical policies and principled heuristics for the selection of demonstrations and queries. Experimental results in five different domains exhibit successful learning using fewer queries than a variety of alternatives.


LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at the University of Texas at Austin applies post-custodial archival methods in pursuit of a new vision of digital archival practice and the transnational construction of historical memory. This work seeks to develop a practice for digital archiving that enables the redistribution of resources while centering communities as contributors and owners of their own documentary heritage. Although LLILAS Benson has successfully built partnerships and continues to manage widely recognized collections using a post-custodial model, the anti-colonial framework through which this work has been understood does not fully account for the power imbalances at play. Using Cifor and Lee's survey of neoliberalism in the archives as a launching point, this article considers how neoliberalism has shaped post-custodial practices at LLILAS Benson, focusing on ideas and practices of labor, digitization, and the common good. Through this analysis, the authors describe not a static set of methodologies, but rather an ongoing process of learning, unlearning, and restructuring in pursuit of a collective good.
Pre-print first published online 03/03/2018


The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) is the first National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite designed to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO_2) with the accuracy, resolution, and coverage needed to quantify CO_2 fluxes (sources and sinks) on regional scales. OCO-2 was successfully launched on 2 July 2014 and has gathered more than 2 years of observations. The v7/v7r operational data products from September 2014 to January 2016 are discussed here. On monthly timescales, 7 to 12 % of these measurements are sufficiently cloud and aerosol free to yield estimates of the column-averaged atmospheric CO_2 dry air mole fraction, X_(CO)_2, that pass all quality tests. During the first year of operations, the observing strategy, instrument calibration, and retrieval algorithm were optimized to improve both the data yield and the accuracy of the products. With these changes, global maps of X_(CO)_2 derived from the OCO-2 data are revealing some of the most robust features of the atmospheric carbon cycle. This includes X_(CO)_2 enhancements co-located with intense fossil fuel emissions in eastern US and eastern China, which are most obvious between October and December, when the north–south X_(CO)_2 gradient is small. Enhanced X_(CO)_2 coincident with biomass burning in the Amazon, central Africa, and Indonesia is also evident in this season. In May and June, when the north–south X_(CO)_2 gradient is largest, these sources are less apparent in global maps. During this part of the year, OCO-2 maps show a more than 10 ppm reduction in X_(CO)_2 across the Northern Hemisphere, as photosynthesis by the land biosphere rapidly absorbs CO_2. As the carbon cycle science community continues to analyze these OCO-2 data, information on regional-scale sources (emitters) and sinks (absorbers) which impart X_(CO)_2 changes on the order of 1 ppm, as well as far more subtle features, will emerge from this high-resolution global dataset.


BACKGROUND
The course and prognosis of Crohn disease has previously been described in a regional group of patients in Copenhagen County. The aim of the present study was to reveal the quality of life. as judged by the patients, and compared to age- and sex-matched healthy controls.

METHODS
Out of 100 consecutive out-patients with Crohn disease, 94 patients accepted to participate together with 94 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. A modified McMaster Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire (IBDQ23) was used, excluding bowel-related questions. Medical students conducted interviews without knowing who were Crohn disease patients and who were controls. The bowel-related questions and Crohn's Disease Activity Index (CDAI) were assessed by gastroenterologists at inclusion in the study. Responses were indicated on a seven-point scale (7 best/1 worst). Mean numeric score was calculated as well as a delta score, i.e. the difference in score between a patient and the matched control.

RESULTS
In 21 of 23 questions the median delta score was zero, indicating no difference between patient and control. The median total delta score was 0.4 in favour of healthy controls (P < 0.001), and significantly higher in patients in relapse, 0.9, than in patients in remission, 0.3 (P < 0.01). The median total numeric score was 5.7 for patients and 6.1 for controls.

CONCLUSIONS
Although patients with Crohn disease scored significantly lower on the quality of life scale than matched healthy controls, the differences were smaller than could be expected, taking the chronic disease into consideration. Disease activity correlated with the quality of life score.


A defining question of our age is how AI will influence the workplace of the future and, thereby, the human condition. The dominant perspective is that the competition between AI and humans will be won by either humans or machines. We argue that the future workplace may not belong exclusively to humans or machines. Instead, it is better to use AI together with humans by combining their unique characteristics and abilities. In three experimental studies, we let humans and a state of the art AI classify images alone and together. As expected, the AI outperforms humans. Humans could improve by delegating to the AI, but this combined effort still does not outperform AI itself. The most effective scenario was inversion, where the AI delegated to a human when it was uncertain. Humans could in theory outperform all other configurations if they delegated effectively to the AI, but they did not. Human delegation suffered from wrong self-assessment and lack of strategy. We show that humans are even bad at delegating if they put effort in delegating well; the reason being that despite their best intentions, their perception of task difficulty is often not aligned with the real task difficulty if the image is hard. Humans did not know what they did not know. Because of this, they do not delegate the right images to the AI. This result is novel and important for human-AI collaboration at the workplace. We believe it has broad implications for the future of work, the design of decision support systems, and management education in the age of AI.


The six-port reflectometer technique enables simple and accurate measurement of optical reflection coefficients in both magnitude and phase. The reflection coefficient is computed from four power measurements of linear combinations of the waves incident and reflected from the device under test. While the six-port technique is very successful at microwave frequencies and conceptually related to coherent optical phase diversity receivers, no optical implementations have been reported so far. In this paper, we present an experimental characterization of an optical six-port reflectometer composed of three multimode interference couplers, fabricated with a single etch step in silicon on insulator. Measurements are performed using a novel technique with a simple setup. The six-port combines the incident and reflected waves with magnitude and phase errors less than plusmn0.5 dB and plusmn6deg in the 1485-1575 nm band.


This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. In the past twenty five years numerous books and articles have appeared covering different aspects of ekphrasis, with scholars arguing that it is a fundamental means by which literary artists have explored the nature of aesthetic experience. However many critics continue to rely upon the traditional conception of ekphrasis as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to complicate this critical paradigm, and proposes a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between visual and textual cultures. This critical and theoretical shift demands a new form of ekphrastic poetics, which is less concerned with representational and institutional struggles, and more concerned with ideas of ethics, affect, and intersubjectivity. The book brings together leading scholars working in the fields of literary studies, art history, modern languages, and comparative literature, and offers a fresh exploration of ekphrastic texts from the Renaissance to the present day. The chapters in the book are critically and methodologically wide-ranging; yet they share an interest in challenging the paragonal model of ekphrasis that has been prevalent since the early 1990s, and establishing a new set of theoretical frameworks for exploring the ekphrastic encounter.