In this paper we study cognitive radio networks with secrecy constraints on the primary transmission. In particular we consider several transmission schemes for the secondary

transmitter, namely interference neutralization (IN) and cooperative jamming with and without clean relaying (CR). We derive and analyze the achievable secondary rate performance of the

schemes. Furthermore we thoroughly investigate the advantages and shortcomings of these schemes through numerical simulations in a geometric model where we highlight the impact of the users' locations and show the important difference in all schemes

depending on the topology. Our results show that the secondary transmitter can successfully adapt its transmission scheme (and parameters), i.e., either IN or CR, depending on its location to maximize its rate while insuring perfect secrecy of the primary

transmission.


Who are we today? That deceptively simple question continued to be asked by the French historian and philosopher, Michel Foucault, who for the last three decades has had a profound influence on English-speaking scholars in the humanities and social sciences.; This text is designed for undergraduates and others who feel in need of some assistance when coming to grips with Foucault's voluminous and complex writings. Instead of dealing with them chronologically, however, this book concentrates on some of their central concepts, primarily Foucault's rethinking of the categories of "discourse", "power", and " the subject".; Foucault's writings contribute collectively to what he himself calls "an ontology of the present". His historical research was always geared towards showing how things could have been and still could be otherwise. This is especially the case with respect to the production of human subjects.


The city of Turku is located in southwest Finland, in Northern Europe. Founded in 1229, it is the country's oldest city. It is situated around the Aura River, which flows into the Baltic Sea, making it an ideal location for its 184,000 inhabitants and 20,000 enterprises. In June 2018, the city unveiled an ambitious climate plan to be carbon neutral by 2029. This plan was prepared according to the common model of the European Union (EU) (SECAP, Sustainable energy and climate action plan) with key milestones for years 2021, 2025, and 2029. It focuses on both adaptation and mitigation strategies with six measures outlined as necessary to meet the targets, two of which directly target citizen outreach and engagement. These two measures focus on mobilizing communities as partners in the climate plan and on raising awareness of climate change. Given its significance to the plan, this paper examines stakeholder engagement in the City of Turku's climate policies from a governance perspective. It asks the question, how does stakeholder participation materialize in the City of Turku's carbon neutral planning process? It aims to give a snapshot of baseline stakeholder participation in the city's carbon neutral aspirations. It has found that whilst the plan contains ambitions for stakeholder participation, it is not fully implemented. It recommends a citizen facilitated public participation steering group that aims to inspire citizens towards taking action and engaging in the decision-making process for a carbon neutral 2029.


Assessing treatment effects in observational studies is a multifaceted problem that not only involves heterogeneous mechanisms of how the treatment or cause is exposed to subjects, known as propensity, but also differential causal effects across sub-populations. We introduce a concept termed the facilitating score to account for both the confounding and interacting impacts of covariates on the treatment effect. Several approaches for estimating the facilitating score are discussed. In particular, we put forward a machine learning method, called causal inference tree (CIT), to provide a piecewise constant approximation of the facilitating score. With interpretable rules, CIT splits data in such a way that both the propensity and the treatment effect become more homogeneous within each resultant partition. Causal inference at different levels can be made on the basis of CIT. Together with an aggregated grouping procedure, CIT stratifies data into strata where causal effects can be conveniently assessed within each. Besides, a feasible way of predicting individual causal effects (ICE) is made available by aggregating ensemble CIT models. Both the stratified results and the estimated ICE provide an assessment of heterogeneity of causal effects and can be integrated for estimating the average causal effect (ACE). Mean square consistency of CIT is also established. We evaluate the performance of proposed methods with simulations and illustrate their use with the NSW data in Dehejia and Wahba (1999) where the objective is to assess the impact of a labor training program, the National SupportedWork (NSW) demonstration, on post-intervention earnings.


In this paper we present findings from an empirical study-in-progress that investigates how a teacher integrates technology, specifically an Interactive Whiteboard (IWB), to teach multiliterate practices when reading multi-modal texts. This research was a collaboration between a teacher and a team of university-based researchers as they used ethnographic action research to make visible the teacher's espoused and enacted beliefs as to what counts as multiliteracies in her classroom during the exploratory first phase of the inquiry. Social constructionism framed our theoretical orientation and our epistemological view of knowledge. Data based on observations, field notes, reflective journal entries, videotapes and cultural artifacts were analyzed from contrastive and holistic perspectives using micro-analytic techniques to interpret ways that meanings were negotiated when reading a multi-modal text on an IWB. Results reported indicate lack of congruence between the teacher's espoused and enacted beliefs, given that her practices focused mainly on traditional print-based modes of communication. These findings will inform the teacher's action in the next phase of the study where ethnographic action research methods will guide the teacher's planning in ways that will align her espoused and enacted beliefs about multiliteracies, multimodal texts and the use of the IWB in her classroom.


A prototypical problem on which techniques for exact enumeration are tested and compared is the enumeration of self-avoiding walks. Here, we show an advance in the methodology of enumeration, making the process thousands or millions of times faster. This allowed us to enumerate self-avoiding walks on the simple cubic lattice up to a length of 36 steps.


The overlap of pulses in the pedestal database and the global H-mode confinement database has been increased. This has resulted in a new improved combined dataset with core and pedestal energy data. Regression analysis of this dataset indicates that in ELMy H-mode the pedestal energy scales differently from the core energy and degrades strongly with plasma pressure β. Using these regression results to estimate the pedestal energy in the full ELMy dataset of the global H-mode confinement database, a new two-term scaling for ELMy H-mode confinement has been found that indicates that the core confinement scales as a pure gyro-Bohm scaling with no β degradation. At present, these findings are not conclusive as the dataset is limited in the range of data and has strong correlations between the plasma parameters.


Background and Aim: Health-related quality of life (HRQOL), a pivotal outcome indicator of health care interventions, has not been evaluated in children with autoimmune liver disease (AILD). The aim of this study was to determine HRQOL in children with AILD and the factors affecting it. Methods: The Pediatric Quality Of Life Inventory, generic core scale, was used to collect HRQOL data on children with AILD. Specific liver disease–related questions were added. Results: Survey responses were received from 30 of 40 patients. Patients' mean age at diagnosis was 11.6 ± 4.5 years, with M:F ratio of 1:1.3, and AILD for average of 4.6 ± 4.3 years. Seventy-three percent of patients had advanced liver disease. Mean overall health summary scores for the group per child and parent reports were 71.6 ± 19.0 and 71.3 ± 17.1, respectively, which were lower than healthy controls: 83.9 ± 12.5 and 82.3 ± 15.6 (P = 0.002). Frequent liver-related symptoms were associated with impaired physical and school functioning by child (P = 0.034 and 0.047) and parent reports (P = 0.051 and P = 0.018). Abdominal pain, fatigue, and psychological symptoms were found to adversely affect the HRQOL. Although it was difficult to estimate the effect of individual features of advanced liver disease such as cirrhosis, history of upper gastrointestinal bleed, and portal hypertension on the HRQOL, because of a relatively small sample size, the presence of ascites revealed lower social functioning score per parent report (P = 0.036). In an analysis of patients with any of the above complications versus those without, however, children reported lower social functioning scores (P = 0.018). There were no differences in HRQOL scores in children with autoimmune hepatitis versus primary sclerosing cholangitis versus autoimmune hepatitis/primary sclerosing cholangitis overlap syndrome. Conclusions: First study to date shows that AILD in children significantly affects HRQOL, especially with frequent liver disease–related symptoms, even in early stages of disease. Findings need to be validated in larger, multicenter studies and will help practitioners understand their patients better and optimize care.


Carbon (C) sequestration following afforestation is regarded as economically, politically, and technically feasible for fighting global warming, whereas the afforested area which will contribute more efficiently as sinks for CO2 is still uncertain. To compare the benefits for C sequestration combined with its biogeochemical effects, an earth system model of intermediate complexity, the McGill Paleoclimate Model-2 (MPM-2) is used to identify the biogeophysical effects of regional afforestation on shaping global climate. An increase in forest in China has led to a prominent global warming during summer around 45° N. Conversely, the forest expansion in the USA causes a noticeable increase in global mean annual temperature during winter. Afforestation in the USA and China brings about a decrease in annual mean meridional oceanic heat transport, while the afforestation in low latitudes of the southern hemisphere causes an increase. These local and global impacts suggest that regional tree plantations may produce a differential effect on the Earth's climate, and even exert an opposite effect on the annual mean meridional oceanic heat transport; they imply that its spatial variation of biogeophysical feedbacks needs to be considered when evaluating the benefits of afforestation.


Transatlantic Food and Agricultural Trade Policy traces the past fifty years of transatlantic trade relations in the area of food and agricultural policy, from early skirmishes over chicken exports to ongoing conflicts over biotech foods and hormone use in animal rearing. The current talks on a free-trade area between the US and the EU (TTIP) bring all these differences to the negotiating table. The book points to possible solutions to these decades-old problems.


Aims and method Mephedrone is a cathinone with amphetamine-like
stimulant effects, and is a commonly used recreational drug. The adverse
effects of mephedrone use have not been extensively studied. All individuals
who self-presented between January and June 2010 to the emergency departments
and acute mental health services in Edinburgh and Falkirk with adverse effects
of self-reported mephedrone use were identified. Results Twenty cases were identified and analysed. Severe agitation
was the most common presenting problem (70%), with 40% of individuals
developing psychotic symptoms and a further 20% reporting low mood and
suicidality. One person died by suicide. Clinical implications Mephedrone can produce amphetamine-like
adverse psychological intoxication effects, particularly in those with a
history of mental illness. Clinicians should consider advising patients on the
adverse effects of mephedrone, where relevant.


'Evidence-based policy' often uses systematic reviews of existing research on the effectiveness of interventions to provide guidance for policymakers. When applied to gauging public support for interventions, there are two stumbling blocks – opinion data on contentious issues are volatile and prone to measurement error, and the barometer of public opinion should be set for the present rather than reflecting sentiments of other times. Despite these impediments, systematic reviews are a useful tool. Authoritative evidence to support policy is not a matter of taking contemporary, error-free snapshots of public opinion but derives from building and testing explanation of how public attitudes arise. We make this case via a review of public support for legislation banning smoking in cars carrying children.


This book represents the first analysis of the evolutionary significance of sperm phenotypes and derived sperm traits and the possible selection pressures responsible for sperm-egg coevolution. An understanding of sperm evolution is fast developing and promises to shed light on many topics from basic reproductive biology to the evolutionary process itself as well as the sperm proteome, the sperm genome and the quantitative genetics of sperm. The Editors have identified 15 topics of current interest and biological significance to cover all aspects of this bizarre, fascinating and important subject. It comprises the most comprehensive and up-to-date review of the evolution of sperm and pointers for future research, written by experts in both sperm biology and evolutionary biology. The combination of evolution and sperm is a potent mix, and this is the definitive account. * The first review survey of this emerging field * Written by experts from a broad array of disciplines from the physiological and biomedical to the ecological and evolutionary * Sheds light on the intricacies of reproduction and the coevolution of sperm, egg and reproductive behavior


The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are known as the Age of Enlightenment, a time of science and reason. But in this illuminating book, Paul Monod reveals the surprising extent to which Newton, Boyle, Locke, and other giants of rational thought and empiricism also embraced the spiritual, the magical, and the occult. Although public acceptance of occult and magical practices waxed and waned during this period they survived underground, experiencing a considerable revival in the mid-eighteenth century with the rise of new antiestablishment religious denominations. The occult spilled over into politics with the radicalism of the French Revolution and into literature in early Romanticism. Even when official disapproval was at its strongest, the evidence points to a growing audience for occult publications as well as to subversive popular enthusiasm. Ultimately, finds Monod, the occult was not discarded in favor of "reason" but was incorporated into new forms of learning. In that sense, the occult is part of the modern world, not simply a relic of an unenlightened past, and is still with us today.


Artificial agents that interact with other (human or artificial) agents require models in order to reason about those other agents' behavior. In addition to the predictive utility of these models, maintaining a model that is aligned with an agent's true generative model of behavior is critical for effective human-agent interaction. In applications wherein observations and partial specification of the agent's behavior are available, achieving model alignment is challenging for a variety of reasons. For one, the agent's decision factors are often not completely known; further, prior approaches that rely upon observations of agents' behavior alone can fail to recover the true model, since multiple models can explain observed behavior equally well. To achieve better model alignment, we provide a novel approach capable of learning aligned models that conform to partial knowledge of the agent's behavior. Central to our approach are a factored model of behavior (AMM), along with Bayesian nonparametric priors, and an inference approach capable of incorporating partial specifications as constraints for model learning. We evaluate our approach in experiments and demonstrate improvements in metrics of model alignment.


Fluid simulation plays an important role in Computer Graphics and has wide applications in film and games. The desire for an improved physically-based fluid simulation solver has grown hand in hand with the advances made in Computer Graphics. Interesting fluid behaviours emerge when solid objects are added to a simulation: when fluid and solid make contact, they do not only have a physical interaction (e.g., buoyancy), but also a chemical reaction (e.g., dissolution) under the right conditions. Dissolution is one of the most common natural phenomena which is an important visual effect in fluid simulation. However this phe- nomenon is difficult to simulate due to the complexity of the behaviour and there are only few techniques available. A novel unified particle-based method for approximating chemical dis- solution is introduced in this thesis which is fast, predictable and visually plausible. The dissolution algorithm is derived using chemical Collision Theory and integrated into a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) framework. The Collision Theory of chemistry is used as an analogy to the dissolution process modelling. Dissolution occurs when solute submerges into solvent. Physical laws govern the local excitation of so- lute particles based on the relative motion with solvent particles. When the local excitation energy exceeds a user specified threshold (activation energy), the particle will be dislodged from the solid. Unlike previous methods, this dissolution model ensures that the dissolution result is in- dependent of solute sampling resolution. A mathematical relationship is also established between the activation energy, the interfacial surface area, and the total dissolution time — allowing for intuitive artistic con- trol over the global dissolution rate. Applications of this method are demonstrated using a number of practical examples, including antacid pills dissolving in water and hydraulic erosion of non-homogeneous ter- rains. Both solutes and solvents are represented by particles, and the dis- tribution of the solute particles greatly affects the plausibility of the dissolution simulation. An even but stochastic distribution of particles on both the surface and within the volume of the solute is essential for a good visual simulation of the dynamic process of dissolution. A new iterative particle-based sampling method derived from SPH is introduced in this thesis which can generate a range of blue noise pat- terns and is computationally efficient, controllable and has a variety of applications. This approach resolves many of the limitations of classic blue noise methods, such as the lack of controllability or varying the dis- tribution properties of the generated samples. Fast sampling is achieved in general dimensions for curves, surfaces and volumes. By varying a sin- gle parameter, the proposed method can generate a range of controllable blue noise samples with different distribution properties which are suit- able for various applications such as adaptive sampling and multi-class sampling. The SPH sampling approach is used for solute particle distribution which guarantees a predictable and smooth dissolution process thanks to the evenly distributed density and also gives the user control of the volume change during the phase transition. The proposed SPH sampling method achieves better visual effects compared with simple grid sampling and other blue noise sampling methods. Our energy based dissolution simulation with SPH sampled solute and solvent ensures that the dissolution behaviour is physically and chemi- cally plausible, while supporting features such as object separation and sharp feature rounding. The simulation is parallelized per particle on a GPU to enhance the performance.


This working paper discusses the use of unit labour costs (ULC) by the European Commission as a measure of competitiveness of exports, especially in central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It shows the flawed nature of the European Commission's argument that increasing wages ahead of measured productivity would necessarily represent a threat to export competitiveness. In fact, past history has shown rising unit labour costs and rising relative wages have frequently accompanied increasing exports. It demonstrates that the recorded measure of productivity appears to be low in countries with lower wage levels precisely because wages are low, even when the work performed is often very similar, or identical, to much better-paid work in higher income countries. The conclusion is that there is scope for significant wage increases without harming export competitiveness.


A lattice of Abrikosov vortices in type II superconductors is characterized by a periodic modulation of the magnetic induction perpendicular to the applied magnetic field. For a coherent vortex motion under the action of a transport current, the magnetic induction at a given point of the sample varies in time with a washboard frequency f_WB = v/d, where v is the vortex velocity and d is the distance between the vortices in the direction of motion. Here, by using a spectrum analyzer connected to a 50 nm-wide Au nanowire meander near the surface of a superconducting Nb film we detect an ac voltage induced by coherently moving fluxons. The voltage is peaked at the washboard frequency, f_WB, and its subharmonics, f_TOF = f_WB/5, determined by the antenna width. By sweeping the dc current value, we reveal that f_WB can be tuned from 100 MHz to 1.5 GHz, thereby demonstrating that patterned normal metal/superconductor nanostructures can be used as dc-tunable generators operating in the radiofrequency range.


Specifying the objective function that an AI system should pursue can be challenging. Especially when the decisions to be made by the system have a moral component, input from multiple stakeholders is often required. We consider approaches that query them about their judgments in individual examples, and then aggregate these judgments into a general policy. We propose a formal learning-theoretic framework for this setting. We then give general results on how to translate classical results from PAC learning into results in our framework. Subsequently, we show that in some settings, better results can be obtained by working directly in our framework. Finally, we discuss how our model can be extended in a variety of ways for future research.


Abstract. The results of the numerical simulation of possible hydrodynamic perturbations in Lake Chebarkul (Russia) as a consequence of the meteorite fall of 2013 (15 February) are presented. The numerical modeling is based on the Navier–Stokes equations for a two-phase fluid. The results of the simulation of a meteorite entering the water at an angle of 20° are given. Numerical experiments are carried out both when the lake is covered with ice and when it is not. The estimation of size of the destructed ice cover is made. It is shown that the size of the observed ice hole at the place of the meteorite fall is in good agreement with the theoretical predictions, as well as with other estimates. The heights of tsunami waves generated by a small meteorite entering the lake are small enough (a few centimeters) according to the estimations. However, the danger of a tsunami of meteorite or asteroid origin should not be underestimated.


In an earlier work [6] we presented a simple FM-index variant, based on the idea of Huffman-compressing the text and then applying the Burrows-Wheeler transform over it. The main drawback of using Huffman was its lack of synchronizing properties, forcing us to supply another bit stream indicating the Huffman codeword boundaries. In this way, the resulting index needed O(n(H0+1)) bits of space but with the constant 2 (concerning the main term). There are several options aiming to mitigate the overhead in space, with various effects on the query handling speed. In this work we propose Kautz-Zeckendorf coding as a both simple and practical replacement for Huffman. We dub the new index FM-KZ. We also present an efficient implementation of the rank operation, which is the main building brick of the FM-KZ. Experimental results show that our index provides an attractive space/time tradeoff in comparison with existing succinct data structures, and in the DNA test it even wins both in search time and space use. An additional asset of our solution is its relative simplicity.


In the 20 years since the death of Christopher McCandless, his story has spread far and wide, in print, in film, and in word of mouth discussion. This essay reflects on his story from a folkloristic perspective, as emergent legend and as focal point for vernacular discussion and debate. It reflects on McCandless' folk appeal, along the way considering elements of hero narrative, wilderness enthusiast testimony, online discourse, secular pilgrimage, vernacular nature religion, and the means by which media forms can encourage and even become folklore in the modern age.


Inspired by Ted Schneyer's future history of professional discipline and Bob Gordon's description of "the hazy aspirational world" of the "Law Day Sermon," I offer a vision of the legal profession's next fifty years in the form of a Law Day speech from the year 2050. Looking back on developments in the first half of the twenty-first century, this piece explores the implications of the analysis proposed in my earlier article, The Professionalism Paradigm Shift: Why Discarding Professional Ideology Will Improve the Conduct and Reputation of the Bar. The speech presents a projection of the moral leadership the bar could achieve if it were to embrace the law as a business paradigm.


Celebrated for his Art Nouveau stained-glass interpretations of birds, insects, fruits and flowers, Louis Comfort Tiffany was the foremost American designer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His enormous influence on his father's famed company, however, has been largely obscured. In this illustrated volume, Tiffany & Co design director John Loring puts into perspective the mutually beneficial bonds between "LCT" and the family firm. The book includes 350 colour images of the jewellery, enamels, blown glass, ceramics, desk accessories and other objets d'art created by LCT during his 16-year tenure as the company's design director, as well as luxury goods produced in his own studios - but in fact financed and retailed by the family company.


In many domains of science
and society, the amount of data being gathered is increasing rapidly. To
estimate input-output relationships that are often of interest, supervised
learning techniques rely on a specific type of data: labeled examples for which
we know both the input and an outcome. The problem of semi-supervised learning
is how to use, increasingly abundantly available, unlabeled examples, with
unknown outcomes, to improve supervised learning methods. This thesis is
concerned with the question if and how these improvements are possible in a
"robust", or safe, way: can we guarantee these methods do not lead to
worse performance than the supervised solution?We show that for some supervised classifiers, most notably, the least squares
classifier, semi-supervised adaptations can be constructed where this
non-degradation in performance can indeed be guaranteed, in terms of the
surrogate loss used by the classifier. Since these guarantees are given in
terms of the surrogate loss, we explore why this is a useful criterion to
evaluate performance. We then prove that semi-supervised versions with strict
non-degradation guarantees are not possible for a large class of commonly used
supervised classifiers. Other aspects covered in the thesis include optimistic
learning, the peaking phenomenon and reproducibility.


The development of models describing water and nutrient fluxes to and through 3‐D spatially resolved root structures in soils brings along the need to predict or describe the root architecture and root growth in detail. However, detailed data to calibrate and validate such architecture and growth models is typically not available. Here, we investigate the sensitivity of the root architecture model RootTyp to changes in its model parameters and reconstructed the root system architecture of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) growing in an undisturbed lysimeter using minirhizotron images at four different depths. Root arrival curves from a series of minirhizotron images were used to parameterize RootTyp using a range of realistic architectures. We adjusted a simple architecture to the data, which contained only long primary roots starting from the seed. This simple model unfortunately could not reproduce the observed increase of root density with depth. The model was subsequently improved by allowing root branching and elongation to be horizon‐dependent and by making reiteration of root tips possible. Reiteration is an alternative form of branching, where secondary roots can become as long and thick as primary roots. Our results show that minirhizotron data do not contain enough information to warrant identification of the parameters governing these processes, as the additional parameters act similarly on data characteristics as the initial ones. Therefore, different experimental techniques should be combined to constrain the model parameters better in the future.


The animated piece was designed and created to capture the imagination of children attending the Halloween festival in Buncrana. It was designed and created using the 3d animation software 3ds Max. The name Beeble Bob was given to the character and he became the mascot for the town's Halloween festival in 2008. It was animated to introduce the audience to the stage event and also to interact with the creator at varying points in the performance. The compere for the event was the creator and he would talk to Beeble Bob who was being projected on to a screen at the back of the open air stage. At the end of the sequence Beeble Bob then introduced the band and danced to one of their songs. Eventually the projection faded away and the band were left to continue the show without interruption.


There is a large population of microorganisms which reside deep within the skin and are not easily accessible or removed without damaging the skin layers. Therefore, it
would be useful to design an effective drug delivery system that could deliver the antimicrobial agent deeper into the outmost layer of the skin, the stratum corneum.
The main objective of this study was to prepare a nanosized lipidic particulate drug delivery system that has an innate antimicrobial activity as well as the ability to carry an antimicrobial agent with the potential to deliver the drug through the skin. Similar to ethosomes and transfersomes, the use of edge activators such as sodium cholate hydrate, Span 80 and Tween 80, could make these lipidic nanoparticles more elastic and have the ability to be deformed allowing deeper penetration into the skin or applied topically.
In this study, thin film hydration technique was used to prepare the conventional formulations of liposomes, ethosomes and transfersomes by first dissolving DPPC, SPC, cholesterol and edge activators (Sodium cholate hydrate, Span 80, Tween 80) in either chloroform or chloroform: methanol mixture. The samples were then hydrated by a PBS (pH 7.4), doubled distilled water or distilled water-ethanol mixture following rotary evaporation for 60 minutes. The conventional formulations either with or without the model drug (chlorhexidine) were compared with the purposely- designed ultraflexible lipidic formulation, which is termed as propanosomes.
Modifying the thin film hydration method, this study used propanol for the hydration step for the synthesis and optimisation of propanosomes.
Propanol was selected over other solvents due to its more bactericidal property.
All formulations were characterised using laser diffraction, zeta sizer and lipid extrusion techniques. The propanosomal formulations were visualised under TEM. The following size ranges were found with the following formulations: liposomes (1μm), ethosomes (6-8 μm), transferosomes (60-90 nm) and propanosomes (80-100 nm). These experiments alsoshowed that ethosomes were more ultradeformable than liposomes and transfersomes as there was no change of the size upon extrusion. The propanosomal results showed that the mean particle size was inherited by transfersomes and deformability and charge were inherited by ethosomes concluding that the combining preparatory method of using transfersomes and ethosomes was successfully achieved.
Antimicrobial studies on the formulations as disk diffusion testing was also conducted on the formulations. In conclusion, the results of this study have demonstrated that it is possible to synthesis and characterise novel lipidic particulate system and further optimisation on the nanolipidic system warrants potential application as drug delivery system for topical antimicrobial application.


'Their realm is held in balance by their union ...Break that union and the Three Countries will fall apart.' Otori Takeo and Kaede have ruled the Three Countries peacefully for over sixteen years, following the events laid out in the epic Tales of the Otori. They have three daughters: Shigeko, fifteen years old and heir to the Otori, and Maya and Miki, thirteen-year-old twins who have inherited the supernatural skills of their father. Kaede knows nothing of the prophecy that Takeo will die at the hands of his son and longs to give him a male child. Nor does she know of the boy he fathered sixteen years ago -- a boy whose heart is filled with hatred and whose skills as a Ghostmaster give him the power to incite the dead. Takeo is determined that clan conflicts will never again ravage the Three Countries, but warriors are born to fight: the warlord Arai Zenko has deadly ambitions, the Emperor himself has challenged Takeo's rule and, despite a delicate truce between the deadly Tribe and the Otori, revenge still eats at the heart of renegade leader Kikuta Akio ...Against these gathering threats Takeo draws strength from his love for Kaede, but even this is not beyond the reach of their enemies . ..


Several quality criteria were determined in beef derived from animals of two age groups classified by dentition: those with four permanent incisors (55 head), and those with five or more permanent incisors (50 head), corresponding to chronological ages of up to 2.5 years and three years or more, respectively. The 105 animals were processed into beef in three local slaughtherhouses. From each left-carcass, samples from the Longissimus dorsi lumborum (LDL), Semimembranosus (SM) and Semitendinosus (ST) were obtained and analyzed for tenderness (Warner-Braztler Shear Force; WBS) and intramuscular fat as crude and cooked beef, and for contents of water and protein in crude condition, at the laboratory of Food Science and Technology, Mayaguez Campus of UPR. A similar number of crude samples were analyzed for contents of intramuscular fat and cholesterol at the laboratory of Meat Technology of the University of Florida in Gainesville. Animal age did not affect (P > 0.05) contents of water, protein or cholesterol, nor the WBS value. Intramuscular fat content of younger animals was lower (P less than 0.05) than that of the older group in crude beef analyzed at Mayaguez (1.89 vs. 2.73%) and Florida (2.60 vs. 3.48%), and in cooked beef analyzed in Mayaguez (2.98 vs. 4.56%), respectively. The general means of protein and cholesterol content were 20.38% and 56.41 mg/100 g (wet basis), the latter being lower than that found in the literature (70 to 75 mg/100 g). This difference is ascribed mainly to the common local practice of basing bovine feeding on grazing tropical grasses. Muscle did not affect (P > 0.05) the contents of protein and intramuscular fat in crude and cooked samples analyzed at Mayaguez, and of cholesterol (LD vs. SM) in crude beef samples analyzed at Florida. Intramuscular fat was higher (P less than 0.05) in crude samples from Longissimus analyzed at Florida. In addition, of the three muscles tested, Longissimus yielded crude beef with higher (P less than 0.05) intramuscular fat content (Florida samples) and of greatest tenderness (WBS 1.53 kg/1.27 cm). It is concluded that beef produced in Puerto Rico can be classified as moderately tender and low in intramuscular fat and cholesterol, thus constituting a healthy and appetizing source of nutrients for the consuming public.


Papers p 159

Never, sometimes, or always characterise the wide variation in individual doctors' practice of using chaperones during genital and rectal examination. This variation is not confined to general practice.1 In this week's issue Torrance et al report a survey of chaperone policy in genitourinary medicine clinics (p 159).2 Some clinics would appear to allow male doctors to examine female patients without the presence or offer of a chaperone. Such practice is surely beyond justification.

Some may argue that the use of chaperones is an area where physician discretion is more relevant than policy. Certainly not all patients choose to have a chaperone present during intimate examinations, and it may be difficult to provide chaperones in some settings. However, in this area of quality and clinical risk guidelines rather than discretion need to dictate practice.

What considerations should direct the use of chaperones? Several studies have sought patient preferences in primary and secondary healthcare settings,3–7 although not in genitourinary medicine. The …


This paper investigates the short-run consumption expenditure dynamics and the interaction of public and private arrangements of ultra-poor and labor-constrained households in Malawi using an original dataset from the Mchinjii social cash transfer pilot project (one of the first experiments of social protection policies based on unconditional cash transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa). The authors exploit the unique source of exogenous variation provided by the randomized component of the program in order to isolate the effect of cash transfers on consumption expenditures as well as the net crowding out effect of cash transfers on private arrangements. They find a statistically significant reduction effect on the level of consumption expenditures for those households receiving cash transfers, thus leading to the rejection of the perfect risk sharing hypothesis. Moreover, by looking at the effects of cash transfers on private arrangements in a context characterized by imperfect enforceability of contracts and by a social fabric heavily compromised by high HIV/AIDS rates, the analysis confirms the presence of crowding out effects on private arrangements when looking at gifts and (to a lesser extent) remittances, while informal loans seem to be completely independent from the cash transfer's reception. From a policy perspective, the paper offers a contribution to the evaluation of the very recent wave of social protection policies based on (unconditional) cash transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that there might be an important role for public interventions aimed at helping households to pool risk more effectively.


Since 2002, the Master's students at the Graduate School of Architecture of Nantes who are enrolled in the "Architecture in Representation" orientation have carried out a pioneering work in the use of digital tools. By adopting the most recent techniques and tools, they have transformed the architectural design approach, thanks to the integration of "narrative design". In fifteen years, students will have gone from the board to digital drawing, to immersion and virtual reality, including short films and interactive devices, without losing sight that the subject of the work is in fact the project, and not the tool. In doing so, they have questioned, led by their professors, the status of synthesis images, the challenges of interactive narrative and of the virtual world. Within the school, time was needed to accept these explorations; the use of digital tools, long criticised, was blocking the appreciation of the content and the students' experimental approaches. Nowadays, the experience from these past fifteen years lead us to ask this question: do digital tools renew the design paradigms, or are we only involved in the evolution of practices through the integration of other means?


Leadership plays a critical but poorly understood role in determining the success or failure of the processes of institutional bargaining that dominate efforts to form international regimes or, more generally, institutional arrangements in international society. An examination of the nature of institutional bargaining serves as a springboard both for pinpointing the role of leadership in regime formation and for differentiating three forms of leadership that regularly come into play in efforts to establish international institutions: structural leadership, entrepreneurial leadership, and intellectual leadership. Because much of the real work of regime formation occurs in the interplay of different types of leadership, the study of interactions among individual leaders is a high priority for those seeking to illuminate the processes involved in the creation of international institutions. Not only does such a study help to explain the conditions under which regimes form or fail to form, but it also provides an opportunity to bring the individual back in to an important area of international affairs.


Liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and kerosene can be substituted by vegetable cooking oils (VCOs) as fuel using pressurized cooking stove. The higher of ignition values, density and viscosity of VCOs compared to other oils, such as kerosene was a basic consideration to modify the vegetable oil pressure stove (VOPS). The voPs design employed with spiral coil pipe line as oil preheater that was intended to reduce viscosity and ignition values of VCOs. The spiral coil pipe line in this VOPS will auto preaheat the oil to decrease its viscosity and to produce smaller droplets before being combusted. The performance indicators fuel/stove/vessel combination were conducted by measurements, calculations and experiments. The performance parameters were represented by fuel characteristic, oil droplet diameter, combustion flame and fuel consumption.  The main purpose of this experiment was to study of the use of VCOs as alternative fuels as well as combustion performance and economics evaluation. The experiment was conducted by using three kind of VCOs as fuel; used vegetable oil (UCO), crude VCO and fresh UCO on VOPS. The VCOs could be burned in a red bluish flame with a maximum flame temperature of flue gases of 1100 °C, 1042 °C and 920 °C, respectively. Atomization of all VCOs could produce fuel droplets diameter of 155 µm-650 µm and lower viscosity and lower ignition values of the fuels. The efficiency of the VOPS was 20%-32% calculated by the fuel consumption rate (FCR) of ±1.50 L/h and gave the economic values were cheaper than using kerosene or LPG as fuel.


Retail and institutional investors have been stunned at recent stock market volatility. The general thinking is that everything is related to the global financial crisis, starting, for the most part, in August 2007, when the Volatility Index, or VIX, started to climb. We believe, however, that there are more fundamental reasons behind the explosion in trading volume and the speed at which stock prices and indexes are changing. It has to do with the way electronic trading, the new for-profit exchanges and ECNs, the NYSE Hybrid and the SEC's Regulation NMS have all come together in unexpected ways, starting, coincidently, in late summer of 2007.


Astrocytes suppress neuroinflammation through activation of their dopamine D2 receptors. Chronic neuroinflammation commonly occurs in the brains of aged individuals, as well as in patients suffering from certain neurodegenerative disorders. Impairments in the brain function of the elderly are associated with the decreased abundance of the dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2). Noting that neuroglial cells, including astrocytes, express DRD2 and contribute to neuroinflammation, Shao et al. investigated whether defects in DRD2 signaling in glial cells contributed to a loss of brain homeostasis. Immunohistochemical analysis showed that neuroinflammation in aged DRD2-deficient mice was more severe than that in age-matched wild-type mice. This phenotype was associated with the increased abundance of mRNA and protein of proinflammatory mediators, including interleukin-1β and cyclooxygenase-2. In vitro analysis of different cell types isolated from brains showed that astrocytes, and not neurons or microglia, were more activated in DRD2-deficient mice than in wild-type mice and that they produced increased amounts of proinflammatory mediators. DRD2-deficient astrocytes showed enhanced responsiveness to immune stimuli compared with that of astrocytes from wild-type mice. In addition, aging-associated neuroinflammation was enhanced in mice with an astrocyte-specific deletion of Drd2 compared with that in wild-type mice. Microarray analysis revealed the decreased expression of the gene encoding αB-crystallin (CRYAB) in DRD2-deficient mice compared with that in wild-type mice. CRYAB is a small heat-shock protein with anti-inflammatory function. Knockdown of Cryab in cultured astrocytes resulted in increased production of proinflammatory factors, whereas the opposite effect was observed in DRD2-deficient astrocytes expressing exogenous CRYAB. In a neurotoxin-induced mouse model of Parkinson's disease, pretreatment of mice with a DRD2-selective agonist led to protection of dopaminergic neurons from toxin-induced death. Together, these data suggest that DRD2 signaling in astrocytes mediates protection from neuroinflammation through a CRYAB-dependent mechanism. W. Shao, S.-z. Zhang, M. Tang, X.-h. Zhang, Z. Zhou, Y.-q. Yin, Q.-b. Zhou, Y.-y. Huang, Y.-j. Liu, E. Wawrousek, T. Chen, S.-b. Li, M. Xu, J.-n. Zhou, G. Hu, J.-w. Zhou, Suppression of neuroinflammation by astrocytic dopamine D2 receptors via αB-crystallin. Nature 494, 90–94 (2013). [PubMed]


BACKGROUND
Clinical characteristics driving variations in Medicare outpatient physical therapy expenditures are inadequately understood.

OBJECTIVE
The objectives of this study were to examine variations in annual outpatient physical therapy expenditures of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries by primary diagnosis and baseline functional mobility, and to assess whether case mix groups based on primary diagnosis and functional mobility scores would be useful for expenditure differentiation.

DESIGN
This was an observational, longitudinal study.

METHODS
Volunteer providers in community settings participated in data collection with Continuity Assessment Record and Evaluation-Community (CARE-C) assessments for Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries. Annual outpatient physical therapy expenditures were calculated using allowed charges on Medicare claims; primary diagnosis and baseline functional mobility were obtained from CARE-C assessments. Whether annual expenditures varied significantly across primary diagnosis groups and within diagnosis groups by functional mobility was examined.

RESULTS
Data for 4210 patients (mean [SD] age = 72.9 [9.9] years; 64.6% women) from 127 providers were included. Mean expenditures differed significantly across 12 primary diagnosis groups created from CARE-C clinician-reported diagnoses (F = 12.73; df = 11). Twenty-five pairwise differences in 66 pairwise diagnosis group comparisons were statistically significant. Within 8 diagnosis groups, expenditures were significantly higher for low-mobility subgroups than for high-mobility subgroups; borderline significance was achieved for 1 diagnosis group.

LIMITATIONS
The small convenience sample limited the statistical power and the generalizability of the results.

CONCLUSIONS
Significant variations in physical therapy expenditures based on primary diagnosis and baseline functional mobility support the use of these variables in predicting outpatient physical therapy expenditures. Although Medicare's annual therapy spending cap was repealed effective January 2018, the data from this study provide an initial foundation to inform any future policy efforts, such as targeted medical review, risk-adjusted therapy payments, or case mix groups as potential payment alternatives. Additional research with larger samples is needed to further develop and test case mix groups and improve generalizability to the national population. Refined case mix groups could also help providers prognosticate physical therapy expenditures based on patient profiles.


This publication is a reflection on approaches that stimulate responsiveness in citizens and communities – based in their strengths – and enable more confident expressions of their civic voice and agency. This is done through the lens of the Australia Africa Community Engagement Scheme (AACES), a community-led water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) initiative implemented in South Africa and Zambia by Oxfam Australia and Oxfam Great Britain, respectively. This report is the second volume in a series of publications focussed on identifying principles and practices for effectively facilitating the active civic engagement of communities and civil society organisations. The first volume, Facilitating Civic Engagement through Consultation: Learning from local communities through the NHI-Accountability Project in South Africa, published by Oxfam Australia in February 2016, draws directly on the experience of the organisations and communities that participated in health policy reform in South Africa.


This paper investigates globalizing activities of Japanese manufacturing firms and their domestic adjustments in terms of domestic employment since the 2000s. A unique feature of this paper is to apply the job creation (JC)/job destruction (JD) method to changes in domestic employment at three different stages, i.e., industry level, firm level, and intra-firm section level, with a distinction among three types of firms, namely, expanding multinational enterprises (MNEs), non-expanding MNEs, and local firms. The paper also examines domestic adjustments to import competition. Major findings include: (i) de-industrialization advances in the early 2000s, but the shrinkage of manufacturing industry is not observed after that, (ii) both gross job creation and gross job destruction at firm and intra-firm section levels are much larger than net changes in all periods, showing the restructuring dynamism, firm heterogeneity, and active adjustments within firms, (iii) gross changes are widely different among three periods at the industry level, (iv) small and medium enterprises (SMEs) actively contribute to net job creation (or less net job destruction), compared with large firms, (v) multinational SMEs that expand foreign operations enlarge domestic employment in total, intensify headquarters (HQ) services, and almost maintain or expand manufacturing activities, in all periods, unlike other types of SMEs, (vi) multinational large firms that expand foreign operations increase domestic employment in total as well as employment engaged in HQ services and manufacturing activities, compared with other types of large firms, except in the early 2000s when both the manufacturing industry as a whole and manufacturing activities significantly shrunk, and vii) negative effects of import competition on domestic employment seem to exist particularly in the early 2000s, but such a tendency is becoming weak, and rather globalizing corporate activities contribute to the expansion of domestic employment by extending complementary activities at home.


Agricultural production on the Texas High Plains is heavily dependent on the Ogallala Aquifer, which accounts for approximately 95 percent of groundwater pumped. Rapid groundwater depletion has been observed in the Ogallala Aquifer, which is attributed to low recharge rates and high water withdrawals. In an effort to manage this limitedly-renewable water resource, High Plains Water Conservation District (HPWD) No.1 has established a rule to reduce pumping 1.25 acre-feet per acre per year for all groundwater users within HPWD. This research evaluates the efficiency and distributional effects of a "cap and trade" mechanism for the HPWD region under alternative methods of allocating the allowable groundwater use: an equal distribution rule and a uniform percentage reduction rule. Marginal abatement curves are derived from producer profit functions, which include four irrigated and three rain fed crops. Optimal cropping choices, water use, water permit trades, and water permit prices are estimated simultaneously by maximizing producer profits. The relative efficiency of the programs are evaluated by comparing total producer profits. The results shows that the equal distribution cap will result in a more efficient use of groundwater resources, while the uniform percentage reduction cap will result in less wealth redistribution.


Efficient scalability and process synchronization are critical for achieving high performance in distributed computing environments. Analysis of the scalability is usually done using intensive case studies, which give an answer only for the particular set of model parameters. We found an efficient way to analyze the time evolution in models simulated with the Parallel Discrete Event Simulations (PDES) approach. The essential feature of PDES is the concept of local virtual time (LVT) associated with the evolution of each process of the model. The LVT of processes evaluates in simulations and forms a complicated profile.These profiles remind the profiles of the surface growth in the physical devices. In physics, researchers use the concept of universality, which helps to divide the different regimes of the class's surface growth—each class is described by some universal laws and does not depend on the details of the model. We demonstrate the applicability of this concept and present a model of LVT profile evolution in Personal Communication Service (PCS) model. The PCS network consists of a square grid of radio ports that serve users in their zone (cell). We build the LVT-PCS model, which describes the evolution of the LVT profile associated with the PCS model. We simulate the PCS model using the ROSS simulator (optimistic PDES) and compare results with those simulated by our LVT-PCS model. We found the profile demonstrates property, which is known in physics as roughening transition. We estimate the values of ``critical'' exponents for two models, which seem to belong to the same universality class. We believe that the similarity we found can be helpful for the preliminary analysis of the model scalability, process desynchronization, and possible deadlocks.


The main aims of this study were to "develop and test a classification system for sustained village sanitation uptake" and to "identify and confirm which village-level factors influence the sustained uptake of latrines". Household survey data are generally considered to be more reliable than administrative data, and in order to monitor development and identify the needs of specific locations, there is a need to be able to obtain data at a neighbourhood level rather than district or ward level. The data collection strategy developed for Phase 1 enabled household data to be collected by each village for all households, rather than a small sample, with minimal instruction from District Government staff. These data were entered onto computer and combined to generate village sanitation profiles. Individual village sanitation profile graphs (latrine acquisition curves (Smith 1988)) were produced and adding trend lines to these demonstrated that both individual village sanitation coverage levels and the rates of change of coverage could be easily quantified and thus compared. Categories of high, medium and low coverage were established and rates of change in sanitation coverage were observed to be falling, rising or constant. Combining these village sanitation characteristics led to the proposed village classification system for sustainability. Each village was duly classified as having sustained, intermediate or unsustained sanitation. The perspective of villagers, village leaders, District Government and WaterAid staff were sought and combined to formulate a list of factors perceived to influence local sanitation uptake. The sustainability classification system enabled the subsequent testing of these factors in both sustained and unsustained sanitation villages to confirm which factors proved to be statistically significant. Both physical and social factors proved to be significant for sustainable sanitation though only the social factors were seen to have the potential for influence or change. The key findings were: » Villages were able to successfully collect their own historical household sanitation data with minimal input from District Government staff. » The greatest increase in overall District sanitation coverage would result from enabling those villages classified as having intermediate or unsustained sanitation to reach their individual village MDG targets. » Replacing full/collapsed latrines is happening across the study area but not always straight away. » Sharing of household latrines between two or more households is commonplace. » Physical determinants of sustained sanitation relate to village size/status, housing density/spread, level of infrastructure, remoteness of services, distance to an urban centre, and level of bush cover within the village. Social determinants of sustained sanitation relate to the quality of village leadership, level of activity of the Village Health Committee, openness of local people to new ideas, education level of village, exposure to more than one sanitation intervention.


Melanie Ilic, 'Women in the Khrushchev Era: an Overview'
(in Women in the Khrushchev Era)

This chapter provides an overview of the changing roles and status of women in the Soviet Union in the Khrushchev era (1956-64). In this period of tentative de-Stalinisation, Khrushchev gave new impetus to the 'woman question' and reversed a number of important legal decisions concerning women and the family that had been introduced in the 1930s and 1940s. The outcome of the population losses and demographic imbalance resulting from the Second World War was that considerable emphasis was now placed on the health and welfare of women, in particular concerning their reproductive rights and maternal responsibilities. The relative economic prosperity of the post-war years provided additional material benefits and home comforts for all Soviet citizens, as well as bringing about changes in the conditions of employment in both industry and agriculture. The scope of production was now extended to the newly-developing territories and settlements of the 'Virgin Lands'. These changes inevitably impacted on the lives of women.
A new lease of life was given to women's social and political organisations, and women's representation in the various organs of government and administration increased substantially. Soviet women participated in, and convened, a number of important international conferences in these years. Whole generations of women, who had been active in, or eyewitness to, the events of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were reaching old age by the 1950s, and they were now encouraged to record and publish their memoirs. In the public as well as the private realm, then, the Khrushchev era saw Soviet women once more propelled into the limelight, and, most startlingly of all, even into space.
 In preparing this chapter, I have drawn heavily on a number of Soviet women's magazines that enjoyed mass circulation in the Khrushchev era. Most notable amongst these are Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker), Krest'yanka (Peasant Woman) and Zhenshchiny Mira (Women of the World, published by the Russian Women's International Democratic Federation). During the Khrushchevian 'thaw' in international relations the Soviet Union explored and extended its communications with other countries, sometimes with the aid of the foreign language press. The magazine Soviet Woman, the monthly publication of the Soviet Women's Anti-Fascist Committee and the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, was circulated widely in the western world and developing countries. Newspaper reports have provided interesting and important additional sources of information. The press media is an important source for exploring both the dissemination of official policy directives and the airing of popular opinion, taking into account the editorial constraints of the magazines and newspapers under review.


In rural parts of Sweden, there is a growing interest in remote teaching, i.e. synchronous teaching using ICT. The Swedish National Agency for Education views remote teaching as a way to meet teacher shortage. However, there is limited research on remote teaching as an educational form. The purpose of this study was to investigate opportunities and challenges with remote teaching from three perspectives: school, region, and research. The method chosen was content analysis of qualitative interviews with school leaders, regional officials and researchers. All informants ment that remote teaching had great opportunities. Common themes were equality, meeting teacher shortages, access to qualified teachers, and increased teaching quality. However, the informants highlighted challenges related to the technological, practical and organizational issues, learning, and legal issues. Limited use by the Education Act was the foremost challenge according to regional officials and researchers, while school leader more often highlighted technology, pedagogy, and organization as challenges. In conclusion, all three perspectives saw remote teaching as a way to ensure pupils in rural areas the right to equal education and teaching quality. Despite challenges introducing a novel form of teaching, there is a consensus on remote teaching as an integral part of the future school.


Australian copyright law and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) have always sat uncomfortably together, each with their own internal logic and legitimacy, but forcing certain arrangements and compromises when applied to specific contexts. The collection of Indigenous language materials into a digital archive has required finding means to observe and respect these two incongruent knowledge traditions. The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages, an open online repository containing thousands of books in dozens of languages from Indigenous communities of Australia's Northern Territory, offers opportunity to explore how the need to attend to both knowledge traditions led to specific decisions and practices. In particular, where the Australian copyright law was satisfied, additional steps were needed to respectfully incorporate Indigenous perspectives. This paper outlines the negotiations and compromises inherent in seeking a solution which observes and respects both Indigenous and western knowledge practices in a unique collection of cultural heritage materials.


The aim of this thesis is to study the unital subrings contained in associative algebras arising as the endomorphism algebras of hyperelliptic Jacobians over finite fields. In the first part we study associative algebras with special emphasis on maximal orders. In the second part we introduce the theory of abelian varieties over finite fields and study the ideal structures of their endomorphism rings. Finally we specialize to hyperelliptic Jacobians and study their endomorphism rings.


Human talent is the cornerstone to promote responses from the entrepreneurial "new logic" to the needs of changes in the behavior of the binomial relationship between supply and demand in hotels dedicated to the management and service delivery based on  people. For this reason, conscientious, ethical, motivated, and trained managers are needed committed to satisfying internal and external customers. This  scientific and technological research article, based on the theme:  human resource management and leadership, explores the formation and development of managerial competencies in human talent management jobs in the hotels listed in the National Tourism Registry (RTN, for the term in Spanish) and categorized as five star hotels. The discourse is based on applied field and transactional research, conducted in Venezuela in the state of Nueva Esparta, specifically in Margarita Island. The dissertation concludes by demonstrating the need to immediately undertake the formation and development of managerial skills in tourist accommodation establishments. It recommends taking advantage of tax incentives established by Venezuelan legislation to fund training and development of managerial competencies.


The spatial distribution of relative humidity with respect to ice (RHI) in the boreal wintertime tropical tropopause layer (TTL, ≃14–18 km) over the Pacific is examined with the measurements provided by the NASA Airborne Tropical TRopopause EXperiment. We also compare the measured RHI distributions with results from a transport and microphysical model driven by meteorological analysis fields. Notable features in the distribution of RHI versus temperature and longitude include (1) the common occurrence of RHI values near ice saturation over the western Pacific in the lower to middle TTL; (2) low RHI values in the lower TTL over the central and eastern Pacific; (3) common occurrence of RHI values following a constant mixing ratio in the middle to upper TTL (temperatures between 190 and 200 K); (4) RHI values typically near ice saturation in the coldest airmasses sampled; and (5) RHI values typically near 100% across the TTL temperature range in air parcels with ozone mixing ratios less than 50 ppbv. We suggest that the typically saturated air in the lower TTL over the western Pacific is likely driven by a combination of the frequent occurrence of deep convection and the predominance of rising motion in this region. The nearly constant water vapor mixing ratios in the middle to upper TTL likely result from the combination of slow ascent (resulting in long residence times) and wave‐driven temperature variability. The numerical simulations generally reproduce the observed RHI distribution features, and sensitivity tests further emphasize the strong influence of convective input and vertical motions on TTL relative humidity.


The fall of the Berlin Wall, and the chain of events leading up to it, arguably constitute one of the most thoroughly documented episodes in recent history. Nonetheless, most accounts have focused predominantly on high-level politics and diplomacy along with the most dramatic and photogenic public displays. End Game, a rich, sweeping account of the autumn of 1989 as it was experienced "on the ground" in the German Democratic Republic, powerfully depicting the desolation and dysfunction that shaped everyday life for so many East Germans in the face of economic disruption and political impotence. Citizens' frustration mounted until it bubbled over in the form of massive demonstrations and other forms of protest. Following the story up to the first free elections in March 1990, the volume combines abundant detail with sharp analysis and helps us to see this familiar historical moment through new eyes.


Brahmaputra river basin is one of the most vulnerable areas in the world subject to combined effects of glacier melt, extreme monsoon rainfall and sea level rise. Water is emerging as a new possible irritant between China and India. For India, Water of Brahmaputra constitutes a major lifeline for people of Tibet and North Eastern states. The building of dams and diversion projects in Tibet by China is a matter of grave concern for lower riparian states. For China, it is having hidden inclination to create employment potentials for more than millions of people by making Brahmaputra diversion project forward. The requirement of fresh water as the pollution grows and population rise has forced China to have the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River project. The objective of this paper is to focus the reaction of both people on the water diversion issue, disastrous ecological consequences and the urgent necessity for having a water treaty between Asian giants. It also examines the hegemonic tendencies of China on Brahmaputra River & exercise of power for economic gains and outcomes. The policies China takes on trans- Boundary Rivers are not symptom of peaceful nature of its rise. In addition, it establishes the fact that sharing of information, ecosystem-friendly policies, thought and mutual understanding will dispel the suspicion and develop trust between two countries, creating an enabling environment for better management of Brahmaputra River.


Advanced methods of applying deep learning to structured data such as graphs have been proposed in recent years. In particular, studies have focused on generalizing convolutional neural networks to graph data, which includes redefining the convolution and the downsampling (pooling) operations for graphs. The method of generalizing the convolution operation to graphs has been proven to improve performance and is widely used. However, the method of applying downsampling to graphs is still difficult to perform and has room for improvement. In this paper, we propose a graph pooling method based on self-attention. Self-attention using graph convolution allows our pooling method to consider both node features and graph topology. To ensure a fair comparison, the same training procedures and model architectures were used for the existing pooling methods and our method. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior graph classification performance on the benchmark datasets using a reasonable number of parameters.


Abstract—In India, cooling loads in residential sector is a major contributor to its total energy consumption. Due to the increasing cooling need, the market penetration of air-conditioners is further expected to rise. Natural Ventilation (NV), however, possesses great potential to save significant energy consumption especially for residential buildings in moderate climates. As multifamily residential apartment buildings are designed by repetitive use of prototype designs, deriving individual NV based design prototype solutions for a combination of different wind incidence angles and orientations would provide significant opportunity to address the rise in cooling loads by residential sector. This paper presents the results of NV performance of a selected prototype apartment design with a cluster of four units in Pune, India, and an attempt to improve the NV performance through design modifications. The water table apparatus, a physical modelling tool, is used to study the flow patterns and simulate wind-induced NV performance. Quantification of NV performance is done by post processing images captured from video recordings in terms of percentage of area with good and poor access to ventilation. NV performance of the existing design for eight wind incidence angles showed that of the cluster of four units, the windward units showed good access to ventilation for all rooms, and the leeward units had lower access to ventilation with the bedrooms in the leeward units having the least access. The results showed improved performance in all the units for all wind incidence angles to more than 80% good access to ventilation. Some units showed an additional improvement to more than 90% good access to ventilation. This process of design and performance evaluation improved some individual units from 0% to 100% for good access to ventilation. The results demonstrate the ease of use and the power of the water table apparatus for performance-based design to simulate wind induced NV.


Room acoustic diffusers can be used to treat critical listening environments to improve sound quality. One popular class is Schroeder diffusers, which comprise wells of varying depth separated by thin fins. This paper concerns a new approach to enable the modeling of these complex surfaces in the time domain. Mostly, diffuser scattering is predicted using steady-state single frequency methods. A popular approach is to use a frequency domain boundary element method (BEM) model of a box containing the diffuser, where the mouth of each well is replaced by a compliant surface with appropriate surface impedance. The best way of representing compliant surfaces in time domain prediction models, such as the transient BEM is, however, currently unresolved. A representation based on surface impedance yields convolution kernels which involve future sound, so is not compatible with the current generation of time-marching transient BEM solvers. Consequently, this paper proposes the use of a surface reflection kernel for modeling well behavior and this is tested in a time domain BEM implementation. The new algorithm is verified on two surfaces including a Schroeder diffuser model and accurate results are obtained. It is hoped that this representation may be extended to arbitrary compliant locally reacting materials.


RAYMOND GOZZI, JR. [*] AS COMPUTER NETWORKS become more pervasive in everyday life, there are more reasons for people to want to tamper with them. Because e-commerce attracts more and more money to the internet, the old-fashioned game of cops-and-robbers now enters the new territory of cyberspace. A new industry of computer security has given rise to a colorful vocabulary, heavily influenced by science fiction and fantasy writers. There are the Samurai (hackers who hire out for legal jobs unveiling difficult-to-access information) who work for the suits whom they despise. There are the Dark Side Hackers who are out to steal or destroy information. They roam the internet trying to get through firewalls (programs set up to protect particular networks). They risk getting caught in iron boxes or venus flytraps (traps for remote hackers). Among the "malware" (malicious programs) which can be found on computer networks, viruses are the most feared -- these are programs hidden in other programs which can do all sorts of unauthorized tasks. The Chernobyl Virus, for example, attempts to erase the entire hard drive and disable a key chip in the computer. In some versions of the virus, it becomes active on the 26th of every month, recalling the April 26 date of the Chernobyl disaster. Also dangerous are worms, self-contained programs which roam the internet looking for systems to break into and disable. The most famous worm incident remains The Great Worm of 1988, (which was mistakenly called a virus in the press). This little program disabled thousands of computers around the country by clogging them up, much to the dismay of its perpetrator, who had not anticipated it would replicate itself so quickly. Although the worst infestations of the Great Worm were cleared in a couple of days, it still occasionally shows up and needs to be dealt with. There is another piece of "malware" which has started to get headlines -- the Trojan Horse. This is a program which looks like something else, but when it runs on your computer it performs various hidden tasks. Some observers call it a kind of virus, but some Trojan Horses can have worm-like properties as well. The metaphor, of course, goes back a few thousand years to the end of the Trojan War, when the invading Greeks appeared to give up and sail away from Troy, leaving behind a large wooden horse as a mute offering. When the triumphant Trojans pulled the horse, conveniently provided with wheels, into their city, Greek soldiers hidden inside sneaked out after the party was over and opened the gates of the city. The Greeks came in and slaughtered the unsuspecting Trojans. The Trojan Horse deception was the idea of the wily Odysseus, one of the Greek leaders. However, Odysseus incurred the displeasure of the Gods, who detoured his trip home for over ten years. His various improbable adventures are chronicled in The Odyssey, one of the great mythic tales of all time. When Odysseus did get back home to Ithaca in Greece, he had to slaughter dozens of suitors who were wooing his wife and eating his provisions. So maybe it is not such a good idea to author a Trojan Horse. As a metaphor, however, the Trojan Horse imagery works effectively. It captures the deceptive nature of the programs, and calls to mind the problem of hidden elements within the program which work against the purposes of the owner. It also implies that this program is something made by humans, not an organic, natural phenomenon as implied by the virus and worm metaphors. A Trojan Horse named "Explore.Zip" made headlines in June, 1999. It was first detected in Israel, but in less than a week had spread around the world. It erased files on tens of thousands of corporate computers at AT&T, Boeing, General Electric, Microsoft, and perhaps others. (See Meyerson, 1999.) This Trojan Horse arrived as an attachment to an e-mail message. The e-mail message came from the computer of someone you knew, and stated "I received your e-mail and I shall send you a reply ASAP. …


This title makes complex criminal law issues more accessible to students by examining the facts of real-life case studies. The new edition continues the practice of adding additional cases, along with all accompanying material. Included in the text are details regarding the offender's background, the nature of the offense, all relevant facts of the case, photographs of the people and locations of the offense, and the texts of both then-governing and current statutes. This approach encourages analysis about what the law is and should be, and the aftermath of each case encourages discussion about what actually happened to the defendant and why.


We define the concept of Dynamic Passive Haptic Feedback (DPHF) for virtual reality by introducing the weight-shifting physical DPHF proxy object Shifty. This concept combines actuators known from active haptics and physical proxies known from passive haptics to construct proxies that automatically adapt their passive haptic feedback. We describe the concept behind our ungrounded weight-shifting DPHF proxy Shifty and the implementation of our prototype. We then investigate how Shifty can, by automatically changing its internal weight distribution, enhance the user's perception of virtual objects interacted with in two experiments. In a first experiment, we show that Shifty can enhance the perception of virtual objects changing in shape, especially in length and thickness. Here, Shifty was shown to increase the user's fun and perceived realism significantly, compared to an equivalent passive haptic proxy. In a second experiment, Shifty is used to pick up virtual objects of different virtual weights. The results show that Shifty enhances the perception of weight and thus the perceived realism by adapting its kinesthetic feedback to the picked-up virtual object. In the same experiment, we additionally show that specific combinations of haptic, visual and auditory feedback during the pick-up interaction help to compensate for visual-haptic mismatch perceived during the shifting process.


In this text, Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of 20th-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the "event." He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation. Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian dur e, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.


As a democracy develops and matures, the number of interest groups attempting to voice their interests with respect to trade policies tends to increase, and sometimes governments collide with them in the process of enacting restraints. This paper aims to investigate empirically the role of interest groups in Korea's trade policy, utilizing the Grossman and Helpman model (1994). Contrary to prevailing wisdom, the results of our empirical investigation suggest that a greater level of participation by diverse interest groups actually promotes trade liberalization, as different groups offset each other's demands in the act of obtaining government protection. The findings imply that "openness and pluralism" with respect to interest groups is necessary if better strategies for trade liberalization are to be developed.


In the paper, the effect of the pulse electron radiation on the stability of the colloidal iron solutions is studied. The work is performed on the standard test solutions which correspond to the real natural and waste water regarding their chemical composition. The irradiation was performed using the pulse accelerator TEA-500 with the electron energy 500 keV and pulse duration 60 ns. The dose was calculated using the potassium nitrate recommended for measuring the dose of the pulse electron radiation. The standard test solution used for radiation contained iron, silicon and humic substances ions in the correlation 5.6:20:2.2 mg/l, respectively. The solutions were subjected to radiation within the range of 0.6-5.0 Mrad. The efficiency of radiation was estimated by the variation in iron chromaticity and concentration in the initial and irradiated solution. The decrease in iron concentration and solution chromaticity after the radiation indicates the violation of the stability of the colloidal solution and the Fe(OH)3 coagulation sludge. To explain the interaction of the radiation with the colloidal particles, the water radiolysis mechanism was considered, since the most of the ionizing radiation energy is consumed for the interaction with the water forming a large spectrum of radiolysis products. In the paper we offer the interaction mechanism of hydrated electron and the colloidal particles on the ground that the hydrated electron has a much longer life compared to H and OH radicals and is formed with a large radiation-chemical output which is equal to 3.3÷3.5 ions per 100 eV. The lifetime of the hydrated electron is 2.3*10-4 s. Besides, the size of the hydrated electron is 0.38 nm that is much less than the size of micelle and because of these factors it interacts with the micelle nucleus. According to the literature data, the mechanism of the electron transfer to the micelle nucleus is accompanied with the violation of the double electrical layer, the destruction of the micelle forming the Fe(OH)3 sludge that was observed during the electron beam irradiation of the standard test colloidal solutions. In the paper we present the results on the effect of the ion nitrate on the kinetics of the variation in iron ion color and concentration in the standard test solution.


Acanthocephalans, or spiny-headed worms, are endoparasites found in almost all marine, freshwater and terrestrial systems. They infect a huge range of definitive and intermediate hosts during their life cycles, including both vertebrates and arthropods. This volume, first published in 2006, examines the distribution and abundance of the Acanthocephala, and uses this ecological information to reveal the group's enormous survival success. It discusses how the acanthocephalans have evolved differently to all other groups of parasites, and represent a distinct and alternative pathway of parasite evolution and host parasite-interactions. Written for graduate students and researchers in parasitology, ecology and zoology or anyone interested in reading about parasite ecology and evolution.


According to the early Chinese textual accounts, the polities of the Central Plain beginning in the Zhou, colonized the territory north of the Wei River, through the Ordos Region under the Great Bend of the Yellow River and north to the borders of modern Mongolia. The historical model suggested that military expansion and cultural diffusion expanded the agricultural lifeway of the empire through population replacement, but the texts do not describe the local social and political environment into which these policies were imposed. Liangcheng County, in central Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, is an excellent location to study the integration of populations into the Central Plain political system (500 BCE-200 CE). Archaeological survey provides the diachronic perspective that is necessary to examine the process of integration and to facilitate an understanding of how the intrusive social systems affected the indigenous social and political environment. During the chaotic Warring States period, Central Plain bureaucrats co-opted the feudal manor system of the Western Zhou and created a system of compact villages that assisted administrative control and increased agricultural production. The data here suggest that it is the village system that is exported to Liangcheng. Although the traditional interpretation suggests population replacement, in Liangcheng a settlement system characterized by single family homesteads on land that is not productive for agriculture persists from the Neolithic to the Han Dynasty period. The combination of new farming villages introduced during the Warring States period and the persistence of dispersed homestead sites suggests a gradual process of acculturation to Central Plain social norms, not a wholesale replacement of population. Not until the Han Dynasty does a majority of the populace move into villages on the best agricultural lands. The stability of the settlement pattern from the Neolithic into the Warring States period in similar locations that are not particularly advantageous for agriculture suggests that indigenous subsistence systems changed little until the Han Dynasty, implying that in Liangcheng, subsistence responded not to environmental fluctuation, but to social and political change.


A passively mode-locked, flash-lamp-pumped long-cavity Nd:YAG laser was developed with a cavity length that was variable in discrete increments from approximately 11 to 60 m, permitting adjustment of the mode-locked pulse repetition frequency over a range from 13 to 2.5 MHz. Multiple-pulse acoustic signals were generated with this laser in an aluminum sample and remotely detected by a path-stabilized Michelson interferometer. The energy in the multiple-pulse acoustic signal was confined to a considerably reduced spectral range compared with that in a single pulse. Successful laser generation of spectrally selective narrow-band ultrasound presents new opportunities to integrate advanced signal-processing strategies with interferometric detection to enhance the sensitivity of laser ultrasonics for industrial applications.


A novel methodology to quantify displacements and strain in musculoskeletal ultrasound sequences is presented. We extend the principles of 2D interframe displacements produced by our earlier work using hierarchical variable block size matching, to quantify displacement trajectories. We provide novel solutions for probe motion, quantification of objects moving in the 3D volume traversing the 2D plane, and improving the temporal coherence of displacements for longer image sequences than the frame pairs traditionally applied in ultrasound. We also present trajectory strain that yields a novel strain history for musculoskeletal tendon tissue samples.


Red fruit pasta are reported containing active components that are important to health, so the opportunities to be developed into a functional food ingredients. The purpose of this study is utilize pasta as natural dye in beef sausage and based on chemical quality and sensory. Given some active compounds are known to display as natural dye for food.  In this study, beef sausage was added by red fruit pasta in various concentrations: (0%, 7%, 9%, and 11%) were added on beef sausage. The observed variables were chemical qualities (water content, protein content, fat content, ash content and carbohydrate content) and sensory (colour, taste, texture, and aroma). The result showed that the addition of red fruit pasta on beef sausage significantly affected on water content and protein content. Organoleptic testing (hedonic and hedonic quality testing) showed that the panelists remarkably prefered all beef sausages with addition of red fruit pasta


The objective of the paper is to analyze the formation of social networks where individuals are allowed to engage in several groups at the same time. These group structures are interpreted here as social networks. Each group is supposed to have specific rules or constitutions governing which members may join or leave it. Given these constitutions, we consider a social network to be stable if no group is modified any more. We provide requirements on constitutions and players' preferences under which stable social networks are induced for sure. Furthermore, by embedding many-to-many matchings into our setting, we apply our model to job markets with labor unions. To some extent the unions may provide job guarantees and, therefore, have influence on the stability of the job market.


The mobile data collection has received much attention from researchers all over the world during the past 15-20 years. The result of this extensive work is a number of commercially available products, usually called mobile mapping systems (MMS), which are used for collection of geospatial data from cars or aircrafts. The heart of each MMS is a positioning module based on combination of GNSS receiver and inertial navigation system (INS). The module determines the position and orientation of the platform. The platform is equipped with a mapping sensor, usually a laser scanner and/or one or more digital cameras. The accuracy of collected data greatly depends on the accuracy of the positioning module. One of the main goals of this report is to assess the quality of the positioning module.


Some moral philosophers have suggested that a basic prohibition against intentional harm ought to be at the core of moral belief systems across human societies. Yet, experimental work suggests that not all harm is viewed equally—people often respond more negatively to harm that occurs among fellow social group members, rather than between members of different groups. The present two studies investigated how concerns about social group membership factor into the moral judgment system. Adults (N = 111, Study 1) and children (N = 110, Study 2) evaluated instances of interand intra-group harm under varying levels of cognitive load. Both children and adults responded more slowly to intergroup harm than to intragroup harm. Furthermore, adults under cognitive load rated intergroup harm more leniently than intragroup harm, but adults who were not under load rated the two types of behaviors similarly. These findings suggest that across development, evaluations of intergroup harm rely more heavily on conscious deliberation than evaluations of intragroup harm. Thus, people's evaluations of harmful behaviors are made in light of information about the social category membership of the people involved.


Key messagesThe Congo Basin is rich in biodiversity and stores an estimated 25%–30% of the world's tropical forest carbon stocks. As agricultural land becomes increasingly scarce in Southeast Asia, and regulatory pressures continue to intensify, the Congo Basin could become the next frontier for oil palm expansion. Most of the roughly 280 million hectares (Mha) of additional land suitable for oil palm in the Congo Basin are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo (60%), Cameroon (11%) and the Republic of Congo (10%).Many heavily forested countries in the Congo Basin are setting national targets to increase production to meet national and regional demands. Land area allocated to oil palm increased by 40% in the Congo Basin and five additional top-producing countries in Africa between 1990 and 2017. Without intervention, future production increases in the region will likely come from expansion rather than intensification due to low crop and processing yields, possibly at the expense of forest.Sustainability strategies initiated by companies and aimed at certifying palm oil mills are unlikely to be effective at curbing deforestation in the Congo Basin. Smallholder farmers are an engine of growth in the region's palm oil sector, and recent evidence suggests they are actively clearing forest to expand. Because of the proliferation of non-industrial processing facilities (artisanal mills), a substantial fraction of the palm oil produced by smallholders never passes through a company's jurisdiction. Smallholders are also disadvantaged by power imbalances and limited access to technical and financial resources. Including smallholders in sustainability strategies offers opportunities to achieve multisectoral goals.Recommendations to improve the sustainability of the palm oil sector in the Congo Basin include (1) improving access to finance for smallholders and non-industrial mill managers; (2) implementing policies to safeguard natural resources and facilitate access to appropriate market opportunities that offer incentives to prevent future deforestation; (3) intensifying production by replanting aging plantations, rehabilitating abandoned plantations with disease-resistant and high-yielding varieties, and increasing fertilization, without further expansion into high conservation value or high carbon stock forest areas; and (4) improving processing capacity and extraction rates by upgrading mill technologies. Sustainable palm oil development in the Congo Basin will require careful consideration of the governance, institutional, environmental and socioeconomic factors that underpin the complex regional supply chains.


Established phonological theories postulate uniform syllable constituent structures. From a traditional hierarchical point of
view, syllables are right branching implying a close connection between the nucleus and the coda. Articulatory Phonology in contrast suggests a stronger cohesion between onsets and nuclei than between nuclei and codas. This claim is empirically supported by the c-center effect which initially has been observed for onsets only. Nevertheless, recent studies revealed that this effect does not occur in all complex onsets and can also be observed in codas. To account for this structure non-uniformity, we propose an information theoretic approach to measure connection strengths between syllable constituents in terms of their pointwise mutual information. It turned out that the derived constituent structures correspond well to the empirical c-center findings on American English and German data. The results are discussed from a Usage-based Phonology perspective considering c-centers to be a frequency effect.


This is a letter from the Charles B. Moore Collection. it is written by Matilda Dodd and Adelitia "Dinkie" McGee. In Matilda's first letter, dated December 28, 1889, she informs the Moore family and Alice of the happenings in Gallatin, Tennessee. The news includes: confirmation of the receipt of the Moore's letter, well-wishes for Florence's recovery, a dialogue about Christmas plans, community health updates, news about the mild winter weather and its affects on the community, a discussion about the rose slips and cherry sprouts Dodd sent to Mary Ann, details about their new neighbors, and news about family and friends.

In Dinkie's letter, dated December 29, 1889, McGee informs the Moore family and Alice about the goings-on in Sumner County. The news includes: a discussion about Mattie, a dialogue about their Christmas and details on what everyone received as gifts when they were at Bettie's place, news about friends in the community, a discussion about a dinner she made and who came over to join the family, inquiries for Linnet,plans for a social, additional updates on friends in the community. She closes the letter by stating that she wants Alice and the Moore family to write soon.

In Matilda's second letter, dated December 30, 1889, she updates the Moore family on the cold and rainy weather that has hit Tennessee. She mentions that Will and Abe have helped their new neighbor to build a barn and that Abe will help him build kitchen furniture this day she has written. She closes this brief letter by stating that the Moore family should write soon if they hear from Tobe and that Birdie will write later in the week. The envelope is included with the letter.